July 6, 2011: “WHAT IS THIS!?!” “That’s your voice at too loud a volume.”
June 29, 2011: “Don’t cry. It’s just a comma. Imagine if it was a semicolon.”
June 21, 2011: “I just wrote a new social etiquette manual called Real Talk. Deal with it.”
June 14, 2011: “Do you want anything from Montreal? Attitude? Or bagels?”
June 7, 2011: “You can have as many cries as you want. He can’t control your tears.”
May 30, 2011: “There were some serious inconsistencies in Charlie’s Angels 2.”
May 25, 2011: “You’re like a hot Where’s Waldo. It’s totally good.”
May 5, 2011: “A little power corrupts a little bit.”
April 14, 2011: “No one expects a unicorn to actually do anything.”
March 4, 2011: “My whole life is a Whitesnake moment.”
In the course of our day-to-day lives, it can be easy to forget that, a mere couple of decades ago, most of us could not use computers to talk to people. Widespread internet access has since revolutionized communication and entertainment with astounding speed for an ever-expanding slice of the world’s population. Reactions to this kind of radical novelty generally fall into either of two camps: those who fear (or, occasionally, hope) that enveloping ourselves in new media environments will cause dramatic, unforeseen changes in our minds and lives; and those who picture us less as helpless recipients and more as autonomous users of a set of changing tools that we could pick up or put down as we please. As with most such polarized debates, there is truth to both ways of looking at it. The effects our social media have on us, and the ways we choose to use them, make up a feedback loop in which each influences the other. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube reshape our lives and minds, not by enslaving or coercing, but largely just by giving us what we want — and, in turn, shaping what we want.
The practice of “retweeting” — copying another person’s tweet, with attribution, prefaced by “RT” — arose organically out of the nascent Twitter community. By late 2009, this bit of etiquette had become so ubiquitous that it was formalized as a built-in function of the site, allowing users to retweet with a single mouse click, and also see how many times a given tweet had been repeated. Now, observe here an intriguing commenting behaviour, on a wholly different website, in which the users paste in a previous comment and put a number beside it to indicate how many times it’s been repeated. (more…)
Twitter looms large in the minds of journalists. Some of us live on the micro-blogging site: it is our industry’s collective water cooler. Others hate and fear the blue bird, confining themselves to Facebook or even email for social communication. All, however, feel compelled to file stories about what Twitter and Facebook mean for traditional media, in a relentless, mind-numbing, collective effort to convince readers that our business is its own top story.
So it is that today we read about an experiment called “Behind closed doors on the Net.” Starting on Feb. 1, five French-language broadcast journalists will get all of their information from Facebook or Twitter — no newspapers, magazines, television, or radio allowed. They will be allowed to click on links, but not surf freely across the web. The Toronto Star says that this will “test the limits of reporting solely with Facebook and Twitter.”
Of course, to call this reporting confuses consumption with production. Reading Twitter is not reporting any more than watching the Food Network is cooking. So let’s take the project for what it will actually measure (and to their credit, the experimenters seem to understand this much) — what news is like when it is consumed from social networking sites. As Radio-Canada’s Janic Tremblay told the Star, “We don’t know what to expect. There are people who just inform themselves with those 140 characters. What image do they get of news?”
Since Tremblay doesn’t quote any research about how people actually read Twitter, I’ll make my own evidence-free assertion: he’s wrong; nobody gets all of their news in 140-character increments. Most tweets contain links to actual news articles or video clips by folks (i.e., traditional journalists) like Tremblay. We follow sources that interest us, and then click links from their feeds. We Google something related to the story, get sucked into Wikipedia, and look up to find that the work day is over. Or we click, find a superficial criticism of the internet, and give up on newspapers for another day.
Last week a computerized voice at TD Canada Trust called to inform me that my ATM card’s security had been compromised, and I had to come get a new one; meanwhile, my old card had been deactivated. This irritated me, not least because it was the second such call in three weeks. So I did what any right-thinking modern man does when faced with a petty annoyance. I groused about it on Twitter.
Minutes later my friend J. responded that the same thing had happened to him and his wife twice in two weeks. They’d been told it was a local skimming scam in Toronto’s Beaches — but I hadn’t been out thataway in over a month. I quickly drew two conclusions:
• TDCT’s recent security problems were more widespread than they admitted to their customers.
• Twitter is more interesting than I thought.
Twitter’s long-term strategy is to be “the pulse of the planet.” At first that sounded ridiculous to me — but you know what, maybe it’s half-right. Maybe its fire hose of data can be filtered, collated, and used to draw connections that would have otherwise gone unseen.
Corporations have been quick to realize this. Another online friend of mine recently went to the U.S. with her iPhone, and was charged $300 even though she had turned data roaming off. She called Rogers; they said it was her fault for not turning off 3G. So she complained on Twitter — and Rogers noticed, and contacted her, and refunded the charge in full.
Why? Because companies don’t care if individual customers are upset, but if they tell enough people about it in writing, on a public forum where complaints can easily be retweeted across the Twittersphere — well, that’s different. I still don’t know about pulse of the planet; but Twitter as the world’s complaint department? Now that I can buy.
Here in the First World, we complain about First World problems: inactive ATM cards, excessive data charges. It’s mostly no big deal. But in the developing world, there are real complaints. In particular, endemic corruption. I have long argued that the human leeches (i.e., government leaders) who steal money from their own people are the single biggest problem the Third World faces.
A few years ago, a Very Large Corporation called for ideas on how to use technology to help sub-Saharan Africa; I suggested a corruption-reporting service to name and shame those parasites. The company liked the idea, but it didn’t go forward. (See my latest Maisonneuve column for more about why.)
But now I realize that there’s no need for anybody to implement such a system. It already exists. It’s called Twitter. And in a few years, the developing world will have ubiquitous access to it via both the internet and cell-phone SMS, the medium for which Twitter was originally designed.
The cephalopod of corruption has long festered in the shadows, and held the poor world back with its bloodsucking tentacles. Call me an optimist, but I can easily imagine the monster finally dragged into light by a few Twitter hashtags, some judicious data mining, and the unquenchable human urge to complain. Paging Transparency International. Perhaps your Holy Grail is here.
Yes. That’s right. I’m saying it’s over. My love affair with the socialnets might have finally ended.
As CNN and phishing scams have piled on, the gloss has come off Twitter for me. Cloud computing is just another boring concentration of power. And the (white, male, monied) tech news ratface race is blisteringly tedious. It’s not that I am going to be quitting Twitter or the cloud: I’m writing this post in the cloud on Google Docs. But it’s all completely integrated into my life now. Like breathing. Tools that are available just aren’t really that sexy anymore. (more…)
I’m Jesuspenis and I’m taking over for Chantelle today because she is sucky and heartbroken still. Grrrr.*
I’m an expert on anthropomorphism and Twitter because I am both a four pound yorkshire terrier and a Twitter identity. So I get used phatically all the time on Twitter by Chantelle.
Some examples of my incredible tweets:
I’m staring at you. 9:18 AM Apr 20th
the rain really screws up my foot-hair 1:12 PM May 2nd (more…)
So I broke my foot.
I’m on a roll here: Heartbreak last week and foot-snafu this week.
What ever could be next?
My Rev A Macbook Pro will arrive soon and so I expect I will have a broken churned-out-of-Shanghai-too-soon computer.
I’m as bad off as Yahoo, mewling and crawling back to Microsoft. Yahoo now needs to be bought by them after failing to close on any other offers. And me? I’ve taken for granted how well my heart and feet have served me thus far. Now I long for immediate rejuvenation.
What a pathetic pair we make.
