While cruising around the website Stuff Nobody Likes, I have to admit that this post about members of the doucheoisie who walk around talking on their Bluetooth earpieces cracked me up. I have, on more than one occasion, mistaken some dude talking on his earpiece for a dude doing what some creepy dudes all too often unfortunately do, which is start talking to random women for no real reason and to the benefit of no one. When dudes start to talk to me in public like this, I usually pointedly ignore them, which is a different thing than just plain ignoring someone. Which means that if I’ve been standing around or walking along and a dude with a Bluetooth earpiece starts talking in it behind me, and I found myself pointedly ignoring someone who actually took no notice of me in the first place. Then I feel bad, like I insulted this dude whose major crime was low level phone douchebaggery, instead of the higher level douchebaggery of treating women like we’re public property. At what point I feel I should return to just plain ignoring him instead of pointedly ignoring him, but that’s actually a much harder trick to pull off than it seems. I’d suggest that the solution is that people who are talking on phones in public should actually talk on phones so we know what they’re doing, but then that seems awfully close to blaming the victim of pointed ignoring behavior. Not sure what the solution is, because being open to any asshole talking to me is also not a solution.
The video that changed the world.
Update: A couple of other points from comments. Podcasts can help reach people that have learning disabilities or vision problems that can make blog reading problematic at times. Also, podcasting is a way to reject corporate radio while not losing out on the great potential of radio.
Echidne asks if people really like podcasts.
I can see the value of being able to listen to an interesting geeky political podcast while commuting, say, but to me the podcasts have a serious flaw: Listening to them takes much more time than reading the same as a written text, and life is short, short.
Unless the ear is offered something extra: emotional nuances, perhaps, the extra time requirement isn’t worth the trouble for me. But that’s just me, and I’m sure that other people have very different views on podcasts.
She’s being asked to do a podcast, and I would say that I’d listen to hers. I’m very attuned to the “do something different” thing with podcasts, so I try very hard to make mine feel different than just a blog post. And because I have one, I’m probably prejudiced here, but I love podcasts. But it’s also because I agree that life is short.
Google has entered the online recipe market. (Via the new blog that promises to be enticing, Cogitamus.) It even has a calorie search feature, so you can alert it to the fact that you’re not interested in dishes with 1,500 calories a sitting or whatever. If our Google overlords ever decide to tyrannize us, I suspect most of us will go quietly.
Update: Reading 3 Bulls, I find out the slanderous anti-internet crap is even worse than I thought.
How about “Cable news watcher becomes serial killer”.
Message: Unless you’re all for child molestation, it’s better to throw out the computer and go back to your old habits of just feeling alienated and disempowered in front of the TV news.
Sometimes I think that if it weren’t for clips on Crooks and Liars, I’d probably never see a minute of cable news in my everyday life, which sets me up to be really appalled when I do watch it for any length of time. Yesterday was no exception. I was sitting in an airport watching “American Morning” on CNN and occasionally reading a novel, and a story about a pedophile caught lurking around daycares came on. I wasn’t too interested in the story, except for being annoyed that what seemed to me to be strictly a local interest story was being elevated to a national platform for sensationalist reasons, until they mentioned that the guy had chronicled his obsession online. At this point, I tuned in with interest, because I knew that somehow, someway, they were going to use a story about a guy who conducted himself in what you might call the traditional pedophile method (hanging out where children are, hoping to snag one) to raise some more brainless hysteria about the evils of modern technology.
Being innocent, though, I thought that surely they wouldn’t go further than fuss over the fact that pedophiles use online tools to distribute child pornography to each other, instead of using the mail as they probably did in the past. When it comes to the vile nature of cable news, though, I am but a babe in the woods and so was genuinely shocked and pissed when they instead made the rest of the segment about the danger your child faces from pedophiles because she chats online with her friends and has a MySpace page. They threw out a lot of statistics about how many kids use social networking tools and implied that the major threat comes from here, all in a fairly brainless manner, probably figuring that the audience is already familiar with “To Catch A Predator”.
In other words, they used a story about a guy who is accused of lingering near schools to grab little girls—no computer technology on hand—to warn against the dangers of letting your kids use computers. Who cares if the story has nothing to do with social networking software? The main thing is driving home the point that the internet=pedophiles through repetition, regardless of the facts. I swear, if they showed the movie “M” on TV now, they’d make sure to add some scenes (using computer technology, oh the irony) where the pedophile is shown whistling while he cruises MySpace, because we all know there’s no way that pedophilia existed before the modem was invented.
In another age, I might have been more shocked by this:
The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you’re thinking.
[…]
The idea — to grossly over-simplify — is that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer’s display, to compensate. If a person’s getting too much visual information, send him a text alert. If that person is reading too much at once, present some of the data visually — in a chart or map.
This research is being conducted under the guise of improving troop performance:
So much of what’s done today in the military involves staring at a computer screen — parsing an intelligence report, keeping track of fellow soldiers, flying a drone airplane — that it can quickly lead to information overload…
[…]
“With technology, we’re constantly interrupting people, burdening people,” Schmorrow explains. “My phone is ringing, my Blackberry is buzzing, I’ve gotten 20 e-mails since we started talking. We just want people to be able to focus. Give them a bit of peace.”
[…]
“We began with the idea that there was too much information out there these days for anyone to comprehend,” says Schmorrow. “So how can we present it in a way that people will remember? Proffitt tells me, ‘And wouldn’t it be even better if we could figure out what people were doing, what they were thinking, so we could present them with the right things?’”
Figuring out the military value of this technology is easy. Can you think of any commercial applications?
Photo credits (l-r): girl from finito, laurie ♥, and cherry mary
As we don’t seem to be having much luck discussing the environmental and human costs we incur through our use of technology without everyone putting on her best Gloomy Face, whaddya say we turn those frowns upside down and talk about how gollygeewhiz cool it is when technology comes in pink?
PINK, I said! That’s right! Pink! “Pink,” as in, “pink is the new pink!”
Hmm. Tough crowd tonight.
Look, this is what happened: I couldn’t think of anything really good to do for Blog Against Sexism Day, all right? But then I had an email from a friend and she happened to mention the age-old question of why, when companies are trying to sell more products to women, the best many of those companies, especially the tech ones, can seem to come up with strategically is simply to make the same product available in pink.
My husband, collector of ancient vinyl and pirate radio fanboy, curiously welcomed today’s news that “official” analog broadcasts will cease in 2009 because he thinks it will lead to wild experimentation with PTV. After decades of non-consensual exposure to public access cable programming, I know *I* won’t be watching it.
My enemy (Uploaded by Anthemic Tangle.)
Aspazia asks an interesting question today:
Why is it that when you are young, you want to spend hours on the phone with your friends talking about the most minute and meaningless details of your life, and when you are older, the phone is a chore? Sure, I like to talk to friends once a week or so. And, I find it valuable to get some advice or work through some stuff with friends on the phone. But, most of the time, I get pretty overwhelmed when the phone rings . . . I just want to know what causes the shift?
Well, I was never overly fond of the phone. I participated in a haphazard way in the mandatory chat-a-thons as a teenager with friends and boyfriends, but my heart was rarely in it. And now the phone simply fails to live up to the internet as a form of remote communication. The advantages of the internet are that you have more control over when you speak to someone. In chat, if they’re online, sweet, you can talk to them. If you’re busy or distracted, log off and no feelings hurt. Email is casual but can be performed on your time. The telephone has none of the convenience or privacy of the internet, but it doesn’t really have the intimacy of in-person conversations.
When I have to talk to someone on the phone, I get really easily frustrated. It doesn’t command your entire attention like an in-person conversation does, and for better or worse, I am not someone who handles that very well. I want to fill up the rest of my brainspace doing something. Ideally, when I’m on the phone, I’d be able to be responding to emails or cleaning something or organizing something at the same time. But often cleaning is noisy (and interferes with the conversation) and emails take up too much brainspace and you tune out the conversation or some other problem. Non-noisy tasks, like repotting or watering plants (a favorite thing to do while talking on the phone) make you drop the phone.
My frustration and hatred of the telephone has reached the point where I reallly need to engage the gadget lover inside. Minor amounts of research have made me think what I need to embrace my full-on campaign staffer lifestyle are a Blackberry and a wireless headset. Yes, I’m going to become that asshole, but admit it, Blackberries are cool.
Any suggestions how what specific gadgets I might need to make my relationship to the telephone more palatable?
Any accoutrements of modern communications that you loathe as much as I hate the telephone?
“Keeping up with the Ivanovs,” they said.
“We build them so they’ll never be used,” they said.
“A new kind of war,” they said.
“Our enemy is an ideology,” they said.
“Non-nation-state targets,” they said.
So what are these for?
Officials of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the nuclear weapons complex, said yesterday that they hope to receive administration and congressional authorization by the end of 2008 for the development and production of a warhead that could be deployed on submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Mutually assured destruction: If you don’t get that suitcase nuke out of Los Angeles, we’ll nuke Los Angeles.
My first thought was, “Only 65%?” Who are these other 35% of people and what’s wrong with them? Don’t they know that much togetherness turns you into one of those couples that everyone thinks are pod people?
Remember, boys and girls, this:
Is an excellent prevention for this condition:
So I’m not seeing the downside. For those who feel the computer is eating into your couple time, I recommend the laptop computer. Since all it takes to make eye contact is a lifting up of the eyes off the screen for a second and peering over the top of the monitor, the laptop makes romantic bonding much less of a suck on time you would prefer to spend surfing the internet or playing video games.
