Yesterday morning, Google formally announced their cloud storage service Google Drive.
Yesterday evening, Merlin Mann quipped:
Imagine a guy who's REALLY into panties who makes ALL his money selling data about panties. Now he offers to store your panties.
Yeah—that.—
Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) April 25, 2012
“Web philosophy is an idiom devoid of objective, impersonal thinking. In 2008, the Columbia Review of Journalism interviewed a man named Clay Shirky about the pitfalls of modern Luddism and the meaning of information overload. Shirky teaches interactive telecommunications at NYU and wrote a book about social media called Here Comes Everybody. In the CRJ interview, Shirky said things like ‘I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on.’ This is the message net-obsessed people always deliever; the condescending phrase most uttered by frothing New Media advocates is ‘You just don’t get it.’ The truth of the matter is that Clay Shirky must argue that the Internet is having a positive effect – it’s the only reason he’s publicly essential. Prior to 1996, no one wanted to interview Clay Shirky about anything.”
—Chuck Klosterman, “Fail”
“To start announcing your own preferences for old values when your world is collapsing and everything is changing at a furious pitch: this is not the act of a serious person. It is frivolous, fatuous. If you were to knock on the door of one of these critics and say ‘Sir, there are flames leaping out of your roof, your house is burning,’ under these conditions he would then say to you, ‘That’s a very interesting point of view. Personally, I couldn’t disagree with you more.’
“That’s all these critics are saying. Their house is burning and they’re saying, ‘Don’t you have any sense of values, simply telling people about fire when you should be thinking about the serious content, the noble works of the mind?’”
—Marshall McLuhan on his new media-phobic critics
(Via Jay Rosen.)
“Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising.’ But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product. They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”
(Via Michael Leddy.)
Posted in technology
Posted in endorsements, technology
“Technology acts as a salve on our communal doubt. ‘Will they like me?’ ‘Will I be accepted?’ ‘Are my teeth white enough?’ ‘Buy this and you’re OK!’ Can you imagine Picasso asking, ‘Will they like this painting?’ Or Van Gogh saying, ‘Will they understand what I’m doing?’ Those guys were like, ‘Fuck you, I got something to do. I have an idea. I don’t care what you think. Thick paint, you don’t like it? Then get the fuck out of here!’”
—Melvin Sokolsky, Wraparound Magazine 1.4 (2004): 16.
Posted in art, inspiration, technology, work
Scott Berkun on The Social Network:
The film has been criticized for poorly portraying women, which is true, but this misses how the film poorly portrays everyone. Nearly every character is an embarrassment in some significant way, and the movie is largely criticizing the shallowness of elites (Harvard, Silicon valley, lawyers, VCs, the upper class, etc.). The movie is a critique of the kinds of people who would choose to profit from changing the world based on the model of “facebooks” (e.g. yearbooks), relationship status and friending people. The point is: it’s a 19 or 20 year old view of the universe, for better and, as the movie emphasizes, for worse.
Exactly.
Posted in movies, technology
Jonathan Franzen’s writing routine:
He writes six or seven days a week, starting at 7 a.m. He’s often hoarse at the end of the day because he performs his dialogue out loud as he writes it…. Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”
(Via.)
Posted in technology, writing
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