And like…the idea of the metaverse isn’t the same wierd thing?!

RE the hipster stuff: OH YOU WERE KIDDING! Damn, sorry, I didn’t pick up on that. Duh.

Noosphere, hoo boy… this conversation has officially run the gamut. LOL! What a strange idea that was… floating somewhere between sociology and (later) occultism. Pretty avant garde for the turn of the last century though. I wonder what ideas we might tease out of it for our modern network.

Flickr kills me. Maybe it’s because it’s… oh I know why! Because you’re there and have to wait wait wait for the page to load, and then you get these useless tiny little thumbs on the side to give you an idea of what the other pix are, but there are only TWO thumbs, so you click on the next image and wait..wait..wait.. oh that one sucked, ok let’s check the next one wait..wait..wait..yeah that was less than good too. They make you wait JUST long enough to stay but not QUITE long enough so that you conciously notice that you’re waiting, and you can’t SKIP AHEAD or have any idea what’s in the rest of the album. Plus the captions are generally non-existent so nothing has any context, which more thumbnails would at least give you…

It’s like a projector slideshow where the thing is set on automatic and you’re the only one in the room.

The problem with you, Onder, is that you live in Canada. And here, I’m on safe ground criticizing Canada because I lived there for nearly 5 years going to university, and also own land there and travel a bit there now and then. Canada is one of those English-speaking countries with a huge chip on its shoulder about America. It creates its identity using the casting mold method of deciding what it’s against and what it hates rather than establishing its own secure identity. I have good, long-time Canadian friends that I chuckle over as they write me these fulminating rants about “Bush” and “Guantanamo” as if they are completely unaware of far greater horrors in the world which in fact their own government is very active in working on through the UN and OSCE and such.

The other thing about Canada is that it has a huge, vast, sprawling government structure where LOTS AND LOTS of people have their jobs. Artists, writer, animators, etc. get grants to do what they do from the government, not from private foundations as they would in the US. The government is just EVERYWHERE. And that gives people an attitude to government that is actually scornful and cynical, as yours is.

I didn’t vote for these current rogues in charge in the National Security Junta in Washingstan or whatever, but at my local level, I have congressmen, assemblymen, etc who are hugely responsible and that actually hoof it over to my housing and schools and get way down in the weeds with all the severe problems of NYC, and also have a good global perspective too. So I can’t be cynical and despairing about people who actually show up when I and my neighbours write them. People like Dan Gorodnik or Brian Cavanaugh in NYC or even take Hillary at the senatorial level, whatever you might think about her, she has great staff and she’s good on a lot of issues even though I don’t favour her as president. There are many good members fighting now to get the Iraq bill passed, or fighting to get more money for Darfur, and they are hugely responsive, networked, internnetted, hell some of them are even in SL.

I have the highest regard for the Canadian civil servants who occupy certain very key positions in the UN — my God, they put themselves in harm’s way in ways you can’t imagine sitting in your games. Seriously, I cannot say enough good things about Canada as a country and a force in the world — but I do think that it is simply too government top-heavy. P.S. I have the Canadians to thank for good health care too, compared to so many other countries with socialized medicine INCLUDING OUR OWN which truly rots on the managed care front.

Your religion is your affair, but if religious doctrine is in error or just pig=headed and stupid, hey, it’s fine to critique it. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that I must believe in the Virgin Birth or something…

You simply sound to me like a lot of smug, jaded, 20 or 30 something tekkie types who pride themselves on being “independent” and “innovative” but often as as alike as peas in a pod in their predictable, knee-jerk views, hating government, hating religious belief, hating democracy, and fancing that the world should just all be a yes/no toggle on a switchboard they devise to maximum their own peculiar pleasures and pursuits. It’s really a God-awful generation to be observing from the perspective of the previous one…

Freedom isn’t obsession with back-up copies. Hey, I’ve lost thousands of emails, you don’t “let it go” but it disappears and you deal. It’s not like the death of a loved one, of course, so you put it in perspective. I am merely trying to explain the permeation of these companies and their influence. ON the one hand, they’re nothings, disposable, forgottable, burnt as crash in the next big thing, on the other had they’re pervasive for what they are.

