whatsupnah…

If anyone was unsure of the echo chamber capabilities of Twitter, today was a great example. In the wake of reports of Michael Jackson’s death, a very smart and relatively unscrupulous person posted two fake articles about George Clooney and Jeff Goldblum having died in New Zealand in completely separate and unrelated circumstances.

Twitter bought in, and the messages started (and still are) flying around like hotcakes in a lumberjack food fight. I even bought in for a few minutes, but you’ll notice that the pages were fakes. If you rolled over, or clicked on any of the other links in the pages that looked very much like news sites with tabs like “Business” and “World News,” etc., you would see that all navigation links on the page link back to the page you are already reading. That is, there is no navigation. There is no rest of the site. There is just what looks like a navigation bar to give the illusion of a site.

Furthermore, if you took the time to scroll to the bottom of the site you would see this: read more »

This is part two of a two-part post; a brain dump of potentially lilliputian proportions. The first part was about the idea of Transactive Memory and outsourcing certain types of brain function to the web. This post is about what this new way of thinking and functioning means with regard to our individuality. This might be tricky.

Part two:

There is a long tradition, that is surprisingly hard to document with any specificity online, of indigenous cultures and first peoples being unwilling to have their pictures taken by visitors with cameras - at least initially. Many of these cultures eventually shifted toward allowance, ambivalence, or even adoption of technologies like the camera, but even today there are people who do not allow their pictures to be taken. read more »

Wikipedia defines Transactive Memory as:

…the process whereby people remember things in relationships and groups. Each person does not need to remember everything the group needs to know, after all, if each person merely stores in memory information about who is likely to have a particular item in the future. This capacity for remembering who knows what is the key to transactive memory…

Now that the internet has become such a deeply ingrained part of our daily lives, are we different? Who are we? And where are we going? read more »