Issues like this aren’t a problem unless someone makes a big deal out of them. I mean people aren’t bothered by it unless someone like this bothers everyone.
I can’t see my face when I hear these words but I know my expression has to be unpleasant. Without getting into it I’ve had a long hard struggle with some of these very cultural tropes which he dismisses with an assumptive “This doesn’t matter to anyone.”
Cos my site is not working right.
9/3/11 Miss Pearl's first night
So mad I could spit 9/8
The fairy tale trope does matter, it is erroneous and while it is fairly innocuous that scientists find themselves blinded by our assumptions about roles in courtship the effect these lies about what women are supposed to do and what men are supposed to do has been anything but innocuous in my own life.
Good girls are all princesses, we’re supposed to fall in love with the prince because he decides we are worth pursing. Bad girls try to take control and be in charge usually because they are ugly or old. Princesses/good girls should try not be ugly or old and they should try to be nice to everyone except for maybe the mean men that want something from them that is ominously left out of disney movies.
And we come across evidence that our culture is so inundated with these tropes it is affecting our most objective thinkers and what is the response? Oh this doesn’t really matter?!?
It dose, it matters a lot. It matters because there are nice healthy normal boys out there growing up thinking that the right way to go about courtship is to pursue the girl and if they just keep pushing and are the prince not the monster of course she’ll give in. It matters because there are girls out there who see no examples of strong women that are also good. Even in our science textbooks we are pursued, penetrated in effigy when the reality has our cells as something much more active and destructive.
The Vision 9/11/11
Transcendant Shawna 10/21
Corporate advertising folks talk about us early adopters as if we are a useful group to impress. The idea is if you get the attention of those of us who jump on the newest an latest tech at every opportunity the advantage for your brand is that we will somehow infect the rest of the populace with our enthusiasm for the next greatest thing.
I’ve personally seen this work, for example I absolutely love to do my word processing on google docs I am just an internet connection away from anything Ive written for class, be it notes, papers, or homework assignments. For group projects I trick my group members into jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon. I ask em for their emails, send them a link and cut and paste the assigned questions before they even realize that they are about to do something new on computers.
We divid our labor and organize ourselves so efficently, once my new to cloud classmates get done giggling over the fact we can see each other type.
I wouldn’t stop with the cloud, I would be one of the first to upgrade if and when bio-software becomes availible,
I would want eyes that can see in a myrid of spectrums, I would want ears that can hear sounds outside of the audible range for humans. I want a body that self repairs ad communicates emotions with gentle flashing colors under transluscent skin. I want to search google with a thought and interact with a world that I can paint with digital skins based on the imagination and what takes my fancy that day. And other extremely cool things that haven’t happened yet. I wonder where other people would draw the line and where my line is. Would they be okay with contacts but not implants? Implants but not replacements? Odin gave up his eye for knowledge...
Shirky inspiries online dialect development 10/26
me: did this book just translate lol?
seriously
who the fuck is it written for
look <shows to webcam>
Luke: HAH!
What the fuck?
me: it also took a whole page to explain tagging
so over this
Luke: Where have these people been for the past, like, 15 years?
9:49 PM
me: It was published in 2006
2006
WTF
[What the fuck]
Luke: HAHAHAH!
9:50 PM
You fuckin' rock.
This is me complaining about my homework, Of course I do it anyhow and to be quite honest I enjoy the Shirky book, I was just buried under a ton of reading at the time and venting online to a buddy. but look what happened? Our online dialect grew out of my experience. This is what language is, it changes and grows based on experience. Say Luke and I spread this around to a few other people, underscore and make ironic the use of a net-acronym by writing out the words it stands for in brackets lol [laugh out loud]
Also poke fun at people who are so outside of our hip online culture so badly they need something like lol spelled out for them. All because I had to make fun of my homework.
Linguists are beginning to study online language and they have found it has regional characteristics even though the net is “boundry-less”
This is fascinating especially given the points Shirky made about audience and fame later in his chapter.
10/29 It's Yucky
So I was in starbucks today and a little girl saw what appeared to be another childs comb on the floor. It was blue and wrapped in two rubber bands that had some hair stuck in them. “Don’t pick that up!” said her dad as she reached for it, “It’s yucky.”
The girl looked up at me startled and I realized something, I have a vauge sense of unease when in foreign environments, could this be because my mother and father told me strange objects and strange floors were “yucky” when i was her age? It is highly likely.
However unlike this little girl I was only in urban environment as an extremely rare event. My childhood was spent bringing frogs, strange plants, mushrooms, flowers, and random junk I’d found in the woods back to my parents to see if we could figure out what it was. Maybe that is why I am so into finding out how new things work and what they are. I’m not afraid, I have very little cause to think it might be yucky.
Obviously we don’t want our kids picking up stuff they find on the floor. What if it had been diseased? What if it had been broken glass she was reaching for, or worse broken glass covered in MURSA?
So how can we walk that fine line between keeping our children curious and keeping them safe?
Later I was in Lazy Daze coffee shop. Since it was the Irvington Halloween festival quite a few families circled through while I was saving our seat at the couch and the guys were in line for coffee. Both times the kids walked right up to me and started telling me about how they had gotten candy or something else in baby talk I couldn’t really make out. Both times I talked back to them, helped them count their candy and was generally friendly. They took the risk that I was friendly without hesitation and their parents made the judgement that I was pretty safe to at least talk to them in their presence. I think that is a good plan, if you judge the risk low enough encourage and allow their curiosity and explorative nature.
