Random Thoughts
1. Excellent Writing.
"... a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, he has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there."
-- Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair on the collapse of Iceland's economy.
2. Atomization, redux.
We (modern Americans at least, and probably all first-worlders) no longer have a mental commons. As we seek out customized experiences, cherry-picking whatever electronica appeals to our prejudices, we no longer have any authentic collective experiences. Unwanted electronica-- that is, electronica we do not seek out ourselves-- is typically rejected as spam. Never before in history have so many people been so connected, yet at the same time so isolated and alone.
The flip side of this coin is hyper-connectivity, or an over-representation of electronic connections to people with whom we have only a tangential real-life relationship, or no real-life relationship at all. Until a couple of years ago, the past was largely the past, and people from long ago remained in the vague recesses of dim memory. Now, however, it is entirely possible for the long-lost girlfriend from the third grade to pop up out of nowhere a generation later asking you to be "friends"-- now, currently, today-- on Facebook. How is one supposed to handle that?
A couple of months ago I defriended someone on MySpace. While I knew this person vaguely in real-life, I didn't even know her last name. We definitely have absolutely zero in common. I defriended her because she would put up multiple bulletins every day, effectively taking over my MySpace page with her announcements about heavy metal, something that is of zero relevance to my life. Yesterday, I got a friend request on MySpace... from her. The "personalized" message was "How dare you defriend me. Add me!"
I think I might be in the position where to do nothing is to offend her. While that isn't my intention, she and I aren't friends and I'm not going to add her, because I would just be inviting the sorts of over-posting that caused me to delete her in the first place.
It's interesting to contemplate the new social nuances and subtleties of electronic offense by ommission, but she's going to have to get over it...
"... a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, he has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there."
-- Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair on the collapse of Iceland's economy.
2. Atomization, redux.
We (modern Americans at least, and probably all first-worlders) no longer have a mental commons. As we seek out customized experiences, cherry-picking whatever electronica appeals to our prejudices, we no longer have any authentic collective experiences. Unwanted electronica-- that is, electronica we do not seek out ourselves-- is typically rejected as spam. Never before in history have so many people been so connected, yet at the same time so isolated and alone.
The flip side of this coin is hyper-connectivity, or an over-representation of electronic connections to people with whom we have only a tangential real-life relationship, or no real-life relationship at all. Until a couple of years ago, the past was largely the past, and people from long ago remained in the vague recesses of dim memory. Now, however, it is entirely possible for the long-lost girlfriend from the third grade to pop up out of nowhere a generation later asking you to be "friends"-- now, currently, today-- on Facebook. How is one supposed to handle that?
A couple of months ago I defriended someone on MySpace. While I knew this person vaguely in real-life, I didn't even know her last name. We definitely have absolutely zero in common. I defriended her because she would put up multiple bulletins every day, effectively taking over my MySpace page with her announcements about heavy metal, something that is of zero relevance to my life. Yesterday, I got a friend request on MySpace... from her. The "personalized" message was "How dare you defriend me. Add me!"
I think I might be in the position where to do nothing is to offend her. While that isn't my intention, she and I aren't friends and I'm not going to add her, because I would just be inviting the sorts of over-posting that caused me to delete her in the first place.
It's interesting to contemplate the new social nuances and subtleties of electronic offense by ommission, but she's going to have to get over it...