David Emery OnlineGeneration Why?
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
A fascinating – albeit long – article by Zadie Smith for the New York Review of Books on The Social Network (a film which you really should go and see if you haven’t already).
Lots of good points are raised, but I’ve picked this quote out as it represents a feeling that I’ve seen crop up in a few places – that being that in someway online communications are in someway lesser then traditional forms – and it’s a feeling that I think is seriously wrongheaded.
Social network presences for me are not a replacement for physical interaction but an additional representation of yourself. In fact, I think often they can represent a person better then they do in real life, depending on the character.
Another point worth pointing out – there’s also an underlying tone of ‘all your data belongs to facebook’ but that’s no more relevant then what phone network you use; it’s just the delivery method – it’s the content, which can be (often simultaneously) on all sorts of sites, that matters.
Visit ➔I believe in WikiLeaks.
I wonder what it’s like to be 14, to be watching this unfold and have Wikileaks as the base of certain assumptions you will make about media, news, government and information for the rest of your life.
I am proud to live in a world where this is possible.
WikiLeaks defines the effect the internet has on the world; information cannot be controlled anymore (once more then a small handful possesses it), and you just have to deal with it.
As Anthony says, WikiLeaks is like Napster, but for governments.
Visit ➔It’s As If Apple Has Hired Don Draper
Watching Apple’s iPhone 4 FaceTime commercial again, it reminds me of something: Mad Men. The television show is starting its fourth season in a couple of weeks, but the commercial takes me back to the end of season one — an episode called “The Wheel.” I’ve actually talked about this episode before because it contains a scene that is perhaps the best in the entire series. In it, ad man Don Draper gives a presentation to Kodak showing why Sterling Cooper should be handling the account for their new picture projector.
I really like the FaceTime ad for the new iPhone; yes, it borders on (well, cannonballs straight into) over-sentimentality, but it’s an ad that actually makes you feel something and you can’t say that very often.
It feels old school, timeless, in way quite reminiscent to what Pixar achieve with their films.
If you haven’t seen it:
Visit ➔I hope ebooks usher in a world of ideal book lengths
I hope ebooks usher in a world of ideal book lengths. I.e., detached from the burden of having to be "book-sized"; less filler, more focus.
A great idea – after having now spent a bit of time reading on the iPad (2 books so far) I firmly believe this is the future of the medium, and it’s a lot more adaptable then paper ever was.
Of course, whether the publishers will get their heads around this sort of thing is a whole different question…
Visit ➔W+K: Honda commercial
Great new ad for Honda from W+K, love the photography style
Well isn’t this beautiful:
While we’re on the subject of adverts, I really like the new Cadbury’s Flake ad as well:
Visit ➔Fifth Birthday
On the 18th of April, 2005 I posted this inauspicious post and brought this blog blinking into the world. Everything has to start somewhere.
It’s quite a strange thought to me that this blog is 5 years old.
5 years is a strange in-between length of time that somehow simultaneously a long time and not that long at all. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing this blog for a huge amount of time, but yet I’ve somehow amassed 1376 posts – not including this one – totalling 200,000+ words (it’s very difficult to get an accurate figure) which seems like a hell of a lot.
Not that quantity is any indication of quality, of course.
Looking back at the first few posts indicates that at the very least my writing has got a little better (although I could really do with a proof reader), but also that my focus has got a bit broader (and maybe deeper?) – certainly less of ‘woo Apple have a new thing out’ posts hopefully. I think I’ve hit a much more sustainable rhythm that’s been mirrored by much of the rest of the blogosphere (hey, we don’t use that word really anymore, do we? Not...
Read more ➔Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch
This clip is raw from Camera E-8 on the launch umbilical tower/mobile launch program of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. [...] The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time.
Awesome (in the true meaning of the word):
Visit ➔Ambient Inspiration
I’m a heavy user of tabs in whatever browser I call home – Safari at the moment. There’s always a bunch of sites that I keep open all the time: Google Reader (using Helvetireader of course), this site, the visitor logs for this site, the server stats for this site (I may be sharing too much here…), my Flickr stats, Facebook & Last.fm. They can be split up nicely into: News, Blog+Stats & Social Networks.
In the last couple of months I’ve added another site into that last category, which slots in very nicely right next to Flickr: Dribbble.
So what is Dribbble? In short, it is to design and creativity as Twitter is to a blog post; as a member of the site, you upload little snippets of what you’re working on, limited to a 400×300 pixel canvas. That’s actually pretty much it; everything else has a vague twitter-ish feel around it so you can follow people, have followers and all that jazz. It’s simple, and all the better for it.
It’s just come out of a lengthy beta period so now non-drafted players (it uses basketball as a hook to hang all of the interface metaphors...
Read more ➔How Software Engineers and Designers Can Increase Their Focus
There’s a really simple tip almost everybody can use to increase productivity tremendously. Not only is the tip free, it might even make you a bit of money. *And* it’ll make you smarter. It’s really easy, there’s only one step involved: Sell your TVs.
I don’t get how anyone can fail to see that TV is one of the most important source of culture and knowledge we have.
Might as well be saying ‘sell all your books’ or ‘don’t listen to music’.
Visit ➔