gMurderers.

forget privacy or our desire to maintain control over our representation in the public sphere. the real victims of surveillance society are woodland creatures.

Google's StreetView camera car hits a baby deer

(LG, you might get a point for this)

140 characters of resistance.

It's not hard for me to admit when I'm wrong. In fact, I suffer from a chronic lack of confidence in my opinions, so believing I'm wrong is actually my default setting. With that said, I want to admit on these pages that I was wrong about Twitter and its usefulness in my life.

I started out using Twitter for purely academic purposes; I was conducting research for a paper about how the 2008 presidential candidates were using Twitter to communicate to their "followers." At the time, Twitter bored me. I didn't get it. I didn't think the candidates were using it in any particularly interesting way; it was as if they'd simply been handed a "Politics Web 2.0" starter kit and Twitter fit nicely in the Microblogging compartment. My guess at the time was that voters who were aware of and using Twitter didn't need to hear from Hillary Clinton that she'd be making a speech at their local Barnes and Noble that day; they probably already knew. Of course, this was just a hunch, and while many innovative research papers have been predicated on a mere hunch over the years, this paper in particular needed some quantifiable data to back up my theories, so instead, I looked at how often (and to how many followers) the candidates tweeted.

After I finished writing the paper, I still saw no use for Twitter.... and then a funny thing happened: people I really like started to use it. All of a sudden, I used Twitter all the time! I didn't always post what I was doing (after all, I hold fast to my contention that my friends can't possibly care about the contents of my breakfast), but I sure started reading it a lot more often. I even signed up to receive tweets on my cell phone so that I could hear up-to-the-minute news from my friends as they walked through their lives in boston and DC.

So, I would like to admit that I was wrong. Like many things in our lives -- especially communication technologies -- a narrative needs to exist for why we should incorporate a new habit, some compelling reason to nudge us in another direction. For a long time, that narrative just didn't speak to me.... and then one day it did.

(I would also like to take this time to state for the record that I think Twitter will be dead within six months, or at least left in a shallow roadside grave once a better / shinier new technology comes around.)

http://twitter.com/boobasket

Twittered Out.

For one of my final papers, I decided to look a bit more closely at Twitter, the micro-blogging service that's sweeping the geeky nation. I first heard about Twitter last year when a friend sent me an invitation to join (not that it's a club, but he thought that telling his friends personally might encourage them to accompany him on the Twitter journey). So, I checked it out and read all about how Twitter would allow me to keep my friends abreast of every facet of my daily minutiae (except they phrase it a bit more appealingly). My immediate thought was, "um, why in the world would my friends care?"

You see, Twitter works kind of like those silly Facebook status updates. But it's like a status update (called a "tweet") that you can write from anywhere--your phone or instant messaging service or simply through the site itself. I seriously wouldn't be surprised if by next week, they figured out a way to send tweets via carrier pigeon.

Twitter is very straightforward. In fact, compared to other technological devices, it's remarkably unassuming. It works by prompting you to answer the following question (within a 140 character limit): "What are you doing?" As you can imagine, this yields a wide variety of responses, but as you can probably also imagine, few of them are actually very interesting.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm often surprised by how entertaining/informative those silly Facebook status updates can be. I just can't imagine why my friends would ever want to hear little bits about my life in real time, especially when I'm (rather impersonally) telling all of them at once.

"Boo is writing a paper."
"Boo is pacing."
"Boo is eating cereal."
"Boo is looking at photoshopped pictures in which the babies' and men's heads have been switched! http://manbabies.com/1"

See what I mean?

Anyway, for my paper, I decided to look at how presidential candidates were using Twitter in their campaigns. And do you know what I found out? Their lives are just as boring as mine! Not surprisingly, Obama and Clinton use Twitter to alert their "followers" (people who sign up to receive their tweets) of upcoming press appearances, or to remind them to register to vote. McCain, however, likes to tweet attacks on his opponents. My favorite was: "Barack's people ask vulgar question of McCain http://twurl.nl/s0kcuc"

I should take a step back from my criticism for a moment and say that I absolutely understand how Twitter can be useful. After all, it's helped to free someone from an Egyptian jail, report an earthquake in Mexico before the USGS got on the case, and organize activists.

In other words, micro-blogging serves its purpose. I get that. And I think it'll be interesting to see if it ends up filling a gap in investigative journalism or allowing organizers to keep a step ahead of the police trying to shut them down, or making conferences run more smoothly than they typically do. But as a service that supposedly offers some value to my life, I just don't see it.

So, I think I'll keep my tweets to myself for now.

Time Machiner.

I can't decide if this is useful or fucking terrifying.

Heidegrrrrrr.

