Archive for the 'Lifestyle' Category

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Defending Social Media

Published by Taylor on February 2, 2009 in Blogging, Computing, Culture, Facebook, Lifestyle, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

Reader Jared (not Jarred) left a lengthy comment on my post about what I feel is our growing need and ability to create and share content.  In short: our attraction to social media.  I want to pull out what I think is the essence of Jared’s concern, because it merits a more complete response:

Dig[ital] interconnectedness, to me, connotes an element of dystopic irony, a warning that we might not end up getting what we want out of this, and someday find that while social media was created and driven by a fundamental desire and longing for connection…it left that behind at some point in the past. [...]

The more data and content we create, the more noise. We keep finding more noise, more noise, more noise everywhere. White noise. [...]

It’s good stuff, this Internet….as long as we know what we’re getting ourselves into.

The issue of useless “white noise” comes up a lot.  The fact that the web is for all purposes infinite, and the information online limitless, makes the idea of constant content creation by an ever-expanding group of people seem completely overwhelming.  “I can’t even find time to read all the online articles in the NY Times every day” we think to ourselves; “My Google Reader is up to 4,000 unread items!  I don’t need MORE content–I’m barely keeping up with what I’ve already chosen to follow!”

Questioning whether the social media we use and follow will allow us to connect and grow in meaningful ways is almost completely tied to the issue of noise.  After all, absent the noisy distractions that Jared describes, the Internet would be an incredibly useful place.  Anyone who skims through the comments section of any popular YouTube video (a phenomenon captured brilliantly by XKCD) understands the limits of the current social web: when everyone speaks with equal weight and access, a lot of useless and ignorant crap is published online.

But let me argue that the proliferation and widespread adoption of social media–even in the midst of more noise–will be a good thing for a few reasons:

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New to Me in ’08: Web Services and Software

Published by Taylor on December 30, 2008 in Computing, Lifestyle and Web 2.0. View Comments
This is a continuation of year-end posts.  As a I said in my music post, I wanted to reflect on (in this case) programs and services that I couldn’t live without in 2008.  Some of these debuted in ’08, while others are simply new to me.

Web Services and Software

lala–JRod and I haven’t been bashful in our adoration of this site.  There’s a reason: this is an amazing service for music lovers.  DRM-free MP3 downloads (note to non-techies: that means you can burn, share, trade, etc at will) for $.89 (paging $.99 iTunes Music Store…), or unlimited streams for $.10 a song.  It communicates flawlessly with iTunes, automatically loading newly-downloaded tunes into your library.  It also uses Music Mover (a free-standing program) to find the music you already own and make it available anywhere there’s a web connection.  My workday is now filled with the joyous sounds of Fleet Foxes and Sigur Ros, and I’m more productive because of it.  Amen.  (PS–as evidenced in my music post, lala also boasts a simple and great embed tool)

Mint–A great one stop shop for tracking multiple bank accounts, credit cards, and investments.  I tried a similar site (Wesabe) for a while, and ultimately brought my personal finances home to roost at Mint.  This site has improved remarkably throughout the year, adding much-needed features like the ability to customize categories of purchases, the inclusion of stocks, and student loan tracking.  I don’t know that I could live without Mint at this point.

TripIt–Another indispensable addition to my life in 2008.  Being in a long-distance relationship necessarily means lots of travel plans.  On top of that, my work requires fairly regular time on the road.  With TripIt, I simply forward every e-ticket, hotel reservation, and rental car arrangement from my email account to TripIt, and it’s automatically imported into a comprehensive itinerary that I can pull up quickly or print out for reference.  I love this site.

GoodReads–Were niche social networks a trend of 2008 or was that “like soooo 2007″ already?  In any case, I started using GoodReads in earnest in 2008 and it’s one of the few non-Facebook social networks [did anybody try that Doostang thing?] that holds my attention.  GoodReads does one thing (tracks the books you and your friends have read/are reading/want to read) and does it well with a simple interface.

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What I Took Away From “Getting Things Done”

Published by Jarred on November 6, 2008 in Lifestyle and Productivity. View Comments

Last week, I took a course over two half-days called “Getting Things Done.”  Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a productivity methodology developed by David Allen, who was profiled last year by Wired.  His book of the same name is a bestseller, and he now has a consulting and coaching company to preach his gospel to the overworked masses.  Google, of course, let’s us take the course for free. :)

Getting Things Done argues that the key to less stress is to empty your head of those to-do’s and projects and “objectify” them by putting them into an external system.  To do this, GTD suggests five key steps: collect, process, organize, review, and do.  It sounds simplistic, but when was the last time you actually sat down and thought about the way that you orchestrate your productivity?  For me, it wasn’t recently.  I had developed some kind of nebulous system throughout high school and college to make sure I stayed on task.  My tools consisted of e-mail, calendar, and millions of sticky notes.  My collection, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing all took place in a single jumbled mess that — though it worked — was probably grossly inefficient.

