(La)k(t)-märk(e)t(ill)

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. “I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men,” she says. “I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it’s often hard to see beyond that.

Jag gillar när kvinnor tvättar sina trosor.

In network economics Craig wants to charge as little as possible, not just because he’s a crazy tech hippie but because it means no one else can enter in. That is the barrier of entry now, that he charges as little as possible. And he can do that because he had the technology that enabled him to take a 10 billion dollar market and make into a reported 100 million dollar company. And he’s in great shape. 30 employees, wonderful thing. People look at that and say: You destroyed value. No, Craig says: I left the value in the pockets of the transactors rather than those of the middle men. There’s a shift of key economic value here, that’s just happening anyway in the economy.

“Couldn’t we do some kind of sentence constructor, with a limited vocabulary of safe words?”

Before we could give it any serious thought, their own project manager interrupted, “That won’t work. We tried it for KA-Worlds. We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world. We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:”

“I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.”

Gratulerar gör man rimligtvis till framgångar eller segrar, och anledningen att gratulera en bemärkelsedag bör vara en temporal framgång, en seger över tiden självt, eller genom tiden. Vad som gratuleras till är vad du åstadkommit sedan bemärkelsen, med avseende på bemärkelsen, som jag ser det: en födelsedag gratuleras man till att man överlevt sedan födseln. Vad gäller din dåblivande hustru, att ni alltjämt är ihop (så vitt jag vet), vad gäller disputationen, att du fortfarande inte blivit galen (så vitt jag kan döma).

[“S]o in a nutshell, given the current media composition of the world, you’re pretty much doomed to being uninteresting and storyless.”

“But I can blog my life! I could turn it into a story that way!”

“Blogs? Sorry, but all those blogs and vlogs or whatever’s out there — they just make being unique harder. The more truths you spill out, the more generic you become.”