"Heidegger observed that technology worked to promote a shrinking of the world. While technology enabled a breaching of distance, it also concealed other forms of interaction which take place within the world. Heidegger argued that the essential nature of things lay in their 'nearness.' Nearness involves how things reveal themselves as meaningful within the context of our dealings with them. Instead of bringing things near, the shrinking of distance and time by technological means has caused nearness to withdraw."
*Simon Cooper*

We tend to think of technological artifacts as mere tools that extend one or another of our limbs or senses. A phone just amplifies a voice that's too far away to hear with the naked ear. A pair of glasses make words and faces come into focus when our eyes aren't up to the task. But by bringing the world in--by making it louder and sharper--do we lose touch with the "essential nature" of the things that fill it?

This makes me wonder if people, too, have a "nearness." Maybe they do. Is it possible that a person's nearness can still reveal itself if it's mediated by technology? Or is it inevitably concealed by the medium through which it's transmitted? Hiding under a layer of carcinogenic, electromagnetic waves... I'd like to think that someone could reach through those waves and find another person floating on a raft and sipping a daiquiri on a nearby crest.

(I know I'm completely skewering Cooper--and in the process, Heidegger too--but so be it.)

Questioning Builds a Way.

I spend a lot of time reading things on the Internet. I bring this confession to you unabashedly. I find the entire existence of the Internet, and the text written upon and within it, endlessly fascinating. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the contents of my Google Reader page. Funnily enough, the very week I was giving this some thought, we discussed one of these concepts in my class--namely how technology has somewhat blurred the line between work and play, and also inverted their relationship to a certain extent. As a byproduct of the information economy, now some people get paid a wage to supply ideas that emerge from activities we would traditionally consider a part of playtime. And conversely: now employers bake playtime into their employees' work days under the pretext of caring about the employee as a human, not just a cog in the wheel. How does this relate to my Google Reader page? Well, in one sitting, I read friends' blogs, vegan food recipes, Red sox updates, and countless news sources about technology & society. My classmate added his own illustration of reading sources he relies on for "work" within minutes of checking out the latest LOLcat. I'm not sure how I would even begin to parse out that sitting into "work" and play."

Just when I was starting to feel guilty for letting my eyes spend precious time reading up on how to make blueberry muffins using egg-replacer, I stumbled on this amazing piece of prose concerning time and our use of it, and knowledge and the vitality of our subjective grip on it, and most importantly, how that whole question about work/play I just spent a paragraph trying to describe doesn't even matter.

On the one hand, this essay supports the idea that work and play can no longer be separated so easily into pre-defined buckets. On the other hand, it wholly substantiates and validates my endless procrastination. Mostly what I love about it is the giant middle finger it gives to anything close to a prescriptive ordering of our lives. We're told to specialize--to focus--but as Tozier explains, this only cuts off the most interesting path where it's just getting good. To generalize is to ask more questions, to find (and subsequently celebrate) the connections between the bits you find most hair-raising in this world.

This is not to say that my Google Reader page defines me in any way, or that it could do a better job of representing me than, say, this blog could, or even better--a bona fide face-to-face conversation with me would reveal*. But the myriad sites on Google Reader are connected through me, the endlessly delaying, and increasingly unashamed generalist.

*this conversation will reveal even more if, in addition to talking to you, I am also consuming bourbon.

Play

Lately, I've been thinking about the nature of play. We agree to some extent that play is a part of our nature. We think abstractly. We tinker. We devise more efficient ways of accomplishing tasks. Sometimes we simply devise different ways of doing the same tasks over and over again.

Yet my classes treat the concept of play as if all humans hold the same privilege to access it. I buy the premise of the importance of play (though I would maintain that all mammals possess our capacity/inclination for it). My objection is subtle, but it nags at me whenever a class discussion turns to the subject. Play takes place all the time, and yet, it seems undeniable that people who have access to more leisure time in general also have more access to the time and space in which to tinker, to do puzzles and crack codes.

I went to a lecture today about the marriage of collective social action and communication technologies. An example is the 2003 presidential election in Spain during which a massive student protest was organized via text message. Not only did thousands of students descend on the same square at the same time (all wearing black shirts), but their movement arguably turned the tide of the election.

Online collective projects of today -- Wikipedia, Linux, etc. -- tap into this human inclination for play. People steal moments during their workday or before they go to sleep in order to work on these social puzzles. When we study these movements in school, we pretend like anyone can join in. All it takes, after all, is access to a computer, and a few minutes in your schedule. But how many people are left out of that scenario? A lot.

We study how these initiatives are reshaping the production/consumption cycle in our society, and how wonderful it is that so many people can contribute to so many different areas of discourse that used to belong solely to the white guys at the top. But I guess I'm just more interested in the people who get left behind. They're the same ones who get left behind in most technology narratives... but for some reason, this one bothers me an awful lot more.