I linked to ARS Electronic in the last posting and feel compelled to point to Arse Electroknia, as so many other blogs have recently.

Besides having an amusing name, Arse is holding a conference in the city in early Oct on the theme of PrOnnovation - the history of how pornography has driven technological innovation for several hundreds of years.

The last major story of porn related innovation (prior to the current VC funding for adult social media sites) was about the problems HDTV was causing for actors in skin flicks as the sharper HD image was revealing physical imperfections that had not been previously visible to the naked eye.

Read more here: In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real

It appears that the porn industry is now getting into the swing of social media and picking up some of the VC money gushing aroudn so freely ($29B this year).

A few stories on recent funding/launch announcements for adult social media sites:

Zivity: Silicon Valley Elite Dabble in Adult Content

New Playboy Social Network Built On Ning

Playboy Launches Social Network: “High schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join

The last line of the “your Mom can’t join” article, cites young people lamenting the loss of certain social networks as the exlusive domain of the young and that they’re looking for something new that provides that seperate space.

I concur.

At a online communities meetup I went to earlier this week, the main subject was Facebook, and I managed to inadvertendly insult at least half the room when I blurted out something to the effect of people 35+ only using FB as a job networking tool or to check up on thier kids.

The diversity of my ‘friends’ on Facebook has led to a panopticon effect as I alter my behavior due to the different venues my contacts extend across. It morphs from a (semi) private venue to further extension of one’s public persona. Of course there are those who just don’t care who knows what, and kudos to them if their skill set is valuable enough that they’ll always be employable no matter what they do in their personal life, however mixing the two worlds and treating it as one is fraught with all sorts of complications.

The creep of blurred networks is something perhaps I’m more concerned about than is necessary, but is due to having just recently researched and written a chapter for my thesis dedicated to the work/life balance issues the BlackBerry raises by blurring the boundaries between networks, which contribute to what I call “the professionalization of the personal.”

It seems to me that there’s significant room for some PrOnnovation in the space of social networking, if only in that it creates a separate space that is clearly off limits to any networks beyond the social.

Although, as the TechCrunch posting asserted, it’s highly unlikely that Playboy is the brand that wins over the kids.

  
The Museum of the Future will be closed for a fortnight or so in late August.

I don’t think this is suppose to be funny, but it is a little, no?

When was the last time you heard someone drop ‘fortnight’ into a conversation? For me I think it must have been when I watched that Pocahontas movie with that dirty hot guy that came out last year.

Interesting to note that the Museum of the FUTURE measures time in fortnights.

Love those European summer holidays.

Is AT&T playing favorites? Rumor has it they’ve disabled the BlackBerry’s GPS functionality so that the iPhone doesn’t look “diminished” in comparison.

Slashdot reports: “BlackBerryCool got a tip that not only was AT&T removing GPS functionality from their version of the BlackBerry 8820, they’re doing it so it won’t show up the iPhone. While carriers crippling phones to stop them from competing with pay-per-use services is nothing new, this might be the first time they’ve done it to make their other products seem less diminished.”

Naughty.

1. “Zombies are the new Pirates”

From flash mobs to Facebook app…

Hilarious mash-up video of White-house journalist interviewing Dubya about zombies:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoXgRtDysLY]

2. Red Invasion in SF - Hammer and Sickle red hot marketing gimmick

It has moved way beyond the annoying hippy kids with the dirty Che Guevara t-shirt… communist-era propaganda has never been more popular as evidenced by the plethora of red I’ve seen in the past few weeks (and I ain’t talking the [Red]emption through consumption campaign)

First there was the introduction to the uber-hipster coffee scene at Ritual Coffee in The Mission where you can pick up your red “Loyalist” frequent coffee buyer card alongside your biodegradable drinking straw.

Then there was my friend with a boi-diesel revolution bumper sticker on his VW:

At least he’s from Russia…

And THEN, this is the kicker, and what ruins the rev-chic of the other logos: Fashionista Diaries.

From the makers of Laguna Beach… another reality TV show. Such an obvious connection between fashion and communism.

Who doesn’t like hats? Or red for that matter? I’m a big fan of both, but based on this show alone I will not be bringing back the red beret I wore last winter.

How do I know about this amazing show you ask? I usually eat lunch in Union Square, and last week there was a troupe of young women wearing little black dresses and jaunty revolutionary caps handing out fliers for what I thought would be something interesting based on their outfits (like a burlesque show or something).

From bio-diesel, to coffee, to reality TV; the hammer and sickle is used to promote it all. Poor Stalin.

