Why hello there! Well, fancy that, yours truly is editing the DigitalDigest® once again and in a week where in the real world jungle-hating, chesty non-entities dominated the headlines, we aim to provide an oasis of calm reflection and mild amusement by filling your heads with the latest in digital goings-on. This week: newspapers saved from recycling bin, the dark side of the web and a rather unusual, if extremely sad, wedding.
Extra! Extra! Newspapers saved by Satan’s minions!
Hooray! At least for now…Newspaper websites all over the world are (sort of) rejoicing at the news that The Dirty Digger and The Borg have joined forces to announce a revenue sharing deal for traffic referred to news sites by upstart search engine, Bing. A lifeline for news content or just another way to Rupe to line his pockets with crumpled fivers?
Government Digital Britain Bill spells misery for freeloaders
This week saw the parliamentary debate over the proposed ‘Digital Economy Bill’. Based on the year long report by Lord Carter, it sets out the government’s vision for a wide-ranging set of issues surrounding the digital economy in these shores, from copyright to digital television and beyond. Controversial in both things included and left out, not least the threat of permanent disconnection from the Internet for repeated illegal filesharing, or the lack of a provision for funding broadband infrastructure by levying a broadband tax, the bill threatens to become law before the end of this parliament
You will know the power of the dark side
Great investigative piece from The Grauniad on the dark side of the internet: Freenet, a place where your total anonymity is assured and where, content-wise at least, pretty much anything goes. As the ‘net cruises towards greater censorship and control, with big sites such as Google and Yahoo bowing down to pressure from repressive governments, the existence of the ‘deep net’ becomes more important; but how much freedom is too much?
9/11 as it happened: Wikileaks publishes pager intercepts throughout the whole terrible day
Text pagers, while uncommon over here, are often used in the US by persons operating in an official capacity to communicate with one another. Wikileaks have compiled a definitive list of all pager intercepts for a 24-hour period, starting from 3AM on the morning of September 11th 2009. Ranging from Pentagon employees to members of the NYPD, this provides the definitive account of how events on that unforgettable day unfolded.
Pointless contextual search ads…Now with 15% extra annoying!
Muted trumpets announce the latest innovation by search and advertising behemoth, Google: new search formats for their contextual advertising. With new video, shopping and Google Maps integration flavours available, advertisers will be scrambling to take advantage of this new technology to find ways of persuading you to part with your hard-earned readies.
Apple help glum Brits celebrate confusing American concept of ‘Thanksgiving’
‘Happy Thanksgiving!’ – a phrase guaranteed to be greeted by confusion and ambivalence by most Britons. But not any more! Shiny, plastic and brushed aluminium geek overlords, Apple, are launching a US Thanksgiving-related custom that people on these grey and damp shores might actually give a hoot about: Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving where shops and stores slash prices like crazy for 24 hours only! This is officially a ‘Big Thing’ in the US, so big in fact that people have died in the name of low, low prices.
At the time of writing, there are no discounted prices, but those of you with nice big limits on your credit cards might want to take advantage. Oh, and by the way, I could really do with a new Macbook Pro…just sayin’.
And finally…Japanese man fulfils the dream of millions of unpopular boys
From the early days of ogling Chun Li’s thighs to drooling Lara Croft’s pneumatic ‘talents’, fancying make believe videogame characters has been a rite of passage for the spotty, asthmatic, overweight and painfully single across the world. Now, bizarrely-named Japanese videogame enthusiast, Sal9000, has taken this childish fixation to its inevitable logical conclusion: by marrying Nene Anegasaki, suspiciously young-looking virtual star of computer game, Love Plus. Read more about the Internet’s new First Couple here. Just don’t think too hard about what they’re going to get up to on their honeymoon.
Remember, my friends: live long and prosper!
This has been this week’s DigitalDigest®
facebook, social network, twitter
Anti-social networking
In Comment, Technology, Web on October 13, 2010 at 11:07 amImagine if 10 years ago you sent a text message from your mobile phone to 300 people you knew, with varying degrees of intimacy, saying that you were eating a sandwich, or had just had a particularly satisfying bowel movement, or you’d had a row with your partner and were now single, or to deny that you were having an affair.
I would imagine that you would get some rather confused responses and that possibly when you next saw some of the recipients, you may get a few quizzical looks as if to say ‘why are you sharing this frankly utterly uninteresting information with me’.
Yet, here we are in 2010 with Facebook and Twitter together having over 600 million accounts, where each day the electronic ether is chock full with over 120 million tweets and status updates, each a single meaningless brainfart, lost in a thick miasma of narcissism, self-regard and banality, detailing the lives of its many, many, many inhabitants.That’s not the worst of it though: from the endless, badly shot photos of people’s holidays that you feel obliged to wade through, each click on the mouse another blast of the pounding refrain ‘Oh, look at my life. Isn’t it interesting? Don’t I just visit the most interesting places?’ to the cooing and clucking over grainy, dark videos of your vague acquaintances’ dribbling progeny. And what about the bitter and twisted passive aggressive ones who pop up to let the world know that ‘why can’t people (you know who you are, SALLY) just stop being such fat bitches?’, which segues neatly into the passive-aggressives’ maudlin cousins, the ones who spout self-pitying nonsense, telling all and sundry that ‘they’re having a weally, weally bad day’, instead of stoically facing up to the trials and tribulations that life throws at you. JUST GROW A PAIR, PLEASE!
What is the attraction of social networking? Why do we insist of letting our lives be examined in such microscopic detail by people that 10 years ago we would have shuddered at the prospect of sharing a lift with, let alone allowing them to look at pictures of us in our swimming costumes on a beach somewhere? Perhaps it’s the opportunity to live one’s life vicariously through other people, or to fill a hole right in the middle of our empty, consumerist lives.
However, I think it’s a deeper urge for closer ties with fellow fellow human beings, but one that has been subverted and twisted by the big companies who run our social networks, and the brands that pay their advertising rates, into a pure money printing machine that exposes its user’s most intimate details for a price. It’s not all hopeless though, as there are some social networks, such as Diaspora, that purport to help satisfy this urge for human contact in a web context, but more ethically; giving users total control over privacy and not selling data to other companies. How they hope to make money is another matter entirely.
Some social networks, however, such as Twitter might have changed things for the better: much was made of Twitter’s involvement in reporting events from the ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran and how thethe media blackout that existed in the country at the time was circumnavigated. Are then social networks replacing traditional activism? Big-haired boffin, Malcom Gladwell, recently spoke out against this idea, stating that the bonds formed online were many times weaker, even between like-minded people, than those formed in the heat of protest or in traditional activist groups. One only has to look at the popularity of cause-related Facebook groups in relation to actual activism to see the disconnect between the two. I guess that clicking on a button to say that you ‘Like’ a campaign against AIDS is not quite the same as giving money, time or effort to the cause.
Like it or not, online social networks are to stay and will only integrate themselves more and more into our lives. The question is, what effect will they have on our lives in the long run?