Tag: internet

being native

There are 100s of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you – an even “thicker” accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting website (rather than just sending them the URL). I’m sure you can think of 1 or 2 examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the “Did you get my email?” phone call.

excellent. (via rich bowen)

Origin of stupid nicknames

It’s _really_ amusing to look at AOL today and say “I know why users are limited to 10-character names.“, and see many other elements of the original PlayNet design unchanged (even though the reason for them is LONG gone). For example, the 10-character name limit was largely based on how many screen names we could display in the room header in chat within 4(?) 40-character lines on a C64 screen. Ditto the screen-name defaults (I remember us sitting around BS’ing about how we’d handle that, and conflicts- so now you have JoeS12345.)

TV? Stereo?

What was interesting about our discussion – which was echoed by some friends packing their kids off to school this weekend – was their data showing college students now arriving at school with 2 things, dominantly. First, a cell phone. Second, a laptop. In that order. Stereo? Nope. TV? No. Did you bring a phone to school? I’m embarrassed to identify the model I used. Or stereo. Everyone had them. No more.
What do college kids do with their laptops? Shoot at each other. Play movies. Listen to music. Write papers. Chat. TV? Stereo? Why bother. They’re focused – just like the rest of us – on interactive communications and entertainment. Things have changed. Ask a college kid which they’d be less likely to give up: their mobile or their laptop. Interesting.

roger that, except why bother with a cell phone?

Munchhausen

We are the ants building an ant hill. We are neurons building a mind. We are unwittingly constructing something that we can’t even see or understand because we see it too zoomed in. Our descendants are reaching back from the future and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Their influence can be felt even now, but will only get stronger.

Telephony to co-presence

I’ve noticed that Skype has changed the way my household communicates with the rest of our family. Even though we still have PSTN access to each other, we very rarely use it. We’ve become reluctant to interrupt each other without some form of presence indicator telling us it’s OK. If someone is online, they’re not depooing babies or watching a movie. We talk for much longer, but in a more relaxed way. The PC in our living/dining area has speakers and a webcam – we don’t use headsets. My wife can chat to both her parents at once, not serially. It doesn’t feel like a phone call when your family are chatting with you while you make dinner. When my parents were over in Kansas City, we were sat around the dinner table chomping away, nattering with my brother in London. The whole anxiety that you need to say something meaningful to justify the payment of money to a phone company evaporates.

most telephone conversations that extend one minute have been asynchronous, we just haven’t admitted it in the past. (doodles anyone?) a shared understanding that attention varies and the elimination of technical limits to voice communication patterns move “telephone” conversations towards ambient virtual co-presence. this is exciting because it brings down the wall between virtual and real another tiny bit.

Forking languages

having finished the power of babel, a book on language evolution, i found the following comment on how the internet promotes “bad” spelling insightful:

Ironically, the internet seems to be taking us back a few centuries, to the days before English spellings were standardized by the likes of Webster and other lexicographers. Which was fine back when all parsing of text was done by humans, who could easily figure out that “Thomas Smith” and “Tomas Smythe” were the same person. But as this article points out, it can be a problem when more literal computers are concerned.

it would be highly ironic if electronic media eventually led to the emergence of many new dialects after having contributed substantially to the demise of most of the world’s languages. these new dialects would not necessarily form along geographical lines, but would connect social subgroups independent of location.
one particularly amusing slip i am seeing more and more is “bare with me”.