Archive for February, 2007
interweb disconnect »
Saturday, February 24th, 2007
First of all I’m not against the interweb and by that i mean the pool of digital connection devices. They obviously serve an important purpose. Email and cell phones are how i connect with almost everyone. I don’t have a land-line and live on the south side. No one comes down here without some effort or needing a ride to the airport or wanting to shop. Almost all of my good friends aren’t even in the same state and some aren’t in the same climate. I need tools to keep in contact with these folk.
Second, i think I’m becoming the minority in aiming for personal interaction over interweb connections. But i got to reading this article and it made me think a bit.
The cell
sucks ass. I’m not much for talking on the phone and i don’t like being available at all times. The best part though is the built in caller id. I can choose which calls i pick up. This comes in handy when I’m not in the mood or it’s someone annoying as hell. The vibrate function is fantastic because i don’t have to disturb anyone else. I’ve also accumulated over a thousand “anytime” minutes so i can pretty much take a day and talk non-stop if i wanted. Which i don’t.
When a cell phone becomes a person’s primary form of contact they immediately lose the benefit of non-verbal communication. They talk loudly say on the lightrail in public places and somehow expect some sort of privacy. They interrupt person-to-person to start a cell phone conversation. They become annoyances on others and hurt their on value as an acquaintance. They become “those people” of which everyone talks when they bitch. They talk when they drive, eat, shit, and work because they don’t have the limitation of being in a static position.
Instant Messenger
is one of my favorites. I have a soft spot in the heart for it because it’s a way for me to avoid all the damn cell phone connections. If I’m online even if I’m away as i am 90% of the time people can bypass the usual waste of a conversation with a few quick lines directed at my clever quip of an away message. This is slowly being gnawed at by text messages because people know I’m around my phone even when I’m not at the computer.
The problem with instant messenger lies in it’s ability to choose friends. I realize everyone can choose their friends already. I also realize some people are more liberal with their buddy list. and by no means is this a problem exclusive to i.m. In every form of interweb lies a way to determine your own contacts. But where is the development of tolerance to annoying fucks or ability to interact with those you don’t enjoy the company of? If you’re left to make friends the old way, with social activities or sports or anything else not done in front of a computer or alone, you’re guaranteed to have a friend of a friend who pisses you off involved. The development of the skills to deal with that person are not only important, but i’d argue necessary. Today if you’re that annoying person you not only don’t know it, but don’t know how to change it, on top of being socially isolated because of everyone else choosing not to interact with you.
social networks: as in the Book or the space
are the natural evolution of our spiral into social disability. If it weren’t so easy to keep in contact with folk out of town with these things i’d likely disable both my book and space accounts in favor of sitting around watching my carpet decay. I spend as little time as possible on them, but use them to message or inform others. I rarely update the book, but have changed the space a few times because it allows more flexibility guess it just plays on my webplay aspirations.
This feeds into the worst of the worst. It’s like giving a cupcake to a kid on the way to his gastric bypass. You take narcissm, add exclusivity, and shake well; serve with a side of generic interaction and you have yourself the recipe for overwhelming success. It plays well with every other part of the interweb: cell alerts, blogs, and messaging, with the added awesomeness of showing everyone how great you are. No matter how you use the profile you’re advertising yourself. Some people go above and beyond to the point of being downright laughable see: digipic of yourself in mirror in various stages of undress used as profile picture. Not only can you choose your friends again, but on the space you can determine which are your favorites up to sixteen depending on who you steal some code from.
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television and the computer have led to a general decline in interaction that is likely irreparable. Not that people can’t avoid it, but they feel a disconnect without the interweb while the disconnect grows because of their using it. We’re surrounded by it. Working at a computer leads to even more saturation. The computer allows for multitasking like never before. I’ve seen my sister talk on the cell phone, chat with 4 people, check email, and play bejeweled simultaneously. There has to be some correlation between the increase in the number of channels, amount of interweb features, and the increase in mental disease including A.D.D., even if over-diagnosed.
