How does one produce “truth”?

Today gnovis ran an article of mine considering this very question. It all started when I stumbled across an issue of Wired with a headline proclaiming “The End of Theory”. Evocative titles always seem to get me to buy magazines, but this one seemed to have some personal relevance and worth the $4.95. I suppose the gnovis article was inevitable. Here is a taste:

As we rush to reconstruct our physical lives in online spaces, digital worlds like Facebook and Second Life have largely forgone the potential freedoms of digital environments. When Anderson asserts that we should focus on what people are doing, he forgets Althusser’s Marxist response that “ideology is material” and as such, never offers a problem that is outside of material’s ability to respond. No wonder all of this data analysis is working. We are just measuring predefined user behavior in a digital world, a world we insisted on digitizing.

It is a fun piece, so I hope you will check it out.

This week gnovis published a special issue on “New Media, Technology, and Democracy“. With the elections just months away, the editor Brad Weikel (or “sleepcamel” on his blog) was right when he said that now is the perfect time to reflect on the intersection of technology and politics.

There are a number of fantastic articles, but I was particularly delighted to see my friend Tatyana Varshavsky’s article published. In the editor’s words:

Tatyana Varshavsky’s “Creating Community Through the Arts: Cultural Engagement, Democracy, and the Role of Civil Society” brings a valuable perspective to the discourse of civic engagement, examining the relationship between cultural and community engagement, and a broader notion of citizenship. By stepping out of the normative model of the Big Media / Big Politics spectacle, Varshavsky offers an inspiring view of civic engagement, at once pragmatic and idealistic, which would give even Robert Putnam a glimmer of hope.

You are on a desert island. You have the option of an email account or Google, which do you choose? Well, that’s a no brainer. You choose email and send someone a letter so you can get off the stupid island. But what if that island was Manhattan?

Earlier this month, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released the latest statistics frequency on search engine use. In case you are curious, here is how it stacks up (click for a full-size version):

Despite where you live, apparently we all feel like we are on our own island of sorts. And believe it or not, search engine use has only recently been gaining on email. The Pew offers two explanations for the increased populatity of search engines (and let’s just ignore the absurdity of considering Google as unpopular).

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I was having dinner with a colleague earlier this week who in a hushed and slightly embarrassed voice admitted that she just didn’t understand Twitter. Normally I would have assured her that Twittering is not a social requirement, but in her case, it was part of her job. Twitter, Blogs, Facebook - these are the bread and butter of an emerging professional class of “social media consultants.” Maybe it is a D.C. thing. After admitting to her that I am more confused about these jobs than the technologies they rely on, I happily agreed to help get her up to speed.

Internet culture, however, is incredibly memetic. I suppose this makes Dawkins the philosopher of choice for contemporary geekdom, but it also means that the distinction between popular and unpopular, in and out, can be dizzying.

Point and case: This video from CrunchGear. Somehow they managed to capture the simultaneous love, disdain, and absurdity of Twitter. And it only took Hitler to pull it off.

“I have to admit something. Sometimes I like to read the missed connections section in the paper, just for fun. And I really like them. Is that so bad?”

Without fail, every time I tell someone new that I am doing a research project on Missed Connections, they quickly interrupt me to exclaim how much they love reading these little messages. It is funny, I certainly can relate to how they feel, but I frequently am so “down in the trenches”, if you will, that I miss the beautiful potential embedded in each post.

While stumbling around the net this weekend I ran across a video that seemed to tug on this very point. An episode of Val’s Art Diary, this video gets right to the heart of the matter, and gives one artist’s interpretation of this suspended form of romance. In her words:

Every couple you talk to has a story of them meeting, and it is usually is a pretty random thing… what if your moment already happened and none of you did anything about it? It seems to me that as much as we like to shape our lives, somethings are simply beyond our control.

I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.

My friend Tim from Utah has been visiting this week. Last night in the midst of John Stewart, he asked the following question: “How do you think history will treat President Bush?”

Compared to my Media and Politics focused peers at CCT I am a totally poli-wuss. All the same we compared notes, exchanged ideas, and then quickly agreed that we had no idea. Will history blame Bush for the last 8 year or will he fade into presidential obscurity over time?

Imagine my delight when I found the following clip this morning. Perhaps our problem was with the term “presidential”.

When writing about the troubles Apple had last week during their v2.0 launch, I reminded about some of the load challenges we had with the MCAT system under heavy volume, and, of all things, software patents. should point out that the The following is a brief post that I wrote last semester after giving a presentation on the Amazon One Click patent case in a class on Internet policy. It never quite made it up, so I am sharing it now.

