Okay, perhaps that was a little melodramatic, but it got you to read this didn’t it?

But I digress – linked here is a very interesting piece by Kathy Sierra titled “Is Twitter Too Good?” on Creating Passionate Users. In it, she waxes philosophical about the potential dangers of the new microblogging trend, something I’ve been trying to both do and avoid for a while now. Sierra argues that outlets like Twitter provide a false sense of connection, while constantly sapping any linear, focused and ‘deep’ streams of thought. The bit that struck me:

Worst of all, this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow. Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our knowledge and skills, and that’s quite different from mindless tasks we can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely we are to ever get there.

While I always end up being an apologist for Web 2.0 trends, I think most interesting (and relevant to me) is this notion of continual distraction – that there are movements towards the dissolution of sustained thought and the kinds of rewards it can bring. What strikes me as most problematic about this destruction of depth is that contemporary liberal-humanist democracies already function in such a manner to dissuade one from sustained critique – if you spend most of your time worrying about which PC to buy or what drapes go with your couch, you aren’t about to notice capitalism’s need for an underclass, are you?

Now if I could just get off this computer long enough to think through some of the further ramifications, I’d be all set. But if you’ll excuse me, I am off to post something snarky on Jaiku.

While it should hardly come as a shock to anyone that we live in a narcissistic era, it’s refreshing to see some actual discussion of the trend. On Slate, Christopher Hitchens states the painfully obvious when he argues that the self-absorption of the ‘me decade’ hasn’t gone anywhere, and has instead transposed itself to the democratically-correct pronoun ‘You’ – i.e. you the voter, you the creator, you the decider. While it’s a little self-evident, it’s nice to see some mainstream discussion of some of the more insidious aspects of liberal-humanism.

Then, Tony Long from Wired suggests that the recent hubbub around the Blogger Code of Conduct is in fact a futile effort in a piece rather cleverly titled “The Blogosphere, Where a Tawdry Culture Goes to Die“. He suggests that civility is based on self-restraint, the sort that actually involves placing others’ needs in front of one’s own – something that is at odds with the dominant entertainment and cultural trends of the last thirty or forty years.

But most interesting is the yawning gap in both writers’ arguments. Hitchens gestures towards it, but only dismissively:

Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual. What you can do to stop planetary warming. How the maximum leader is on your side. The ways in which the corporation has your needs in mind as it makes its dispositions. The candidate who wants to hear your views. Or, a little farther down the scale of flattery and hucksterism, come to our completely uniform and standardized food outlet and create your own salad and dessert, from our own pre-selected range of freshly prepared and tasteless ingredients!

But both Hitchens and Long miss the utter alienation that mass-society populism creates – that narcissism is much a defence-mechanism as it is a symptom of democratic-capitalist excess. In doing so, they again place blame at the feet of those who have neither the time, resources or scope to appreciate how we historically arrived at the contemporary moment. To riff on Hitchens, it’s your fault you were born into the modern western ethos.

And that’s why they’re both jackasses.

Even though it’s already been said, I sorta’ figured it needed to be said again. For those who haven’t yet heard – and trust me, you will – Jaiku is Web 2.0′s latest bright idea, and I for one am mightily impressed. It’s as if someone took a look at my messy online life and just rolled up their sleeves and said: “Alright – I’m cleaning this shit up”.

While many have compared it to Twitter, Jaiku’s primary function is to aggregate one’s own RSS feeds. So rather than working like a straight RSS reader, if, for example, you have a blog, post photos to Flickr, use last.fm and use a social bookmarking service like de.licio.us, Jaiku puts your feeds from all those sites in one, neat, aesthetically pleasing location. Yes, there is a little 140 character spot for microblogging, but you can even put your Twitter feed on, so there’s no need to leave that service – unless, of course, you’re Leo Laporte.

While many have claimed that Jaiku continues the nanoblogging trend – a trend that is as equally reviled as it is adored – Jaiku seems to be more concerned with RSS consolidation, or what has been termed ‘presence management’ by some. While that sounds awfully fancy – and in conception actually is quite sophisticated – what it does is quite basic: takes everything you do online and puts it one place.

Of course, here’s my Jaiku, because I’m pretty convinced this is going to make waves. It may not be Jaiku itself – other sites may begin to incorporate it or just appropriate its ideas – but presence awareness is here to stay. Here’s some more reading:

Eric Berlin’s take at the Online Media Cultist
Rafe Needleman’s Take on Webware

Have you head the exciting news? About Apple and EMI? Huh? You have? You say you’ve read it about twenty times, just in the last hour? Oh. Well I guess I’ll leave it then…

Oh, here’s an interesting snippit: while many are doing the usual prostrating at the Altar of Apple, seems like this was actually EMI’s Idea.

An interesting little piece by Andrew Keen in response to the whole Kathy Sierra debacle where said blogger had death threats and some almost-impossibly misogynistic threads posted on her website. While many – like Tim O’Reilly – trumpeted the usual “free speech” and “self-policing” arguments, Keen argues that the libertarian ideal of the internet is precisely what makes it such an unpleasant place to be – a choice little bit:

O’Reilly sounds like a libertarian spokesman for the NRA. Guns don’t kill people, the anti firearms lobby claim, people kill people. Thus, the O’Reilly line goes, blogs don’t sexually humiliate and threaten women, male internet bloggers sexually humiliate & threaten women. But the problem is that the blogosphere has been colonized by a type of technophile male whose dialectic method is insult rather than polite argument. And this rotten culture of anonymity has spawned a contemporary Internet of social deviants, loonies, perverts and get-a-lifers (not to mention weird Second Lifers).

A perfectly valid point, I think – though why he says “social deviants” instead of the simple “sexists and homophobes” that he means is a little confusing. Of course, what Keen goes on to suggest is that all anonymous posting online be banned which, if I might descend into cliche for a second, seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It might deter online death threats, but it will do little do curb the rampant misogyny and homophobia, while costing billions to maintain. Still – how incredibly refreshing to see a voice that isn’t completely invested in right-wing libertarianism. In a recent half-assed exchange with Rex on fimoculous.com, I tried to flesh out some of my unease with the tech-world’s right-wing underpinnings, but was totally unsuccessful, and came off sounding like a silly undergraduate instead. Nuts.

Also, the comments section on Keen’s post is actually pretty smart – a pleasant change.

As a lifelong cynic, I think I have a pretty good knack for detecting the difference between comedic parody and intelligent critique. After seeing this Alanis Morissette cover of BEP’s “My Humps”, my brain just sat there, sucking wind. If this isn’t the most confounding thing you’ve ever watched, then you have lived a much stranger life than me.

[Update 1]: Alright, everyone and their mother has seen this. I now wish to add that I get that it’s supposed to be parody. It just seems so fucking earnest that it’s entirely discombobulating to watch. Yeah. That’s right. Discombobulating.

Oh, this is via fimoculous.com: