Posts Tagged ‘analysis’

30
Jan
21:45

Get Off My Lawn & Start Making Sense

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Or: Get Off My Lawn & Start Making Sense – My Guide For Fruitful Internet Discussion

Start with the assumption that you, dear reader, are nothing but a mere lost soul in a great ocean of successful people and that the only light at the end of any tunnel is the crack under the door from your basement where you live to your parents’ house. Feeling trodden down yet? No, OK, I didn’t mean it quite that way. Lots of people are talking about things nobody cares about, not even their friends. For instance how this twitter search actually comes up with results – not only that, results keep being discharged by the collective rectum of the internet.
The point I’m trying to get across is that you are nothing. Nobody cares about you. The internet is full of drivel as it is, and nobody wants to talk to you unless they:

  1. Want to feel better about themselves by smearing you
  2. Want to have sex with you
  3. Feel they have an overwhelming duty that they must carry out by talking to you

Wanting to avoid 1, and probably 2 (or just not being the object of number 2) there’s still number 3. There’s always a plan B… or C.

You may ask yourself, how come I don’t have such frequent debates with (most) people around me in the same way I do with the internet personalities that surround me? Could they all be internet superheroes? Of course not – the answer is simple: You can’t punch people on the internet.

I suppose protection from physical harm is what leads to these cans of worms be readily available for quick opening. So considering the alternatives, it’s a no-brainer. All gain for no risk and no cost, other than your reputation, sanity and oh look – a slippery slope. It’s the get rich quick scheme of attention (negative and otherwise), which leads me to my first lesson, maybe inspired by Colbert’s tips for a healthy marriage:

1. A smart poster knows how to post with at least some tact

But you know that one guy who religiously defends something, who stubbornly shoves it down your throat and feeds it to you on every damn occasion they get. Sometimes more gracefully than other times.

I, too, know a few people like that. First, an immigrant co-worker who (somewhat ironically) hates Arabs and finds annoying ways to say it sometimes and brings in a wide array of manners to express his right-wing views. Second, my cousin who is a staunch communist and would never miss an opportunity to tell us over family dinner how the government caused the recession on purpose, that phone manufacturers insert flaws into their devices on purpose. They’ll get… very emotional when anything opposes their extreme views. They don’t have that “poster tact” and won’t hesitate to get into a very heated discussion with you to defend their ideas.

Those exist in all walks of life, on the ‘nets as well. So, here, have another tip:

2. A smart poster knows to pick their battles

And what about when you have to? A sense of duty exists in us all, and I wouldn’t bother denying it personally (neither should you). We all have a soft spot in us when somebody mentions that one thing that ticks us off:

3. A smart poster has a second account/handle/username they can use to be everything I said they shouldn’t be without any risk

I guess the internet is a place full of cruel ironies.

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24
Apr
13:51

The Trend in News, Reporting and Journalism

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Recently a thought crossed my mind. A thought about content. One of those big ideas people write books about. This one is about the content on the Internet.

So I will start by presenting the history of content and news. Not that I’ve seen them first hand, but think about the days before television. You got your “content” (entertainment, news, music, whatever) by listening to the radio and by reading newspapers. Other than that, there was buying LP records.

There were and still are people whose sole job was to go places to report news. So a newspaper or a radio station would hire these reporters to get news that otherwise they simply could not get.

Television wasn’t much different. It certainly added another dimension, namely a moving picture. That did not do much to change the format until the 1990s (as I recall) when camcorders gained popularity and ordinary folks would send in their UFO sightings or hurricane footage. Even then, let’s face it, the format is about the same – but it was a beginning of a sort.

Back to the present, the year is 2009. We have the Internet. I have a blog on a .org address on the internet where I post what I think, what I make and what I want to show. There is not much in that respect that differentiates me from online news agencies other than the type of content. As in, this is mostly opinions, theirs is mostly reporting.

So think of it this way, we all have our own column, our own galleries and if we wanted to our own channel or radio station.

