Chapter Ideas

Chapter and Thesis Ideas

Extremely Huge and Incredibly Complex:

Big Data leads to the overpersonalization of the Internet.

                -But is is a huge opportunity for a new kind of artist/communicator, visualizers

                -maybe a bare-bones interface (Google of old) with a promise of a “dumb” search will catch on

Proximity, Privacy, and Identity

Questions about our identity arising in the Internet age are the next phase of a process that began with feudalism and urbanization.

                -Turkle and the projection of our identity

                -How our privacy expectations are correlated with how much we interact with people

                -Our image-consciousness is related to how much we look at other people and affects our    sense of identity

Tool vs. Pellet Feeder

The happiest and most productive users of the Internet use it to complement their natural world goals.

                -Digital Addictions

                -Principled use

                -Lack of vision

Intellectual Property

Support liberal licenses that circumvent copyright so that we can have a healthier and more natural digital diet.

                -What we eat is used to build our bodies. So with digital consumption? 

                -Thenewest lexicon: pop culture, the newest set of grammar rules: memes

                -disruptive innovation

Facebook vs. 3D Virtual Worlds

A few months ago I wondered whether the two-dimensional social networks the world has adopted were only waypoints on the road to a three-dimensional Internet. (See the blog post here.) I took a look at Second Life and thought, hey, maybe this will be the next big place for people to hang out online--it just needs better graphics and less stigma. But a recent Wired article soundly refuted my arguement.

I'm okay with that, especially because the author--Mark Wallace--acknowledged that he was of the same opinion in 2006. He wrote a book about it. But now he sees differently, and I think he's right. The gist of his arguement:

Facebook’s near-universal appeal — and virtual worlds’ near-universal failure — has as much to do with presentation as anything else. The very concept of a virtual world works against its acceptance. If I’m your great-aunt and I need a place to post pictures of your cousin’s bat mitzvah, I don’t necessarily mind joining a network in order to do so. But do I really want to join another world?

Yes, Facebook often feels like the downmarket version of the original internet dream. In term of the free exchange of ideas, it is more of a nightmare. And it was not Zuck who brought us a new kind ofinterconnected commerce. But being downmarket about the dream (instead of demanding and exclusive) is what brought critical mass to the new mode of social connectivity in a way that virtual worlds were never going to do.

It's cool that I asked a question on my blog a few months ago that was relevant enough to the global tech conversation that Wired happened to address that very question soon after. My initial hypothesis was probably wrong, but who cares about that? This is an iterative process, right?

Culture and the "New Aesthetic"

"Lawrence Levine has argued that culture is less "a fixed condition" than "a process: the product of interaction between past and present." In Levine's view, therefore, cultural persistence depends less on the ability to defend the status quo than the capacity to "react creatively and responsively to the realities of a new situation.""

-James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, preface

Isn't that what the new aesthetic is? Artist acknowledge that the status quo has a legacy but that we aren't bound to it. They react creatively to this new situation of digital connectedness.

By the way, we're going to have to come up with a name that won't sound so silly in fifty years, or a couple of aesthetics from now.

Newsfeeds: watch your diet

Dr. Burton mentioned a conversation he saw on the internet about the validity of Twitter as a communication medium. One man railed against twitter, saying that in 140 characters it wasn't possible to communicate much more than junk. Dr. Burton observed that feeds from services like Twitter, Facebook, +Google, etc. are subjective. They output material based on the qualities of the network you have built on the service. Possibly that man's Twitter feed was good for nothing but junk, but get the right network and that same feed can become a vibrant watering trough where people share big ideas, links to current event coverage, and other positive things.

The Project Begins Anew

Last Thursday I met with Professors Gideon Burton and Daniel Zappalla (who taught my Digital Civilization class last winter) and another student from that class. We talked about our motivations are for writing this ebook (because that strongly affects how much effort we'll invest in it.) We also talked about the direction we want to take with the book. Most of my posts on this blog will not be a meeting recap, but this meeting may be the most important and the discussion was so interesting that I want to record it.