Sociologist Erving Goffmanll said that all of life is performance, and Peggy Orenstein in the NYTimes says that Twitter is a new stage.
Jeff Jarvis is getting ready to write a book about “abundant publicness” and some of the thoughts and quotes from the linked post are thought provoking.
“Once-abundant privacy is now scarce. Once-scarce publicness is now abundant.”
I like this – a lot. Makes a whole hell of a lot more sense than PMRC warning labels, that’s for sure. I wonder if a Firefox plugin, enabling some social review mechanism to apply these labels would work. Probably too small of an audience. Besides, I think Tom Scott was joking. I think. Gotta send him an email.
Contents Not Verified 🙂
I have been hard on Memeorandum in the past, believing that its story selection algorithm’s were too narrow, that it promoted a small subset of the Web, but just look at it. Look at it again.
Memeorandum is the only one stop shop on the Web to get exposed to both sides of the political conversation taking place. That admirable, helpful, and downright impressive. No one else does this and I am thankful I can go there each day to get a round up of what’s being discussed in the political sphere.
Jeffrey Rosen in the NYTimes reports on the effects social networking will have on our efforts to redefine ourselves:
It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.
Tom Meltzer in the Guardian reports on the strange paradox of loneliness among the most connected generation seemingly ever:
This is not just a teenage problem. In May, the Mental Health Foundation released a report called The Lonely Society? Its survey found that 53% of 18-34-year-olds had felt depressed because of loneliness, compared with just 32% of people over 55. The question of why was, in part, answered by another of the report’s findings: nearly a third of young people said they spent too much time communicating online and not enough in person.
In a YouGov poll published by Samaritans last December, 21% of young people aged 18-24 identified loneliness as one of their major concerns. Young people worried more than any other age group about feeling alone, being single, about the quality of their relationships with friends and family. Such figures have led newspapers to dub us the “Eleanor Rigby generation”; better connected than any in history, yet strangely alone.
Check out the Guardian’s Datablog, and while you are at it, read/watch the Guardian’s Simon Rogers interview with Jonathan Stray of Nieman Journalism Labs on the rise of data journalism and the tools they use.
“You Are Not Smart” well… explains a lot and is great for self-introspection.
Other sites you might want to check out, if this is your cup of tea:
reddit.com: cognitive science
reddit.com: psychology
The Atlantic: James Fallows: “On Today’s Hot Media Stories: Sherrod, “Journolist”.
The only way it would be so is if we collectively stop watching, stop clicking, and stop linking to such witch hunts, such hatred, served in pursuit of traffic and ratings.
And you would think that by now, in our media-savvy land, we’d instinctively know that soundbites out of context lead to misunderstanding.
For a world of context from all sides, check out the Memeorandum thread.
Interested in how information reaches those it needs to reach? Intersted in acts of journalism crossing cultural gulfs and divides? Interested in web services and connectivity? You will want to watch Ethan Zuckerman’s talk at TEDGlobal 2010 and I hope be inspired: “Ethan Zuckerman: Listening to global voices”:
Check out his ideas on how to use Twitter to open up your world.
Zuckerman and danah boyd are helping establish a reasoned view of the Web and its potential based upon its now decade-plus history. It is why I feel project’s like Zuckerman’s Global Voices are so important. Following is danah boyd’s talk at PDF 2009: “danah boyd – PdF2009 – The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”:
Related:
Ethan Zuckerman’s transcription of the talk
danah boyd: transcription of her Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) 2009 talk: “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”
Clay Shirky: “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”
Guardian.co.uk: John Naughton: “The internet: Everything you ever need to know”
Previously:
“If you believe in The Long Tail, then stop saying the web is “flat” okay?”
“It exists, and its influence matters”
The call to action:
raise voices, go beyond babel, engineer serendipity, build bridges, cultivate xenophiles, rewire
Well this doesn’t get you exactly there, but László Kozma has a Perl script and some analysis that points you to the top sentences on the Web that start with “How can I” using Google. Fascinating stuff.
Lately I’ve been part of a project helping tutor an individual in assisted living, who is disabled, in learning how to navigate the Web and email, with the eventual goal of uploading his music to YouTube. I can’t wait to introduce you to him – he’s fantastic and his songwriting is interesting.
It has been a terrific experience, an eye opener, and a reminder of things I I might have forgotten from when I used to develop applications for folks I worked with at Sears, who were not familiar with using a mouse, let alone an application of some sort.
Two things that come to mind that I will probably talk more about in later posts are that metaphors and analogies are terrific communication tools and that we as programmers and web service producers still make things too damn hard – there is still tremendous opportunity for innovation.
Example idea:
Markup that web browsers recognize for Login and Logout links/activities/forms so that the web browser itself can present a common interface for this kind of common action. Everyone has these interactions in different locations, with different looks and feels, but for those people who are disadvantaged in some way, this could provide a common interface. This way, web designers can keep the flexibility in their UI designs they seek *and* an additional utility would be available in the browser itself, to assist those who need it.
Just an idea to throw out there.
I’m thankful to be in a position to do this, and I hope to share more as this project progresses.