BBC News reported this week that the Treasury Department has eased sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and Sudan with the hope of “[helping] further the use of web services and [supporting] opposition groups.” While I generally disagree with sanctions on principle, and so certainly welcome any removal of them by our gov’t, I can’t help but make a few quick points regarding the general narrative that this move fits into. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, technology
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I’ve been a Facebook believer for well over a year now. Although some have logged off permanently, I couldn’t be prouder of my obsession. This social networking site has given me the chance to communicate with people that I haven’t seen in a long time. One would argue that there’s a reason why we lose touch with people, or that our three hundred Facebook friends are fake friendships. But frankly, I need all the friends I can get, if they are real friends or merely Facebook friends. [Read more →]

Tags: ends & odd, technology
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To anyone who stumbles self-consciously through voice messaging: relax, voicemail is dying along with the home landline. To everyone else: let’s not prolong its suffering. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, technology
2 Comments »

I’m about as far from an electronic gadget junkie as you can get. I own a barely-used cell phone and a laptop that never works fast enough. I bought a Kindle, but that was only after Oprah told me that it was her most favorite thing in the world. (And Oprah would never lead me astray.) It was only recently that I learned what “apps” are. I don’t text, and I definitely don’t sext. And what is Wi-Fi anyway? I don’t know. I employ a husband to figure out these technical details. So it’s pretty surprising, then, that I watched the dog and pony show for the new iPad, Apple’s latest must-have item. [Read more →]

Tags: technology
1 Comment »

I’m a member of the Mac-Cult. I went with a MacBook Pro over a Dell last year to avoid Vista and have never looked back. When my phone plan was up I switched to the iPhone. I’ve considered getting an Apple tattooed on my person in a private but alluring area. Today is a great day, for the High Priest has shown us a sign, a sign so magical I want to lick it. Behold the iPad! [Read more →]

Tags: technology
2 Comments »

I spent this past week in telecommunications hell, as the California rains shut down my Verizon phone and DSL line for the third time this month; this time for almost the entire week. It surprisingly made me long for the monopoly that once was AT&T. [Read more →]

Tags: technology
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It’s been about a year, now, since I made the move to a cell phone that does more than just telephone calls and text messages. Now my phone is A LOT smarter … wish I could say the same for me. [Read more →]

Tags: technology
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When I was an undergraduate, back in the 1950s*, professors had office hours. There were maybe 3 or 4 hours a week we knew the professor would be in his or her office and we could stop by to talk about course content or an upcoming assignment. We had the phone number of the office and could call during those office hours if we had a quick question. Professors also were available by appointment if we had a class that conflicted with their office hours. But basically, aside from seeing them during class time and the option of seeing them during their office hours — hours that they set — we didn’t have contact with them. They didn’t generally provide their home phone numbers. If we had a question at night or over the weekend, we lived with it. [Read more →]

Tags: education, technology
4 Comments »

One question I have concerning full body scans at airports, and the threats they pose to personal liberties, travelers’ dignity, yada-yada-yada … what about the poor schmucks who will have to look at way-too-many images of way-too-many travelers such as myself?
[Read more →]

Tags: technology, terror & war
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Raising a kid can be expensive. There are diapers and formula when they are babies, and as they get older they get pickier about their toys and their clothes (not to mention you still need to feed them!). Plus, maybe there is a certain bike they want or there is a new Wii game that is out. And in this economy, buying any holiday gifts at all may be a difficult expense for some people. Needless to say, I was intrigued when the other day, a friend “invited” me to donate to her daughter Ashtyn’s bike fund through Facebook.  [Read more →]

Tags: family & parenting, technology
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I have a house full of books. Every room in the house has bookshelves. Last summer, I put four new six foot tall shelves in the basement and filled them, front and back — that got the books off the floor around the rest of the house. That’s the second time I’ve done this.

So, some people like the clutter of books, as I do. Some love the feel of a nice deckle-edged hardback with crisp paper — some more than others.

I understand, even if I don’t share it, the appeal for some of having all their books in a convenient, portable form. And, undeniably, it’s cool to be able to have instant access to a big library of books. (How big is something I’ll return to.)

