All done now. Awwww....
(Now I just hope I pass... with a HD...)
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Week 12: Would Jesus have a Blog?
--Probably. Plus a youtube channel, and twitter. And Facebook. Although he wouldn't have time to update them all himself.
Firstly, let me make it clear: I'm an atheist. Or is it Atheist. Or perhaps Agnostic. Anyway, I don't thump on the Bible or any other religious text. But it's like I once heard somewhere: There are many paths to the Almighty.
In my journey to the Almighty (I guess that makes me an Agnostic) here are some of the various religious bents I have investigated:
Obviously, few of these belief systems would have been accessible to me (or many other people) without New Media presenting them in a convenient, safe, anonymous, I'm-just-looking-so-take-away-the-ass-paddle way. But more importantly, the trend seems to be that Netizens are taking their religion in the same way they take their porn, friendships, and funny cat pictures: Eclectic, non-committal, and as fast as the wires can deliver them.
None of this is more apparent than with Jedi beliefs. What started off as a bit of a gag for Atheists to stick it to government censuses, has now all the hallmarks of an emergent religion. The Jedi phenomenon has its roots some thirty years ago in a certain series of movies, made up out of whole cloth as a plot device; but it took the magic of New Media for the "Jediism" as a belief system to evolve and be disseminated, to reach critical mass with a global and rapidly growing bunch of believers.
Now we just need someone to demonstrate use of the Force...
The same can be said of New Age beliefs, as an elephantine, intransigent whole. Probably the weirdest group I've seen are the "Psychic Vampires". There are tons of people who fully believe they are vampires, on account of some kind of blood or cutting fetish they have. But there are others who identify with the vampire visage (i.e. cool and attractive), but can't stand the sight of blood. So instead they claim they suck on peoples' "psychic energy". People who have pissed them off, bullies and mean teachers mostly. Only the power of New Media could have brought this geographically sparse assortment of dysfunctional teens into a cyber-whole.
Some paths to the Almighty are rockier than others...
Back to my opening statement. One of the gems of New Media is that Wisdom (with a capital W) is easily available to all. It allows us to access to accumulated teachings of the great religious leaders, living and otherwise, across the entire socio-ethnic spectrum. It means we don't have to "throw the baby out with the bathwater." For example, I can appreciate the notion of loving thy neighbour without having to scoop out my brain and subscribe to Intelligent Design.
Many orthodox commentators see this as a watering down of Religion; taking bits of teachings from here-and-there and discarding those which are inconvenient. Meh...
Firstly, let me make it clear: I'm an atheist. Or is it Atheist. Or perhaps Agnostic. Anyway, I don't thump on the Bible or any other religious text. But it's like I once heard somewhere: There are many paths to the Almighty.
In my journey to the Almighty (I guess that makes me an Agnostic) here are some of the various religious bents I have investigated:
- Ascetic Catholicism
- Islam
- Wicca
- Shamanism
- Animism
- Germanic Paganism
- Native American wisdom (for want of a better word)
- Satanism (for a laugh)
- Rosicrucianism/Masonic stuff
- Druidism
- Chaos magic
- Alchemy
- Scientology
- Discordianism
- Jediism
Obviously, few of these belief systems would have been accessible to me (or many other people) without New Media presenting them in a convenient, safe, anonymous, I'm-just-looking-so-take-away-the-ass-paddle way. But more importantly, the trend seems to be that Netizens are taking their religion in the same way they take their porn, friendships, and funny cat pictures: Eclectic, non-committal, and as fast as the wires can deliver them.
None of this is more apparent than with Jedi beliefs. What started off as a bit of a gag for Atheists to stick it to government censuses, has now all the hallmarks of an emergent religion. The Jedi phenomenon has its roots some thirty years ago in a certain series of movies, made up out of whole cloth as a plot device; but it took the magic of New Media for the "Jediism" as a belief system to evolve and be disseminated, to reach critical mass with a global and rapidly growing bunch of believers.
Now we just need someone to demonstrate use of the Force...
The same can be said of New Age beliefs, as an elephantine, intransigent whole. Probably the weirdest group I've seen are the "Psychic Vampires". There are tons of people who fully believe they are vampires, on account of some kind of blood or cutting fetish they have. But there are others who identify with the vampire visage (i.e. cool and attractive), but can't stand the sight of blood. So instead they claim they suck on peoples' "psychic energy". People who have pissed them off, bullies and mean teachers mostly. Only the power of New Media could have brought this geographically sparse assortment of dysfunctional teens into a cyber-whole.
