February Frivolity

So it's been how long since I"ve posted here? My oh my I have been letting my piece of the I-space languish hmm? But if you were expecting my first post in ..oh...two months, to be an intensive thought piece on digital culture, I'm afraid I have to disabuse you of the notion. I'm in the mood to be frivolous so I'm posting a joke that I found on one of my favourite online communities, which shall remain nameless, given that this is supposed to be an academically-focused thought blog.

So enjoy this piece of February frivolity from yours truly. I'll try to get back to my regular serious self later next week after my statistics mid-term is over.

Having Mom over for Dinner

Brian Hester invited his mother over for dinner. During the course of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but keep noticing how beautiful Brian's roommate, Stephanie, was. Mrs. Hester had long been suspicious of a relationship between Brian and Stephanie, and this had only made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two react, Mrs. Hester started to wonder if there was more between Brian and Stephanie than met the eye. Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, "I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Stephanie and I are just roommates."

About a week later, Stephanie came to Brian saying, "Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You don't suppose she took it, do you?" Brian said, "Well, I doubt it, but I'll send her an e-mail just to be sure."

So he sat down and wrote:

Dear Mother: I'm not saying that you "did" take the gravy ladle from the house, I'm not saying that you "did not" take the gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.

Love, Brian

Several days later, Brian received a letter from his mother that read:

Dear Son: I'm not saying that you "do" sleep with Stephanie, and I'm not saying that you "do not" sleep with Stephanie. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the gravy ladle by now.

Love, Mom

Blanketing the defense

No, I'm not talking about how surprisingly well the Bills are playing this year.

Rather, I'm talking about how the supposedly sensitive and endangered nation of the US needs to be so careful about itself that it can't produce the appropriate constitutionally-required evidence against John Perry Barlow in order to prove or disprove his claim of being duped.

I know I believe him, but believing isn't enough. They're supposed to give up the evidence in court and so far, his attempts to get them to produce evidence and testimony have met with the blanket statement that it is all so "sensitive" that it threatens "national security".

Yeah right. Reason 326 I'm glad I'm Canadian right now.

Missing online shopping

Despite the depressing media doomsday dialogue about online shopping, hackers, fraud, theft, blah blah, I'm not afraid to do it. I like the convenience of it, the selection, the fact I can do it in my bunny slippers at home (or would if I actually owned bunny slippers).

Since Canada is finally starting to get it and more and more stores are putting up an online presence complete with shopping cart ability, I'd love to do more and more of my shopping online through real stores rather than just eBay.

Don't get me wrong - I still love eBay. But when you're trying to buy a gift for someone and don't necessarily want to have to worry about whether it will cross the border in time for the big day, you'd much rather keep your money north of the 49th and buy from a store with a true money-back guarantee and liberal return policy.

So why don't I? Because the lack of a simple little piece of plastic prevents me. A credit card.

Used to have one, but ran it up scarily high. The stress of the debt was too much for me. So it got paid off and cancelled. And I'm now CC-less. Feels good...until I go try and shop online.

What I don't understand is why the Canadian banks don't get together and offer an online form of debit payment like the Interac system used in stores, restaurants and even for at-home pizza delivery now too. Heck, apparently 2/3 of the population of this country now use debit cards instead of cash.

Paypal is nice, but few large reputable etailers really want you to "wire" them cash like that. Switch-style debit-cards unwritten by Visa would be even nicer. I had these in Bermuda when I lived there in 1996 and adored it. I could use it as a Visa in places where debit cards don't tread, but the effect was still the same - money direct from my account, rather than ringing up a debt I'd have to pay off eventually.

It's not like it would be that difficult - Canada's banking system is much more homogenized than the US, given banking regulations here. But alas! The banks haven't yet figured out we'd depend on them even more if they offered this kind of service and thus I must live without access to the clicks-and-bricks shopping for the foreseeable future. And they wonder why Canadians lag behind the US in online shopping? Humph!

So when people ask me this year why I didn't do my Christmas shopping online this year, I'll end up mumbling something about the lack of plastic in my life and changing the subject quickly.

Google keeps its eye on search

Google is planning on scanning the collections of a variety of huge libraries in the US, including Harvard and Stanford universities and the wonderful New York Public Library and making them searchable through it.

