Digital Culture Studies

• ERNursey: It is my fondest dream that every politician in this country start reading a health care provider’s blog on a regular basis, so that they may better understand how money and power have isolated them from the health care crisis in America. See also, White Coat Rants, DB’s Med Rants, and Med Blog Groupie.

• Passive Aggressive Notes: Be sure to check out the minor gall, the major lift (bonus points if you get the reference), The angry graduate assistants, and a great email from the front-lines of post-post feminism.

• I am RICH and I want to spend it on YOU tonight: I wish my husband would stop posting his personal ad on craigslist like this :)

High up on the list of ‘worst ways to break up’ might be this: via Wikipedia. It gets more salacious, what with the saved IM chats, etc. She is known as Ann Coulter 2.0, he is a creator of Wikipedia, and when they broke up, it got public and ugly.

89 Second Jane.

• “Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship?” Tom Hodgkinson of the Guardian weighs in on the politics behind Facebook and the commodification of relational ties.
• Diane Keaton says “Fuck” on Good Morning America. Why is the word fuck so inherently dreadful that we have to invent cutsie-isms like ‘F Bomb’ to substitute on television. Which is mildly ironic, because really, shouldn’t the word ‘bomb’ be much, much scarier than the word ‘fuck’?
• RulesOfThumb.org. A compendium of the world’s rules of thumb. One from my childhood on the frozen tundra:  one inch, keep away; two inches, one may; three inches, small groups; four inches, O.K. (how to verify if ice is safe to walk or skate on).

After clearing out more than 10,000 spam comments, although the email for this site is still non-functional (thanks, spam!), this site may or may not be working again. New design to come, but in the meantime, the last 3 things I looked at online:

• Top 87 bad predictions about the future. I will let you make your own flying car joke.
• iPhones ad parody, via Kottke.
• Flock - the ’social web browser’.

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.

In 1997, I watched as a number of the personal websites that I read particpated in a group notebook project, each decorating one page of a blank notebook, scanning in and posting the page they had decorated, before mailing the moleskine off to the next participant. The premise was a simple one - a moleskine, mailed from one person to the next, and each recipient decorating and/or filling up one page, and then finding someone to whom it should be mailed next, someone that they only knew in the context of reading each other’s personal web pages.
Two themes quickly emerged: the notion of connecting one’s screen life with one’s offline life, vis a vis giving out a real name/mailing address, to the person who wanted to send you the journal, and the notion of exclusivity and how that affects online relationships. That second theme is a whole other post!
It was the beginning of deciding who to trust, oneline - who could have your real name, who could place you in ‘the big blue box’. These experiments continued, in various formats, including two of my favourites - Where’s George, and Dropspots. I just got a Where’s George bill the other day, and dutifully logged in to register it. This is the second bill I have recieved with a Where’s George stamp on it, and as it turns out, the person that registered it has registered more than thirty four thousand bills. That is some serious commitment to outsider social connection.

Dropspots is new, and a little more personal than wheresgeorge - a harkening back to the whole moleskine journal idea. In their FAQ, they say this: Leave things of little or no financial value. Leave things that you’d like people to add to, or modify in some way. It is amazing to me the lengths to which humans will go in order to connect with one another.