In all seriousness, the amount of time people are spending on computers makes me really happy. TV has some good, interesting shows, but most of it is mindless pap and if people are reducing their TV watching time and actually playing games or surfing the internet. Even looking for videos on YouTube probably requires more neuron firing than surfing the channels on TV. And with neurons, if you don’t use ‘em, you lose ‘em.
In other words, for those about to blog, we salute you. You could very well be taking the steps required to reverse a half a century of steady brain atrophy in Americans that has led us to this point.
The hash being made over this video game “Bully” is sort of the best example of cynical vote-garnering I’ve ever seen. Farhad Manjoo’s article is a pretty thorough description of what the game is about, and it seems that it’s basically about a kid who’s an anti-hero who keeps getting put into heroic situations. So basically, it’s a Western set in a schoolyard.
What’s great about video games if you’re a school official or politician seeking an easy issue to exploit, this one is great because the parents often don’t get video games at all. If the last video game you played was Pac-Man, odds are that the labyrinthe games of today like “Bully” are too intimidating for you to investigate too closely. Add to that the apparently long-standing tradition of parents resenting their offspring for having knowledge of pop culture the parents don’t share, and you’ve got a perfect set of parental anxieties to exploit. You can insinuate the game is setting up your kids to re-enact the Columbine shootings and you’ve got the more gullible set of parents eating out of your hand, giving you power so that you can fix this problem you basically made up.
Hillary Clinton has looked at the numbers and realized that a lot more people don’t get video games than do, so she can get the votes of the former by insinuating the latter group is dangerous and needs to be controlled.
According to a recent study by Nielsen, 117 million Americans routinely play video games. More than half of these people are of voting age. Yet polls suggest that for politicians, there is no downside to campaigning against video games — the tactic turns parents on and doesn’t necessarily turn young people off.
In campaign ads this year, Clinton has been highlighting her work to “shield” children from violent video games. At the same time, according to a recent survey by Young Voter Strategies, her popularity among people under 30 years old is rising. Danny Goldberg, the music executive who wrote a book chastising the left for attacking pop culture, says that although he doesn’t agree with Clinton’s criticism of games, he can see why young voters might not care much about her stance toward pop culture. They’re justifiably less concerned about censorship, he says, than about “war and peace, and what we’re doing about what happened in New Orleans.”
Purely cynical hay-making. If politicians felt they could convince parents that bicycle riding was the death of the next generation while not running off the votes of that generation, they’d do that, too.
In the past, like in the 80s with the PMRC dust-up, the people whose work was being exploited would fight back. The politicians actually felt they had to censor and supress the music they were making hay about, and this was rightly perceived by the artists as an attack. What appears to have changed is that Rockstar realized that rilling up the would-be censors could be used as a viral marketing campaign, and get them all sorts of free publicity. This game appears to be designed to get the politicians and parents to flip shit, just by the name “Bully”. So instead of creating a situation where politicians are pitted against them, Rockstar has instead created a pas a deux of publicity. They win by getting the game into the media, the politicians win by having something to denounce, and the journalists win by having something to write about. Very well done, Rockstar, you evil bastards.
What I find really amusing about this whole thing is that it appears, from Manjoo’s descriptions of the game, that the content almost seems to be something of a mockery of the tedious controversy Rockstar knew would be generated by calling a game “Bully”. The kid has to help a homeless guy, save kids from being tortured by bullies, and commit other good deeds in order to get by. To keep it from being corny, it appears he’s a grumbly anti-hero, but you get the idea. The fact that the content sounds nothing like what the controversy is about seems to be a statement of sorts on how empty such censorship controversies tend to be. Maybe next time they’re release a game called, “Honor Students Suck Let’s Beat Them Up” and the game itself will turn out, after all the controversy, to be built around helping a set of cold, hungry bunnies get home to their mother. Unfortunately, you can only pull a stunt like that once and it doesn’t have continuing returns as a marketing strategy.
Tied into my points below, Rockstar didn’t create the cynical political posturing over youth culture or the tension between young and old people. But they are remarkably adept at plugging into it. And none of this means anything about the game. It could be a very good game, and in fact, I’ll bet it is. Rockstar knows well enough that if the gaming press will forgive a lot of exploitative marketing if the game itself is good.
When I read the quote, “Do you love your computer? Really, really love your computer?”, I could only think of one thing.
There is only one company that can take this idea (NSFW) and make it profitable. Hip. Stylish. And maybe even unisex one day. With a typically curt but intriguing slogan.
Apple Powerbook: Our cutout is your pleasure.
Good news for Jeff G*ldst*in: Soon available for microcomputers.
