Web Utopia No More
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
For a while after his first TV series was broadcast in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee was in the habit of collecting and filing some of the comments that people made about him on web pages and social media sites. He did a 10-minute Google trawl most days for about six months and the resultant collected observations soon ran to dozens of pages. If you read those comments now as a cumulative narrative, you begin to fear for Stewart Lee. A good third of the posts fantasised about violence being done to the comic, most of the rest could barely contain the extent of their loathing. "Stewart Lee is a cynical man, who has been able to build an entire carrer [sic] out of his own smugness. I hope the fucking chrones disease [sic] kills him."
Online commenting: the age of rage | Technology | The Observer
profoundheterogeneity
“I am sitting here, six in the morning, I am staring at two people bascially naked in the shower together with 30 people watching and its like uh okay, but that’s the future.”-Josh Harris, We Live in Public Perhaps the most haunting film I have watched on publicity and the digital network is Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public. On the surface the documentary is about the Josh Harris and his various internet ventures. But on a more significant level the film raises questions about what it means to “live” once that living is done almost exclusively in public. The movie covers several of Harris’s projects including “Quiet: We Live in Public” a bunker hotel in NYC where one hundred people agreed to have every aspect of their lives exposed to every other member of the community.
The Internet causes connections to multiply and strengthen, creating a frenzy of positive feedback, which can drive people apart--not together Optimists have long dominated the cyber-landscape, firm and vocal in their belief that the Internet creates a more transparent world, and that the quick and easy access to information it provides is bringing the global population together into one enlightened chorus of harmony. My perspective is different, and my goal in this, the first in a series of posts for The Atlantic , is to lay out the implications of an Internet-driven world.
Life in the Age of Extremes - Bill Davidow - Technology - The Atlantic
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.
What it Means Today to be 'Connected' - Lucy P. Marcus - Harvard Business Review
This past Tuesday, Facebook made a deal with the F.T.C.: from now on, the social-networking company can no longer humbug us about privacy. If we’re told that something we post on the site will be private, it will stay that way, unless we give Facebook permission to make it public. Or at least sort of. For a while.
Culture Desk: Bigger Brother: The Exponential Law of Privacy Loss : The New Yorker
Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique | Magazine
Photo: Brock Davis You don’t have to read this essay to know whether you’ll like it. Just go online and assess how provocative it is by the number of comments at the bottom of the web version.
Technology Provides an Alternative to Love. - NYTimes.com
I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship. Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.
The internet is a child with many fathers. It is an extremely complex multi-module technology and each module—from communication protocols to browsers—has a convoluted history. The internet’s earliest roots lie in the rise of cybernetics during the 1950s. Later breakthroughs included the invention of packet switching in the 1960s, a novel way for transmitting data by breaking it into chunks.
Two decades of the web: a utopia no longer | Prospect Magazine
The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why
Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below. The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time.
Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed?: Scientific American
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. View full size image Image: Creative Commons | The Opte Project Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way... Read More »Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin | Technology | The Guardian
Exclusive: Threats range from governments trying to control citizens to the rise of Facebook and Apple-style 'walled gardens' The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried than I have been in the past," he said. "It's scary." The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.Censoring the Internet: It's Not Just for China Any More! - James Fallows - Technology - The Atlantic
For the record, like nearly everyone else who has thought about the importance of a freely operating Internet to the cultural, political, and economic vibrancy of the United States, I take a dim view of the Orwellian-named "Stop Online Piracy Act" being considered in Congressional hearings today. For more of the reasons why opponents of the bill have declared today "American Censorship Day," go to the ACD site , or Fight for the Future , or Mozilla's site . And for a how-to of Internet censorship a la Chinoise , there is this Atlantic piece from three years ago, still basically true to the operations of the Great Firewall. In the NYT Rebecca MacKinnon makes the Great Firewall-SOPA connection. The Vimeo clip below does a very clear and concise job of explaining the commercial, technical, and political issues at stake. Short description of the problem: in the name of blocking copyright-infringing piracy sites mainly outside the United States, the bill would make U.S.Rep. Lofgren, who represents part of Silicon Valley, told me that her constituents have already made a couple of rookie mistakes in their anti-SOPA campaigning. The flood of calls to Congress came as many members were looking ahead to the Thanksgiving recess, and many went to district offices rather than offices in the Capitol. For all the fury on Facebook and Twitter, Lofgren says, the backlash against SOPA has registered as “a blip” in Congress so far. “Eighty-seven thousand (phone calls), that’s a start,” she says. “But remember when President Bush was pushing for immigration reform in the Senate?