Some paths to the Almighty are rockier than others...
Back to my opening statement. One of the gems of New Media is that Wisdom (with a capital W) is easily available to all. It allows us to access to accumulated teachings of the great religious leaders, living and otherwise, across the entire socio-ethnic spectrum. It means we don't have to "throw the baby out with the bathwater." For example, I can appreciate the notion of loving thy neighbour without having to scoop out my brain and subscribe to Intelligent Design.
Many orthodox commentators see this as a watering down of Religion; taking bits of teachings from here-and-there and discarding those which are inconvenient. Meh...
Friday, May 7, 2010
Week 11: Bring On the Soapbox
The last time I wrote an essay was in 1987. It was an English essay on the poet Keats, for the final exam in my HSC. The bastards had decided to make us write about two poets for the exam, rather than one poet and one playwright as they had done in all previous years for the HSC. So I, and every other English student across NSW, was horribly unprepared, and my overall HSC mark really suffered because of it. I've carried a smouldering loathing for the NSW Department of Education, as well as literary studies and essay writing in general, ever since.
It is, unfortunately, in this frame of mind that I approach assessment #3 for this subject.
Well that's not quite true. I had written a few essays last year. I even got a HD for one. But my problem is, my essays tend to devolve into a rant.
Is that really a bad thing, though? Whatever happened to the impassioned argument? The fiery rhetoric? Isn't this what university is all about, a hotbed of radical thinking and social activism? Or is it now just an extension of school, a glorified day-care for 18-22 year-olds to punch at Facebook and their iPhones all day?
Prove me wrong, kids...
It is, unfortunately, in this frame of mind that I approach assessment #3 for this subject.
Well that's not quite true. I had written a few essays last year. I even got a HD for one. But my problem is, my essays tend to devolve into a rant.
Is that really a bad thing, though? Whatever happened to the impassioned argument? The fiery rhetoric? Isn't this what university is all about, a hotbed of radical thinking and social activism? Or is it now just an extension of school, a glorified day-care for 18-22 year-olds to punch at Facebook and their iPhones all day?
Prove me wrong, kids...
Friday, April 30, 2010
Week 10: Someone Visit My Blog, Pleeeeeeese
Blogs! Blogs! Everywhere. One of the issues we raised in our presentation this week was: has blogging become saturated? Is there anything left to say, and if so, is anyone left who can bear hearing about it?
In my own blog (my other one, not this one), I started with a pretty wide premise: Things which annoy me. So it is yet another a rant/soapbox blog. It is written reasonably well, if I may say so myself, although it is not well researched. But then I never made any statement that it was, and it is just my opinion.
Similarly my choice of audience was wide open: Anyone with half a brain, who would possibly find themselves agreeing with what I had to say.
In the course of blogging, I found myself leaning towards criticism of politics and television media, probably because those are the two most well-known and fattest targets on the average person's mind.
Back to my original question: Is what I have to say being repeated a thousand times over? Probably. To be honest I haven't really made an exhaustive search of the blogosphere, and I don't read many other blogs. In fact I don't read any at all regularly, and my site doesn't have a blogroll. I suppose I shouldn't complain that I don't have any readers.
Perhaps the question shouldn't be whether the blogosphere has been saturated. While there are a few bytes free on the Internet there will always be space for another blog (or another picture of a cat with a funny caption.) Rather, the question which irks me is this: Why do a few blogs have inexplicably loyal readerships of tens-of-thousands, while others which are comparable in terms of content and "goodness" have readerships of nil?
I guess it's that impersonal, unfeeling bell curve at work.
In my own blog (my other one, not this one), I started with a pretty wide premise: Things which annoy me. So it is yet another a rant/soapbox blog. It is written reasonably well, if I may say so myself, although it is not well researched. But then I never made any statement that it was, and it is just my opinion.
Similarly my choice of audience was wide open: Anyone with half a brain, who would possibly find themselves agreeing with what I had to say.
In the course of blogging, I found myself leaning towards criticism of politics and television media, probably because those are the two most well-known and fattest targets on the average person's mind.
Back to my original question: Is what I have to say being repeated a thousand times over? Probably. To be honest I haven't really made an exhaustive search of the blogosphere, and I don't read many other blogs. In fact I don't read any at all regularly, and my site doesn't have a blogroll. I suppose I shouldn't complain that I don't have any readers.
