Net Culture Talk

PLEASE use that emoticon ONE more timeNow, here's a late-at-night-out-of-my-mind-bleary post for yer :- )

............

Does anybody care to explain why some communities find minimal chatspeak, and emoticons, as annoying as they do.  This isn't a challenge.  It's a request for information.

We were skimming a comments thread at a big M's blog and somebody threw "LOL" into a comment.

Immediately, in Terrence Stamp fashion, another poster icily intoned "please do not use chatspeak here."  (Of course, wtf is acceptable and encouraged.)

............ Read more

Tess Under House ArrestFacebook has been used by possibly nefarious parties to secretly find out the color of your underwear, to take sides in the disputed Iranian election, and is now being used by a 15-year-old to protest being grounded by her parents.

Her crime was simple: she went to a party with alcohol present and was late for her curfew by one hour. Her parents responded quickly to their daughter’s crimes with a swift and possibly harsh judgment: they grounded her for five weeks.
Read more

Google is Unhappy with the Way China Regulates Information in its countryThe U.S. government is going to say something to China about the Google situation. They are going to express concern about the “cyber-attacks” that have brought up the issue of Google leaving China and ending business matters there.

"We will be issuing a formal demarche to the Chinese government in Beijing on this issue in the coming days, probably early next week. It will express our concern for this incident and request information from China as to an explanation of how it happened and what they plan to do about it," said P.J. Crowley, U.S. State Department spokesman.

A demarche is a formal, written message directly from a diplomat to a government- so we are saying we are upset for real. Read more

Haiti EarthquakeI haven’t watched much of the footage from Haiti, not because I don’t care, but because I don’t have cable tv. This hasn’t stopped me from reading about it, thinking about it, and wondering what responsibility we in the West have for preventing these kinds of disasters or what we can do now to help.

The two most straightforward ways remain the same for every type of disaster. They need donations of either your time or your money. I chose money, but only a little bit and then felt bad about my donation and its usefulness or lack thereof after reading an article on Gawker criticizing the “netiquette” of using social media to promote your cause.
Read more

I like, very much, the concept of "pay it forward."

It's a bit disconcerting to realize that the concept as currently presented, especially in online culture, is most closely associated a slight novel that's so full of saccarine that my teeth hurt just looking at the cover blurb, and a film that's actually even more annoying. Nonetheless, the concept itself is utterly fabulous. Sometimes called "alternative giving," or even "random acts of kindness,""pay it forward" has deep roots in both legal and American culture. Read more

Rule 34 states:

If it exists, there is porn of it.

It was soon followed by Rule 35: Read more

Google- As Ubiquitous as the Morning CoffeeAs if we didn’t know already, Google is taking over. Google's mission? According to them, it’s “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Fair enough- but of course, they are a business as well, and a good one at that. They reported $5.94 billion in revenue for 2009 Q3, up 7% from 2008. So they are doing well. And making investments in everything from YouTube to AOL to ClearWire. Basically, they know what they are doing and are doing it aggressively.

I’ve noticed 3 things lately that speak to another expansion that Google is going for, I would say in a big way: Read more

This skit was originally created for the Norwegian Broadcasting company (NRK) in 2001. It was performed on the show Øystein og jeg, starring Øystein Backe (geek) and Rune Gokstad (despondent monastic user), and written by Knut Nærum.

In 1992 John Bangsund writing in the Victorian Society of Editors' Newsletter observed that Muphry's Law referred to the well-known editorial phenomenon that: Read more

Back in the day, in 1990, to be specific, before UseNet was transformed into little more than a digital petri dish for porn spammers, Mike Godwin noticed a disturbing pattern. In UseNet threads about guns and gun control, those who oppose gun control sooner or later reminded those in favor of gun control that Hitler outlawed personal ownership of firearms. In debates about birth control, those who argued in favor of abortion remaining a legal option were inevitably compared to mass-murderers in the context of Nazi death camps. And of course, in any discussion around censorship on the Internet, some sort of reference to Nazi book burning was predestined.

In response to what he perceived as a method of shutting down open discourse, Godwin devloped Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies (generally referred to in shorthand as Godwin's Law): Read more