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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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 by Eva Thury
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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.

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Tags: animals, stone age memes, technology by Eva Thury
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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?

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Tags: stone age memes, technology by Eva Thury
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