Perhaps the question shouldn't be whether the blogosphere has been saturated. While there are a few bytes free on the Internet there will always be space for another blog (or another picture of a cat with a funny caption.) Rather, the question which irks me is this: Why do a few blogs have inexplicably loyal readerships of tens-of-thousands, while others which are comparable in terms of content and "goodness" have readerships of nil?
I guess it's that impersonal, unfeeling bell curve at work.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Week 9: Paging Dr. WWW...
Let's face it, people have been using "unofficial" health resources for years. Advice from friends, so-called experts on TV, crank alternatives they had recommended to them. Remember the "snake oil salesman" from old Western shows?
Naturally though, the Web presents us with orders of magnitude more health information than is available through traditional sources. But as Lewis points out, how do we determine what is "good" and what is not? Frankly the last thing we need is Government legislation; firstly because the only way for Governments to control overseas sites is to block them completely, and secondly because Government "experts" have shown themselves inept with many laughable attempts at educating the public on serious health issues.
Instead, many things we love and trust on the Web today, have obtained this level of trust through self-policing. Example: Ebay allows buyers to rate and provide feedback on sellers; the rating of bad sellers naturally sinks, and no one buys from them any more. I can see perhaps similar models being for health-related site. Then again, this kind of anecdotal evidence flies in the face of scientific, study-based medicine.
As far as Lewis' study is concerned, it's all well and good to include only young people in the prime of health. One would expect people enjoying good health to be primarily concerned with lifestyle and fitness. In contrast, I would like to see studies including older people and folks with serious and chronic health problems. Combined with the digital divide, it would provide insights into the value of health information from various online sources versus traditional sources.
In respects to really sick people, the Web has also, unfortunately, provided rich virgin territory for "alternative" quack therapies. Not that I'm knocking things like traditional Eastern medicine, but it seems every miracle cure and ludicrous health claim has garnered ardent followers on the Web. These hucksters especially like to prey upon the chronically ill and hopelessly sick, who naturally view regular medicine as having failed them and are willing to try anything. These crooks thrive in cyberspace where they can operate outside the jurisdiction of Government legislation. Formal bodies like the AMA and WHO must step up to the plate and stamp out crooked practices, especially when they are espoused by regular GPs to make money. Sites like quackwatch.org are invaluable for exposing fraudsters and useless medicine. Furthermore, prominent movie stars and athletes can be held to account when pushing crank therapies to a gullible public.
As a side note, what concerns me most about the ease of obtaining prescription drugs online is not their inherent danger. Drug abusers will always find a source for their habit, whether it be the traditional dealer or a website. If a website offers the same fix cheaper than a dealer, so much the better for society as the junkie will not need to break in to as many houses to pay for their habit. And if their "self-medication" will run dealers out of business, again, so much the better.
No, what concerns me is what the Government will do with drug websites. Many online drug groups are concerned with helping people kick the habit, which is a good thing. But as Nielsen and Barratt point out, these sources will necessarily contain innocuous information which can be twisted and abused by users and pushers -- how to manufacture narcotics from over-the-counter substances, how to increase highs, how to make potent combinations. Other nefarious websites are set up specifically to disseminate this kind of information. Finally, there are reference sites which list ingredients and information of drugs, which, again, can be abused. Now, with the Internet Filter hanging over this country like the Sword of Damocles, it is certain the Government will blacklist these sites because they contain information which could potentially be used for illicit purposes. What will this mean for people seeking advice on kicking a drug habit? What about people honestly seeking information on drug brands? What about people trying to educate themselves on the drug cocktail prescribed to their sick child?
Naturally though, the Web presents us with orders of magnitude more health information than is available through traditional sources. But as Lewis points out, how do we determine what is "good" and what is not? Frankly the last thing we need is Government legislation; firstly because the only way for Governments to control overseas sites is to block them completely, and secondly because Government "experts" have shown themselves inept with many laughable attempts at educating the public on serious health issues.
Instead, many things we love and trust on the Web today, have obtained this level of trust through self-policing. Example: Ebay allows buyers to rate and provide feedback on sellers; the rating of bad sellers naturally sinks, and no one buys from them any more. I can see perhaps similar models being for health-related site. Then again, this kind of anecdotal evidence flies in the face of scientific, study-based medicine.
As far as Lewis' study is concerned, it's all well and good to include only young people in the prime of health. One would expect people enjoying good health to be primarily concerned with lifestyle and fitness. In contrast, I would like to see studies including older people and folks with serious and chronic health problems. Combined with the digital divide, it would provide insights into the value of health information from various online sources versus traditional sources.
