mediajunk

A couple of articles this week --

a) how the Daily Mail are in trouble for doctoring photos of Michael Jackson

b) how a widely circulated fake of George W. Bush holding a book upside-down is an example of why we may all ignore photos in a few years

-- made me think about what Baudrillard called hyperreality, the postmodern inability to distinguish the illusory from the real.

(Note: For all you know, I'm not really Michael Heraghty at all. But I'm not so sure that you're really veggie7897342@pinklady.com either!)

Prettied-up extract from an email I just posted:

Blogging tools (like Movable Type and Blogger) are at the heart of the latest phase of the web's evolution. Like swiss army knives for webmasters, they not only build blog-style sites, but embellish them with quirky little features, some of which (like 'pinging' other sites to let them know you've just updated) work only because so many people are using the same software, and are part of the same communities.

Is the blog becoming the 'standardized interface' that Jakob Neilson has been moaning about for so long? Will blogs produce a shared set of interface conventions that will ultimately make the web more usable? We're certainly growing accustomed to the blog-style interface: newest entries on top; archives and 'my favourite sites' lists in the right or left margins; etc. Maybe the humble blog is the web's 'killer app' -- like the PC was for the home computing market (or like Netscape was for the internet)?

Reading the previous post on mobile phones and their effects on society and culture led me to think about the related issue of social distance.

In 1926 an American sociologist named Emory Bogardus developed his valuable social distance scale, still commonly used within the social sciences today.

The scale was based on a series of seven statements that subjects were asked to consider for different racial, social and national groups. In 1927 people where asked how they would feel to have a member of group X :

a) in close kinship marriage
b) in my club as a personal chum
c) in my street as a neighbour
d) as a fellow employmee in my occupation
e) as a fellow citizen in my country
f) as a visitor only in my country
g) I would exclude all members of X my country

Bogardus's original series of statements has, of coures, been updated, but the quaint terms in the original highlight the key milestones in our definition of social distance: marriage, friendship, neighbours, workmates, citizenship and visitors to one's country (with different notions of how long to stay). Are these barometers still relevant in our 'network age'?

Continue reading "Virtual Communities and Social Distance"

The Guardian recently devoted a 'G2' supplement to the ubiquity of mobile phones (cellphones, for American readers) -- you'll find yourself nodding in shameful self-recognition more than once.

The supplement includes a humorous (and curiously compelling) eavesdropping report.

Reading the latter reminded me of those eavesdropping sites that reveal, often live, what people are typing into search engines.

None of these is as good as Excite's (now sadly defunct) 'Search Voyeur' -- a ticker-style java applet that displayed live search queries. It was wonderful (if pointless) fun; now it's just another of our fickle web's dead links. Boohoo.