Socialnets to the rescue! (more…)
Last night I was so unprepared (no socks; summer-weight quilt) for the temperature drop that I had to put my laptop on my feet to get to sleep. It had me thinking this would be a good example of the real-world utility of digital tech to give luddites who criticize my Internet-dependence.
The painfully common rhetorical question I get about my Twittering or streaming of my life’s details is “What is the point?” followed instantly with an explanation of why they don’t do it: because their life “isn’t interesting enough.”
The passive-aggressive implication here is that I am an arrogant turd who thinks my everyday life is interesting enough to feverishly microblog about. It is hard to intervene in this logic. But let me try. (more…)
Instead of investing in real estate and companies that make stuff and have a dull old strategy for making money the answer is clear: when the opportunity comes, invest in nothing because nothing is the future. Lehman Brothers has been around for a century and a half making huge profits, and today it’s nothing but FAIL. Same goes for newly sold Merrill Lynch. But fear not: I will provide you here with my expert Fall 2008 list that will pull us right out of economic depression and immerse us deeply in the bushy-tailed future:
Twitter
People are addicted to Twitter. You know I am. And addicts will do anything to get a fix. Sure, as of yet it has no way of making money, so investing in it will be faith based. But you believe in Jesus don’t you? The old economy has collapsed and the new economy is the only hope. Even Jack Layton is on Twitter, warming the cockles of my Canadian heart and proving how we, as a nation, are on the cutting edge. (more…)
I just had to take a quick break from re-writing the movie Red Dawn (it’s a rush job to shoot it before Patrick Swayze passes away and before everyone has jumped on the Cold War resurgence bandwagon) to talk about my Twitter heroes, the truckers.
Early adoption of GPS was mandatory for truckers given their destination-driven vocation. So they have taken to the location awareness services like Brightkite that we 3G iPhone users are just getting into. The iPhone can pinpoint your exact location and, using Brightkite you can check in at that location. (more…)
Equal amounts of laughter and applause at the night’s entertainment were followed by genuine conversation. Between my twitters, of course (twot is my Twitter name):
twot Arriving fashionably late!
I even got the opportunity to talk tech with Don Gillmor who simultaneously visited and posted to our blogs for the first time ever this week. I couldn’t believe it! He had never read any of his Walrus articles online. But then he couldn’t believe I don’t read print magazines or newspapers. His curiosity and my verbosity allowed us to move beyond disbelief. (more…)
Like Dolly Parton, I love tackiness. In interviews Dolly often tells the story of being a little girl and admiring this ‘pretty lady’ in town. The lady had crimson lipstick, glittering clothes and platinum hair. She fashioned herself after this lady and it wasn’t until she was grown that she realized the lady was the town whore.
I relate to Dolly. Only I admired a place, not a person.
Growing up I dreamed of Las Vegas. Not a day went by when I didn’t imagine myself in the most beautiful place on earth: The Vegas Strip. As a child I dressed as though I was headed there (just in case). I wore gold lamé, faux-leather mini-dresses, and I stuck sparkles to my face.
It wasn’t until I was grown that I realized Paris, France, was supposed to be a far more desirable destination than Paris, Las Vegas. All the spitballs and Baby-soft perfume bombs suddenly made sense. (Note: I still haven’t made it to France).
But neither Dolly nor I changed our ways. I still prefer electric-green polyester paint-suits and neon to cotton and sunlight; likewise, Dolly never took off her wigs, nails, or boobs. (more…)
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
Mark: It’s not just in Canada, it seems all over artists don’t get the local recogtnition they should. I was in Malaga where Picasso was born and it is much different, but then he is...
Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
Jefry: I do not really like to read a story like a novel or a real story but I think this is very interesting and need to be read
Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
Djzklj: Pretty interesting article, despite that I don’t wanna make a voyage there
Sanyo Seiki: I love this game! Very addicted! Sanyo Seiki
Anonymous: People are so disconnected from reality these days, it seems like the only thing that matters to them is materialism and celebrity gossip, disgusting! http://poemti.me