All the pill-popping in the world won’t change anyone’s brain chemistry enough to avoid the interweb’s influence. We don’t have much choice and things won’t get better as our cars become more compatible with most interweb features: wireless internet, iPod plugins, dashboard monitors, etc. Most people don’t know their neighbors and developments are growing in a way to deter that further. We’re creating a general disrespect that’s growing exponentially. People are concerned less and less with the well-being of those around them. They concern themselves instead with their own wants, toys, desires, and, to a lesser extent, needs. This way of life cannot support itself and, more importantly, can’t be healthy.
i realize that this got long, and that by writing this here, on the interweb, I’m not exactly an advocate for change. Nobody’s perfect.
a quote from busters »
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
Along the vein of this article i wanted to quote adbusters because it’s related:
The All-Consuming Self
Never before have our emerging environmental crises been laid out so clearly before us. Rather than shouting from the fringes, respected economists, scientists, and politicians are sounding the warnings on high-profile journals and the halls of government – warnings that our oceans are dying, that the ice shelves are melting, and that we are setting ourselves up for the most massive and devastating market failure humanity has ever seen. / so we recycle our garbage. we vote greener. we buy sleek, new hybrid cars and fill our houses with energy-efficient light bulbs. and we put our money and faith in the brave and ingenious technologies that will rescue us from the whirlwind. / but it won’t be enough. because this is not, fundamentally, a technological problem. nor is it, fundamentally, a political problem. this is a problem of appetites, and of narcissism, and of self-deceit. the planet is breaking, and it is breaking under the weight of our hunger for more.to reform the world, we must first reform ourselves.
that is all. great magazine.
God bless Emerka … »
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
so i got to browsing the alternet and found this article. Found it intriguing. Not that it’s all that surprising, but it was fun to read instead of ricochet through my own head infinitely. Granted it’s also written by a guy from ‘rolling stone’ and the only time i’ve been remotely interested in reading the mag was when it was featured in almost famous.
a quick summation for those who don’t feel like reading:
America is too consumed with what’s going on with any number of uninteresting, culturally devoid celebrity pairings and hijinks to notice the entire country going to shit. we’ve missed habeous corpus getting jacked, illegal wiretapping was a blip on the social radar, the only reason we’ve begun noticing the lies fed to us by the administration is the overwhelming number of them, and we’re about to sidestep a budget that will fuck the aver… wait… obliterate the average american.
the reason i bring this up besides it being on my mind is to set up some new goals for myself. I’m going to spend as much time working as possible. fuck relationships, fuck sleep, fuck general health and well-being. coming from a guy who has spent the last year soaking up free time like sponge bob out of water that may sound mildly clinical, but i don’t have a choice. i need to make as much money as possible. stored in as many jars, shoe boxes, and cubby holes as possible for when the market crashes.
and it will crash. it will crash like a 90-year-old in a clover-leaf merge. it’s going to be epic. then i can use that seed money when the dollar is worth less than a peso to set up my own gig and make as much yen as i can. i think we can pull out of it. in fact i think we even have the ability to halt the global catastrofuck thanks J.Stewart. but with government doing shit like this i can’t help but feel my optimism ooze out of me. it’s fucking disgusting that the fucking wal-mart kids are getting tax breaks when my kids will grow up in absolute shit. there’s no way to support the weight of the rich on the backs of the poor when you insist on making the rich heavier with each passing day.
should be a wild ride, but hopefully it’s more the first half of the giant drop and less the second.
KARE11 can suck my balls. »
Monday, February 19th, 2007
As some of you know, i don’t much get into local news. it’s painful to watch and beyond the realm of me giving a shit. the “reporters” are a bunch of socially-handicapped, kiss-asses who don’t have the talent to do anything culturally viable. another example came up tonight and this is why it’s on me mind.
So the house is watching the 60 still a pretty money show and a promo for the ten o’clock news comes on. big story… apparently the stadium deal was “flawed from the start.” NO FUCKING SHIT!! The city pages had a story on this in their February seventh issue. An impressively in-depth one at that. describing the situation and the money that was looking to change hands and how it got to this point.
The promo went on to say that the land was owned by “average joes” just like us who were just trying to save up for retirement. The report makes the land owners a group of about twelve who represent about a hundred share holders seem as though they’re getting shafted.