(I should point out that the load issues I talk about here were resolved with a rather popular queuing system that we build for the MCAT registration system that managed load throughout the system. I loved that project, and a great lessons learned about performance services oriented architecture! Okay, enough geek talk - carry on…)

I got to work at 6:30 am the day after a class presentation on the Amazon “One Click” legal issue, and walked into what we loving call “the war room.” It is exactly what you would expect. Computers are everywhere, monitors, projectors, and a conference phone I am determined to paint red. This, however, was not a military operation, although pretending sometimes helps us do a better job. This was a launch day for the MCAT software. We were opening over 50,000 testing seats, and war or not, pre-med students fighting for their future always results in blood. (more…)

Last night was crazy. I expected a somewhat benign experience that would reward my annoyance with lines with a new shiny toy that, immediately upon opening, would never again live up to my expectations.¹ What I didn’t expect was the bizarre roller-coaster of emotions, and dare I say dramatic conclusion that would lend itself to a blog narrative such as this.

(If you prefer a visual narrative, check Flickr, or for a narrative limited to short 140 character updates, Twitter.)

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Footnotes:

1. There is actually an amazing philosopher who talks about this. I would highly recommend anyone who is disillusioned with consumerism’s promise read Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle“. I can’t recommend it enough!↩

Like many iPhone owners, I have looked forward to today with a lot of anticipation. I resisted the hype for a bit. I soon realized, however, that if I was rationalizing the purchase of a new iPhone under the thinly veiled guise of “one who studies technology and culture”, then who was I to deny myself of the full first day release experience?

I decided to go half way. I do, after all, have a job. I figured I would go after work, around dinner, and catch some of the spectacle (product and person based). In the meantime I would be satiating my techno-lust by updating my current phone to the new software and getting a feel for what my new and improved life will be like. Cut to me at work with a non-operational phone, sitting with a coworker, frantically trying to access the iTunes music store in order to reconnect to the digital world.

Earlier in the morning iTunes had offered to update my phone to v2.0, but I was running to a meeting and delayed the install. Post meeting I found my phone unwilling to admit that the today was the biggest launch in mobile history, adamently proclaiming that 1.1.4 was the most current version. Apparently my computer doesn’t read the same blogs I do. Nor does it understand my need for Monkey Ball. What to do? Restore the iPhone! (I promise, this seemed like a good idea. Forums are full of cases where older firmware updates wouldn’t take until users restored their phones from a backup.)

Well, apparently I wasn’t reading the right blogs. Crave reported (at about the time I restored) that the Apple has been overwhelmed, servers are down, customer service is swamped, and my scenario is far from unique. Then I ran across a post from my friend Chris who works for AT&T entitled “iUh Oh” (he explained things from his perspective here). The short of it is that I have no way to restore my phone while Apple servers are unavailable.

I am sure there is a LaTourian joke in here somewhere. One thing is clear. For the time being I own a brick that only asks me if I am experiencing an emergency (sure, I guess) while like a trained pigeon I repeatedly check to see if Apple servers have been restored. The bizarre saving grace? I know that this problem will go away as soon as I give this company a whole lot of money for my new phone.

UPDATE @ 3:53 PM EDT: I was able to connect to the Apple servers to restore my iPhone. No v2.0 software available yet, so for now my phone is going through the slow process of syncing everything back onto the device.

Additionally, Crave reported that “A reader added the text of a note he received from Apple in the comments. Apple blames the problem on ‘network congestion on the iTunes server,’ but says you should be able to update or restore the firmware once the traffic dies down.”

I have my own experience with super high volume traffic days (not here, of course… and I suppose it is silly to compare my professional work to Apple, but the point is…) and sometimes all you can do is just wait for the traffic to die down.

After a week in my new favorite city Chicago (move over Bangkok; check out pictures here and here, and videos here), I am playing that catch up game. My inbox is overflowing and the unread count on my Google Reader is making me question the darker side of RSS. One thing that didn’t change? Twitter. It is still down.

After endlessly defending Twitter to friends, and even giving Twitter kudos during their iPhone 2.0 related downtime, I am beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t be looking at other options.

The reason? No Instant Messenger tweeting. Even more frustrating than the intermittent inability to see who has replied to your tweets (the whole point, no?), the inability for me to submit tweets via IM is killing me. To top things off, my Facebook status/Twitter syncer of choice accesses the service via IM. I have no Facebook status!

I started tweeting via IM as to not add one more web2.0 obligation, but now the overhead of sharing trivial thought is less than trivial. Where does that leave me? Well, relentlessly checking the Twitter Status blog, which unfortunately seems to be as limited as Twitter’s 140 character tweets. It is a fate worse than… well, getting work done.

There is an interesting upside to the twitter-verse having some unexpected time on its hands. No, I am not talking about the temporary demise of Twitter-log Blog entries and repetitive stress thumb injuries. I am talking about a return to fan art! Right in the middle of an “I hate Twitter” fit, I ran across this:

Yes, this is a 3D creation of the twitter image I posted about a couple weeks ago. Apparertly the image was originally created by the Australian illustrator Yiying Lu. I had been pondering the meaning of the image, but Lu’s title of ‘Lifting up a Dreamer’ seems to suggest that Twitter is the whale, and that we are the tweeter struggling to lift it to greater heights. What do they dream about? An IPO? More servers? A t-shirt deal? Who knows, but it seems that even when it is down, people just can’t bring themselves to hate on Twitter.