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Friday, December 4, 2009

Post a video about gay marriage, have a few conversations with people on facebook moments later about it.

Best: I got to talk to people who both agreed and disagreed.

It reminded me that you need to always collect. Always ask. Always listen.

Or to steal quotes from conversations last night:

In other words – by listening to what others believe, I am able to strengthen and elaborate on my own beliefs (without being threatened by what they believe).

I think I read a quote somewhere that said something along the lines of “The mark of an educated mind is the ability to consider another person’s opinion without necessarily accepting it.”

Filed in philosophy | | Comments (0)

Right.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

…found this on a number of different blogs, today.

Filed in human rights | | Comments (3)

In video game jargon, a “completionist” is a player who will continue playing a game until they have finished every level, found every secret, maximized their final score and have (essentially) consumed every single experience that a game has to offer.

Book Completionist
Last night, I was on Amazon looking for gifts for the coming holiday and I found that my purchase history back to 2004 was available. I started to look back to see what I purchased. It’s not a small number of books, so I copied them and then tried to remember which ones I read.

I’ve completed 34.0% of the books I purchased via Amazon in the last five years.

I’m not sure if that’s a good number, compared to all book buyers, but it’s much lower than I imagined it. I would have easily guessed I had completed 50% or more of the books…but no.

There’s a strong urge to go back and find all those unfinished books and get through them. In most cases, that would mean starting at the beginning because I can’t remember what I read in a book I bought and started in 2005.

I don’t know…if I started a book and put it down and forgot about it, is it worth picking back up? meh….

Filed in books | | Comments (3)

I, Wikipedian (finale)

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Yesterday, I was thinking about how everything I post here (or on facebook or twitter or …) has a life of its own. This site is durable in a way that only digital things can be durable: infinite copies, nearly no value, ephemeral yet eternal.

Not everything I’ve done online is here or places like facebook. In October 2006, I wrote a Wikipedia article about Slowness, a book by Milan Kundera. I was and am still skeptical about Wikipedia’s value, especially as Google can offer links to many sites written by academic experts as opposed to Wikipedia’s self-appointed editorial “experts”.

Nothing new. Most people I know feel the same way.

It’s been three years since I wrote that article, so I went into the history to see how much was changed by other people. The answer surprised me a tiny bit: not much changed.

To be honest, I wrote a short article about a short novel by an author who is famous for two or three of his other works. This one is, in a way, an also-ran in his oeuvre…but it’s the one I enjoyed most.

I doubt I’ll ever write anything else (or even edit anything) on Wikipedia. While it was fun to try once, the interface is still a pain. All the markup and standard ways to identify things and notations are just annoying.

I never aspired to write for an encyclopedia. I am completely opposed to learning a second language (the markup tags and formatting rules) to even try to write for an encyclopedia.

And so, I’d say this is certainly the last time I ever write about Wikipedia, unless I think about comparing a few pages again…

Filed in technology | | Comments (1)

In the future, we’ll all be naked.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Swing, batter batter batter….swing, batter.
Grady Sizemore took photos of himself in nearly naked states of undress, sent them to his girlfriend and then they were “leaked” to the internet…

…and nobody cared. (Corrected: …and nobody cared except for Grady Sizemore groupies.)

In one entire day, not a single “Sizemore” related joke was told in my presence. None of the people I follow on twitter made one. None of my friends on facebook made a pun on his last name. It didn’t exist.

Everybody will be naked
There’s a certain point, which I’m sure we have passed, when so many people have had their nude photos leaked/stolen/sold/whatever that it just doesn’t matter.

Recently, one person I knew argued: the more people who post nude photos of themselves, the less nude photos matter. While I guess this is a voting for shoes approach, it’s not one I’m planning to pursue. I’m not enough of an exhibitionist, thank you! (And you’re welcome!)

It gives me pause, however, because it shows how technology is changing our world. On facebook, people I knew 20 or 30 years ago (hi!) are my friends. I haven’t seen them since the 1980’s in many cases, yet I see their posts about life and they see mine (hi!). What does this mean?

I think there’s some good to this, but at the same time I’ve lost some amount of privacy by participating.

Leaked photos, as with poor Mr. Sizemore, are one example. Everybody has heard a story of college kids losing job offers when photos of wild parties are found. Facebook status or twitter updates are another step-down, but if I write about the sublime drink that I was served at the Greenhouse…will somebody assume I’m a drunk?

To be clear, I’m not playing the slippery slope game. Each of these things has a specific affect on those who witness what we share.

What I’m saying is that there is a price to participate and that price is not money, it’s information. To get information we need to share it. To share it means sharing a bit of ourselves with the world. The question is whom are we trying to affect and what is the affect we desire to create? The other question is “what happens when we no longer control what we’ve created?”

Notes: