One thing she is describes at the end is the contrast between when she herself went off to college, and wrote letters back to her mother from time to time, to today, as her daughter is off to college and they share texts, skype each other and otherwise stay in touch.

I always considered it a positive benefit of social media that people can stay in touch – friends after they leave school, parents with kids, etc – and it is, but there is a downside to this always on, always connected, always at-the-end-of-a-line communications too.

Will kids every really gain independence if mum is just a text away?  Will they ever develop empathy and social skills required for anything other than superficial social relationships if it is always mediated by a screen?  Some will, some won’t.  Maybe it is true that the communicators will be using these tools to communicating better while the recluses can now pretend to have a social life … I don’t know.

But what the epilogue was making me consider was more the recording and preservation of digital memories.  If you have a letter, it can sit in a loft to be discovered one day, to get out and cherish and give an insight into the writers mind at the time.  What will be the “hidden in the loft” letters of today?  An email buried amongst 1000s of other emails?  Ephemeral texts long since deleted?  How many of those picture uploaded to “the cloud” will ever be looked at again?

No, today it is possible to record practically everything, but that means that often nothing is ever singled out for posterity or special preservation.  We will get to the stage where one’s whole life is spent catching up on what contacts are doing today that there will never be time to look back over preserved memories.

Our digital archive will become an audit trail, to only be perused when something has to be checked.  Who will browse through 1000s of photos or emails or chat logs just to reminisce?  No, when you have 1 second of digital record for each second of your life, how many of those same precious seconds would you need to be able to read any of it again.

So whilst it is possible to have full-life recording in various forms, from a memories point of view it would appear to be a write-only memory.  Designed to benefit the holding companies by providing fodder for data mining.  In recording so much, we might be gaining nothing at all.

It will be interesting to see how society develops – will we see a return to older style activities – promoting selected digital records into preserved snapshots of life?  With so many photos, will people cherish a bit of time taken to print a few out for an old-style photo album?  And will we see a return to giving someone your full attention by composing a physical letter?

Interesting to see what happens and what the push-backs against always-on, always-connected, always-recording will be.

Kevin.

So I had a bit of a play myself.  War and peace was interesting – some very clear peaks in the early 20th Century as you’d expect.  Eventually I started on some more odd ball ones, including Google vs Microsoft.  Well that yielded a surprise …

Don’t know if you can see that … but just what is that peak around 1900 for Microsoft?

Well, looks like it must just be a mishap in the Google scanning of books … top of the list of books returned from searching for Microsoft from 1880 to 1950 is the following:

books.google.com 1938 – Snippet view Microsoft FORTRAN also has a high degree of Xenix source-level compatibility, a comprehensive set of utilities, and direct interlanguage calling with Microsoft C, Pascal, and Macro Assembler routines. …

So there.  Writing about Xenix, Microsoft C and Pascal in 1938 … so that’s where Alan Turin got all those ideas from!

But on further investigation, it appears there are even earlier examples (obviously very hushed up, but presumably can be released now)

So now we all know.

Kevin.

Well, I might be a bit busy that evening, as I have to:

• Create a culinary, early evening nutritional experience (make the tea)
• Ensure that extra-curricular learning enhancements are being achieved (make the kids do their homework)
• Partake in mind expanding information gathering (browsing the Internet)
• Have some immersive, competitive, electronic stimulation (play some computer games)
• Perform some social voyeurism and expand my social horizons (read Facebook)
• Encourage wind-down, enduce a relaxed-mind state and create an environment for visual stimuli and body recharging (read bedtime stories and get the kids to bed)
• And then finally perform some passive media-rich information absorbtion (watch some telly)

Kevin

I do like the way Google are using very subtle marketing techniques just in case anyone hadn’t noticed. In fact it’s so subtle, you might not have noticed yourself, so I thought I should point it out to you …

Kevin

Stylesheet?  Whats that then?  Title?  Official crest?  Graphics??  Nope – none of that namby-pamby stuff.  Now I am quite a fan of content over style, but that doesn’t mean content and no style.