What it fails to mention, and why anyone watching should be exterminated from the populous, is that these owners are the same people that campaigned for over a year to make their site appear as the only viable spot for the Twins. The site is small, which provides its own costs and design challenges, but has great placement. The owners are trying to tell the city they should take the ninety million they are allotted, subtract the costs of infrastructure, and then give them the rest.
So if you ignore the fact that these owners spent so much damn time convincing people to put the stadium on their land and are now doing the same to convince everyone that they’re the ones being taken advantage of you’ll probably miss the second major point of this whole thing: the value of the land. It’’s currently a set of parking lots north of 394. It’s value is in question on all sides. The owners believe that it’s somehow retained the value it had when the housing market wasn’t crashing like a dumb box into a pylon because she dropped her cell turning on the left blinker. The city realizes this is ridiculous and values it much lower than the owners would like i think it’’s about 13.5 million.
What the city should do is fast-track someone getting out there to get a real value of the land. Not six years ago, but today. Once that’s done they should present the owners with this value, give them a month to get their own statistics, and decide why the numbers don’t match unless they do. With that done they can get started on the dozens of design/city planning challenges they have yet to address like closing down part of 3rd for an observation deck. And KARE11 and any other shitty network affiliate news program should shut the hell up and get their facts before breezing through a three minute segment that’s already been analyzed a dozen times in paper and online articles.
and here we go again »
Monday, February 12th, 2007
So i may have a different perspective than most, but for me trust is earned. I don’t usually go for blind faith. Most have to prove to me they’re mildly lower in social retardation than the general masses. i’m a dick. i’ve come to terms with it.
i think all politicians are at the least easily swayed and at the most corrupt to the smallest ounce of their biomass. The media has become an absolutely depressing farce. I’d love to say i have faith in the system, but there are small, subtle points that keep me from such things. They include, but are by no means limited to, turning the opinions of the world from support to disdain in less than two years, remorselessly lying to an entire nation, rampant corporate irresponsibility, an entire week of coverage over a death of some morally inept, mental sloth, and the complete avoidance of worthwhile probes into the business of our nation.
The latest buzz is the main reason for me coming out of my posting hibernation. Apparently Iran is supporting the insurgency in Iraq and killing innocent Americans. This, mind you, is based on a report whose readership is supporter exclusive. Always the best way of analyzing intelligence. At least Lieberman is on the wagon, because he seems so wise and skeptical. If dubya claimed he had just shit a solid brick of gold Lieberman would be the first to volunteer an appraisal. The buzz itself doesn’t annoy me all that much. In fact I’m proud of them. For decades we’ve had a hand in everything we possibly could and boasted about it.
It’s the fact that it comes after such a catastrophic blunder of intelligence that’s it’s almost impossible to believe the reports. How can you muster up support without showing as many people as possible indisputable proof so soon after a monumental misleading of American opinion? This war mongering has, in roughly the last year, been widely attacked and discredited. So why are we seeing it happen again with so little opposition? Why can talking heads on the major gossip networks continue to speculate and accuse without someone in the mainstream confronting them? Why do we continue to soak up whatever Tony Snow spits at us?
The main problem they have in generating credibility for their intelligence is the general lack of it in the administration. And it’s the same administration as lied to us three years ago so consistently and unanimously that they moved a government to killing 3126 as of posting and wounding over 23,400.
Until we have a global investigation by credible officials and a multi-national consensus there is no way i can believe the intelligence brought to me by the same people that have kept so many in fear to keep power and influence over the people in my favorite nation even if there are about three million ways we could be better. If that happens I still can’t throw my support behind another war because the voluntary military is running out of volunteers and a draft would really fuck up my five year plan.
A quote from a fun article:
So, you see? This case is different. This time we can trust the “intelligence” sources. Because, last time, we’d merely had crews of trained inspectors swarming the country for years, and they reported confidently that there weren’t any WMD there. This time, we have amateurs observing the situation in the middle of guerrilla warfare, and they say they’ve got the goods but can’t reveal them. So, you see, it’s different.