future of ~the internet~

terrible cover, sorry X(

I watched this google glass preview recently where a google designer unironically said something to the effect of "we designed this because we realized we needed technology to get out of the way more"

I hate the overuse of the world "orwellian" but jfc, you are strapping an android phone to your FUCKING FACE

i haven't read the turkle book but saw her ted talk in school a while back & found it pretty frustrating. she seemed to really ride for the technology-is-impoverishing-discourse argument, comparing text messages, say, to ~real conversation~, without noting any of the corollaries to the fact that we're talking that way, now; that we might be using those texts as part of a bigger, multi-(ugh)-media dialogue; that we're able to talk to people to whom we feel connected, rather than just who we're just born geographically proximate to; that the rhythms are different, scope is different, sense of social space is different, &c&c&c. to her she just saw it as an equivalent transaction but just one that was crudely rendered, yielded less of an immediate & nourishing social kick. i probably don't need to spell out the various empowering/anonymising/pro-social dimensions of remote communication to people reading the technology thread on an internet messageboard, but it kinda bugged me & made me sorta lazily bump her into a kind of generation-divide pile of people (/lost unsalvageable souls) unable to grasp the parameters of a modern life interwoven with technology & sprawling across different platforms (which like i am by no means totally unqualifiedly pro-, just, i am not anti- on the base of it being less neighbourly or w/e).

what's the book like, matt? i am happy to be corrected if this seems like a misrepresentation, & would be interested to hear if it sprawls off into other directions. it's just that it seemed like her basic take, that there's been a switch of platform without equal understanding that there's a lot of context to the new media, seemed off.

too early to tell, i just started it last night online (and kept switching tabs, lol). from the first few pages i think she's going to talk about how the platforms are successful because they offer connection and minimize feelings of vulnerability.. very tiredly true in my experience.

i mean there's a lot of anxious reflection about this stuff which i understand, it sets off my red flags of i smell a reactionary / old person too, but it's a real thing, i don't think it should be just swept aside because lol technology is so empowering or w/e. i mean it is and it isn't. i think we are changing as people, it's hard to pinpoint it or articulate how without having an argument full of holes.

As long as I get to describe and define the form of communication I am plumping for as being thus, I can prove it runs rings around whatever other form of communication you put it up against. Real communication is always fraught with ugly flaws, for example omissions, ambiguities, misunderstandings, oblique motives, outright lies, and all the hazards that come with individual fallibility. But if I can idealize one term of the argument, it wins.

yeah for sure. i feel like i pretty often come at these things indignant that there isn't just some huge chapter of disclaimers & caveats before anyone gets into anything, & maybe it's best that there are just whole books dedicated to different sides of the argument. but i still can't really get with it. i do think that there's such a strange bind relating to feeding any kind of social impulse using the internet. like i really outsource big parts of my diet to it; i talk about photography on ilx in lieu of participating in any irl discussion, & it is, cost-benefit-style, a good decision, it allows me to feed arcane needs in a way i wouldn't be able to without using the weird inhuman proxy we have. & yet you sit there on your bed, having stared at a computer for five hours, feeling nourished but wondering if it qualifies as a satisfying social interaction if the physical-human reality of it was just you, dormant & ignorant of your body, exercising your brain for several dumbstruck hours, immersed in the things that make you feel alive but in a room that has grown dark without you noticing.

xp!, & yes for sure. but that said i think that flaw's probably unavoidable, & a book seeking to democratically overcome it is five thousand pages long & probably some form of weird dos passos-esque social poetry.

Technology out of the way -> getting to data is not encumbered by getting you phone, searching for data, having to use a physical and graphical user interface. Having it just visible or available by voice is seen as "not in the way"

http://youbentmywookie.com/wookie/gallery/0910_wtf/robocop_anatomy.jpg

future of t'internet

Technology out of the way -> getting to data is not encumbered by getting you phone, searching for data, having to use a physical and graphical user interface. Having it just visible or available by voice is seen as "not in the way"

― ☠ ☃ ☠ (mh), Monday, March 25, 2013 2:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I get that, but it only seems "out of the way" in that sense within the very narrow frame of reference of a world in which everyone has smartphones

shoulder unit

haha

I mean it seems a little like describing some new device that makes things cook slightly less badly in your microwave as a "culinary revolution"

i think turkle understands the technologies she's talking about pretty well despite one or two quite minor old-person/non-geek-insider warning signs (after all she's been studying them for decades, teaching at mit).

i would say that she basically handles the concerns you mention, schlump. and she has to, because although she's interested in the 'this is worse' argument, she's also interested in claiming that changes tied up in the various redimensionings of things along time and space and interest and quality axes have introduced blurriness into what had heretofore been some key personal/psychological/social concepts, so that it can be no longer clear what counts as intimacy, spending time with a person, expressing your feelings, etc.

this comes out a bit better against the background of the first half of the book, the ROBOTS half, but i'm not so sure that needs to be read to get the second half, so it might be better to skip if you're kinda gtfo with this robot dog crap. turkle's futurological inclination there is ok i guess but for various reasons you kinda wanna not take it fully seriously. something akin to her interest in second life in the second half of the book, which even granting that publication of her book might have lagged its fieldwork/writing/completion a bit, seems a little too web 2.0-bubble. methodologically favorable for her to focus on it but realistically more of a go-nowhere proposition.

overall the book also has this frustrating quality where she seems to have some definite notions about what her theoretical framework/concepts are and what her claims are, but when they're couched in her popularizing/warning tone and somewhat repetitively given the topical/case-study organization of the chapters, some of the real distinctions she seems to care about tend to get flattened out so that she -sounds- kind of contentless and cassandraish. i think that can be overcome somewhat with some study, but it does seem to have the effect that the initial takeaway can seem glib (or hard not to express glibly).

i am not super techy but fwiw/imo the fascination with & perceived significance of second life in various tech contexts is surreal to me

ty for that post j, that's good to know. i am not on the verge of reading this or anything, book-length takes on things that are so inchoate are sorta just made for reading the reviews of, for me, but it's nice to get a breakdown.

