Knockoff Apple Stores, down to the blue t-shirts with white name medallions, whose employees genuinely believe they work for Apple. Unbelievable. http://www.ifoapplestore.com/db/2011/07/19/counterfeit-apple-stores-popping-u...
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
The filter bubble and you, via @chipotlecoyote
The Internet presents far more information to us than any of us can realistically process even as it encourages us to subscribe to ever more of that information. You’ll be behind and uninformed if you don’t use this service, too—but don’t worry, we’ll make sure you only get the information stream from it you really want.
From the ever-insightful Watts Martin, worth a six-minute read: http://chipotle.tumblr.com/post/7768594711/the-filter-bubble-and-you
The Filter Problem has long been a fascination of mine.
Gatekeeping has been the traditional solution, as evident in traditional media: publishers evaluate content and select for profitability, rejecting what they believe will be unpopular in their market.
In the early days of the public, popular Internet For The Common Man we had the likes of CompuServe and AOL whose portals served similar functions, providing easy access to a selected subset of Internet content that the editors thought valuable.
This model is on the way out, and good riddance.
In its place there's a glut of content available to everyone at negligible cost. As a consequence, most of it has little value and the dream of a young creative to Make It Big with their artistic output (music, fiction, art) is becoming more tenuous by the millisecond.
Google had the right idea around the turn of the century: an Algorithmic filter. Good, solid, intuitive searching of the entire corpus of the digital collective consciousness, with sincere efforts to be unbiased and democratic, later refined to be more individually tailored.
This is the Pull model. Netizens actively perform a search on subjects of interest, or subscribe to the RSS feeds of sites and blogs they deem interesting.
In recent years, a new Push model has emerged. Rather than having our content selected for us by a monolithic agency like a publisher or a web portal, it's our individualized social graph that provides us with content that could be of interest, which we could never have thought to search for or subscribe to.
Twitter, Facebook, and apps and services that automatically aggregate content shared from the people in our streams and present it in a pleasing way, such as the iPad's flagship reader Flipboard.
This thinking also inspired some of the philosophies and long-term plans for SoFurry.com. No barrier to entry for any creative, minimized emphasis on a homogenized, democratic 'standard' of quality: every content item has an audience somewhere, and a good system ensures that the right content is presented to the right audience. That can also be read in reverse: the right audience is delivered to the right content.
But it's a long, hard, deep problem. Trusting your social network introduces significant bias in the content you receive, since birds of a feather tend to flock together, eliminating viewpoints contrary to yours from your awareness. The occasions where we are presented with something truly novel, unexpected and delightful are rare -- but this is what a good filter should provide.
Basically, we need a Psychic Internet. Not only an Internet that understands what we want better than we do, but which can predict different future versions of us and provides us with varied nourishment to help us choose and cultivate one of those future selves.
For all the criticisms that can be leveled against the Social filter (ideological bias, limited broadening of horizons), there's just as much and more to be said against the Gatekeeper and Algorithm filters (deliberate manipulation of the audience to popularize selected content and the inability to present the unexpected, respectively).
Is there a radical alternative that's better than any of these? Most certainly, but it hasn't caught fire yet, so we don't know what it might be. Six years from now it'll be obvious. I'll reflect on the fallacies of the Social filter fad and laugh heartily, while the Psychic Internet feeds me a really, truly thought-provoking article on Creationism that makes me re-evaluate my place in the universe.
Just as it always does.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
"Life won't get me down."
From the back of a bike cab on a ride through Amsterdam, I saw this chap out of the corner of my eye and swung my camera into action. Four seconds, if that. I don't know this guy, and I don't think he noticed me, but for the brief moment I saw him, I felt I was a member of an indomitable and ultimately pretty okay species. From his bearing I got the impression he was alone. No family, few who cared about him. Used to being passed by and ignored. His hat and scarf and heavy coat, even in the (admittedly modest) height of Dutch summer might point to his being sick, if he felt so cold as to arm himself against it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he was just waiting for his grand kids to drop by. Maybe he's a foreigner, a Moroccan or a Bosnian who, in his old age, finally decided to take the plunge and live his lifelong dream of a travel adventure in Amsterdam. Either way, though. Seeing his face, that cheeky smile, that acceptance and delight of all the troubles and wonders the world has heaped on him...
I think we'd all be well served by seeing the world through his eyes for a little while. - AlexThursday, July 14, 2011
Google+? More like Grammar+. Gender-neutral, singular 'they' and privacy.
Google+ is on a roll. Having learned from Wave's failed adoption there's a lot of engineering and development going on. This week they're rolling out a new contact importer and a privacy setting for gender, for those for whom it's a sensitive topic.
Like Facebook, Google+'s notification system is conversational. "Alan shared a photo with his circles," which, if Alan were to decide to keep his gender private, would then become "Alan has shared a photo with their circles."
In the words of the Googler who announced the feature, Frances Haugen: “Controlling privacy is more important than being grammatically correct."
Is it wrong, though?
The pronoun they has a very fluid place in the culture of English-speaking nations. Officially it's third-person plural, but it's also used as a third-person singular pronoun if the subject's gender is unknown. And further, it's used for vague abstracts that can be described in singular or plural.
From the play Ceasar and Cleopatra:
"No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.""But they do get killed!"
This use of they, and its gender-neutral application, is disputable. By the letter of grammatical law, the above example should be wrong -- but it doesn't feel wrong. Ceasar wasn't talking about a man, he was talking about men but chose a more elegant sentence structure to express his thought, which Cleopatra correctly interpreted.
Ah, Google. You've made me more interested in modern grammar and syntax than the evolution of social networking, and given my background in New Media, that's impressive. Firsth +You vs +Usted, then you defined +1 as a verb and charted the correct conjugations, and now you're putting proper thought in the role of gender in your automation systems.
Google, you rock.
Sorry, I mean they rock.
- Alex
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)