So, the first thing I took away from GTD was that big picture: taking time to separate the steps of your self-organization and reflecting on how to make it more efficient is worthwhile.

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“The Death of Mystery” in the Age of the Blackberry

Published by Taylor on August 5, 2008 in Computing, Culture and Lifestyle. View Comments

I recently joined the mobile web wielding hordes: I received a Blackberry.  My employer decided to upgrade and…well…I’m now one of “those people.”

I received the device about a month ago, and days later I was with my family for the Fourth of July.  One night after dinner, sitting around the large and ancient oak table, my 92-year-old grandfather asked if I had heard about an ambidextrous pitcher on the Yankees.  I hadn’t heard a thing about it*, and Grandpa couldn’t remember where he’d read about the athlete.  Imagine his shock when, across the dinner table, I reported the details of Pat Venditte: a truly ambidextrous pitcher, currently in the Yankees’ minor league system, who wears a special 6-finger glove so that he can slip it on either hand.  I even related a story from an article I found Googling “ambidextrous yankees pitcher” (it’s a fascinating story, and worth reading).

I read this story aloud from my little black box and a conversation that might have ended with “That’s interesting–I’ll have to look that up when I get home!” instead concluded with six people walking away from the table with the full story.

My grandfather, for his part, was impressed and glad that I’d uncovered the information he remembered vaguely.  My grandmother (God bless her, the most stubborn person I know, but also the most interesting) reacted differently: she lamented, more than a little seriously, the “death of mystery” inherent in on-demand web access from the beach, the bar, and even–when appropriate–the dinner table.

I think this is actually a manifestation of a pretty common generational difference: some people, principally older folks, relish the quest for information.  They take pride in working for their knowledge: digging through a dusty bookshelf to find a specific book with a description of the bird they see in the back yard, or looking through the recycling to find a newspaper article they read days before.  This quest for information makes uncovering even trivial information–like the difference between sherry and port wine…true story–a triumph.  The “mystery” my grandmother refers to is, I think, actually the satisfaction that comes from resolving a perplexing question or investing time in finding an answer.

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Distracted by Shoes

Published by a Guest on July 24, 2008 in Advertising, Consumer Behavior, Culture and Lifestyle. View Comments

The following is a guest post from Daniel H.  Welcome back, Dan!

In a recent NY Times column, David Brooks describes a deterioration in American culture over the past century, noting that “America once had a culture of thrift…but over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded,” and now we exist in a “culture of debt.”

He partially blames the effects of a rapidly growing economy, noting how some luxury items which were once unaffordable for the middle class suddenly came within financial reach (especially within the reach of creditors if not within the reach of one’s own cash).  He also blames the deterioration of the norm of personal responsibility, and claims that those who fell victim to marketing schemes were also furthering the deterioration of a norm of thriftiness, in themselves and in those around them.

I thought it was a good opinion piece, really. But the whole time I was reading the article, I kept getting distracted by shoes.

Lots of shoes.

The whole top and side of the internet page on the New York Times website was full of shoe advertisements, which of course, exist because the Times wants to collect on extra revenue whenever possible and because advertisers are willing to pay prime dollar for space on a site viewed by perhaps millions of people per day.  And so as I was challenged by Brooks’ thoughts on how we, as Americans, should seek to be wiser consumers, I also felt that this change cannot and will not happen if I do not seek to monitor the ways in which I take in information, most especially on the web, but anywhere for that matter.  If Americans truly desire to become wiser spenders, we must question our acceptance of the commercial advertising industry and its self-imposition into our day-to-day lives.

While I don’t think internet advertising is wrong at all, it might be helpful, as technology and the internet becomes more and more central to our means of gathering information, to ask several questions:  First, what space is sacred?  What space or information should not be corrupted with advertisements?  At what point, if any, is the value of information corrupted or degraded by advertisements?  Would we put corporate sponsors on our holy scriptures or governmental documents?  What about on websites that contain this kind of information?  What about good literature?  The unspoken reality here is that corporate sponsors help keep quite a bit of the internet free and available to all, which I tend to find is a good thing.  I only wonder where we go from here?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bcjordan.