Lee Barry's List: technology

• if today everything else is speeding up, so, maybe, can our understanding accelerate of what is happening to us as senders and recipients of so many almost instantaneously transmitted electronic messages. It's at least the case that some thoughtful books have begun to appear on the subject of our increasing intimacy with the supernatural devices—the laptops, the iPhones, the BlackBerries—at our fingertips
• A second palpable change is the ease with which each of us can become an author or publisher." The corollary to this increased ease of communication is of course an increased susceptibility to being communicated with. "Our relentless access to others—and them to us" is how Baron puts it. The grammatical slip (it should be "theirs to us") offers a small confirmation of Baron's fear that a superabundance of text and talk is driving out careful expression.

• "five open supersecrets" about bloggers:

  1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.

  2. Few people have anything original to say.

  3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.

  4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

  5. "Customers" are always right, but "people" aren't.
• Most Mondays, I visit James Howard Kunstler's blog Clusterfuck Nation to watch him rub his hands with glee as he contemplates America's evaporating paper wealth and its mounting energy bills. Kunstler is too irresponsible and acerbic ever to have been granted a column in a major newspaper, and I don't claim that he is the best blogger out there—I would never go looking for such a thing—but he is a better writer, possessed of a more interesting mind and personality, than, for instance, two thirds of the New York Times' columnists, and I have the internet to thank for showing me as much.
• . There is no giving up the internet now. And truly no logical reason exists why you couldn't be a thorough reader of both Proust and Gawker—both, after all, are interested in gossip—or couldn't exchange, by snail-mail, long, unbosoming letters with the same friend with whom you trade ticklishly glib text messages. A regular visitor to YouTube—a realm of mostly short, grainy clips pitched to amusement—can in theory also be a fan of Tarkovsky's long, eidetic, and solemn productions. The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you.

3 more annotations...

• The survey shows apps are also using up lots of people’s time — to the detriment of other technologies and types of media. Thirty-two percent said they used portable gaming devices less because of their app-enabled phones. Other technologies and media also suffered; 31 percent said they read newspapers less; 28 percent use GPS devices less; 28 percent use their MP3 players less; and 24 percent are watching less television.
• With apps, the phone has really become a kind of digital Swiss Army knife that people are using in all sorts of new ways

• Any emergent social movements concerned with matters of universal and affordable connectivity — as opposed to the corporatism of Silicon Valley — should not take this premise for granted. Nor should they fall for the pseudo-humanitarian rhetoric of rights espoused by technology companies. Whenever Mark Zuckerberg says that “connectivity is a human right,” as he put it in his Internet.org essay, you should think twice before agreeing. There is, after all, little joy in obtaining free access to an empty library, or browsing a bookstore with empty pockets — which is, in effect, what Internet.org offers, while holding out the promise of robust content, if users will pay, a few cents at a time, for the privilege.

• Tech really is changing how we think about our ideas.
• people understood the same set of instructions