More proof that the Internet has destroyed my mind: I simply could not stop laughing at these.
Tag Internet
Random Linkage
Things too good to pass up but not good enough to merit their own posts:
This post at English Russia.com remembers some of the more prevalent urban legends that were common among Russians during the Soviet era. A lot of them involve being poisoned by evil Western imperialists, as you might expect, particularly through our evil blue jeans, but there are also the apparently universal legends about rats in food products, certain products being notorious aphrodesiacs, and the occasional corpse in the tanker truck.
Those of us who were paying attention to the Internet back in the early 1990s remember a time before the “World Wide Web”, when the online universe consisted of several distinct provinces: Usenet, FTP servers and “Archie” searches, and “gophers”. Gophers were publicly available databases that contained all sorts of things, but usually documents pertaining to a particular university’s research or something similar, named after the mascot of the University of Minnesota, which created the first one. The advent of the web collapsed most of those distinct information sources into one giant black hole of information, but there were still gopher sites on line right up until the last couple of years. This post at BoingBoing tells us that one guy captured a snapshot of everything he could still find on gopher sites in 2007 and saved it all as one big database of about 40 gigs’ worth of data. Because it’s almost all text, the data can be compressed into 15GB, at which point the guy ought to just copy it onto a USB flash drive and put it on his keychain for safekeeping.
Gizmag reports that the University of Granada in Spain has developed an improved artificial skin that uses a compound of fibrin from real skin samples and a seaweed derivative called agarose. It’s stretchier than previous artificial skin materials, making it a better candidate for use with burn victims.
I always enjoy the posts from TV writer-extraordinaire Ken Levine, but I was especially charmed by his fond recollection of actress Elizabeth Montgomery. He nursed a crush for her for years (and, seriously, who hasn’t) but only ever got to see her from afar despite his involvement in many TV shows over the years. Sadly, she passed away about a dozen years ago at the early age of 62, but through the magic of television will be wiggling her nose for us forever.
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Internet 101
Attention, boys and girls, your attention please!
Welcome to Internet 101, I am your instructor, E. Normous Arse, Ph.D. This semester we will attempt to help you establish a basic level of fluency in the primary currency of the Internet — memes. Yes, in order to be a fully-fledged member of the broad online community, it is absolutely essential that you are able to comprehend a fair number of popular memes and other cultural reference points in order to understand the endless variety of inside jokes, remixes, offhanded remarks, and other versions of social intercourse that you will encounter online. Without these under your belt, you will be like a wandering simpleton, unable to understand almost anything said to you by a long-time “netizen”. And no, nobody says “netizen” anymore except those deluded people at BoingBoing.
So let us begin with your required reading and viewing:
Here are 99 assorted Internet memes that anyone who professes to understand the Internet MUST see. Some, like the Dancing Baby date back to the earliest days of what was then quaintly called the “World Wide Web”. Others, like “David After The Dentist” are as recent as last week. There are a few notable omissions, such as the many variations of the “Mr. T Ate My Balls” , the Hamster Dance , and the more recent “Yo dawg!”, but we can cover these in class.
The rest of your syllabus is posted online, of course, so I won’t waste your time with that here. Please be prepared for a short quiz on this material for the next session. Class dismissed.
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Clink, Clink Another Drink
How to tell when you have become desperate for things to drink:
1. You take perfectly good vodka and ruin it by dissolving an entire package of Skittles into it to create an “infusion”
2. You take perfectly good vodka and REALLY REALLY ruin it by mixing it with a McDonalds shake and garnishing it with a Chicken McNugget and calling it “The McNuggetini“
Dear 20-somethings of the Internet, please stop. Your zany antics and wacky websites have grown tiresome. I invite you to grow up and find something worthwhile to do with your copious free time rather than attempt to “amaze” us with your juvenile adventures. Seriously.
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Am Teh Intarwebz Making Us Dum?
Writing in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr considers whether or not the Internet is deteriorating our intellectual skills. He tells about a group of academics who found themselves bewildered as to why their ability to focus on long reading was diminishing, and the best answer that they could come up with was that they were spending so much time reading material on line that their brains had adapted to the shorter and disruptive presentation of information that the Internet provides. As it stands, though, there isn’t a great deal of empirical evidence to confirm these suspicions, just a growing body of anecdotal evidence.
