The Last Blog

It's been fun guys, but now it's time for me to go.
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Here we are...the last blog. I've had a few blogs over the years, each never lasting too long. I'm just not a blogger. But it's been fun. This is a great class, Steph is an awesome teacher. I've had fun.

Let's talk about internet genres

The internet is a living thing. It breathes and grows just like any other living thing. As it grows, things emerge that are entirely new, but can completely shape the way our lives work in a short amount of time. The two "genres" that have developed that I want to discuss both touch on social media- something that has become so prevalent in our online lives that there is almost no way to escape it.

"See? It says right there: if we don't send this to at least 10 people
by tomorrow, something terrible will happen."
http://anakam.equifax.com/

Way back when in the stone ages of the internet, when you found something you liked and you wanted to show it to people, you emailed them.

What an awful system. Luckily, we've made several leaps and bounds from that time. The biggest one being the advent of social networking sites. Now, when you wanted to share something with your friends, you could just post it in one spot, and everyone would be able to see it! But the story doesn't stop there. Facebook developed the "share" button, a simple gadget that would allow you to instantly post things to your wall without having to copy and paste the url address. As Facebook became more integrated with various websites, the button migrated outward across the web. This is not only an easier way to share things you find, but also things other people have found as well. It promotes the viral nature of the web. After the share button, pictures began cropping up all over newsfeeds, typically poignant images with some sort of under-covered news story attached. These images got shared by the tens of thousands, spreading instantly across hundreds of miles to different people all over the United States and the world.

http://owni.eu/

This is significant. This has changed how we do things. But this is not the true legacy of Facebook. The thing that Facebook has done that will persevere long after Facebook itself has faded is the "like" button. This little feature revolutionized the way we interact online. It has gone so far as to even affect what we associate the very word with. The "like" of 2010 is a different thing entirely than the "like" of 1990. As with the share button, this has also spread it's roots across the web, spawning an entire mindset around the rating of ideas and comments. You'd be hardpressed in this day and age to find a major website that does not feature some sort of rating system (made now even more prevalent with Google's +1).

Who knows what the future holds?

Just some stuff

Guys. Firefly is on sale on Amazon right now for 70% off.

I'm really tempted to buy it.

It's also got me thinking about how technology is changing the way we do stuff. Mainly, I'm thinking about Black Friday. More and more, the idea of standing outside a store in the cold for 5-8 hours seems less and less appealing. For awhile now, online BF deals have been happening, some even before BF itself. Some of those deals aren't half bad. These last few years I haven't really gone out BF shopping because nothing in the ads really appeals to me anymore. Maybe one day we'll move on to a point where it's all online.

It's 8 in the morning and I'm not really sure why I'm up right now, much less blogging. Sorry if this was a little less than coherent. Here's a picture of Nathan Fillion in a bonnet.

Let's talk about Intertwingability

Mooreville talks about a lot of things in the future, some of which hit true. While smartphones certainly existed in 2005, they did not hit the widespread explosion of usership that occurred with the release of the iPhone. We see our smartphones becoming increasingly more powerful, integrating many of the things Mooreville predicted they would (such as GPS).

Speaking of the iPhone, Mooreville was concerned with how we would deal with the keyboard in mobile computing- we need something that we can type on, but we need it to be small. How? We can't make our fingers any skinnier, and our pockets aren't getting bigger. The solution came with the iPhone. Touchscreen. Which, also ironically, is pioneering it's way into speech-to-text with Siri, something Mooreville dismisses as never happening.

He mentions how smartphones will allow us to become more organized during protests. This is certainly true, twitter has allowed multiple revolutions to occur in the Middle East as well as here in the States, with Occupy Wallstreet. We also have flashmobs, a more playful evolution of this mass interconnectivity.

There's a list of things he gives that people are and will use technology for:

• Student use of wireless laptops during classroom lectures for real-time reference (e.g., to fact check the professor's claims) and backchannel communications with fellow students (i.e., the digital equivalent of passing notes).
  
• Calling your spouse from the video store to gauge interest in a specific movie or from the grocery store to ask where to find the hot chocolate.
  
• Googling a new acquaintance while waiting for him to arrive at a restaurant (he just called from the road to let you know he'd be five minutes late).
  
• Using a smartphone to check Amazon customer reviews (and prices) of books found while browsing inside a Barnes & Noble bookstore.

• Distributed, collaborative shopping by teenage girls using picture phones. How do you like this dress? Does this color look good on me? Should I buy one for you?

All of these (well, we facebook people, we don't google them) are now commonplace in our lives.