It’s really that simple. It costs practically nothing – and often costs nothing at all. It’s available and in the year 2009 it’s also familiar.

This is not news to anyone, and neither is the statement that content is adopting a more free for all approach and not the traditional approach, in which there is a creator and viewers, and they are not separate in any way. There is no stage in our new world anymore.

And so with this shift to peer-created content, our old approach to journalism will inevitably change. And it is already now as we see already.

Let’s consider the very popular slashdot. Their content is and has always been for as far as I recall something along a very simple format. It contains a quote of a short synopsis if you will, which contain then contains a link or two to the actual content. Under that, a short opinion or question or something for debate added by I’m assuming the slashdot posters.

Slashdot posters don’t need to go anywhere to get their content because the content is already there.. The content is provided already, all I need to do is repackage it, put it on a site, citing the source and linking back and there I have it. A news site with no journalists. Just aggregated content.

The journalists become bloggers, photographers, or anyone with content online. They’re just linking to it and adding their own little bits here and there.

Not everybody’s happy, but this is just where the Internet has been going and still is. For now. It is unstoppable once it became available. Get ready to change your understanding of “news” very soon.

Why are we so willing to feed the internet content machine? I have that coming up in a post some time in the future.

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21
Mar
20:18

The Perils of Organization

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Tenth grade was the worst two years (edit: yes, two years) of my life. It completely alienated me from others, and made me consider suicide. Which I never actually committed, evidently, I’m here blogging myself to death. Ta-da.

Organization is not a learned “skill.” It’s not a “skill” to begin with. It’s about spending time dealing with bureaucracy and the paper-hell in advance. In my experience, it saves practically no time whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I seem to have this self destructive tendency to work great under pressure. If Dushkin works great under pressure, Dushkin will try to push self to edge, Dushkin will create stress for Dushkin to finish work. In other words, I procrastinate on purpose.

“Know thyself” my ass. It’s obviously self-destructive, and mazochistic. One of my incompatible wishes somewhere down in my id, to only work under pressure.

Organization detached me from the rest of the world. You start reading self improvement books, working on things in pieces, and the next thing you know, there’s a distance between you and the rest of the world and you just can’t do anything about it. A thin membrane will seperate you from your peers, parents, “community” and friends. “Sorry, can’t talk now, I’m busy.”

By decompressing your work, you leave yourself practically no time to do other things which are, probably, more important. When you do have the time, you will realize that your “friends” have already gotten into the habbit of not inviting you to social gatherings (of whatever nature.)

Reversing the situation is theoretically impossible. For instance, my birthday “party.” I invited various people, out of which two people came, and one uninvited guest, another one arrived an hour and a half late and insisted on leavingbecome midnight for a total of about 1 hour of actually doing anything. The other three decided it’ll be a great idea to go smoke pot, although I made it very clear that I have no interest in it. The whole thing ended at around 11:40 pm.

I timed it, phoned all the parties that needed to be phoned, passed emails around, begged, and wrote everything down. When it came to the practical stage, nothing went as planned.

It crossed a certain line when I began planning social interaction and trying to make sense of my world using the calendar. After two very long phone calls with BlueCoffee, I finally began to snap out of this organization-overdrive.

There is, I would say, no correlation between organization and saving time. Some of us just work slower, some are less able to isolate themselves from their environment.

It basically became very clear to me what I really wanted to do with myself and how to stop this organization madness. Unfortunately, without it, my grades are starting to slip. I might be a “better person”. I do find myself facing my incompatible wishes and slowly my super-ego dissolving and making less descisions. The former view, which accepted self-help books, now rejects standards, ideas, laws and roles and substitutes it with something else.

At the same time, I can’t convince myself of all sorts of things. The result of less self discipline. I also find it much harder to read, listen to records all the way through and stick to a single task.

My advice, don’t “get organized”! Your superiors are going to go nuts, but at least you don’t sell yourself to the whole bureaucracy.

Actually, I’m quite sick of organization. All I really want is just to run around aimlessly in grassy meadows and not think about anything. Society is all about normalization. Not very pleasant.

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