3. Valley (Silicon) Speak

I’ve been making a lot of trips out to Silicon Valley for client visits since I arrived, but the campus I visited last week was by far the shiniest and happiest place I’ve been so far (and I’ve been to Googleplex).

From the sun, to the chatty banter with the receptionist and security guard, to the ubiquitous smiles. Maybe it was the sun that disoriented me, or the fact that people were walking around free on the campus grounds. Something seemed very unusual. Beyond that, there were a couple of funny terms I heard out there:

Term: $100,000 ponytails

Definition: Ponytailed programmers who command salaries of $100,000.

Beyond the salaries, these guys are treated with a level of preciousness I’ve never seen anywhere else. No one can afford to upset the guys cranking out the code.

Term: Tribal knowledge

Definition: Any unwritten information that is not commonly known by others within a company. This term is used most when referencing information that may need to be known by others in order to produce quality product or service.

Colloquial: “The $100,000 ponytail created a competitor site using tribal knowledge.”

Egawds!

Due to the topic of my thesis - “Constant Connectivity in a Wireless Age: The Discursive Promotional Strategies of the BlackBerry” - I was asked several times during my interview process if I thought the iphone would wipe out the BlackBerry.

Like most other people, I was completely enamoured with the iPhone when I first used it. I stopped into an Apple store just before heading into the city to look at an apt I wanted to rent and I was able to use Google’s Street View to get a virtual tour of the neighbourhood beforehand (seriously, the price of a wash was visable at the laundromat across the street). Beyond all the gee-whiz features of the iPhone, my response to the BlackBerry vs. iPhone question was always that the BlackBerry’s features were unique enough to hold its own.

First off there’s the superior email function of the BlackBerry which is really the application that drives its use. Plus,  I don’t think the iPhone’s entertainment focus will sway the BlackBerry’s core professional-user base (the iPhone may cut into adoption of the multimedia Pearl, but that’s another story).

A few weeks back TechCrunch published a comparison review of the two products, based on the feedback of an annonymous valley venture capitalist. To summarize, “You’ll have to pry the BlackBerry from my cold, dead hands.”

iPhone v. BlackBerry: Side by Side, Two Week Comparison

With the Wi-Fi-equipped BlackBerry 8820 coming soon to an AT&T store near you, business folks around the country will be faced with the decision of switching to the trendy new iPhone or upgrading to a more iPhonesque version of their trusty CrackBerry. To determine whether the grass really is greener on the iPhone side of the fence, we have chronicled the experience of a venture capitalist (who wishes to remain anonymous) who has been using an iPhone and a BlackBerry 8800 side-by-side for the past few weeks. His conclusion: despite the overall attractiveness of the iPhone, it lacks too many vital features to replace the BlackBerry as the corporate weapon of choice.For starters, a BlackBerry set up with Microsoft Exchange Server sports intelligent push email while the iPhone does not. When an email is sent to an account on a BlackBerry, the message is downloaded immediately and an LED on the phone notifies the user that he or she has a new message. The iPhone, on the other hand, recognizes new messages at most every 15 minutes and must be checked actively to see if anything has arrived. This deficiency makes handling email on the iPhone slower and less efficient; it also translates into wasted battery power as users need to perform the extra step of opening the iPhone’s email program every time they want to check for new mail.

Perhaps even more significantly, the iPhone fails to synchronize as well as the BlackBerry. When a BlackBerry user changes a calendar event or some contact information on his or her desktop computer in Exchange, the changes automatically appear on the BlackBerry. This makes keeping track of basic business information a snap because one never has to worry about acting on outdated data or manually updating one’s handheld. In contrast, the iPhone does not synchronize calendar and contact information wirelessly, which makes it less dependable for information ultimately stored on a server.

In addition to these major drawbacks of the iPhone, our venture capitalist cites the following as reasons to prefer the BlackBerry:

• The BlackBerry 8800 possesses GPS, which makes Google Maps much more useful, especially for turn-by-turn directions
• The iPhone lacks basic cut and paste capabilities
• Despite Apple’s reputation for superior user interface design, the BlackBerry possesses keyboard shortcuts that make navigation around and between applications a breeze
• The BlackBerry’s phone quality is better than the iPhone’s
• The Safari browser is certainly more stunning than the BlackBerry’s primitive browser, but the iPhone seems to load even text-only pages more slowly than the BlackBerry over the EDGE network
• The BlackBerry possesses a general contacts application that makes contacting people by any given method more convenient
• The battery runs out faster on the iPhone simply because it is used for more tasks. This makes it less reliable for when one must take the device somewhere overnight without the opportunity to recharge.