Think it will let me take out books online using my Concordia U student card and have them USPSd to me? I'd certainly get much better access to digital culture books than I do here - Concordia has only 73.

Joke of the week

In the spirit of the Holiday season and the impending end of the semester, I found the following "Truth about Reindeer" while procrastinating hard on my sociology of fear and risk paper...

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, while both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlers till after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa's reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen - had to be a girl. We should've known.

Only women, while pregnant, would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night and not get lost.

The empowered porn blog

What is beauty? What is pornography? What is empowerment? All key questions in the lives of the post-modern woman.

These are questions that the group blogcommunity SuicideGirls (warning! nudity!) takes head-on through their self-portrayals of actual digital-minded alterna-grrls in all their tattooed, pierced, goth, tech-loving glory, rendered in brutal honesty. It's a commmercial blog too - to browse it, at some point you've got to pay for it.

Found this via the Journal of Media and Culture, who said:

SuicideGirls.com is an adult community that offers a mix of eroticism, creativity, personality and intelligence. SuicideGirls is about so-called empowered eroticism; it provides a site where girls outside of mainstream culture can express their individual style through soft erotic images, and web logs

Truly a post-modern phenomenon - females using the Internet to willingly participate in former disempowering tactics (taking off their clothes for money) with the intention of showcasing a style of female beauty that has nothing to do with a $30 lipstick and $3000 set of silicones, all with the goal of self-empowerment outside the boundaries of the mainstream.

Cool vacation for music lovers

While doing some serious procrastinating on my SOCI 460 end-term work this afternoon, I was browsing through my favourite online new music site, Aware Store. In addition to finding out about two new artists whose albums I'll have to get (Marc Broussard and The Virginia Coalition) I also found out about the Rock Boat cruise tour that will take place next fall. It's a four day cruise on the Mississippi and the lineup of artists made me breathless. oh do I want to go! Might need to start saving my loonies....

One more reason I miss you, TO

While browsing Hodder's blog, I came across a post of hers about the term "album". What interested me is not the debate about what to call the digimusic we now all consume today (okay all of us who live any kind of wired lives). Rather, what interested me is the side note she posted below her primary post in which she says she's looking for a website or "podcast" that deals with the history of new music (okok I'm deliberately misinterpreting her, 'cause she was looking for history of "pop"). Still, it got me thinking about my favourite radio station on the planet, 102.1 The Edge out of my favourite city on the planet, Toronto.

So I clicked over to find that Alan Cross, Edge 102's resident new music historian, has put together an excellent historical overview of one of my favourite bands, Coldplay, whose song "Daylight" is one of my favourite ringtones on my LG5550.

(For those of you curious about this stuff, Alan has written a few good books about the history of new music, including this one).

Reading it and browsing the site makes me wistful and annoyed in equal measure.

Wistful because dammit I miss that city.

Annoyed that I can't find a station here in Montreal half as good - everyone here seems to want hiphop/pop, dance/house or "oldies). While I can tune into The Buzz out of Burlington, VT, their endless ads for VT merchants, annoying DJs and complete lack of Cancon bugs me. That, plus the fact their signal isn't strong enough to come through with distinct crackle.

And as cool as satellite radio is, it isn't really properly available in Canada yet.

All more reminders (as if I needed them) of why Toronto is so cool. The city of my heart.

God, I miss you, TO!

Going digital

A friend sent me a link to this Wired article about the "digital life" and the trends towards living it. While the article is interesting in a general way, it would have been more interesting by far if they'd spent more time on the social aspects of the life Mary Hodder lives in the digital, rather than dredging up tired stats about how people currently use the net.

The article cites an Online Publisher's Association poll that states that people currently use the net more for content than for communication or searching. Am I the only one that sees the flaws and biases in that statement?

First of all, searching isn't an activity -- you don't approach your web browser saying, "oh I'm going to spend an hour or so using Google to search the Internet". Searching isn't an end, it's a means. If I didn't see stats, then, that say that people use the net more for content than for searching, I'd be worried.

Another part of that which bothers me is the focus on "communications". I'd like to see such lists drop searching and add a different term: "sociability". In the sociological sense, sociability is the act of being social, of interacting with others, of connecting and sharing with other people in those uniquely human ways.

