mediajunk

Science continues to race ahead of ethics ... now face transplants are staring us in the, um, face.

Insert your own witty 'face' quip below! (Suggestions: Can you imagine the NHS waiting list? Who'd want *your* face? Etc.)

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!)

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.