It’s not a new phenomenon, he says. He gives us the example of how switching to the typewriter had an impact on the writing style of Friederich Nietzsche, and talks about how the mechanization of measuring time altered the way human beings interacted with the world around them — synchronizing their lives to the artifice of clock time rather than to their own natural circadian rhythms. But the emergence of a medium which can provide so much information so rapidly alters the way we relate to the information and the business imperatives of Google and Yahoo may have very little to do with the way we need to process information effectively. In other words, relevant search results may provide quick points of reference, but they don’t allow for the associations and tangential observations that long-focus information gathering provides.
I love this part where he quotes from playwright Richard Foreman:
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I completely empathize with this idea. The educated man of a century ago posessed a wide range of knowledge, but with that breadth there also came great depth from being taught through the history of thought. It resulted in such people being able to formulate central worldviews from which to consider what new information came to them, and to be able to draw from a variety of sources to imagine new ideas and theories. The downside to this model is that those worldviews could sometimes be ruinously wrong or misguided; the unshakeable confidence of fatally flawed thinking resulted in bad science, bad politics, and bad endings for many people. But, on the plus side, it spurred the greatest increase in human knowledge in the entire history of humankind. Now our general knowledge is becoming more and more constrained all the time — consider all those people who think Saddam Hussein caused 9/11, or who think Barack Obama is a Muslim, or can’t find Iraq on a map. And the ability to find smaller and more specific peices of information contributes to our blindered vision of the world around us.
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Workers Of The World, Unite!
“tongodeon” is a blogger whom I know as “mrneutron” through our mutual association with Andre Torrez. He writes about all sorts of things, but last week he had a post about the Writer’s Guild strike where he suggested that the writers and other creative people in the TV and movie industries take a lesson that musical artists are beginning to learn: screw the studios and do it yourself. The reason we have movie studios, recording companies, and television production companies in the first place is that when those media first arose, the only way to get your film/song/series made was to go through big companies who could afford all the production facilities and who eventually used their positions to solidify their dominance into the distribution of said products. The combination of cheap professional-grade production and post-production tools available to anyone with a computer, and the arrival of the huge new distribution system called “The Internet” has already empowered plenty of amateurs to try their hands at making their own movies and TV programs, so surely these professionals could end-run their corporate masters to some degree.
There are some weaknesses to this argument, namely that those same media industries are beginning to exert their control over Internet distrbution as well (hence the reason for the strike in the first place), and that there is no shortage of people who want to be screenwriters and producers to take their place. But the idea’s definitely in the right direction. A number of other online acquaintances appear in the comments on this post, some of whom are in fact the very people presently affected by the strike, and they bring some much-needed insider knowledge to the discussion.
I, for one, am astonished that the writers’ strike has gone on for even this short amount of time, because everyone surely knows that the jig is up for the studios and television networks on this. There can’t be anyone who doesn’t seriously believe the industry line that “digital is an unknown quantity”…the only unknown quantity is how many freaking boatloads of cash they’re going to make, not whether they’ll make any at all. The writers deserve their cut just like everybody else. But I think I would love to see some TV folks try the same thing Radiohead tried with their latest album.
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On The Web, EVERYONE Knows You’re A Jerk
By now I think we’re all pretty familiar with the concept of the “Internet Fuckwad Theory” as illustrated above.
The woman who writes the blog “Violent Acres” makes the counter-argument that anonymity has nothing to do with it, people are assholes by nature. Her theory is that real life gives people the opportunity to mask their bad behavior, but that the bad behavior is right there under the surface anyway. The Internet is just the enabler that lets people drop the facade and be their real selves.
I agree with her for the most part. MY pet theory is that most people stop developing emotionally (and intellectually, for that matter) when they hit puberty (or thereabouts). It’s not that everyone is an asshole by nature, it’s that most people have the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old, and 12-year-olds are still willing and able to engage in exceedingly superficial behavior. We don’t ever really grow out of this, we just learn how to suppress it to varying degrees of success. So I agree with her that the enabling condition of the Internet is not the anonymity at all, but the fact that just about everybody using the Internet is doing so while they are alone — either physically isolated in a space like a cubicle or a den (or your momma’s basement) or psychologically isolated by the experience of being online. And it’s only when we are alone with ourselves that our true state is revealed.
I do not exempt myself from this observation, by the way. I know that I bring my truest self to the online experience all the time, and I know that there are elements of the way I interact with people online that come directly from the person I was as a beginning adolescent — attention-seeking, struggling against conformity, nerdy, needy, and quick to rise to the bait of people looking to tease a reaction. Some of that comes off as being a jerk at times. I’d like to think that I am not the BIGGEST jerk on the Internet — I’ve been a member at MetaFilter long enough to know that I am nowhere in the vicinity of that — but inevitably those characteristics will play out in a way that doesn’t happen nearly as much in the more controlled environment of live social interaction. The only thing anonymity buys you is that it makes it harder for someone to find you, come to your house, and punch out your lights…but not THAT much harder.