Um, I think you have a real difficulty distinguishing new age groovster hippness, of which I surely am NOT guilty, with simply garden-variety satire not rising to any great heights.

The Noosphere is a Russian invention, I love it, it’s great, it’s the first Internet from like 2 centuries ago or something.

I feel so uncool for not liking FLickr and made uncomfortable by it that I’m glad to hear you have the same feeling. Is it the box? No, how could that be? Every photo site has boxes. Is it all that whiteness? That’s it, perhaps. THey love whiteness. Pella was as pale as death, remember?

It’s not only that I don’t like Flickr myself to use, and feel better with other places like tripod or photobucket, to which I remain strangely attached despite their drawbacks. It’s that I hate pressing on somebody else’s Flickr. I wince in advance. I know I’m going to be seeing some incomprehensible and stupid tag cloud — tag clouds really set my teeth on edge. I’ve decided that tag clouds are really EVIL.

It’s not about saying and being incomprehensible. It’s about being. People who are coders can walk through the membrane. People who aren’t can’t.

Now, you’re bringing politics into it, comparing virtual worlds to countries. That I get, but you and I have… religious differences there. The kind of thing that can’t be resolved with debate.

Warning: what follows will offend some – probably Prokofy.
You’re under the impression that a government gives a crap what the people think. I seriously don’t. Governments are independent self-serving agencies, just like any company. They “handle” the public, but aren’t really influenced by it. The only way to live in this world is to do as you will, ignore the government, and if the government won’t stand to be ignored, you move. We are permanently, globally subjugated in that respect. That must offend so so SO many people… ah well. Like I said: it’s a religious difference of opinion. Debating the point is a futile effort. We believe what we believe.

You’re describing how Yahoo owns you here. How disturbing is that? I make my peace as I go along that anything I don’t save as a file to my hard drive could disappear tomorrow. If you can’t live like that, demand that Yahoo provide a backup or export service I suppose… but I’m not being “Tekkie” there. Closer to “Vagabond”. I believe that freedom is more important than the pain of letting things go. That’s a bitter pill for some I guess… which… I suppose validates what YOU’re saying about wanting to be able to change the way things work within a given system. Hmmm… so I guess I’m not disagreeing with you anymore, just saying that it completely doesn’t work for somebody like me.

No idea what that means in the larger context…

Now, THIS is a different matter:
“As Pella has explained to us helpfully, the Toaster is now reaffirmed in the Noosphere for all of us. The Toaster is not just “toaster” — that grubby little piece of metal that might have burn English muffin parts in it — but the Toaster is a thing you pick out with your Toaster Friends in Toaster Town with the Toaster Widget. John Doe in Missoula, Montana who told me to buy This Toaster and not That Toaster is now bound to me for life as my Toaster Soul Brother.”

Holy cow. New edge hipster grooviness. I get it, I really do… we all get to rate stuff and those ratings affect what other people buy, and our ratings affect shopping across the entire web not just the particular place we left that rating. There might even, conceivably, be an occasion where I think twice about the person whose recommendation I took. That’s a much less romantic take on it but… I still can’t get excited about it.

I hear what you’re saying about Flickr… it’s awkward and uncomfortable somehow, like everything has to fit in a box they define. Can’t put my finger on it, but Google (through Blogger.com) just launched a new comparable tool that I like a little better (don’t remember the name). There’s always Photobucket. CNet is pushing Heypix. Always alternatives.

Oh and back to the Elite issue… have I said anything that requires technical prowess beyond being able to surf and understand what the hell people are saying?

If you think that Nick Carr has posted ONE piece criticising Web 2.0, then you are not a consistent Carr reader.

“SO that’s where you fit in, and it’s just not interesting. ”

The idea of you criticising someone as “sour and dispetic” is hilarious.

“I’m hardly lazy and rhetorical. Indeed, I’m an A-lister who WORKS HARDER THAN YOU DO. YES, I WORK, HARDER THAN YOU DO.”

