Canned Dragons

This blog post by Tessa Brown teases apart the difference between social networking and social media.

I suppose what the story above suggests is that social media became the pretense for social networking. I’m reminded of this article I used to teach about the role menus played in restaurant interactions between servers and patrons. Basically the finding was that all of the conversations between servers and patrons were about the menu. “Is this good,” “Do you have this today,” “Can I tell you about our specials.” So the implication for literacy theory, the study of reading and writing, is that people use artifacts in conversation to structure what they talk about–the same way you and your friend from high school just Instagram DM memes back and forth to each other. People are awkward and need something to talk about. What I want to conclude is this pat thing: media is the excuse for us to talk to each other.

Social media clusters the conversation around a media artifact. Maybe a video or song. The metaphor of restaurant servers and patrons centering communication around the menu works well here.

This may be why I’m focused on the blogging service I use having solid integration with a social site. I tend to post a fair amount of media and welcome the social aspect of conversation around that media. Whether that actually happens is another matter, but it’s part of the goal, anyway.

The team behind Matter, my favorite read-it-later service, has a new app out. It that promises to help you manage time on your phone one day a week. The app is called Sabbath, drawing from the ancient and holy practice of taking one day a week to rest. Unfortunately, it’s iPhone only (the Matter crew are an Apple shop) and I spend more time on my iPad and Mac.

Isaac Greene has the human interest angle on data centers through the lense of his brother, a farmer, who will have his farm surrounded on both sides by new data centers. Greene highlights the trivial or destructive ways A.I. is used to show the trade-offs we are making.

But for everyone else, there is such pressing need for data computation. Are we expected to make our memes by hand? We couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t know what Donald Trump Jesus would have looked like. We couldn’t create fake versions of loved one’s voices to scam grandmothers out of their life savings without these vital calls. Who will make all these robocalls? People? The indignity. We couldn’t surveil our citizens going about their days with flock cameras, or permanently save the footage of everyone who appears on our ring cameras. What would we do without these data centers? Do we expect corporations to employ humans (with their expectations of salary and benefits) to do their work? There would be no slop to post to Facebook, no way to adjust our faces and bodies so they look their best when we post our selfies and gym mirror shots. Someone must pay the cost for these essentials, and that someone is a family in Pennsylvania trying to live their life on a little bit of land.

It’s a compelling read if you want to know how the data explosion is negatively impacting real people.

Trying to teach the boy to skate last weekend and ended up with some road rash. I’m too old for this.

I’ve been playing a new video game called MIO: Memories in Orbit. I have a bit of a soft spot for what they call Metroidvania’s (a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania), having grown up loving games in the genre. In this game, you “Play MIO, a nimble robot with extraordinary abilities, and unravel the mysteries of the Vessel, an enormous technological ark overgrown with lush vegetation and machines gone rogue.” My brother is playing at the same time, and it’s almost like being in a book club. Or, at least how I imagine it is to be in a book club, as I’ve never actually been part of one. We share updates and new locations we’ve found with each other as we puzzle our way through this organic sci-fi ark.

Jay Peters reports for The Verge about the year-over-year rise in the number of CDs being purchased.

The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself.”

The surprise here is that approximately half of the Gen Z and millennials buying CDs don’t even own a device on which to play them. It’s still about that connection, though. I admitted the other day that I sometimes listen to a CD even when I could just as easily (more easily even) stream the album.