Digital Culture Studies

Back in the day when I made websites, one of the hallmarks of a good site was a witty 404 page. It keeps users from getting upset when the site doesn’t work the way they want it to, and it is a way to flex one’s humour in what is usually a less than amusing venue. I don’t see a lot of 404s anymore - I think most people have a redirect to the index.html page for incorrect pages in sites, so I was charmed when I inadvertently typed in an incorrect livejournal address, and got this:

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Where rejected Wikipedia articles go to die: The wikepedia knowledge dump.

Writing my dissertation: I bet I would have spent a lot of time reading this guy’s site while I was writing my thesis :)

Apple is the new NASA.

You cannot be interested in digital culture and not be interested in issues surrounding free speech - as the medium of CMC grows, questions regarding what can and cannot be said in online venues is in constant debate. So it was with interest that I recently discovered ReputationDefender, a site which states that, “who you are online is as important as who you are offline”. Can’t argue that! But in the FAQ, I found this, and it gave me pause:

Does ReputationDefender simply send cease-and-desist letters or sue everybody when it seeks to “Destroy” content?

No. Most of our approaches to effecting correction or removal of content are non-legal. We will only pursue legal options with the express consent of our clients, and these techniques are strictly optional and usually the last resort. They may incur additional cost.

Are college students techno-idiots? While I don’t like the term ‘idiot’, I do wonder sometimes about the nature of technology fluency at the undergraduate level and whether or not colleges plan to address this in terms of core competancy in the same way that alcohol use and other social norms are addressed. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that this isn’t a problem limited strictly to students on campuses - how do you understand the need for technology-fluency if you yourself are not fluent? And even if you can understand it, how do you impart knowledge you don’t have to your students?

“As of this week, roughly 0.1 percent of the sum of modern humanity plays World of Warcraft.” Or to put it into personal perspective - that is more than a quarter of the entire population of my home country.

From this, to almost caught up - I have reached December 24th in my inbox, and resolve to answer all of my email from 2006 by January 15th. And I would be done now, except that I had to take a break to write thank you notes for the holidays!

Current email, inbox: 1468

Caught up to: December 24th, 2006

Need: 1468 smart things to say, to complete this task!

Manhattan Society: If I was writing one of those ‘chick lit with a shoe on the cover books’, this is where I would be starting my research.

BC Dome loses roof: of course the irony is that the BC contractor’s association had a convention booked here starting next week.

Software for starving students: Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more. I am not starving, but still appreciative! And the Mac and PC version is a nice touch! Via Digg

I try to donate a little money every month to a different charity. The amounts are small, but regular giving is important to me - like flossing and vitamins, giving is a good habit to cultivate. In December, I try to pick one or two charities for larger donations, as a way of balancing out the constant ‘buy buy BUY Things equal Love‘ message of Xmas that I feel bombarded with from about the middle of October onward.

This year, Half the Sky was our December charity, and then we sponsored christmas for some children (so much fun, by the way, to get their letters and go shopping! I spent more time on this project than I did presents for my family!) and sent care packages to soldiers. In the past, I have always meant to donate to heifer international, but hadn’t yet - they were on my future giving list. After all, how fun to give someone honeybees, or geese, or a water buffalo. Except….you aren’t. I received their catalog this year, and the copy is very, very misleading, according to Philip Greenspun and Michael Stillwell, who read the small print, and discovered that, “you find that your purchase is “symbolic” and “represents a contribution to the entire mission of Heifer International.” (Quote from Stillwell). Not quite as much fun, is it, to contribute to a general fund that one day may provide stock animals to families than it is to buy a flock of geese.

And as always, I am a huge fan of charity navigator, for evaluating one’s charities of choice.