Candor v. racism.
At this point, I think the whole John Mayer deal should be dying down as tabloid fodder. This, perhaps, is one of the more redeeming features of the gossip blogosphere — here today, gone today. Now, to consider his statements (the race ones) with a bit less knee-jerking.
If you only look at six letters of his interview, then yeah, of COURSE he’s racist. However, if you take the time to read some of the surrounding words, however, you might catch something different. His use of the phrase “nigger pass” was actually a very interesting, if clumsy, take on the whole idea of what it means to be perceived as accepted/loved by the black community. I appreciate that there might be discomfort around such a phrase — but on the other hand, it could be construed as a ballsy way to confront a difficult question which might easily go unchecked. To suggest that “Black people like so-and-so” is a deeply complex and weird thing that often is not treated as such.
It’s probable that he forgot that he should have been using his “general public” voice, and not his “I’m around my peoples” voice. Regardless, dude was speaking with a lot of candor. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go around vilifying people for doing so.
Facebook is good, but twitter is better.
This won’t be an all out slam, don’t worry. But, I submit that twitter and facebook essentially do the same thing. They both answer the question; “What are my friends up to lately?” So then, three reasons why twitter is a superior platform. Less magic, better privacy, more control.
Less magic.
Facebook doesn’t let you find out what your friends are up to comprehensively without a fair bit of digging. That is, even if you make lists, there still appears to be some randomness (or not randomness) involved in exactly which updates show up when. To be sure you’ve caught everything, you’d have to click on each friend individually.
With twitter, you see everything everyone does. You just have to keep scrolling. The good thing is, with all text, this is speedy and doesn’t require clicking “next page” over and over.
Better privacy.
I didn’t say “more privacy” here, of course. It would appear that Facebook has this one won, due to its privacy controls. However, there’s good reason to believe that facebook’s privacy is mostly illusory. Zuckerberg himself has been quoted as saying that if he was to start over, he’d make “public” the default. Privacy on facebook seems is a bit like the no smoking section in the restaurant. It only takes one gossipy friend-of-a-friend, a clever hacker, or a simple facebook employee mistake for anything of yours to go public.
By being public by default, twitter mostly avoids these problems. Use email and IM for better one-to-one privacy, and something like google groups for group privacy. Facebook and twitter are public.
(Obviously, it’s not that simple –This topic requires a blogpost, or book, of its own, but to touch on it a bit: Questions of privacy are extremely complicated in a socially networked world, and there is definitely a need for the ability to personally define social spaces and still partake in the goodness of the internet; e.g. I don’t need work people seeing my party pics. One factor will be technology, but another big factor will have to be “forgiveness,” e.g. people party, get over it. Regardless, I think the last paragraph is a good baseline to work with)
More control.
This is the biggie. There’s no doubting the convenience of facebook, especially for aggregating pictures and videos and such. But again, I’m not sure if this centralization is good for us. Twitter does make this a bit more complicated by forcing you to rely on other methods for publicizing pictures, media, even anything longer than 140 characters.
But in the long run, this is a very good thing. It gets people away from the habit of uploading their lives into one monolithic source and instead, gives people the opportunity to retain greater control over their personal data. This blogpost could have been “property of Facebook,” or perhaps on blogspot — but here it is, in my personal jrm4.com domain. I can do the same with pictures, music, whatever.
On this note, we could probably do even better than twitter, since it too is rather centralized. I have not yet tried out identi.ca or others, but there’s no reason that microblogging need be limited to one provider; it could be syndicated in the same way that email/DNS/usenet are.
So yes, there’s my push for twitter. I have to push for it, because by far, most of my peoples are still primarily facebook folks. So, people — go try out the twitter (again, you’ll want another client besides the main twitter page. I like tweetdeck as a standalone program, though twithive.com is pretty good too and doesn’t require downloading.) I’m jrm4 in twitterland too.
iPad? iWont.
Let’s make it clear. There was a time when I was the ultimate Apple fanboy. I’ll show my age here, because it was before the Macintosh ever existed. My first computer was an Apple IIc, my second, the Apple IIgs. The Apple II series of computers was one of the greatest advancements in computing. This is due to its openness as a platform. It was equally a user’s and programmer’s dream — you could buy software, trade freeware, or write yourself. And many, perhaps most, users did all three. Say what you want, but the BASIC programming language has probably done more for computing than Python, Ruby, and Perl combined. It turned kids like me into lifelong computer fanatics more than anything.
Microsoft knew how to build on openness as well. IBM and Microsoft were bosom buddies until about 1990, when the two had competing operating systems; Windows 3.0 vs IBM OS/2. IBM took a closed approach, to try to use OS/2 to sell proprietary hardware. Microsoft took an open approach, allowing many different hardware makers to use its operating system. How that turned out is apparent.