I had completely forgotten about Second Life.

pretty sure second life is sustained entirely by academia at this point.

^

echoing schlumps thx for that post j.

it makes sense, it's a digital online imagined community, which is always going to be fascinating and interesting to research, but you don't have to worry about killing things or chopping down trees or going on quests.

it's very 'do you know anything about techno?" for liberal arts majors

i've literally never met anyone who's used it besides information studies students

bro do u even slife

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/28/your_iphone_kills_jobs/

boss in your pocket

thought he was dead already

I've used TaskRabbit. Handy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor–network_theory

actor-network theory

latour was the real founder of google

I made a bunch of sites 5-10 years ago, all using Flash CS3 & HTML, and they all made extensive use of frames. Like the site would be split into 2 or 3 frames, and there would be a Flash menu in one of them that called up pages in another frame. A year or so ago i tried putting them on a portfolio site and none of the menus worked, apparently the cross-frame functionality is incompatible with new versions of Flash and the Flash player. I tried briefly to fix them and found out the newer Flash did EVERYTHING differently. Something as simple as making a single button now involved coding a ton of javascript. So eff that.

This post doesn't exactly have anything to do w the future, but I'm hoping there will be browsers where you can select 'Browse the web through a 2004 machine' and all that stuff actually works.

hopefully in the future there will just be a 'make things go back to the way there once were' that somehow changes your whole life

Instrgram filters for your brain

i was incredibly pleased recently to find my old, pre-smart-phone phone, which i hadn't used in ~ 4 years. it still had a charge. i put in a spare SIM card and all my old contacts were still there somehow, many of which i had no idea who they were, and for a second it was like i really had gone back in time. i loved that fucking phone.

did it remember your high score in snake?

that phone didn't have snake. i can't remember what it had actually. i didn't play games on it. it had the internet, but only over GPRS (the "circle" connection on an iPhone, i.e. practically useless) so i never used it. i can vividly remember the anxiety that welled up when i realized i didn't have any reading material for a train ride though. the surreptitious angling for a discarded evening standard on the other side of the carriage.

http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

on tim o'reilly, feel like it might have been posted elsewhere on ilx but can't be bothered to find it

there may be some valid points in the article, but i think it's essentially _wrong_ in basically saying corporations on, one side, stallman on the other, and that's it, and that's how its always been. the BSD license dates back to '88 or so, as does the MIT license, which means that they _predate_ the GPL. So the argument that there was a broader more general unix/academic driven notion of open source before the GPL/GNU/etc. is straightforwardly historically correct.

i mean some of the obvious technocratic stuff seems obviously technocratic. but the 'sinister' element of open source is a much more complex and contentious issue, and the folks embracing the term knew basically why they were doing it, and what it meant, and license disputes in the 'free software' world waaay predated o'reilly and i think he had very little effect on how things happened since, for that matter.

Evgeny Morozov is a New York Times guest columnist and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. His new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Utopianism, is available now. This essay appears in the current issue of The Baffler so goddamn tedious.

Some of it seems painfully otm though, e.g. the Eric Raymond quote - "The implication of [the open source] label is that we intend to convince the corporate world to adopt our way for economic, self-interested, non-ideological reasons,” - no ideology there, no sirree! But yeah would be nice to have the skewering done in less than 500 pages.

well yeah, precisely. everyone knew the GNU approach was about changing computing by forcing software to be free, and had a strong ideological component, and the BSD approach was quite different. basically building cool stuff, sharing it with the world, and hoping the world would want to share back.

but that's not skewering -- that's a well known debate. and GNU has never been anti-business or anti-capital in the least, just pro- free software. furthermore, they've actually supported patent law more than many people would like, because they need it to work in order to enforce the GPL.

I know plenty of folks who basically have the attitude "if i release this GPL then some people won't be able to use it, but I want everyone to use it, so I'm using BSD or public domain licensing or something." Creative commons licenses for example are typically much more BSD-like than GPL like as well. And they're not doing this for ideological reasons, except to the extent their ideology is 'i want to share my cool thing with everyone'.

in fact GPL is usually used _more_ by people out to make money, since they'll use dual licensing schemes where if you need a non-GPL license for a commercial product you can get that too, for an appropriate price. and that's absolutely something promoted by FSF/GNU people!

So this is a much broader issue and I think the article gave a really shallow treatment.

This is awesome. CERN put the very first website back online

Tim B-L should get the Nobel Peace Prize

concur.

Let's wait until Vine brings down the Jong-Un regime /fakejeffjarvis

https://twitter.com/MIAuniverse/status/356553491566706691

IDGI... before the internet crossed what? The Streams?? Venkman said that would be bad.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2013/08/Googleps1-1024x777.jpg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2013/08/Googleps2-1024x735.jpg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/26/hackers-deface-google-palestine-object-to-google-maps-labeling-of-israel/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

The hackers further went on to suggest that changing the title of Israel on Google Maps to Palestine would be a “revolution” — and suggesting that visitors listen to R&B singer Rihanna and “be cool.”

:P