Well, enter in 10 digits and 8 letter random password, and I am assured that the site has no personal details.  Good.  At least it is HTTPS, so they’ve heard of encryption.  But maybe a hint of HTML beyond version 2 would be nice?

Anyway, when all confirmed, I am greeted with the following:

Official Voter Registration Website

That was the enterity of the page.

“Website managed by Document Technology Limited” it says but interestingly the company doesn’t seem to have a website that actually produces a web page.  Bizarre.

“Thank you for using the Internet”. You’re welcome. I use it all the time. Thank you for that slice of web technology nostalgia.

Kevin.

At the time, it was amusing and things move on.  Well, I had cause to be driving down the A5 from Tamworth the other day and decided that the same person must have been responsible for the roadsigns.

As I was driving down towards M1 junction 18, I was priviledged to observe the following sequence of informative signage:

• M1 18m
• M1 20m
• M1 20m
• M1 9m
• M1 8m
• M1 14m
• M1 4m

and then of course was driving past the radio masts and Eddie Stobart to arrive at junction 18.

Well, innacuracies might be expected every now and again, and of course if diverted you’d expect some deviation.  But the A5 south?  Watling street?  I don’t know of many straighter roads … hmm

Kevin.

I’m not sure what was worst, that they were all described in detail or that I had already encountered most of them at some point whilst following the antics of virtual worlds.

Do take a look to see how some people played the system, broke assumptions about the worlds, took the money and ran or just generally trolled out the griefing.

They include the out of control plague to hit World of Warcraft, where carriers deliberately wandered around newbie areas killing them off!; the ganging up in Ever Quest to kill an unkillable monster, totally surprising the game owners so much that they turned the servers off as it was about to die; the slaughter of the virtual mourners holding a funeral in World of Warcraft following the RL death of a player; the Anshe Chung interview ruined by flying penises in Second Life (did this influence the title of the post I wonder); and the chap who setup a virtual bank in Eve Online and then did a runner with the profits.

The only story that I could think of not on the list was the group (I forget who it was) who organised a virtual conference in World Of Warcraft, after all as an immersive medium virtual worlds have a huge edge in interactivity for virtual events, who had a large percentage of their guests slaughtered when they entered the world for the first time.  Many didn’t even make it to the location of the conference.  Oh well, a bold experiment.  More recent virtual world conferences tend to be held in more controlled environments these days.

Human ingenuity.  Fabulous.  A fun read, and thanks to Pete for the link.

Kevin.

As you mould the sand the computer recreates the contours in the virtual space too.  Then things moving in the virtual space move according to the contours in the real space – and are then projected back onto it.

For full details of the project, see http://mimicry.monobanda.nl/

Their video teasers are well worth watching – http://vimeo.com/25666910, http://vimeo.com/25665948.

I particularly like the bit where they put a hand in the sand.  Its like a 3D computer version of pin-art …

This could be a really interesting way to get people modelling terrain in virtual worlds or games.

Kevin.

The only thing missing is the checkbox at the bottom that states “Yes, I agree to you emptying my account and transferring all my money somewhere else” …

Kevin.

I think they missed a trick here – they should have asked for your mother’s maiden name, the street where you were born and your first pet’s name.  That way you’d have the answers to three of the common ‘I’ve lost my password’, “security” questions …

In fact, why not write a Facebook or iPhone app that asks all these but also creates a “the first”, “the 2nd”, “the third”, etc hashed from your date of birth – then you’d get that too.

And while we’re at it, ask for Facebook credentials and post it to your wall (most people won’t know you don’t actually need to give a site your username and password for them to post to your wall, that Facebook provides federated identity services to third party sites).

Actually I’d be surprised if said app doesn’t already exist … let me know if you find it

Kevin.