LOL Prok. Yes, putting something all in caps makes it true. An A-lister? You’re a B-lister even in the smallish world of Second Life blogs. You mistake “shouting loudly and posting a lot” for influence and importance. And that you’re forced to self-proclaim as an A-lister proves that you’re nothing of the sort.

Well, it’s not a product. It’s a world. It’s a place. It’s a realm. It has interactivity, synchronicity, etc. I refuse to accept these are mere “products” when they are “communities” and even “immersive worlds”.

I don’t buy the Tekkie Exit Clause either, which you invoke with all your changing of names, cancelling of accounts, etc. etc. It’s a concept that all these tekkies push strenuously, like they push “no no vote”. It’s part of their ideology. I reject it. You don’t have to emigrate from the United States in order to condemn the government and try to change it. Second Life or Yahoo aren’t things like my telephone service, which I just switched yet again because they were cretins who couldn’t repair a simple phone line for 2 days and passed the buck on it, and I put in another line that was more responsive on their customer service. But I certainly wouldn’t do that with Yahoo. Yahoo has groups that I’ve had for years and years, and email going back centuries in the dog-years of online life. I can’t imagine just saying “oh, well, I’m done with Yahoo”. Yahoo is like air. You breathe it. It’s on your home page. If they take it away, well, they will be taking part of your soul. I feel that way about Zing, the photo site that went down that I just liked a lot better than I like Flicker (which I just can’t get used to. Something about it rubs me the wrong way and I don’t have time to figure out what).

And you are being literalist here, Onder. When I talk about Web 2.0 apps, I’m talking about the entire enterprise of making the giant thingie called “The Internet And All Its Works”. So that *is* like science or health, it’s an area of research, activity, enterprise, and you can’t look at it only as this or that app.

>I’m not saying it’s FORBIDDEN to critique them, but nobody wants to listen to someone carry on and on about how much Tide sucks. Imagine how little the lackey who works at Tide cares to hear it, too, and what little difference complaints make when the cash is rollin’ in.

It’s not about Tide. You’re like those people who muscle on to forums and scornfully deride everybody’s efforts to see SL as a world or a place or an interactive community and yell at people and tell them that they are behaving like people immersing themselves in their toaster or getting upset about their toaster.

As Pella has explained to us helpfully, the Toaster is now reaffirmed in the Noosphere for all of us. The Toaster is not just “toaster” — that grubby little piece of metal that might have burn English muffin parts in it — but the Toaster is a thing you pick out with your Toaster Friends in Toaster Town with the Toaster Widget. John Doe in Missoula, Montana who told me to buy This Toaster and not That Toaster is now bound to me for life as my Toaster Soul Brother.

I have a feeling you’re not getting this, Onder.

>Your need for a No arises from a perception that you don’t have a choice here.

But I don’t! Let me tell you the things I did NOT chose in Second Life:

o removal of telehubs completely from the mainland, and allowing them to remain on islands
o $1000 auction system
o flexiprims
o open-source of the client
o etc

A small but vocal minority amen-cornered the Lindens on these things, and they went in.

>Lastly… hang on now… ME?? Elite? Dewd, not one person in SL knows my real name, I didn’t walk in here with any credentials, I’m not a member of any club, I don’t go to the big boring parties and my account was created late last year.

If you are a programmer/coder/IT guy/tekkie, trust me, you are instantly a member of the Brethren. It’s a relatively small club in SL, and even if you don’t go to the right parties, you’re in. This isn’t being FIC, but my comment about the elites that the Pellas of the word are going after in their “crowd-skimming” is that they pick out the geeks, the people who can learn HTML or PHP or whatever and fuss with all this tekkie nerdy stuff.

I’m also wondering about your comparison of Web 2.0 apps to science, health, politics, education, art. Ultimately a website is a consumer product. We vote on it with our money, as we do with all other products. Web apps WISH they were works of art. Entrepreneurs WISH there was science to all of this. But no, it’s just a bunch of products, and right now what’s working is whatever sticks. (The Yes vote)

I’m not saying it’s FORBIDDEN to critique them, but nobody wants to listen to someone carry on and on about how much Tide sucks. Imagine how little the lackey who works at Tide cares to hear it, too, and what little difference complaints make when the cash is rollin’ in.

