Thu

Apr 9
2009

Nat Torkington

Four short links: 9 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

Scifi, audiences, transparency, and the peril of public life. No links tomorrow, as I'll be preparing for our village fete:

  1. The Fantastic That Denies It's Fantastic: Science Fiction Talk at the Royal Institution -- Matt Jones's fascinating notes from this talk by two academics make thought-provoking reading. “SF is a response to the cultural shock of discovering our marginal place in an alien universe” ... “an attempt put the stamp of humanity back on the universe”
  2. Visualize Your Audience (Rowan Simpson) -- If you don’t think it’s a big deal for your site to be broken or off line while you make changes … think of all of the people who happen to be visiting at that point and imagine what it would feel like to have them all in the room with you while you flick the switch. No matter how small the number it would probably feel like a lot of people. And, you might be motivated to get the site back up more quickly if they were all standing behind you impatiently looking over your shoulder.
  3. Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital (Waxy) -- this reminds me how rare it is to see someone about an Internet blowup where someone has actually talked to the parties involved.
  4. We Live in Public (Caterina Fake) -- Caterina watched "We Live in Public" by Ondi Timoner and concurs with Jason Calacanis's musings about the Internet's ability to promote the worst behaviour: This kind of sociopathic behavior -- treating people like things -- is one of the most horrifying aspects of online interactions, and something that its very nature promotes.


tags: journalism, privacy, science, usability | comments: 1
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Comments: 1

Thomas Lord [2009-04-09 10:01 AM]

Thank you for the Caterina Fake link and thanks to her for the link to the Josh Harris story.

I think there is a new threat to civility arising here as the "intelligentsia" of the blogosphere pick up on the lately popular recognition of the dehumanizing effects of intermediated communications as a primary social form:

There is a tendency for well place technocrats to use this as a purported diagnosis of people they find disagreeable and an aversion to "checking one's self". Within certain powerful cliques, it's more politically acceptable to discriminate against various third parties if you can explain your oppression as a reaction to a "condition" that those poor third party lost soles suffer from on account of the de-humanizing internet, and what not.

You can see the irony in that, right? Yet it plays out anyway. There are cliques among whom stories like the one linked here are spreading and so people are saying words about the de-humanizing internet but what they really mean is "what's wrong with *those* people?"

I think if you give some credence to this de-humanizing hypothesis and you're big on the net then in the name of intellectual honesty you have to explain either how the condition manifests in yourself or explain why you think you are immune.

What sub-human thing did you do on the net, today? I'm not asking about those others, gentle reader - I mean you. (My own apparent internet-based misanthropy seems to be so widely recognized that I'm a little bit at a loss for words that I'm free to say. Dave Weiner recently reiterated his self-nomination as "most hated person on the net" and my suggestion to that was that really, we ought to start a club.)

-t

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