Comments for MOTU

Comment on Implicature by Emma

Emma — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:14:13 +0000

What a great-looking resource.
You, naive? Never.

Comment on Second Life: From the proximate network to the global Internet to the imminent Web (and how we got back again) by Emily

Emily — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:50:11 +0000

Richard:

A very thoughtful and well-written essay.
Of course, I hate you for that.

Comment on Buzzword Preview by DanToday » Blog Archive » The Buzz About Buzzword

DanToday » Blog Archive » The Buzz About Buzzword — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:21:45 +0000

[...] buzz about Buzzword , Adobe’s new Flash based, web based word [...]

Comment on You’re on the Global Frequency: A Web-Powered Online Time/Skill Mashup by Graziella

Graziella — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:11:00 +0000

This is an interesting idea, and one I think would be helpful to a lot of nonprofits. I wrote about a similar need - a way to reach out to community-oriented people using the social web. I’m glad to see others are thinking about the same thing.

Comment on About Me by Emily

Emily — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:43:24 +0000

You can find Vosges Black Pearl Bars at a shop in Hampden that sells–I swear–shoes and chocolate.

http://www.mapetiteshoe.com/catalog/item/4296593/4222598.htm

Just an example of your typical Bawlmer weirdness!

Comment on Happy Sigh by Graziella

Graziella — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:22:43 +0000

I love Pandora - use it all the time. Let’s just hope the Feds don’t take away our rights to streaming web radio.

Comment on Everything changing by Richard

Richard — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:05:01 +0000

Anastasia:
First, thanks for being the first official commentor. I know Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and had picked up Diamond Age a few years ago but never got around to reading it, though sf writer Keith Hartman played with a similar idea in his novel “The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse.” I was thinking about your comment yesterday when I’d heard that Madeleine L’Engle had died, and was thinking about her (somewhat heavyhanded) vision of a horrific future of computer-controlled sameness in “A Wrinkle in Time.” Of course her solution (equally heavyhanded) was love for an individual (the heroine’s love for her father and younger brother in this case). But even William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” and “Idoru” seem to resolve around the personal decisions of individual characters to do right by others (though these are generally plotted with fewer deux ex machinas and large blinking allegorical lights pinpointing the moral).

So, perhaps the moral is: one thing that doesn’t change is personal responsibility? I’m now thinking of the end of “The Stars My Destination,” but that’s really more than enough old SF novels for one day.

-Richard

Comment on Everything changing by Anastasia Salter

Anastasia Salter — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:02:19 +0000

I think I’m generally inclined to support Phillip K. Dick in his view that while the future might bring greater technological wonders, mankind will remain essentially petty / religiously inclined [so many of the more interesting themes in that sense in "Do Androids Dream..." were sadly absent from the film] / vicious / etc.

As to the question of media, I’ve personally been fascinated with revisiting cyberpunk as technology progresses more and more; Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age envisioned a world where almost everyone would get their news from an electronic source perfectly tailored to them, no two alike and perhaps free of some of the great b.s. of the media world. But Stephenson also noted that the highest level of businessmen would subscribe to an old-fashioned paper version out of a desire to keep a collective knowledge base. I think however personalized the information mediasphere becomes, there will always be a level of need to know what “everybody” knows, and that collective experience will continue to be deceptive and subject to political influences.