“You know what your trouble is? You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.”
~William Gibson “The Winter Market”
I really wanted to explore a few different avenues when starting this blog. The first one was to briefly verbalize my thoughts on this new channel of communication (microblogging/microcommunication/anything that uses XMPP to transmit information). I hoped this did not become a boring academic exercise only a few people would read. I thank you for …
Facebook seems to be following the example set by other sites (like Twitter) to give instant feedback to their users. The news-feed that provides information to the user about their friends will auto-refresh on a regular basis. A series of filters will also be connected to the news feed as a a way of limiting …
It is very easy to dismiss the concept of the nanocelebrity if you do not take into account several of the factors that make online socialization different from traditional socialization and traditional mediation. Lev Grossman began to explore these factors when Time named “You” the Person of the Year in 2006. He begins his article …
Theresa Senft and Clive Thompson first put out the idea of the microcelebrity a few years ago, an individual who is promote him or herself on the media and channels that are available to her or him and broadcasts that presentation to the general public and generally has an audience in the thousands. A microcelebrity …
As we say goodbye to the old administration and the old technological initiatives are set by the wayside (remember the Internet is/are a bunch of tubes, classic, classic), it is important to look at President Obama’s technological policy point and see a possible road for the nation’s technical infrastructure. According to the White House website, it …
I’ve wanted to go to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for quite some time. Since the show is the first part of the year, it was difficult to travel to Las Vegas. I’m generally at the National Association of Broadcasters annual show in April, and my travel budget doesn’t cover going to Vegas twice in one year. I was …
It is a rare occurrence that I would stumble across a timely topic. However, it seems that my theoretical academic discussion has turned into a real-world threat. I’ve been working all day, and I finished eating dinner when I see the warning issued by Twitter. The questions that I asked from the last post seem …
As a grad student, I often have a ton of books spread out throughout three to six locations. I can never remember where they are and I always have a tough time organizing them. Therefore, when I heard about Library from Delicious Monster, it seemed that I could finally have some scene of control over …
It was hard for me to start writing this week. Suffering from a combination of writer’s block and a series of allergies made it tough to put words on the screen. However, there came from the Internet a significant amount of chatter that the writer’s block or sickness didn’t matter anymore. The discussion among those …
I talked with one of my friends, and I found out something shocking. I’ve had many computers. The majority of them have simply died on me (5 out of 9, what can I say? I’m hard on computers). However, another point that has come to light is that it was hard for me to become …