In respects to really sick people, the Web has also, unfortunately, provided rich virgin territory for "alternative" quack therapies. Not that I'm knocking things like traditional Eastern medicine, but it seems every miracle cure and ludicrous health claim has garnered ardent followers on the Web. These hucksters especially like to prey upon the chronically ill and hopelessly sick, who naturally view regular medicine as having failed them and are willing to try anything. These crooks thrive in cyberspace where they can operate outside the jurisdiction of Government legislation. Formal bodies like the AMA and WHO must step up to the plate and stamp out crooked practices, especially when they are espoused by regular GPs to make money. Sites like quackwatch.org are invaluable for exposing fraudsters and useless medicine. Furthermore, prominent movie stars and athletes can be held to account when pushing crank therapies to a gullible public.
As a side note, what concerns me most about the ease of obtaining prescription drugs online is not their inherent danger. Drug abusers will always find a source for their habit, whether it be the traditional dealer or a website. If a website offers the same fix cheaper than a dealer, so much the better for society as the junkie will not need to break in to as many houses to pay for their habit. And if their "self-medication" will run dealers out of business, again, so much the better.
No, what concerns me is what the Government will do with drug websites. Many online drug groups are concerned with helping people kick the habit, which is a good thing. But as Nielsen and Barratt point out, these sources will necessarily contain innocuous information which can be twisted and abused by users and pushers -- how to manufacture narcotics from over-the-counter substances, how to increase highs, how to make potent combinations. Other nefarious websites are set up specifically to disseminate this kind of information. Finally, there are reference sites which list ingredients and information of drugs, which, again, can be abused. Now, with the Internet Filter hanging over this country like the Sword of Damocles, it is certain the Government will blacklist these sites because they contain information which could potentially be used for illicit purposes. What will this mean for people seeking advice on kicking a drug habit? What about people honestly seeking information on drug brands? What about people trying to educate themselves on the drug cocktail prescribed to their sick child?
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Week 8: Reinvention of the Wetware
If there was anything which has bent Time's Arrow into Time's Circle, it is the newest thing: Crowdsourcing. (Or as I like to call it, "Crowd Computing".) Poor Carnot! He must be rolling in his grave, although the free energy nuts will be loving it.
Years ago there existed roomfuls of individuals, many of them women, armed with pencil, paper and a love of arithmetic. These people were called "computers", and were employed to perform the many calculations required by science of the day. You see, before the advent of the electronic gadgets we know today as "computers", human brainpower was all we had. And science needed it -- lots of it.
When ENIAC came along, everyone expected these wondrous electronic gizmos would soon be powerful enough to solve all of Humanity's problems. Feed information in, press some buttons, and get the answer out with a "ding".
Now in the early 21st century a simple household PC can perform, in one second, more calculations than all the human brains ever have in the history of pencils. And yet, in an irony of astronomical proportions, even our most humongous petaflop machines are outclassed by a child or an insect on something as pedestrian as seeing things. This is why, 120 years after Karl Benz, cars still can't drive themselves.
It's this "fuzziness" that neural networks do so well, which is required for many of the tasks that are the goals of AI and which gum up even the biggest logic machines. So what's the solution? Link up a whole bunch of ready-made, ready-to-go neural networks! It's the return of human computers in the form of MTurk and the like, which provide quick, neat answers to the simplest questions. Problems which would leave the entire Google server farm smoking out.
And all it costs is pennies. Literally.
In a New Media Utopia I can picture models like MTurk being used for things like the eradication of spam, perfect internet dating, and the accurate tagging of every photo in existence. Or more seriously, the solution of such science and medicine problems which require a wetware touch. And as Zittrain suggests, all this could be presented to kids as game and done at zero cost.
Hallelujah! But here comes my cynical voice. If New Media is sticking it to the traditional corporate bastards, as described by Deuze, then it could, nay will, result in the opposite effect. I can see traditional corporate entities using the crowdsourcing model to reassert and restrengthen themselves, at very little cost.
There is the obvious use of crowdsourcing's ultracheap labour to produce work -- break the project down into many tiny subtasks, farm them out, and only employ a team to join it all back together. Suddenly whole development teams are no longer required. Project budgets are slashed. We already see a very nice form of this model in Open Source, although that relies on the benevolent effort of many dedicated individuals.
But I can imagine the CEOs will find a far more insidious use for crowdsourcing.