Your need for a No arises from a perception that you don’t have a choice here. I’ve changed my name, email accounts, web apps I obsess over, and even my posting style a dozen times over the last decade. Something bores me, I move on, they lose a customer. I’m not the only one… hundreds of thousands of us work this way. I see nothing posing a serious threat to that beyond some jackass somewhere screaming “threat to national security”.

Lastly… hang on now… ME?? Elite? Dewd, not one person in SL knows my real name, I didn’t walk in here with any credentials, I’m not a member of any club, I don’t go to the big boring parties and my account was created late last year. I don’t even own LAND. I’m where I am because I make things happen, take what I need and never mind the bollocks. You can call me ‘l33t, but don’t even THINK about tossing me in with your FIC.

And Pella’s idea of transferring the attention product might sound like merely a rewarming of the idea as you understood it, that “people have low attention spans and demand that it be catered to. That’s not really new info. There’s also the suggestion of tracking “attention” across web platforms. Spyware isn’t new either”

No, I understood her to be saying something that was not unlike the old labour theory of value (and as these leftoid folks all tend to be steeped in conscious or unconscious Marxism at somewhere along their careers in college or whatever, it’s not surprising).

That is, if I as a consumer — a prosumer, a participator in the awesome act of Creation of Media that others will consume and will Add Value to me, them, and that framing company that provides the container, take the time to a) read some books b) scan some stuff on Amazon like favourite lists and c) write a review I now have an Attention Product.

What can I do with my Attention Product? Well, Pella is saying what Web 2 has to do for us is migrate, dislocate, reconnect, keep identity across frontiers, etc.

So my Attention Product, let’s say MyBookOnQuiltsReview123434A on amazon.com is something I port over to E-bay. That entire bundle of links, ideas, thought, helpful tips now because a button, a widget, an icon, a something over on ebay. Those who are browsing for quilts, trying to figure out which ones to buy, whether to get this pattern or that pattern then access my QuiltAttentionProduct321042B which then becomes a factor in them buying EBayQuilt123987C.

Now, me, the buyer of the e-bay quilt, and browsers of similar quilts are now in the QuiltCommunity where we presumably go and have happy little times together in vox.com or kaneva.com where we actually upload our quilt patterns and sit and gab about them and even go over to SL where we upload them and sell them for people to have in their little SL homes, see. So we’ve amplified my little attention product about 6 different ways; made community about 12 different ways, and we’ve Added Value.

All well and good. Where I wonder what’s going on, however, is as follows:

a. Are people willing to be driven into little codified nonce communities like that by companies? The thing I hate most about amazon.com is the way it leaps up to tell me which book to buy when I log on and then also gives me the unnecessary rap about people who bought THIS book also bought THAT book.

b. Amazon gets more clicks and sales of a book it’s selling due to my revue (do they share any revenue for that? I think they do but only after some number of hits or something? worth checking). The ebay person sells their quilt better. But where do I get the payoff? My payoff is in the satisfaction gained from the Contribution Economy that Pella said makes the whole Internet go round, all that selfless giving — which, as she also indicates, is also all about GETTING ATTENTION. Not just GIVING. But GETTING.

c. At what point does this no longer become sustainable becaue the pile of cards is stacked up just too high? If everybody writes reviews, how can I get noticed? If I don’t make much revenue, can I keep writing? Do the people in the quilt club get so organized they break off from ebay and make QuiltBuyersCentral.com that drives all the traffic away from ebay? I dunno, there’s just a lot of questions to me how it all sustains. In other words, I don’t feel that the attention economy, which is merely the old labour theory of value in new cyber clothing, suffers from any alienation of the worker from the product. If anything, the worker suffers from overidentification, overamplication and duplication of his product and that leads to copyright theft.

I know I’m supposed to be like Eric Rice here, and merely accept that I must always and everywhere be just giving, giving, giving away my music, poetry, thoughts, whatever for free…just because. The recipe for getting paid after that gets very hazy to me but seems to involve trying to get the attention of one of the old dinosaur big media companies…