Sometimes it's hard to tell if you are on the Internet or not. For example you are almost always typing into a box on a series of screens on your computer. Because of this, there are whole sections of the Internet that are pretty sure they are not on the Internet, because, they are just boxes, right? You could be typing into anything, who knows if it's public. This was true about LiveJournal for a long time. When you would link to a posting on LiveJournal, back in the day, you would get outraged emails about invasion of privacy. Because in their minds, they were just typing in their diary.
At the Web 2.0 conference, Clay Shirky gave a talk called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. In it, he argues that the "social surplus" soaked up in the latter half of the 20th century by television is now being put to better use on the internet.
For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
But maybe it's possible that the internet is a slightly more sophisticated (or slightly more cognitive) cognitive heat sink?
Mr. Gupta said about half of his sales take place without the presence of the buyer. "Being in Chicago, without the walk-in traffic of a gallery in New York or even L.A., I can't imagine working without digital images," he said. "We have a ton of European collectors, and we reach them through art fairs and digital images, a combined effort."
Could global warming kill the internet? "The internet is a big network of servers, and servers are hot. They devour electricity, they run hot and they mainline air conditioning. When the global thermostat goes up, the servers start going down." (via migurski)
If public parks (like NYC's Bryant Park) offer free wifi, why don't expensive hotels? I can't find the link right now, but I remember reading something awhile ago (possibly on Boing Boing) arguing that free wifi was easier and cheaper for businesses to offer than a paid option because you don't need the ecommerce bit (sort of like a free grocery store not needing cashiers, etc.) and the free internet will bring people in.
Update: Here's that Boing Boing post: "Operating a WiFi hotspot that you charge money for costs $30 a day. Operating a free WiFi hotspot costs $6." (thx alex)
You've got to love an article called The Ten Stupidest Utopias. In regard to the Internet, he says "utopia is never more than what we are; the people in them will always be just like us".
