A Memorable Fancy » internet

Second Life video

erik — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:43:14 +0000

I am still intrigued yet confused about Second Life, but here’s an interesting and informative video about it with Drew Carey.

Internet-challenged

erik — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:55:33 +0000

With the demise of my iBook and the ongoing disbaility of my PC, my opportunities to connect have been seriously curtailed. I have to borrow computers or use those on campus, which is far from ideal. I have been handwriting a lot lately, including a fairly long entry on Burn After Reading (which I can summarize as “Good but not great, not one of the Coens’ best, but Brad Pitt is wonderful — more later if I can). I am also handwriting sections of the diss to be typed later, which is a pain, but prevents me from drifting endlessly on the web instead of writing. I am also having my composition students maintain blogs this semester, to which I will probably link on the sidebar here soon.

whoisi fun

erik — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:42:51 +0000

Here’s an idea for an unintended (nevermind) use of whosi: create groups and add feeds to them. I created a “name” called “Film Scholars” and added the trusty Dr Mabuse’s Kaleidoscope site. I was going to add everyone else in my film blogroll, but I didn’t because I’m lazy and I want to see what other people add. What I’m thinking is that if people add sites to the group, we could have a huge, collaboratively-built RSS feed of blogs of film scholars. One could also create groups for anything this way.

A few more notes about whoisi. I’m still a little creeped out but intrigued by the concept. I looked at the “About” section, which points out some interesting things, like the fact that it is cookie-based, so you don’t have to log in to follow people. It is collaborative, like a wiki + and RSS feed. And he uses the word “frak.” There’s some definite potential here.

Sharing and Stalking

erik — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:57:30 +0000

Back in May of 05, I wrote about distributed identity, and posted links to a number of sites with which I share information about myself, such as last.fm, flickr, etc. I mused about exhibitionism and sharing, but the problem then is that if anyone were actually interested, for some reason, in following my activities, they would have to go to each service and subscribe or return repeatedly. What was missing was a place to aggregate them, and now a few have come around. Doug alerted me to friendfeed, which includes all kinds of data. I have also looked at swurl, which seems to do the same thing, but I haven’t really investigated it yet. Both are remarkably simple to set up, involving little more than typing in your public username for each site (which means for me typing “emarsh” over and over). Friendfeed also has a facebook component, which I haven’t used yet, but which might be a good way to alert friends to new blog entries and other events.

On the flip side of this phenomenon is Whoisi which also lets you track people, but perhaps in a different way. It’s basically a search engine to which one can add people and associate their names with sites. On the one hand this is an intriguing way to build collaboratively a database of individuals. On the other hand, it may be a sinister avenue for outing people’s anonymous blogs, or slandering people by assoicating their names with unsavory sites. There’s nothing for me yet, and I don’t think I’ll create anything, but this site has some interesting, if unsettling, potential.

Anonymity and (online) identity

erik — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:44:29 +0000

I’ve been working on Kracauer’s early writings, trying to think of his concepts of distraction and the loss of individuality attending the rise of modernity in terms of networked communication and video distribution. As a sort of residue of this work, I began thinking about internet use more generally, which spawned the following snippets, stripped of specific theoretical references.

Today’s spectator is still largely anonymous, but trackable,
not as easily able to disappear into a crowd. The internet user always
leaves a trace, whether through cookies or IP logs and referrals. The
user has become a string of numbers, coordinates indicating preferences
and likely paths, interests defined by interactions across sites. Often
nameless and faceless, the typical internet user still has an identity,
pieced together in code through browsing habits.

The loss of individuality is double-edged. Users of networks become bits of data as their habits are aggregated and used for predictive purposes, such as in gmail’s use of keywords in meails to generate ads, or netflix’s recommendation engine, which relires in part on other “Raters Like You” . The cult of self-expression prevalent in blogs and social networking sites seems to be a counterpoint to this anonymizing function of the web, but the ease with which one can hide such things as race and gender, and the rapidity with which one can delete an entire online existence suggest that identity online is still fleeting and superficial. I wonder to what extent this reflects offline, or face-to-face, realtime, interactions as well, or if these things can ever again be usefully or realistically separated.

Second Life

erik — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:40:51 +0000

I am puzzled by Second Life. I like the idea of a virtual environment and everything I’ve read about it is positively amazing. But I just can’t get the hang of it. I think my problem is that I don’t have any real objectives, nor any friends who use it to help me explore. I enter the world, I look around, I walk around, maybe I talk to someone for a minute, and then I get bored and leave. So my questions are: who is using it, and for what? What possibilities does it open up?