Despite all of these criticisms of the iPhone, our venture capitalist admits that he would switch over to the iPhone if only it supported push email, calendar and contacts synchronization, and GPS. For him, the prospect of ridding his pockets of a separate device for music (an iPod nano), as well as enjoying all of the iPhone’s slick features (such as full-featured web browsing, stocks and weather apps, and its YouTube program), makes the iPhone very tempting. However, until Apple resolves these shortcomings (and perhaps Google makes its applications, especially Gmail, work as seamlessly with the iPhone as Microsoft makes Exchange work with the BlackBerry), others are going to have to pry his BlackBerry from his cold, dead hands (his words, mind you, not ours).

Highlights from an A-Z guide to modern etiquette, written by Mark Hooper. For the entire list, click here.

A is for Asbo

B is for BlackberryThere is nothing more irritating in modern life than the message “sent via Blackberry”. Think: why would anyone want to know that? And what sort of person would want other people to know it? Referring to your Blackberry as your “Crackberry” ceased to be funny in 2005. Admitting you’re addicted to checking your emails while away from your desk is now considered nothing short of social suicide. Besides, it’s far more impressive to be uncontactable outside of office hours.

C is for Cameraphones

While the “happy slap” phenomenon is as clear-cut as moral conundrums get (it’s wrong), there is an increasingly large grey area where it comes to the correct usage of the cameraphone. In Japan, the tradition of “tachiyomi” (reading while stood up) has left newsagents and bookstores frustrated at customers photographing magazines rather than buying them. It’s a small step, they claim, from digital shoplifting and information theft. Meanwhile, British Transport Police claim that their fastest growing problem is sexual harassment by videophone. Far more worrying, however, is the casual acceptance of the phone as the new cigarette lighter at gigs, with a sea of glowing screens now greeting every concert performer. Ask yourself: is it really worth the grainy footage?

D is for Drugs

E is for Email

Emails are social timebombs waiting to happen. Remember: there is no “recall” button. While you can usually deny a verbal conversation, it’s hard to do so when it’s spelt out on screen. The appropriateness of your email etiquette will vary from office to office. If in doubt, consider whether you’d mind if your humorous clip, casual flirting or third-party bitching was forwarded to your parents or significant other.

F is for Free PapersG is for Green Angst

Some answers to the most common environment-related questions:

Yes, you can recycle plastic. Driving to your local bottle bank more or less cancels out any positive affect on your carbon footprint, but it’s the thought that counts.

The tipping point for the global warming debate was that cute computer animation of a polar bear slipping off a glacier.

Yes, insisting that green companies make a healthy profit merely panders to the capitalists who are creating the problem, but let’s not go there. No, being a carbon neutral citizen doesn’t make a blind bit of difference in the face of the oil industry, but it’s all about symbolism. Travel does still broaden the mind - but why not take two weeks off and go by boat? Hang on to those British Gas shares you bought when you were 16. If you sell them they’ll just end up in less scrupulous hands than your own.

H is for Hoodies

I is for iPods

iPods don’t actually cause deafness any more than Walkmen did 20 years ago. But there are some general rules of etiquette everyone should follow. For starters, turn the clicker function off as soon as you get it out of the box. It’s really quite annoying. Secondly, ditch the white headphones. They turn your ears into glowing beacons for Asbo kids in hoodies. Finally, don’t fall into the trap of thinking an iPod is your property in any traditional sense. Instead, think of it as a loan from Apple, to be traded in for the newest model as soon as its built-in obsolescence kicks in, several days after the warrantee expires.

J is for Jadism

K is for Knitting Circles

The Alpha Male is in retreat. He is emasculated in the workplace. He is no longer the breadwinner at home. His natural urges are considered Neanderthal. What’s he to do? Simple: take up macramé. Man needs to craft things with his hands, so in our super-protected society, it’s only natural he learns to knit himself a scarf. Just so we’re clear: there’s nothing wrong with this: some might say it’s his destiny.

L is for Love

Dating clubs have evolved into all kinds of peculiar permutations, from speed to online to singleton tents at festivals. But however desperate the format, never let it be said that love cannot flourish in this cynical age. If anything, we’ve become more exacting in our romantic lives than ever before. Marriage is now best entered into after a 10-year courtship, by which time you should have established if your partner is financially and psychologically viable. Largely because you’ll be on your third mortgage together and your children will be preparing for secondary school.

M is for MySpace

N is for Neighbours

O is for Obesity

P is for Patriotism

Q is for Quizzes

R is for Religion

S is for Sex

T is for Travelling

It used to be so much easier. Now, if we’re not worried by our carbon (omega) footprint, we’re out of pocket thanks to expanded congestion zones and road tolls. But rest assured public transport is the future. Those lucky enough to live in London can benefit from a subsidised free service known as the “bendy bus” (derived from the slang term “bent”, meaning morally corrupt.) The Tube’s straining infrastructure also allows every worker a half hour extension to their official morning start (known as “flexitime”). As for rural rail networks: they don’t exist any more.