But, for me, the Kindle is not that. Look, toilet seats are made of the same stuff that Kindles are (and the comparisons don’t end there). [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, technology
8 Comments »

If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, that depends on whether it has a Facebook page. Sounds ridiculous, huh? I thought the same thing when I recently applied for a job to be an interactive editor for a news website. [Read more →]

Tags: all work, technology, trusted media & news
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I started out life as a Latin teacher, and apart from being able to spend time poring over smut no one else could understand and being called a scholar and not a pervert –- it was long ago and in those days the former term was considered preferable -– the appeal was that the subject domain didn’t change very much. You could delve deep and really understand what you were doing.

Oh, Saint Heraclitus, where did I go wrong? I fell into the blogosphere, and I will never be the same again. [Read more →]

Tags: movies, stone age memes, technology
3 Comments »

24,000-22,000 BC: chunky fertility goddess statues (pictured below: notice the prominent and large brains.)

10,000 BC: cave painting

4,000 BC: ziggurat construction [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, technology
2 Comments »

There was an interesting article on CNN.com the other day (”interesting” in the sense of discouraging, scary, and unintentionally funny) titled “The Future of Libraries, With or Without Books,” about how librarians, in the same spirit as a 54-year-old woman getting a nose piercing and tramp stamp to keep up with “the kids,” have wholeheartedly and uncritically embraced the digital revolution, and, in the process, are dumping the “shushing ladies, dank smell and endless shelves of books.”

Are you one of those dwindling band of benighted bibliophiles that labors under the naive misconception that “endless shelves of books” are what libraries are all about?  Shush.  Today’s library contains “hipster staffers who blog (and) chat on Twitter.”

Wow.  Blogging.  That’s some cool new technology that all the teens are doing, isn’t it?
[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, technology
24 Comments »

I always liked that scene in Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise is lowered into the CIA computer. There’s all kinds of suspense having to do with external constraints like being suspended from a cable while hacking into the computer and not being able to make any noise and so on. As any computer user knows, though, what’s amazing about the scene is that Cruise manages to get the computer to do what he wants. All those external plot-heightening devices are nothing compared to the mundane suspense of going to work and trying to do something with a computer at all. [Read more →]

Tags: stone age memes, technology
3 Comments »

Uncle Sam is cheating!

Considering all the money that flows out of New York City’s Financial District, it should not come as a surprise that the news was first brought to light by the Wall Street Journal, but here’s the bottom line: if you just got a fat under-the-table payment at work, or if you’re crying poverty during the day while night swimming in a pool filled with dollar bills, don’t go bragging about it over the internet on your social network of choice. [Read more →]

Tags: money, technology
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Not everyone noticed it, but the world ended last week. The Wikipedia model tanked. The New York Times reported that the English-language version of the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” would will soon institute the editorial review of articles about living people. So there will still be a Wikipedia but the revolutionary encyclopedia we have now will, in effect, cease to exist.

The changes Wikipedia is undergoing are likely to have broad-scale effects on the Internet and on information use throughout cyberspace. [Read more →]

Tags: stone age memes, technology, trusted media & news
10 Comments »

I am not a fan of Twitter. I feel that anything truly worth saying requires 200 characters at minimum. I think the fact Ashton Kutcher established himself as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of this medium suggests it is one to avoid whenever possible. I do concede, however, it’s possible it saved a life. This week Michael Beasley of the Miami Heat checked into a rehabiliation hospital to deal with “possible substance and psychological issues.” Before this, he hinted at his problems with Twitters including, “Feelin like it’s not worth livin!!!!!!! I’m done.” Did someone close to him see these Twitters? Did just typing out his thoughts help Beasley realize how desperate he was? Did he originally consider using only six exclamation points but then added a seventh to be on the safe side? [Read more →]

Tags: sports, technology
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Maslow’s hierarchy of needs should be rejiggered to feature another irresistible human drive. Who can resist drawing black curling mustaches on billboard pictures of beautiful ingénues and decorating upstanding pillars of society with devil’s horns and pitchforks? Photoshop has given us the power to satisfy this need and then some, but these days the influence of photo manipulation seems so pervasive and so powerful that its place in society is being debated in the British Parliament.

