Category Archives: Science & Technology

30 years online

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I started blogging in 2002 and still post a few times a week. It’s more of a journal than a public blog because a) I don’t get a lot of visitors and b) I don’t much care. With 5,000+ posts, “link rot” is always an issue but WordPress has gotten so good it’s pretty easy to manage things. Sifting back and forth through 14 years of posts, one becomes aware of how much has changed, in terms of the tools and services we have for online sharing.

online

I got my first computer around 1985, about the time local BBS’s (bulletin board systems) started popping up. Wasn’t long before CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy came along and I delighted in the topic forums.

I started blogging before there was a good tool. I used Microsoft FrontPage to create a website where I could post stuff but a few years later (1999) Blogger came along and I was in heaven. I stayed with that for a few years before jumping over to TypePad (a tortuous process) and then, finally, to WordPress.

Social media took off in the early-to-mid ’00s. Friendster, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, tumblr. These days it feels odd (to me) to use the term “social media” because it’s all social. Is there a newspaper, radio station, TV station, magazine that does NOT have an “online presence” (another quaint expression)?

It feels like all of this has happened almost overnight but my little graph tells me it’s been 30 years. How connected will we be in another 30?

Phone calls

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Penang Pay PhoneI’m not certain I could easily make a long-distance phone call if I lost my mobile phone. It probably wouldn’t be difficult to find someone who would lend me their phone but I’m not sure I could remember any numbers to call. (I wrote a few down and put them in my wallet)

When I did most of my road work (80s and early 90s) every phone call on the road was made from a pay phone (usually a Hardee’s or Casey’s for me).

We had a toll-free number to call the home office and they gave us Sprint phone cards for all other calls. As I recall, I had to dial a ten digit number to get into the Sprint system; then my calling card number; and then the number of the person or business I was calling. What’s that, 30 numbers? Not a big deal because we all had those first twenty numbers memorized.

For personal calls from the road, I think I could call a number and then have the call billed to my home phone number (something I no longer have). So placing a “collect call” is no longer an option.

All of which serves to remind me how dependent I have become on my mobile phone.

Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

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Interview with Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.

“Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.” — Physicist John Wheeler

TED Talk: Geography is no longer destiny

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Geopolitical futurist Parag Khanna foresees a world in which megacities, supply chains and connective technologies redraw the map away from states and borders. He sees geography and connectivity fusing into what he calls “connectography.” He goes so far as to say “connectivity, not sovereignty, has become the organizing principle of the human species.”

Mr. Khanna predicts “we will build more infrastructure in the next 40 years, than we have in the past 4,000 years.” And “by 2030, more than two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities.

I really liked the part about redrawing the map away from “states and borders.” I was born in Missouri and have lived here most of my life but it’s not something I brag about. I have no pride in this chunk of land or the people who live here for that matter. And they — we — are probably no better or worse than people who live in other “states.” It’s just that the idea of thinking of oneself as a “Missourian” or a “Southerner” or by any other geographic designation seems archaic.

I have much more in common with the people I’ve connected with online than the people in my neighborhood or city. Shame on me, maybe, but there it is. It’s connections I’ve come to value, not geography. This TED Talk made me hopeful. If you watch it, I hope it does the same for you.

Distributed: A New OS for the Digital Economy

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“The increased surface area for corporate capitalism is human attention. So we spend more and more of our time feeding the market place. Central currency and chartered monopoly — corporate capitalism — is not a condition of nature. It is an operating system that was invented by certain people at a certain moment in history and they’ve long since left the building.”

“It was such a good little thing”

“How much is our data worth if we don’t have any money?”

“If we’re all doing everything for advertising, what’s left to advertise?”

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus – Douglas Rushkoff Link above to some of my favorite parts of the book (PDF).

One careless moment

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I’m quick to judge (and harshly) those who get scammed by email. I never download attachments or click links in emails from people I don’t know. I often check email headers or URLs to see if they’ve been spoofed. As for giving out my credit card info over the phone… never! And then I did.

I got a phone call one morning this past week from a woman who works in the billing department of the health care provider I use. Said they’d received a payment slip from me (USPS) but I had failed to enter the credit card number. She knew the amount. I said I was busy at the moment but would call back. I did, by hitting that number in the RECENTS list on my phone. Asked for her by name and gave her the card number.

Dumb. Turned out she was legit but dumb none the less.

When discussing this with my less-dumb friends we theorized how a scammer could have known the exact amount of the payment in question. Since I mailed it, someone could have intercepted that piece of mail and gotten the amount. Or, in theory, they could have social engineered the info from the health care provider. My obvious mistake was not verifying the correct phone number and placing the call instead of clicking the RECENTS link on my phone.

Surely, I cried, there must be a way to use my high tech smart phone to protect from such carelessness in the future. Turns out there are less than a dozen people who I would want/need to immediately take a call from. I’ve added those to my FAVORITES list in the iPhone and everyone else automatically goes to voice mail. Where they’re informed the best way to reach me is IM or email. And if they don’t already have my address or number, they’re SOL.

I’m still a little stunned I could have been so careless.

Surveillance Capitalism

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“What if, when I write down a thought on my phone to remember it later, what I am actually doing is extending my mind, and thereby extending my self using the phone. […] we extend our biological capabilities using technology. We are sharded beings; with parts of our selves spread across and augmented by our everyday things.”

“My iPhone is not like a safe any more than my brain is like a safe. It is a part of my self. In which case, if you want to get into my iPhone, what you really want to do is to violate my self.”

“Personal data isn’t the new oil, personal data is people. […] The business model of mainstream technology today is to monetise everything about you that makes you who are apart from your body.”

The nature of the self in the digital age » – Surveillance Capitalism – Part 2 »