Anyway, as usual, her rant scores pretty high on the truth-o-meter with me, so I’ll recommend it to you.
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“Generation MySpace”
Powells.com, the online version of the famed Powell’s Books in Portland, OR reprints this Atlantic Monthly book review by Caitlin Flanagan of the recently published Generation MySpace.
The review really only glances at the book and also the recent book To Catch A Predator (based on that unbearable “Dateline NBC” feature of the same name) and instead the reviewer talks about her own experiments in social networking websites. She posed as a “tween” girl on a social networking site called Club Penguin to see if she would be singled out by potential pedophiles, but her results were inconclusive. She also played the role of stalker by singling out a young girl on MySpace.com and seeing how easy or difficult it would be to target her in “real life”. It turned out to be extremely easy, but, as she writes, teens seem to be very aware of what they are doing by engaging in the strange public exposure of social networking websites. The review is well worth reading. The book might be, as well.
Meanwhile, via The Good Reverend, who got the story from Bruce Schneier, comes this very interesting first-hand account about how Disney tried to implement a variety of restrictions on their Toontown Online MMORPG website, only to have ingenious kids figure out several ways to defeat the restrictions in order to have open chat.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Because we are the lucky ones who get to live with the Internet as a first-generation, we’re all going to be the ones who get exposed to the pluses and minuses of reinventing social communication. The 20-somethings and their younger siblings are doing the reinventing, and so they have a much better ability to negotiate the pitfalls, but some of them are nonetheless going to end up victimized by it. That’s the way the world has always worked, technology notwithstanding.
Consider this recent infographic from the New York Times about how the Internet is used by different age and psychographic groups. Those of us beyond the magic age of 40 are mostly viewers and consumers, not creators or interactors. We can’t help it, we were raised during the Age of Television and were completely acculturated into being passive consumers of media. The smaller subset of “older” people who ARE less passive would have been the fringy element of people who published zines, made their own home video productions, organized theater groups, etc. (you know…people like ME) Among the “younger” groups, that sort of active engagement is now the norm, not the exception.
By the time my own child hits her teenage years, a lot of the initial bumps and bruises of social networking should be gone, as the 20-somethings find themselves “grown up” and able to exert better methods of control over the interactions compared to our present dysfunctional ones. Not that everything about it will be sunshine, lollipops and roses — every social adaptation brings with it genuine dangers and unintended consequences — people will just be less agog about it.
Comments:
Yup. You’re right. I’ve been the generation that was first to TV and all of my life I’ve seen the evils of TV debated. They still can’t make up their minds…it’s up to us to decide how to best protect our kids…because like water, the bad guys will always find a way in.
Posted by Karan [URL] on 06/27/07
It is up to us, but I guess my point is that once again we’re over-reacting to a broader societal change that we can’t quite get a grasp on. As a consequence, sometimes our focus is misdirected — thus the example of the Disney people trying to engineer out any possible “unsafe” chat, only to have the kids themselves develop a workaround. It’s not so much a question of the bad guys always finding a way in as it is a question of young people always finding a way to connect with the larger outside world.
Posted by Brian [URL] on 06/28/07
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Baa Humbug!
Unless you were living under a rock or otherwise detached from the media universe yesterday, you undoubtedly heard the story about thousands of people in Japan being duped into buying sheep after being told they were poodles.
Well, guess what. It’s bullshit. This Japanese blogger carefully dissects the entire story (via) to explain that whoever originally reported the story (apparently the Australian version of MSNBC) misunderstood some remarks made on a talk show made by an actress.
As the blogger explains, she didn’t say she HAD a sheep, she said she’d heard a STORY about someone else who had one…in other words, the good old fashioned Urban Legend. The blogger then traces the story itself back to an earlier source — another Japanese blogger with a post from February of 2006, who also basically tells the same story as a FOAF-style story.
She then points out that the place where the scam is supposed to have occurred is Japan’s leading sheep-raising area, making it highly unlikely that people would not recognize sheep there. Also, she notes the total lack of coverage of the story in the Japanese media, indicating that they would be all over this story themselves with their own unique brand of “weird news” coverage had it actually occurred.
You gotta love the Internet — less than 24 hours from “breaking news” to “urban legend”!