Things that are right, for the moment at least:

• Fred's old post about Facebook - more right in retrospect than it was at the time.


• The most accurate assessment of the tech blogosphere I've ever read is, "At the beginning of the last century being a Futurist used to be something exciting. Now it's more like being a dentist. Instead of pulling teeth they simply snip platitudes out of the pages of Wired or The Economist and announce them as a fait accompli, preferably three or four times in the same warm breath. Time to get your factoids extracted."


• Antisocial Notworking: can you think of a better way to sum up the application of Italian autonomist thought to online social networks?


• This makes me fondly remember the heady days of Web 2.0 back in '05

Am I getting nostalgic for the medium of nouveau nostalgia? Were blogs and social networks a passing moment when anything went and Paolo Virno seemed universally applicable? Or am I simply suffering from the all-too-common symptom of an early-adopter's early-onset jadedness?

Posted by Nathan at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex over at The End of Cyberspace writes about the functions of remembering and forgetting past acquaintances when it comes to social-archival services like Facebook. He makes a good point that these entities seem driven to eradicate forgetting in one way or another and notes that forgetting does have an important cultural role in subject formation:

"...when it comes to shaping identity, the ability to forget can be as important as the ability to remember."

Yet I don't think - given the current state of things - we're in danger of unrelenting remembrance thanks to the pattern of people moving from one service to another as they tire of its offerings. Maybe one day our networked, subjective data will follow us around no matter where we go, but until that day forgetting will happen as long as attention spans are short.

Posted by Nathan at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You had only to watch the disparity between Techmeme and Memeorandum this weekend to see how isolated the tech and political blogospheres are. While one was in hysterics over various Palin family pregnancies, the other was apoplectic with devotional excitement over the leaked Google browser project, Chrome. Now imagine me writing that sentence a week ago.

Perhaps what all this points to is how focused we are on our present tenses - what is happening now in our narrowed world(s) is the extent of what matters. If so this might highlight some of the reasoning behind each 'sphere outburst. In the case of Palin, the focus on the family's pregnancies (both of rumor and of admission) are the topic of the moment thanks to McCain's seizure of the new, but will be long forgotten by the time voters step into their booths in the world of continual present tenses. Meanwhile, Google's "leak" of their browser project equally capitalizes on such world of present tenses since writers will masturbatorily try to associate themselves with the breaking news and subsequent fawning - allowing Google to sneak in their improved ability to track every online movement you make.

I suppose the only one here no focused on present tenses is Google itself; they're betting on the value of the future perfects.

Posted by Nathan at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)