Jan. 01 2012

A Decade into “Always-On” Internet

from christian sandvig discussing the current state of bandwidth in america.

In other words, Comcast has monopoly power in cable television in many markets. It has set its 250 GB/month cap so that it is impossible to buy television over its Internet service (take that, Netflix!) or to use free Internet video services in lieu of cable TV (take that, YouTube!), thus maintaining its monopoly in video. By the way, that is the definition of a violation of antitrust law. Hello, Justice Department?

related, i received this notice on 12/16.  then another about two days ago.  my phone sits on wi-fi the entire day except, usually, the two hours i’m commuting during a 5-day work week.

looking at my phone statistics (assuming since i’ve owned the iphone 4, not previous versions - but without logging into at&t’s web site, not sure), i’ve sent/received a total of 19.4 GB of data over their cellular network.  my girlfriend and i pay, on average, $150/month to have both of our iphone 4 devices supported by at&t’s network.  on top of that, another $100/month for verizon to grant us internet access and cable television over their fios network.

it costs me $3,000 a year to stay “always-on.”  so, yeah, of course i agree with this shit.

Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing.

The end of social - O’Reilly Radar (via deplorableword)

mike loukides goes on, quoting…wait for it…microsoft:

The other day, I read a perceptive article, “In Defense of Friction,” arguing that “automated trust systems undermine trust by incentivizing cooperation because of the fear of punishment rather than actual trust.” That’s a profound point. If we rely on computational systems for a trust framework, we actually lose our instincts and capacity for personal trust; even more, we cease to care about it. And there’s a big difference between trusting someone and relying on a system that says they’re trustworthy.

it’s a new year so i’m cool with saying that microsoft “gets it” on this one.

Dec. 17 2011

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90’s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

as jigga said, on to the next.

Dec. 15 2011

Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.
Paul Graham, in 2008 via Trolls.

Dec. 13 2011

We discovered that unlike children interacting with their mothers in person or over the phone, girls who instant messaged did not release oxytocin; instead, these participants showed levels of salivary cortisol as high as control subjects who did not interact with their parents at all. We conclude that the comforting sound of a familiar voice is responsible for the hormonal differences observed and, hence, that similar differences may be seen in other species using vocal cues to communicate.

Instant messages vs. speech: hormones and why we still need to hear each other (via slantback)

phones:  not just for poking at them all day.

Dec. 09 2011

Regarding TheNextWeb's Shit-Ass Website

How long it takes to load the page is part of the reading experience. Bandwidth is not free, and not universally fast. People are using 3G for chrissakes. If every article on the web weighed 3 MB, you’d eat through a 2 GB data cap by reading only 20 articles a day. Not watching video — just reading.

it’s sort of like shooting yourself in the foot when your business model is selling advertising based on people visiting your web site.

Nov. 11 2011

karenh:

“Photography in abundance” / 24 Hours of Flickr Photos installation by Erik Kessels

“Through the digitalisation of photography and the rise of sites such as Flickr and Facebook, everyone now takes photos, and distributes and shares them with the world - the result is countless photos at our disposal. Kessels visualises ‘drowning in pictures of the experiences of others’, by printing all the images that were posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumping them in the exhibition space. The end result is an overwhelming presentation of a million prints.”
— What’s Next? The Future of the Photography Museum exhibit at Foam

(via Craft via Creative Review)

can’t wait to start using https://www.picplum.com/.

Sep. 28 2011

The algorithms by which things like Facebook decide what to show you and what to hide are totally opaque. There’s this kind of weird, big lie about how an algorithm is not a form of editorial control. Google will say ‘we have organic search results’ in contrast with what Alta Vista used to do, where they would take payment to put a result first. It’s ‘organic’ because it’s done with math, but actually it’s editorial by another name. All the companies that do editorial by algorithm claim that there’s something about math that makes it free of bias and will.

Cory Doctorow (via azspot)

always knew i hated math.

Aug. 14 2011

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. (via The Elusive Big Idea)

the deeper cut of info overload.