How is that different from communications? In its purest sense, communication is about sharing information; thus the end goal of communication is content. When used to talk about the net, as it was in the article, Communications is a lump-sum term that has come to stand-in for sociability, interactivity, tool-use, etc. As a result, it has been devalued. I'd like to see communication return to its roots as a term that really describes one-to-one exchange of information. In effect, the kind of communication I envision is a sub-set of sociability.

On the net, the term communication tends to mean email. Yes we all know that now, 10+ years after the dawn of the web, email is still the "killer app". It is the reason most people get their first access to the net and it is the reason why many people keep it. So yes, communication as done through email between individuals is important. So keep the term, preserve it for that.

I'd like to see sociability added in, though, to track, chart and allow us to ponder the myriad ways we use the net for social purposes. While I recognize that I may still be a bit on the vanguard of this style of sociability, I honestly do not believe it will be long before the rest of you follow closely behind me and start joining (or even forming?) your own online social spaces. So why not start studying and measuring it?

Of course, as you know if you this space often enough, that's exactly what I'm trying to do.

So ... yeah....sociability. Important term, especially for the net and web. Had the Wired article paid sociability more attention, it would have been far more interesting and thought provoking.

Barlow is blogging

John Perry Barlow is a welcome addition to the blogosphere. Go read him. You'll see why.

Georgetown CCT program

Given that I'm getting closer to the finish line on my Honours BA studies at Concordia, I've started earnest research on graduate schools that have a program that jives with my digital culture and ispace interests. Through the excellent Association of Internet Researchers (AIR-L) list, I found this program at Georgetown University that seems to have everything I want - innovation, research-focused, respectable and prestigious university and generally like-minded people.

This one goes on my own personal shortlist and renews my hope that, given my academic performance to date, despite the fact it's at Concordia, I may have a chance of securing a fellowship in a program like this one.

eBay & Grilled Cheese

I was trying to figure out what pithy words I could come up with to go along with this unusual eBay auction...but words fail me. Just go check it out for yourself while I go buy myself a chocolate bar - I'm suddenly feeling peckish.

Dungeons & Dragons

I know several people who play the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. They're doctors, lawyers, programmers, bankers, in short - adults. Known as D&D to its fans and players, it isn't about maladjusted angst-ridden teen boys running around in dark caves pretending to kill one another and sometimes succeeding (That was the plot of a real movie I saw once - Tom Hanks was even in it).

Instead, D&D is old-school game play. There is no sleek console required, no computer, no wires, no chips (other than the potato kind maybe). It requires imagination, communication skills, some grasp of math (probably the reason I never got into it), some graph paper, a pencil and a motley assortment of odd multi-sided dice. It also requires that each player create an identity and the process of creating a character (referred to as "rolling a character") is all about coming up with something original and that feels like a person you'd want to embody while still respecting the rules of the game. Goffman would have loved it.

Another thing the game most often requires is time. While many newer gamers play weekly 2-3 hour sessions, many of the more hardcore players prefer games that last an entire weekend or even an entire week. These game groups become very dedicated to each other, creating their own small very loyal communities, occasionally travelling long distances to play with a specific group they've become a part of over time.

D&D is in its 30th year, and while it was touch and go for a while through the late 80s and into 90s as Pong gave way to Donkey Kong which lead to Halo, it's enjoying a resurgence despite our digitized world.

Wizards of the Coast, the owners of the license and copyright for D&D, could be credited with this resurgence. In a brilliant move that coincided with the 21st century ongoing clash around copyright versus freedom of information, WoC released in 2000 its new D20 way of playing version 3.0 of the game and announced that the new D20 game system underlying the play would be open source. So long as their well-laid out rules on using the system were respected, publishers were free to based other games on the system.

This has paved the way for other companies to use the game system to deliver games that use other themes not related to wizards and elves and orcs. A few such game are Star Wars and Spycraft.

This is significant because it allows players to built a base of knowledge in a single system that can be played across multiple environments, leveraging their investments in the game books, diversifying their world possibilities and giving WoC a dedicated and increasingly sophisticated pool of players to whom to market add-ons and magazines and such.