U is for Underwear

V is for Virus

W is for Warfare

It is never a good idea to declare a modern war over, or to forget to plan for the uneasy peace that follows. It is also fairly impractical to try to invade terrorist organisations, given that they, by definition, tend not to all live in one place; or indeed, anywhere that can be differentiated from where you also live.

X is for X-rated

Y is for YouTube

Z is for Zidanity

The World Cup finals have a habit of throwing up heroes that embody the spirit of the age. There was Pele and the Beautiful Game. There was Gazza and his heart-on-your-sleeve crybaby patriotism. And in 2006 we had Zidane. How did the sport’s greatest poet cope with modern cynicism? Simple: he imploded with seething rage. The line between sportsmanship and gamesmanship no longer exists. It’s perfectly acceptable to dive, feign and fight your way to success. And if you fnd yourself on the wrong end of it, hit someone.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have no cell phone.

My lack of cell phone mystifies a lot of people, and for good reason: 1/4 of under-30s now go cell-only. People I’m setting up interviews with can’t understand that I don’t have a mobile number to be reached at and I think this makes them a little suspicious.

Yesterday I was on a plane from Toronto to Montreal and was seated next to Leo, a Hasidic Jew from New York City. He was curious about my favorite movies as “his people don’t watch movies.” As the conversation progressed it somehow came out that I didn’t have a cell phone. He was absolutely shocked, he asked “How do you have fun?” He proceeded to pull out his new top of the line cell phone and BlackBerry Pearl to show off. This man also knew about craiglist.org, which added to my overall surprise about his tech savvy considering the movie ban. The surprise was compounded by the fact that I had been talking with a director at a teleco earlier that day and he hadn’t heard of craigslist which made me think maybe it was a generational thing. Meanwhile, Leo is giving me looks of “what, you think I’m stupid?” when I asked him if he knew about craigslist.

The “1/4 under-30s cell-only ” story talks about party lines. Does anyone reading this even know what a party line is? Not surprisingly (based on my prior post), my family operated on a party line for many years. The rules we had for talking over the party line - don’t talk about the neighbour’s kids, etc - are probably good rules to extend to today’s cell conversations.

It’s 2am… the reality of my deadlines is finally hitting me (two weeks late). In my deluded state I’m considering the possibility my thesis topic is divinely inspired.

From Marita Sturken’s Technological Visions:

“Spinning technology through the Fall of Man narrative casts us as the ignorant architects of our own undoing. In this narrative, we make our artifacts but they in turn cast us out into world in which we are not suited. The narrative of the Fall reduces the dynamic relations of people and technology to a story in which technology is the cruel, decisive actor. It was a God with ultimate power who expelled humans from the Garden of Eden. The new narratives of the Fall put technology into that position. They rationalize human passivity in the face of anxiety about technology. They give a sense of inevitability to people’s feelings of impotence in the face of our creations” (Struken et al. 2004: 23-24).

“Spin is distracting. Overheated debates about computer addiction and Internet depression keep us from confronting issues raised by contemporary technology that are resistant to the oversimplification of spin…Technology does things for use but also to us, to our ways of perceiving the world, to our relationships and sense of ourselves” (Struken et al. 2004: 23).

“The world-view of most of the industrialized world remains relentlessly modern in its valuing of science, technology, growth, and progress. Yet these modern sensibilities are integrated with an increasingly postmodern sensibility – a sense of cynicism and fatigue with modernity’s hurtling forward into the future, a world increasingly defined by the digital, the computer, and the virtual… Yet this feeling of life speeding out of control is a deeply modern one, one that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. This moment in history is thus defined specifically by the tensions of living with both the heightened qualities of modernity and the shifting worldview of postmodernism” (Struken et al. 2004: 72).

Too late to comment on these strings of writing, but I think I’ve found a conclusion.

— Speaking of ’spin’… Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday at 84, amazed at his old age after a life-long smoking habit. After joining the army and working for the Chicago City News Bureau, he did PR for General Electric, “a job he loathed.” He published four books before be able to give up selling Saabs to support himself.

I suppose it’s stories like Dana Vachon’s that keep the hope alive for all those bloggers out there. A 28 yr. old prep-kid-turned-investment-banker-turned-blogger got a $650,000 advance to write about his insights into NYC society. The book has already been optioned to the company who produced Babel. It’s possible he provides an illuminating perspective, but not likely of the slaughterhouse 5 variety. See above for ’shifting worldview of postmodernism.’

