Here’s an idea for an unintended (nevermind) use of whosi: create groups and add feeds to them. I created a “name” called “Film Scholars” and added the trusty Dr Mabuse’s Kaleidoscope site. I was going to add everyone else in my film blogroll, but I didn’t because I’m lazy and I want to see what other people add. What I’m thinking is that if people add sites to the group, we could have a huge, collaboratively-built RSS feed of blogs of film scholars. One could also create groups for anything this way.
A few more notes about whoisi. I’m still a little creeped out but intrigued by the concept. I looked at the “About” section, which points out some interesting things, like the fact that it is cookie-based, so you don’t have to log in to follow people. It is collaborative, like a wiki + and RSS feed. And he uses the word “frak.” There’s some definite potential here.
Back in May of 05, I wrote about distributed identity, and posted links to a number of sites with which I share information about myself, such as last.fm, flickr, etc. I mused about exhibitionism and sharing, but the problem then is that if anyone were actually interested, for some reason, in following my activities, they would have to go to each service and subscribe or return repeatedly. What was missing was a place to aggregate them, and now a few have come around. Doug alerted me to friendfeed, which includes all kinds of data. I have also looked at swurl, which seems to do the same thing, but I haven’t really investigated it yet. Both are remarkably simple to set up, involving little more than typing in your public username for each site (which means for me typing “emarsh” over and over). Friendfeed also has a facebook component, which I haven’t used yet, but which might be a good way to alert friends to new blog entries and other events.
On the flip side of this phenomenon is Whoisi which also lets you track people, but perhaps in a different way. It’s basically a search engine to which one can add people and associate their names with sites. On the one hand this is an intriguing way to build collaboratively a database of individuals. On the other hand, it may be a sinister avenue for outing people’s anonymous blogs, or slandering people by assoicating their names with unsavory sites. There’s nothing for me yet, and I don’t think I’ll create anything, but this site has some interesting, if unsettling, potential.
I have been going through my documents on this laptop lately, and I keep finding stray documents with provocative titles, and short text inside. This one is dated May of 2005. I may be interesting to see what I was thinking about 3 years ago, so here it is:
Many have likened the internet to the new wild west, often with calls for more stringent regulation of pornography and other modes of expression, but also with a more optimistic tone of lawlessness-as-freedom. At any rate, the battle over standards, copyright, access and freedom of expression does resemble the wild west in various ways – at heart it resembles a vast open space where corporations and individuals vie for their own stake, a plot of land, maybe some gold, or a space in which to live out their lives based on their own standards.
I’ve been working on Kracauer’s early writings, trying to think of his concepts of distraction and the loss of individuality attending the rise of modernity in terms of networked communication and video distribution. As a sort of residue of this work, I began thinking about internet use more generally, which spawned the following snippets, stripped of specific theoretical references.
Today’s spectator is still largely anonymous, but trackable,
not as easily able to disappear into a crowd. The internet user always
leaves a trace, whether through cookies or IP logs and referrals. The
user has become a string of numbers, coordinates indicating preferences
and likely paths, interests defined by interactions across sites. Often
nameless and faceless, the typical internet user still has an identity,
pieced together in code through browsing habits.
The loss of individuality is double-edged. Users of networks become bits of data as their habits are aggregated and used for predictive purposes, such as in gmail’s use of keywords in meails to generate ads, or netflix’s recommendation engine, which relires in part on other “Raters Like You” . The cult of self-expression prevalent in blogs and social networking sites seems to be a counterpoint to this anonymizing function of the web, but the ease with which one can hide such things as race and gender, and the rapidity with which one can delete an entire online existence suggest that identity online is still fleeting and superficial. I wonder to what extent this reflects offline, or face-to-face, realtime, interactions as well, or if these things can ever again be usefully or realistically separated.
I have a confession to make. I really hate to admit this in public, but up until recently, I hadn’t seen a single Woody Allen film. I don’t know why I have avoided him all this time. I guess I didn’t think he had anything to offer, or thought he was too silly or something. Well, in the last few weeks I have watched a dozen of his films, and I have found many of them fun and interesting. I like his style, the way he doesn’t mind shooting the back of someone’s head, or running with a messed-up line. He ecshews the perfection of mainstream Hollywood editing and achieves something more personal, more lifelike. I am also struck by the range within the films, from the Marx Bros/Monty Python/Three Stooges-inspired Love and Death to the musical Everyone Says I Love You to the heavy Bergmanesque Crimes and Misdemeanors. I am so saturated in Allen that when I see a non-Allen film I find it strange. While some of his work is quite silly, I am moved by what seems to be a perpetual working-through of his personal issues, a very public analogue, perhaps, to one of his favorite themes — psychoanalysis. Below the cut is a list of the films I have watched so far, in rough order of my preference. If you are wondering about the selection, it is based not on chronology nor recommendation, but on availablility at my local library.
I know I’ve been complaining a lot lately, but I’ll soon get back to more useful posts. I have been frustrated with this iBook for some time now, not just because it and thousands like it are defective, but because Apple won’t admit it and service them. Last time, I spent a bunch of money for a new logic board. This time, I spent $.02, thanks to this wonderful site.I basically taped two pennies together with electrical tape and placed them on the faulty chip, creating a shim that puts pressure on the chip, keeping it seated. I would like to resolder it but I don’t have the equipment or the skill to do so. I’ve been on the iBook for about an hour, moving it around, playing video and music, and transferring files (maybe I’ll finally be able to watch that DL’ed copy of Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses). The bulge on the bottom of the case makes the machine a little wobbly, but at least I can type all these handwritten notes, and I will be a little more in contact, a little more quickly, than I have in the past week or so.
A few months ago, my PC died. Bad motherboard. I haven’t had the money or time to fix it, plus I use my iBook for most everything these days anyway. Two weeks ago I dropped the Treo into a pint of Guinness, rendering it pretty much useless. I have finally borrowed an old flip phone, so I’m back in action, but in a somewhat limited way. Now, the iBook is dead. Turned it on the other day and the fans wurr loudly, but nothing else. Same problem as before, I imagine - the video chip on the mainboard has become unseated, a common problem on the G4, but not common enough that Apple will admit it’s a problem and issue a recall. So, all the computing I can do in the near future will be on borrowed machines. I will have to write longhand, and type things out when I can get to a computer. It will be a challenge, but maybe it will change some of my work habits for the better, like more writing and reading and less facebook and myspace. Who knows?
I am really sad that Tim Russert has died. This sort of thing (strangers dying) usually doesn’t bother me much, but for some reason I keep thinking about it. Of all the network pundits, he had the most integrity, and would ask some hard questions. I remember watching him and Brokaw during the 2000 election late into the night, and he had this little white board that he used to recaclualte electoral votes for each candidate. It was so late that he getting silly on air trying to figure out what was going on in that crazy election.
It looks like I went half of April and all of May without posting here. What have I been doing? Good question. I have been contemplating a topic change in my diss, but I am going to stick with it and revise chapter 3. I have moved to Ann Arbor for the summer, which has increased my driving but should give me time and space to write. I have been seriously contemplating a career change (more on that later), but in the meantime I am tutoring high school students in the ACT and French, and trying to scrape by without any teaching. I went on a 10-day meditation retreat, which was incredibly difficult and illiuminating and calming. My motherboard on my PC died, which put my Flash learning on hiatus (if anyone knows where to get a cheap MB with socket 939, let me know). My personal life has seen quite a bit of turmoil, but that’s become so typical I barely notice it anymore. I have been seeing a lot of movies lately, which I should probably blog about, but haven’t. Mostly just trying to survive and regrouping for a final push on this stage of my life.