Britain is considering a law making it illegal to photoshop ads in publications intended for readers less than 16 years old, according to Jezebel.com. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, stone age memes, technology
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Video provides an excellent vantage point for studying the Internet phenomenon, though it is also, oddly enough, where the Internet disappears. Hackers believe “information wants to be free,” but the suits have by and large been happy to charge for it, control it, own it. Case in point is the experience of what has been called the Kafka Lego video incident. [Read more →]

Tags: money, stone age memes, technology
1 Comment »

As I swim my laps a couple of times, a week, I think about copy and paste. On the computer, if you type out a text once, you can copy it and paste it into all the places in your document where you need it. You don’t have to type it over each time. The teachers’ old punishment of writing “I will not chew gum in school” one hundred times loses its edge through copy and paste. But laps don’t work like that. [Read more →]

Tags: stone age memes, technology
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In a sense, every cemetery is virtual, because we bury cadavers in graveyards, not people. As Mary Roach says of her experiences after her mother’s death, “My mom was never a cadaver; no person ever is. You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. My mother was gone. The cadaver was her hull.”

As we walk the paths of a cemetery, we interact with the dead through our personal cognitive interface with the person. The site is merely a liminal space that allows us to step out of our everyday lives and into the world of that relationship. All the same, the Internet abounds in all kinds of opportunities to wander through a graveyard, for all the complicated reasons that people do so. [Read more →]

Tags: stone age memes, technology
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Do you suffer from what my husband calls Pollyannoia, the irrational belief that no one is out to get you? Both this coinage and pronoia, the official term for this condition, are modeled on “paranoia,” the opposite affliction. You see little pronoia on the Internet, where, as Hesiod said, Strife rules and “potter hates potter … beggar strives with beggar and poet with poet.” On Avenue Q they say “The Internet is for porn,” but I think it’s actually for conspiracies fueled by Strife. The medium lends itself to sparking tiny flames amid the unsuspecting and blowing gently on the fragile human tinder beneath until they are engulfed in the resulting bonfire.

In a sense, conspiracies are built into the genetic structure of the Internet. [Read more →]

Tags: stone age memes, technology
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As far as I’m concerned, bibliophilia is idol-worship, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with the book memes on the Internet. There’s everything from annotating and commenting on the BBC’s Top 100 books, to listing your 12 favorites in Flickr with appropriate photographs, to the five most frustrating books on Biblical exegesis. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, stone age memes, technology
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PowerPoint is passé, in my world at least, but does it deserve to die? It has been faulted for taking away our creativity and inhibiting communication, but that is not the real problem with it. The presentation software has been blamed unjustly for the lack of creativity that, unfortunately, riddles our culture. PowerPoint will be used for a long time to come, especially in business, but gradually the Internet will nibble away at the domain of the well-entrenched presentation software, replacing it with more interesting, and interactive ways of conveying our thoughts.

If you work at a university, as I do, you see a lot of PowerPoint used badly: slides in all caps and no bulleted points, tables with a sea of numbers. Passing by the door, I look in and wonder that the students haven’t fallen out of their seats, dizzy from looking at the screen. [Read more →]

Tags: stone age memes, technology
1 Comment »

I’ve never experienced “Radioactive Cats,” Sandy Skoglund’s 1981 installation, in person, but I love the photographs I’ve seen of it: a gray kitchen, with an old man and woman, and everywhere, cats, painted neon green, crawling, writhing, looking lanky and predatory and anything but cute. Skoglund likes to take the things that seem tame and comfortable to us and render them in ways that make us squirm. Lately I’ve begun to think that “Radioactive Cats” suitably predicted the status of the feline on the Internet.

If the Internet is a collective unconscious, we are in big trouble, and I don’t think you have to find sites by child-molesters or terrorists to prove the point. When child-molesters are few, cats will do.

[Read more →]

Tags: animals, stone age memes, technology
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Monkey See is a charming and satirical examination of the question: “what would happen if monkeys could talk, and they had their own 401(k)s?”

It is also a love story, an etiquette manual for talking apes, parenting help for said primates, and a demented “how-to” guide for the aspiring evil scientist. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, technology
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The folks whose lives are intertwined with the tendrils of the Internet believe the meme is something new, but there have always been memes. The latest thing, the knowing smile, spreading from person to person. The sandals of the meme now have wings, but there have always been things we pass along knowingly, loving the knowing.

The purpose of this column is to twit the leet and ponder the creeping kudzu of the Internet. Is there anything new under the sun? Or are those memes on the walls of the Great Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux?

[Read more →]

Tags: stone age memes, technology
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I love my parents, but I draw the line at having them as internet buddies.

A few months back, my mother asked me what Facebook was and if she could join. I told her that the social networking website would be of little use to her because she doesn’t even own a computer. Then recently I was talking with my father on the phone and he asked me if I would accept his friend requests on Facebook and Myspace. My answer was a resounding no [Read more →]

Tags: family & parenting, technology
2 Comments »