Here’s My Number (for Today)

By ANNA JANE GROSSMAN

Published: November 30, 2006

Some people have found a way to avoid compromising the sanctity of their cellphone without committing the modern sin of being unreachable. Instead of giving out her cell number, Ms. McClain has recently been dispersing what has become known as a “social phone number.”

This is a free number that is as disposable as a Hotmail address.

…

Matt Wisk, creator of the social phone number provider PrivatePhone.com (and chief marketing officer of the site’s parent company, United Online), said he got the idea to protect mobile numbers in 2005 when Paris Hilton’s cellphone was hacked into, spilling her contacts’ phone numbers all over the Internet.

“I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’ ” he said.

…

Of course, even if you use a social phone number, your hidden digits are likely to be announced through caller ID to anyone you deign worthy of calling back.

For that, a Web site called Jangl.com offers users the ability to create new, free numbers for every person they want to call. It works by giving the user and the person being called the same social number to call each other.

“Historically, phone numbers were assigned to a destination, like a home or work phone,” explained one of Jangl’s founders, Michael Cerda. “Then they were assigned to a device, like a cell. What we are doing is assigning numbers to specific relationships. We offer a shared, mutually anonymous number.”

###

I’m a dying breed, one of the few my age without a cell phone, and as a non-user I can appreciate that I may not be able to fully understand the oh-so-complicated relationship one develops with their cell, however… when you reach the point that neither you nor the party you’re calling want to exchange real numbers and you’re not returning calls for fear that your real number will show up on call display, why are you bothering? Maybe that person is better off as an email-only buddy? Just saying…
For full article, check here

Douglas Kellner, the Philosophy Chair of Education at UCLA, lectured at McGill this Thursday on the ‘Metaphors of Cyberspace’.

Kellner named four major influences in creating the internet: 1) Military 2) Big Business (IBM, Xerox, Apple) 3) University research 4) Hacker culture.

These groups have necessarily shaped the way we talk about the internet. For example, computing language is filled with militaristic terms such as “erase”, “abort”, “delete”, and “spam”. He observed that metaphors for new objects are pulled from familiar objects, such as the idea of Home, which result in relatable terms like “homepage”, “MySpace”, and “YouTube”, names that put the focus on the personal and immediate surroundings. The Work environment creates language like “desktop”, “mailboxes”, “trash”, “files” etc.

Given my research interests in BlackBerry, I was particularly intrigued by the Nature metaphor, which he argued was used to soften and blur the boundaries between nature and technology, thereby naturalizing it. Companies like Apple and Microsoft (MS fits in here because of the ’soft’, which is natural and sensuous) use the nature metaphor, as do products like BlackBerry and Mac, and terms like ‘virus’, ‘bugs’, ‘mouse’, ’surfing’, and fishing’.

Travel was another metaphor Kellner touched on, claiming the term ‘information superhighway’ was particularly problematic for Bill Gates because a highway implied a FREEway, and so, Microsoft made a move toward a different language that didn’t create an expectation of a free lunch.

And this is why metaphors matters…

Language enables what one can conceptualize. The metaphors you use limit and enable certain discourses. Kellner cited Stuart Hall who said “a metaphor is a serious thing, it informs one’s practice”, and Derrida who said “a metaphor is never innocent.” The tremendous influence metaphors can wield in public and private discussion is why it’s necessary to get out ahead of the trend and define your own terms.. There are plenty of people/companies/ideologues that have a vested interest in defining a dialogue in a certain manner and once a certain way of talking about an object has been established it’s very difficult to break the mould and view it from outside that frame of reference. The Democrats face this problem, in that they’ve been reduced (in many instances) to being a reactionary party, rather than a party that defines the issues they want to pursue.

One of the most interesting comments was a brief aside toward the end of the lecture when Kellner noted that modernity was characterized by the big businesses and infrastructure of the industrial age which have masculine overtones, and that postmodernity (if that’s what we’re still in) is characterized by smaller and more personal infrastructure of the information age which is more feminized (big frames vs. sleek laptops). Postmodernity as feminine.

After Kellner’s lecture I checked back in on a blog I keep track of and in Sept the writer had referenced a lecturer at the Industrial Designers Society of America who said the future of computing needs will be facilitated by more intuitive and human interfaces.  The same lecturer was also encouraging designers to become more “sensually sensitive” and to reconcile the design of digital interfaces with basic human cognition and intuition. Intuition, sensual, sensitive, reconciliation… is it possible the future of cyberspace is female gendered?