Example: One day, someone published a crack for Blu-ray encryption on Digg. Owing to Digg's popularity-voting model, this information quickly rose to the top rankings and stayed there. Then all hell broke loose. Digg found itself being threatened by the biggest corporate heavies you could imagine: the AACS consortium, which in turn represents the movie studios and film distributors. Facing legal annihilation, Digg had no choice but to capitulate and pull the offending material.
But then there was a backlash by Digg's user base. The crack codes were inserted into things like forum messages, where they grew virally and couldn't be eliminated. In the end, here is what Digg's management said to their users:
"...after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."
So why the cynicism? Isn't this Power to the People? Yes and no. Sites like Digg exist on a model of popularity and rankings. But what if Digg's user base had thought to themselves, "Hey AACS is right! Using Blu-ray crack is piracy!" and voted the encryption information down? Then the cracks would have stayed buried. And this, I foresee, is exactly where crowdsourcing comes in. How hard would it be for AACS to simply employ an army of MTurk wet-bots to log into Digg and vote the crack down? At pennies on the dollar? By extension any corporation, facing something it wants buried or something it wants done, could utilise crowdsourcing to make it happen at little cost. Suddenly the our New Media model is not so democratically flattened as we thought. And as Zittrain says, the crowd would not even know what they are doing, even if they are from Sudan.
(Oops sorry for the long blurb! Just I had a bit to say on this issue.)
Years ago there existed roomfuls of individuals, many of them women, armed with pencil, paper and a love of arithmetic. These people were called "computers", and were employed to perform the many calculations required by science of the day. You see, before the advent of the electronic gadgets we know today as "computers", human brainpower was all we had. And science needed it -- lots of it.
When ENIAC came along, everyone expected these wondrous electronic gizmos would soon be powerful enough to solve all of Humanity's problems. Feed information in, press some buttons, and get the answer out with a "ding".
Now in the early 21st century a simple household PC can perform, in one second, more calculations than all the human brains ever have in the history of pencils. And yet, in an irony of astronomical proportions, even our most humongous petaflop machines are outclassed by a child or an insect on something as pedestrian as seeing things. This is why, 120 years after Karl Benz, cars still can't drive themselves.
It's this "fuzziness" that neural networks do so well, which is required for many of the tasks that are the goals of AI and which gum up even the biggest logic machines. So what's the solution? Link up a whole bunch of ready-made, ready-to-go neural networks! It's the return of human computers in the form of MTurk and the like, which provide quick, neat answers to the simplest questions. Problems which would leave the entire Google server farm smoking out.
And all it costs is pennies. Literally.
In a New Media Utopia I can picture models like MTurk being used for things like the eradication of spam, perfect internet dating, and the accurate tagging of every photo in existence. Or more seriously, the solution of such science and medicine problems which require a wetware touch. And as Zittrain suggests, all this could be presented to kids as game and done at zero cost.
Hallelujah! But here comes my cynical voice. If New Media is sticking it to the traditional corporate bastards, as described by Deuze, then it could, nay will, result in the opposite effect. I can see traditional corporate entities using the crowdsourcing model to reassert and restrengthen themselves, at very little cost.
There is the obvious use of crowdsourcing's ultracheap labour to produce work -- break the project down into many tiny subtasks, farm them out, and only employ a team to join it all back together. Suddenly whole development teams are no longer required. Project budgets are slashed. We already see a very nice form of this model in Open Source, although that relies on the benevolent effort of many dedicated individuals.
But I can imagine the CEOs will find a far more insidious use for crowdsourcing.
Example: One day, someone published a crack for Blu-ray encryption on Digg. Owing to Digg's popularity-voting model, this information quickly rose to the top rankings and stayed there. Then all hell broke loose. Digg found itself being threatened by the biggest corporate heavies you could imagine: the AACS consortium, which in turn represents the movie studios and film distributors. Facing legal annihilation, Digg had no choice but to capitulate and pull the offending material.
But then there was a backlash by Digg's user base. The crack codes were inserted into things like forum messages, where they grew virally and couldn't be eliminated. In the end, here is what Digg's management said to their users:
"...after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."
So why the cynicism? Isn't this Power to the People? Yes and no. Sites like Digg exist on a model of popularity and rankings. But what if Digg's user base had thought to themselves, "Hey AACS is right! Using Blu-ray crack is piracy!" and voted the encryption information down? Then the cracks would have stayed buried. And this, I foresee, is exactly where crowdsourcing comes in. How hard would it be for AACS to simply employ an army of MTurk wet-bots to log into Digg and vote the crack down? At pennies on the dollar? By extension any corporation, facing something it wants buried or something it wants done, could utilise crowdsourcing to make it happen at little cost. Suddenly the our New Media model is not so democratically flattened as we thought. And as Zittrain says, the crowd would not even know what they are doing, even if they are from Sudan.
