The unbearable lightness of a free copy of USA Today
A couple of weeks ago I travelled for work. One evening I found myself in the lobby of the hotel reading a free copy of USA Today left on a chair. I started thinking how rarely I read a true paper copy of a newspaper nowadays. Flipping through the pages of the newspaper, I also realized that, unless there were video-cameras in the hotel lobby, nobody would ever know what I was reading. Nobody would be able to reconstruct my behavior (which articles I read, how long did I spend on each page, which pictures I looked at). Then the thought hit me of how unusual this freedom is in our cyberconnected world.
From my site logs, I can learn a lot about people who visit my blog. I know which page they hit first, how long they stay, which pages they visit, an where they are coming from. I know their IP addresses, their geographical location, which words they entered in which search engine before coming to my site. Often I can even piece together who they are (“Hey, my friend Joy visited my site today. How nice of her!”)
Which means that when I surf the web, my behavior is recorded with the same frightening level of detail. Even the books I read can be connected to me, if I bought them on Amazon or at a physical store with my credit card. At work, most of what I do on my computer is logged and my e-mails must be stored for 7 years.
Nothing new here, of course. But for some reason that evening the true significance of our constantly logged life became very real to me. Reading that copy of USA Today seemed the lightest thing I have done in a long long time (light as in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; that book is haunting me in this period.)
I felt free. I felt anonymous. I felt happy.
Technorati Tags: big brother, kundera, weblogs
CBC unplugged
The management of CBC, the Canadian Public Broadcasting radio, broke the labor negotiations that had been going on for 15 months and locked out 5,500 CBC workers on August 15. The dispute is around the hiring of contractors and part-time workers. CBC, which has received no funding increase in five years, decided to solve its financial problems by proposing to increase the number of contract employees to 25 percent. This means that half the CBC employees, which have been without a contract since March 2004, will be left without permanent status. The talks were interrupted when CBC refused to to negotiate this proposal with the Canadian Media Guild, and at 12:01 AM of August 15, the lock-out was announced.
While the workerless radio is broadcasting music and borrowed programs, the locked out Canadian Media Guild workers started CBC unplugged, an alternative broadcast through podcasting. Robert Paterson, who wrote many posts on the CBC predicts that
When the lockout is over CBC staffers will have embraced the new technology and will transform CBC into more of a community organization.
Or, in the interconnected web world, the CBC unplugged experience may change podcasting.
- Read Derek Miller’s comments here and here
- Flickr pictures of the CBC lock-out.
Social Networking and
the art of self-promotion
Andrew answers to a C|Net articles on the failure of social networking sites (Molly Wood’s Five reasons social networking doesn’t work) by suggesting that the Internet doesn’t need special social networking sites: The Internet in its world wide whole is a social networking place.
Molly Wood makes an interesting point, though, when she mentions that one thing that makes social networking sites a less than ideal place to hang out is that so many of the personal profiles in these sites are, well, not that interesting. My take is that most people who spend time creating elaborate profiles on social networking sites are trying to sell themselves (whether to get a date or a job or just to be popular). And ads get boring really fast.
There are promotional tendencies in many blogs too, but you can also find much more candid expressions of people’s individuality. There is something extraordinarily relieving and endearing in things that people write when they come back from work or from the fancy party, and in the silence of their room stop being pretty and invincible, and start talking about the way they really feel. Especially when they are smart and write well.
Hopelessly uncool
It’s been a little less than 2 months since I’ve bought my domain, found a web host, downloaded WordPress, started a blog. Every day, I read blog feeds on Bloglines, including Boingboing whose 68,000 posts a day I browse religiously. I copywrited my blog with Creative Commons, opened an account with Flickr, and I am thinking of attending BlogHer. I even tried to use upcoming.org. So, I am doing whall all the really cool kids do. And, while I zelig my way through the world of bloggers, I realize how hopelessly uncool I am.
Not sure what it is about me that makes me so utterly uncool. I managed to be moderately successful in my life without having never been cool, but I still wonder every day: What makes people uncool? What makes me uncool?
Ten reasons why I am uncool
- I try too hard. [Well, this is not really true, I just have a natural attitute to blend with the tapestry and learn from what other people are doing. But the fact remains: it looks like I am trying too hard.]
- I’m too lazy. This routine of cool activities to do everyday is hard to keep up with, and I always fall behind, which is uncool. I’m just not committed enough to coolness.
- All these cool things are kind of boring. I do love a few cool things (for example, reading Jory Des Jardins posts on Pause or waiting for the next update of PostSecret), but other things I do out of duty rather than passion (“Wow, 106 new posts at Wired News! Can’t wait to read them all”).
- I am too old. This really does not explain why I wasn’t cool when I was a teenager, but it sounds like a good excuse for my current uncoolness. [My husband took a couple of extremely unflattering pictures of me a couple of days ago. Besides looking like my father when he was 60, I noticed that my neck in certain positions shows bizarre folds in the skin I've never seen before. Very, very, very uncool]
- I hang out mostly with uncool people [Sorry, I didn't mean you. You are actually one of the few cool people I like to hang out with]. As a matter of fact, I have a strong magnetic attraction for uncool people. Cool people make me feel uncomfortable and I rather prefer to admire them from a distance.
- I don’t feel cool, I don’t behave cool, and–most importantly– I don’t believe I am cool. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Although I am not without talent, I’ve always been talented in the wrong things when it comes to cool. For example, when I was in high school in Italy, I was good in math and science, and the cool kids where good in philosophy and literature. They did enjoy copying the answers of the math tests from me, but that was pretty much all the attention I ‘ve ever gotten from them.
- I don’t live in San Francisco.
- Nobody links to me [OK, maybe two people link to me]. Note to self: investigate whether I am not cool because people don’t link to me or people don’t link to me because I am not cool.
- I am always unfashionably late. When I arrive to a new site or discover a new tool, everybody else is ready to leave for the next fashionable new thing.
Blog Feed
Cool Readings