It also enabled a thriving online community of dedicated players who regularly contribute public goods to the gaming community, such as player character generators, world scenarios and maps and various kinds of arcana. With hundreds of websites, mailing lists, webrings and a still-thriving Usenet newsgroups centred around the game, D&D is very much a part of the net. One of the more popular gamer-run online communities, EN World, recently raised a respectable amount of money in a very short time to keep their community going, all based on a simple request for donations by the communities caretakers.

D&D play groups are among the more popular groups on Meetup.com.

The book players need to know the rules, the Player's Handbook, has a very respectable Amazon.com sales ranking of 1,031 out of all books on Amazon (it sells better than the Bible). There is even a Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies coming out in April 2005.

Hundreds from around the world flock annually to a gaming convention called Gen Con to learn more about what will be new and to reconnect with other avid players. There is even a decent book out that traces the roots of the current digital RPG and MMORPG to D&D.

Just goes to show that technology hasn't completely supplanted face-to-face game-centred group sociability. It also shows that community at all scales, small scale micro and massively networked, is alive and well as centred around D&D.

Patron saint of geeks?

Move over St. Isidore - it seems like there's another saint in town preferred by hackers, geeks and nerds.... and it's St. Expedite.

No special treatment for disgruntled Democrats

After Tuesday's disappointing result, it looks like there have been enough Americans eyeing the north border that the Canadian government felt compelled to release a statement saying, basically, that they'll have to get in the immigration line with everyone else.
[thanks to my pal Kelly for the link]

Election Day USA

No doubt that is the headline that will scream across newspapers and stream across television screens in the US today. Election Day. Time for change. Time to vote.

I'm Canadian so I can't vote in this one, as badly as I want to do something to show that I believe Bush needs to be turfed.

Instead, I have to sit on the sidelines and hope that people like my hero Derek can make enough of a difference to turf Bush.

Derek speaks of his usual approach to politics and news. As often happens with him, his views and attitudes mirror my own. He says:

I treat politics like dog shit on the sidewalk - I avoid it as much as possible, but every once in a while I forget and get some on my shoe. Then I hope the stink doesn't linger too long.But not this year. Because this year, even someone half paying attention has to see that George W. Bush is destroying America. A pointless war, a tanking economy, and a job market as bad as any I've ever seen. Clinton may have embarrassed us with a stain on a dress, but Bush has embarrassed with a stain on the world.

(To read Derek's entire post, go here...)

If you're American and you're reading this, please vote. I'm gambling on the fact that if you're American and you read my space often, you're a lot like Derek and me, and you wouldn't be voting for Bush. So -- go! vote! please!

Make a difference on election day. Put an X on the Democratic ballot on my behalf.

Dull Men's Club

Look here. Enough said.

Fear & risk on Halloween

Fear is supposed to be part of Halloween. That was the fun of it - the idea of things getting all spooky and scary and weird.

At the same time, the spookiness and fear was supposed to be safe. Then along came the stories and reports. Next thing you know, parents are scared for real. Should they send their kids out? Will the little devils and divas and witches and ghosts get sick from the treats they gather? Suddenly the fear was coupled to risk in a way that made my parents and many others very wary about All Hallowed Eve.

However, it turns out that all those stories you've heard about razor blades in apples and poison in candy are actually urban legends., the famous urban-legend-debunking site Snopes says. So, too, do all the sociological literature on fear and risk.

So send out the kiddies tomorrow and don't worry if they sneak a few chocolate bars into their mouths before you have time to check over their haul. The little goblins will be fine.

Virtual stranger

When is a phone not just a phone? When it is also a people tracker.

Word of the day

Move over liminality...

You've been replaced.

My new favourite word of the day is limerence.

It refers to that strong infatuation period you encounter when you meet someone new and feel an instant, deep and intense attraction to them.

I can see it working better though for my purposes as the deep infatuation feeling people get about a new technology or system...as shown to me recently when my colleague Michael was extolling the virtues of Flickr to me recently over lunch.

[Found via downloading the PDF (72kb) of Angela Lewis' article on cyberspace limerence. Her article was originally published in the ACA Journal, Vol 4, no 1, 2004.]