(Oops sorry for the long blurb! Just I had a bit to say on this issue.)
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Week 6: It's All Been Done Before
In the short time studying New Media, I have noticed a trend: The tendency for pundits and technologists to attach words like "cutting edge", "innovative" and "cool" to every big new idea they come across. Everybody wants to be Steve Jobs...
To that end, this week we were introduced to newest coolest feature to hit the streets: "Location tagging". My initial reaction was, I have to admit, "urgh". I could just picture going to (say) the Eiffel Tower, consulting my generic-brand smartphone for the monument's "location", and being confronted with 100,000 tags like, "HAI FROM BRITNEY & CAYTLIN!!!!! LOL ILY ^.^" And another 100,000 tags advertising everything from Pierre's Tour Petit Shoppe to inexplicable penis enlargements.
I imagined this "Location Tagging" bringing about the electronic equivalent of the said monument lying ruined, buried under commercial brochures and carved and spray-painted to oblivion with "so-and-so woz ere" messages. Of course, being electronic, we could simply turn off or ignore the facility. But doesn't that defeat the purpose?
Clearly something like location tagging would need serious moderation to be meaningful, at least for popular tourist spots. Which would entail some formal control over the information which, unfortunately, is the antithesis of the Internet's uncensored consumer-producer zeitgeist.
More generally, though, I was disturbed, yet again, at how these starry-eyed pundits introduce their pet innovations as the "newest thing", and pat themselves on the back, as if they divined them from heaven. (Or pulled them glittering from a certain orifice.) Guess what? NOTHING IS NEW! Location tagging has been present for several years in Google Maps, which has a neat (if underutilised) facility where people can pin photos, websites, Wikipedia articles, and other resources to any physical location on Earth. And the Moon IIRC. Wikipedia reciprocates by providing lat/long coordinates which can tracked back to several major resources. Street directory sites like Whereis do the same thing. Then we have a good ol' Facebook Group for every tourist spot you can think of, which incorporate "walls" for people to leave comments on. These Groups also benefit from natural moderation by the creators and other "mature" parties, or at least whinging outsiders. Just to name a few.
In its defence, Location Tagging (as an "innovation") seems to be an attempt to distil the above facilities into a central and quickly accessible whole. Cool...
To that end, this week we were introduced to newest coolest feature to hit the streets: "Location tagging". My initial reaction was, I have to admit, "urgh". I could just picture going to (say) the Eiffel Tower, consulting my generic-brand smartphone for the monument's "location", and being confronted with 100,000 tags like, "HAI FROM BRITNEY & CAYTLIN!!!!! LOL ILY ^.^" And another 100,000 tags advertising everything from Pierre's Tour Petit Shoppe to inexplicable penis enlargements.
I imagined this "Location Tagging" bringing about the electronic equivalent of the said monument lying ruined, buried under commercial brochures and carved and spray-painted to oblivion with "so-and-so woz ere" messages. Of course, being electronic, we could simply turn off or ignore the facility. But doesn't that defeat the purpose?
Clearly something like location tagging would need serious moderation to be meaningful, at least for popular tourist spots. Which would entail some formal control over the information which, unfortunately, is the antithesis of the Internet's uncensored consumer-producer zeitgeist.
More generally, though, I was disturbed, yet again, at how these starry-eyed pundits introduce their pet innovations as the "newest thing", and pat themselves on the back, as if they divined them from heaven. (Or pulled them glittering from a certain orifice.) Guess what? NOTHING IS NEW! Location tagging has been present for several years in Google Maps, which has a neat (if underutilised) facility where people can pin photos, websites, Wikipedia articles, and other resources to any physical location on Earth. And the Moon IIRC. Wikipedia reciprocates by providing lat/long coordinates which can tracked back to several major resources. Street directory sites like Whereis do the same thing. Then we have a good ol' Facebook Group for every tourist spot you can think of, which incorporate "walls" for people to leave comments on. These Groups also benefit from natural moderation by the creators and other "mature" parties, or at least whinging outsiders. Just to name a few.
In its defence, Location Tagging (as an "innovation") seems to be an attempt to distil the above facilities into a central and quickly accessible whole. Cool...
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