Busy Signals

Disconnected thoughts for highly-connected times.

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Looking for new Busy Signals content (and Max Leibman)?

Time for a change of pace.  

First of all, thank you for following me on Tumblr or subscribing via RSS!  

Secondly, go find me somewhere else!  For the time being, I'm going to move my blogging efforts in two different directions:

I'm posting links to the kinds of articles I typically post to Busy Signals via Twitter.  You can find me there as @maxleibman.

Second, I'll be posting some related pieces and occasional long essays at HigherProcess.com, the site for my book.

I'll probably come back around to this site/blog at some point, but I have a couple of major professional projects I need to finish first.  Thanks for reading!

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I broke 60 on Klout. Who's the God Particle now? klout.com/user/PeakePoet…

— Robert Peake (@PeakePoetics) July 5, 2012

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Whether or not you believe in the value of the so-called “link economy,” giving credit to the sources of the information that you used to develop a post or story is a principle that distinguishes ethical outlets from unethical ones.

Matthew Ingram, "Why links matter."

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The world around us is ultimately subjective. We can measure the rocks in the ground, we can measure the fish that are in the sea, but we can't measure social reality. We need one another to confirm that the world exists. That money exists. That politics exists. That we've not actually lost our grip. And sometimes, we get it wrong.

Aleks Krotoski, "Crowded," the June 4th episode of Digital Human. 

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The insightful Patrick McKenzie:

So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names.  All of these assumptions are wrong.  Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.

People have exactly one canonical full name.

People have exactly one full name which they go by.

People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.

People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.

People have exactly N names, for any value of N.

People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.

People’s names do not change.

People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.

People’s names are written in ASCII.

People’s names are written in any single character set.

Like, 30 more in the link.

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Bit Rebels:  The Who, Why, and How of Twitter.  As always, click through for more.

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When Beckett wrote, in 1930, that it was every bit as illogical to expect tomorrow’s self to be gratified by today’s experience as it was to expect your hunger to vanish at the sight of your uncle eating a sandwich, he could take it for granted that nobody expected one person’s sandwich to satisfy someone else. That was then. Lots of people on Twitter do think you’ll enjoy the spectacle of their snacks. They tell you what they’re eating, where they’re going, what they’re consuming, never mind why you should care. Or — an apparently opposite genre to the hyper-banal tweet (“Lunch again today!”), but identical in effect — they tweet something cryptic to the point of senselessness. This is the tweet that says, whatever its actual content, “I have nothing to say but I want to say something.”

The Editors of N+1, "Please RT" (via Brent Simmons).

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Independence Day reminds me how fortunate we are to live in a country that eschews violent street protests in favor of snarky blog commentary Via someecards

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I no longer want my friends to have this passive peepshow into my life and I don’t want to have the same view of theirs. I want us to talk. I want a personal email. I want to find a way to share photos in a way that encourages us to talk about them with each other. I want to chortle over sushi about the random events and cry together over wine when heartbreak attacks. In short, I want my friends back. The only way I can do that is to cut the cord.

Goodbye Facebook | Tech Savvy Butterfly (via Opt Out).

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Faster than realtime.

Nicholas Carr:

They say that there’s a brief interlude, measured in milliseconds, between the moment a thought arises in the cellular goop of our brain and the moment our conscious mind becomes aware of that thought. . . .

The same thing goes for sensory perception. What you see, touch, hear, smell are all just messages from the past. It takes time for the signals to travel from your sensory organs to your sense-making brain. Milliseconds. You live, literally, in the past.

Now is then. Always.

As the self-appointed chronicler of realtime, as realtime’s most dedicated cyber-scribe, I find this all unendurably depressing. The closer our latency-free networks and devices bring us to realtime, the further realtime recedes. The net trains us to think not in years or seasons or months or weeks or days or hours or even minutes. It trains us to think in seconds and fractions of seconds. Google says that if it takes longer than the blink of an eye for a web page to load, we’re likely to bolt for greener pastures. Microsoft says that if a site lags 250 milliseconds behind competing sites, it can kiss its traffic goodbye. . . . 

And yet, as we become more conscious of each passing millisecond, it becomes harder and harder to ignore the fact that we’re always a moment behind the real, that what we imagine to be realtime is really just pseudorealtime. A fraud.

They say a man never steps into the same stream twice. But that same man will never step into a web stream even once. It’s long gone by the time he becomes conscious of his virtual toe hitting the virtual flow. 

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Bit Rebels:  The Truth About Online Dating.

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DWI:  Driving while Intexticated | Online Schools

As always, click through for more. [Via Bit Rebels.]

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On one hand I say bravo. Karen Klein deserved a break. And she got one by winning the social media lottery. But on the other, for those who donated, those who may have taken an online simulation of human contact to be the same as the actual thing, I fear the benefit will be short-lived. I fear a crowd-sourced donation will feed the souls of those giving about as well as a Farmville harvest can feed someone’s body.

Todd Essig, "Why Raising 2/3 of a Million Dollars For Bus Monitor Karen Klein Was So Easy"

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Infographic: Why People Unfollow You On Twitter.  

As usual, click through for more.  [Via Bit Rebels.]

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Guessing what other people feel.

Merlin Mann, speaking on this week's episode of Back to Work:

There's the one thought, of like, "Oh my gosh, should I invite neither of them, because that'll be awkward?  Should I invite both of them?  But then, oh, that sounds REALLY awkward?  Should I invite just one of them?  AAAAHHH!"

And then you start getting into this thing of, like--the only way out of that, from a certain point of view, is to try and guess what somebody else feels.  Do you know what I mean?  Where you would go, well, uh, "Man A is really sensitive, and would probably have a hissy fit if I don't invite him, and Lady B never really liked us all that much, so I could probably leave her off (even though we've always invited her)..."

At that point, when you start doing that--when I've started doing that, I start feeling real creepy.  Because, why not just do that with everything?  Why not just start guessing at how everybody feels about everything?  Well, the only real way to handle that, is to invite both of them and not make a big deal about it.  If they want to make a big deal about it, then they can.  

Good stuff.  And I think the same mechanism in a different context can make navigating social networking questions ("What is my relationship to this person?" "Will person X notice if I unfriend them?" "Will relative Y be mad at me if I don't accept this request from relative Z?" Et cetera and bleeding so forth) so draining. 

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Is the Facebook hacking your email?

Facebook is unilaterally replacing the default email address users chose to display with an "@facebook.com" address.  Is that hacking?  Sensationalist headline aside, that's how Gervase Markham sees it:

In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?

Via Kashmir Hill.  For those who need it, she also has instructions to switch your address back to, you know, your address.

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The Gutters, "More Unbalanced Than Unfair."  [Via Andy Ihnatko.]