Remember what exactly is meant by openness — this is the contribution of volunteers, paid employees and anyone interested in making a computing platform better. With computers, contributions are very easily shared by all, creating a valuable participatory ecosystem. In other words, the “value-added” to the platform is largely NOT created by the company itself, but by its users.
Apple and Microsoft both use this to their convenience, for better or worse. Continuing the story, the Mac Operating System uses openness by building on top of BSD, a quasi-open operating system.
Apple is extremely adept at exploiting both openness and closedness to their advantage. The iPod exploited a different kind of openness, that of the convenience of trading music for free via mp3. The iTunes store sort of naturally followed as an afterthought, but iTunes was created for the purpose of selling iPods, not to sell music.
Finally, there’s the iPhone, one of the least open platforms in existence. Its success is largely attributable to the combination of two factors. The first is the oligopolistic nature of the cell phone industry, where the old guard of telephony has been able to wall itself off from the decentralizing nature of the internet. The second is the app store, which succeeds by directly bribing programmers to create applications only for Apple.
The iPad appears to be a big iPhone, with closed applications. There is something to be said for Apple (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) and their role in synthesizing and popularizing advances in technology. But good ideas in computing most often don’t come from the company — they come from the experiences of everyday users and programmers. And access to using those good ideas is threatened by closed environments like the iPad et al.
Luckily, I don’t think the iPad is much of a threat. The Linux platform (a completely open one) is showing that you can have all the goodness of cool Apple tech without the restrictions. It may not have the monolithic recognition, but it’s been able to replicate and surpass much of what Apple does already. We have the safety from viruses that Microsoft lacks, and we also have an app store that works as easily as Apple’s, Ubuntu’s Software Center. The only difference is, ours is free. Both free in cost and free to study and modify to your liking. Hardware companies are making tablets, mp3 players, video game systems and computers that run on free software — giving people a cheaper, more versatile, and overall richer experience.
Prisencolinensinainciusol!
I tweeted it before, but this deserves more attention. This was made in 1973, pre-rap, pre disco even, and it’s just amazing. Musically, it stands on its own. Theme-wise, apparently its about the difficulty of communication in “modern times,” thus the gibberish imitating English. Woo-ha!
Back to blogging; On Kanye and The Prisoner…
Figure this is as good a time as any to get back into blogging a bit. I’m choosing not to succumb to internal pressure to try to say something monumentous.
I wasn’t able to see Kanye make a fool of himself live, because I don’t have cable — and overall, I don’t miss it. After all, it only took me about an extra hour to go online and find a TON of comments from people who were saying bad things about Kanye West. The most fun part was trying to figure out what he’d done THIS time, and I must admit, I’m bit disappointed at the reality of it. Hoping for something perhaps entertaining AND immature, and not just the latter. I see a lot of anger and whatnot over Kanye — but it seems like all of this is pretty predictable, especially when you elevate a so-so musician to superstar status like this. Truly great artists can be a little egotastic, but I think it takes true mediocrity to produce this kind of an outburst.
Either way, while Taylor was being waylaid, I was enjoying the finale of a classic 1960’s television series, The Prisoner. For those that don’t know about it, a James Bond-esque spy is captured after angrily announcing his retirement. He doesn’t wake up in prison, but in a pleasant seaside community — from which there is seemingly no escape. The Matrix, The Truman Show, Lost, and a ton of other shows owe a LOT to this excellent series.
Also, I’ve found that there’s a remake coming out very soon, so I caught the 9 min preview of that. We’ve got Jim Caviezel (Jesus) as #6 (in the Village, you are just a number) and Ian McKellen (Magneto) as #2. Looks pretty solid; I’m impressed with how much they are keeping from the original (especially the “security system.”)
Here’s where I try to tie these two utterly unrelated things together, and try not to sound preachy in the process. I will probably fail.
Let’s try not to give so much attention to mediocrity. There’s lots of genuinely good, thoughtful entertainment out there, even if it is really old. I’d much rather talk about the possible philosophical implications of a place like the Village (it’s a paradise! why not just give up and chill?) than to try to armchair psychoanalyze Kanye the baby.
Actually, that’s not exactly true. I want to do both. I will and do totally get caught up as much as anyone else with this stuff. But I’d also like to see and hear more in my twitter and facebook feeds about good? wholesome? thoughtful? entertainment as well. Not exactly sure how you’d define that, I’m sure it’s pretty subjective. Either way, what “less popular” stuff do you think the world needs to know about?