On Rocketboom, Medium, Messages and the Sanitarium of Techmeme

Am I the only one that found Rocketboom painful to watch? Sure she’s cute, but she’s also annoying as fuck, and the novelty of “oh wow a cute broadcaster with a hip Internet sensibility” wore off after my second episode. The pain of broadcast is its synchronic experience model. You have to WAIT for things to occur (this is also why I hate podcasts, I like non-linear experience). Diachronic people!

Anyhow, Rocketboom’s drama was hysterical today. It was like the SCANDAL at a high school, with everyone weighing in with their falsely sage wisdom and advice, like drug pushers in the hallway, ambulance chasing attorneys and other opportunistic pundits, flacks, wonks and monkeys.

You were played people! And probably willingly so. But this is by far not the first time I’ve seen these blowups. They also aren’t always negative polarizing wars, but also are exemplified by trumpeting accomplishments through the very mechanism of supposed accomplishment, whilst overblowing the very metrics of said accomplishment and impact. Or they can be factions forming along software lines, revisions of history, Wikipissing (the act of peeing in the corners of Wiki pages to mark territory: see DeviantArt/Jark et al) or even physical cattiness at the geek equivalent of a singles bar (conferences).

Here is where we are: online only business is operating in a medium that is based primarily on language, text and visual discourse rather than action and temporal situations. Traditional business was multifaceted and — the key — dimensional. This means it operated in 4D space, including both physical proximity, language (body and text) as well as visual discourse. Online business (as a function) is reduced down to the same media as the business as product. The text which serves as the revenue source for X service, is fundamentally and morphologically the same text that serves the back-end business practice for X company.

Remember McLuhan? The Medium is the Message/The Medium is the Massage. Its still a prescient statement, except in todays ConnectionistWeb/Web++/whatever world, the medium is the message, the massage and the core manner of discourse for public, private, mechanic and computational communication. Is it any wonder the bits cross and what is public goes private, what is private goes public, and the machines can directly run the asylum?

Where does that leave us in terms of Rocketboom et al? We’re in a world where the metaphorically difference between public and private has been eliminated by memes, surveys and demographic data assembled in to the notion of a social network. A world where the difference between snapshot and private photo is a flag on a photo service. A world where 15 year olds lip sync on web-cams before their parents come home, and post it for the world to see without consequence, thereby reducing ridicule down through sheer volume of possible sources.

The contents of my life are a setting, and that binary flag is a subject to my wishes in terms of where that line of private/public is drawn.

I think the question we should ask ourselves is: am I moving the line, or is the line moving me?

That I don’t have an answer to.

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2006
07/06
CATEGORY
life
musing
2 comments

  1. Thanks for writing this. The (over)reaction to this non-event has been crazy. The Internet isn’t the world. It’s not even close to the world.

  2. The whole thing is like way OTT, but I like Amanda – though the way she presents gets quite annoying!

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Asides

    Andreas Schlegel currently lives in Singapore. He likes to write programs that generate audio, visual, and physical output. He enjoys doing projects with syntfarm.

    via sojamo.de

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    ["Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2." From Benedikt]

    If we dimensionalize the data from any given social framework online, could we apply isovistic theory to the quantification of perceptual awareness around a user in this textually augmented reality we now find ourselves?

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    Infra-mince, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, but can only be described by examples, such as the difference in displaced volume between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once, or the taste of one's mouth lingering in exhaled smoke.

    Infra-mince was a new way to think about physical and temporal dimensions (decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals). Holes in some of Duchamp's artwork link the 2nd to the 3rd dimension. Sometimes he shot the holes out with bullets, echoing infra-mince again in the delay between the sounds of the shot and the impact.

    via everything2.com

    Add this to the isovism concept and you basically describe a social network.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point.

    via en.wikipedia.org

    Isovism is an interesting concept when applied to the creation of a website. Quantifying the perception of space in a given point. How far can you see from your homepage for instance into the larger n-dimensional world a site creates?

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    The new iPad has lots of space. The screen offers 1024x768 pixels.

    via tuaw.com

    What excites me the most about the iPad, I think, is that it takes paradigms and approaches and lets us expand them. Good art, whether visual or interface, comes from working against constraints imposed by the medium. The iPhone imposed very strict constraints and amazing new paradigms of interface design came out of that. These new approaches have bled their way into Mac OSX apps, Windows 7, etc. I expect the same to happen with the iPad.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

    - #

    The funny thing is, if Adobe does not take the steps to make tools to address a future with HTML5, what we'll be left with is tools others create. And chief amongst those others will most likely be Apple. Flash's stance here reminds of Microsoft's during the creation of Blackbird and later their migration toward Visual Interdev and Frontpage. When you build the walls so high around your garden, the fall will just kill your plants.

    [From Flash, iPad, Standards – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]

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    Rest in piece little buddy.

    [From xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe]

    - #

    Idiotic. Copy paste wasn't missing because of an ideological reason. It was missing because it wasn't ready. Same with an SDK and an App-Store. Multitasking presents a usability challenge that I wager they are nearly set in addressing. I bet the camera is supply chain related (same with the iPod Touch). WIth Apple products, what is MISSING is the interesting part, as it usually leads to exposure to ideologies, challenges or works in progress.

    [From What We Learned About Apple Yesterday]

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    I wonder if they are also seeing concurrent apps running from the same device, and that's how they know? I imagine the Tablet will be able to run multiple apps in a grid of some sort, given the screen size.

    [From Apple Tablet: The Second Stage Media Booster Rocket ]

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    A pretty big deal I think, especially considering the move from entertainment companies from "impression" based metrics to revenue.

    [From Boxee Blog » Coming soon: Boxee Payments]

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