wintertime in BOS.jpg

wintertime in BOS.jpg
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

I'm back in Somerville. It's cold and I hope I'm not getting sick. Still digesting the trip and will definitely post about it later (in length). Till then...

mom is prepared!

mom is prepared!
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

Going to Haiti for the holiday to shoot vid for Longchamp Charities. Mom has made me a non-perishable care pack with water, coffee, and a spam substitute called Armour Treet. RAD.

Maeghan came to town

Maeghan came to town
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

Maegh came to visit totally out of the blue to crash a swanky party at some artsy hedge-funder's loft. I've missed her so much. She keeps me dreaming.

Drunkorexia?

Defined as "the practice of replacing meals with booze" (thx Buzzfeed).

This is funny only because they don't acknowledge the one inevitable pitfall: when you drink a lot and don't eat, you ultimately get to the point where you'll eat ANYTHING the pub is selling (like 2 orders of buffalo wings) or stumble out to get burger king afterwards, harking down a whopper in the cab on the way home, getting ketchup all over yourself. It's not pretty.

OMG: The Totally Wired panel at the Brattle yesterday

Yesterday evening, I went to go see a panel hosted by the MacArthur Foundation and MIT Press, heralding their new 6-book volume laying the foundation for that shiny new pedagogy: Media Literacies. Participating in the panel were king of kings, Henry Jenkins of MIT's formidable Comparative Media Studies Program, Howard Gardner, the man who taught our generation's teachers to teach (and held his own on the topic pretty well despite being a self-professed luddite), and Katie Salen, who is not only a game designer, educator, and media literacy advocate, but one of those strange and beautiful creatures born as the seamless fusion of all three. Suffice to say, it was a very stimulating discussion, and I'm very excited that I was there for the "ceremony" where media literacy as an official educational discourse had finally "come out" to the rest of academia.

Henry started out by making an interesting correlation: he brought up the (somewhat cliché) image of the "good parent" who takes his/her kids out to art museums, fosters dinnertime conversation, etc., and compared that to the image of this century's "good teacher". We understand; the deeper an investment one makes in stimulating a child, the better formed that child will ultimately be.

When Jenkins made that leap, I immediately thought of that chapter in Stephen D. Hewitt's Freakonomics about the formula for "good parenting". The question was raised: if you bring your child to the art museum on a regular basis, will they be more successful than a child who was never taken? Ultimately, the Freakonomists concluded that a "good parent" doesn't get points for taking the kid to the art museum; a "good parent" is one whose natural notion of parenting is built around including their children in activities that they can enjoy as a family, that will stimulate the child to take part in family discussion, and that ultimately socializes the child in the world around him/her. I believe the quote is: "it isn't what the parent does, it's who the parent is" that makes the difference.

Similarly, you can't give a teacher some new software to teach, or a new device, or a Facebook group, and expect them to make a miracle out of it. A "good teacher" will use their unique ability to see possibilities in the contemporary, insanely digitized world, and use those in a way that will bolster a positive classroom environment. The panel did seem to do a good job of making this distinction. However, there's always the danger that this notion of greater investment could translate directly into "how about I make a game out of MySpace?" or something. (I don't want to do the whole night the disservice of glossing over the key issue; don't get me wrong, it was more nuanced than that. But, there's always that risk.) I can only hope their audience "got it". Some of the questions from the audience made me doubt. ("Have you seen these Webkinz your grandchildren are playing with?")

Sitting there, I wondered if twelve years ago these same people would have been talking about how Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is going to bridge the achievement gap. Or if, twenty-five years ago, they would have been singing the praises of Sesame Street. In any case, it boils down to an attempt by an older generation to intercept and rework the younger generation's attachments and associations with media. Older discourse has always been too quick to call this kind of enterprise "the Answer", and it's always misleading because there are some places adults cannot go, some spheres of play that can never be controlled, harnessed, or emulated. However, I have faith that the panelists are very much invested in this discourse, and will drive it in the direction it needs to go.

Mobile Post.

Post.
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

MIT's conference on learning and new media. I am the youngest person here. There are lots of respectable women here who look like Laura Dern in Jurassic Park.

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1208072132.jpg
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

I got new sneaks for x-mas!

help me.jpg

help me.jpg
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

Company holiday party. Oh noes.

o noes its teh singularity

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Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

o noes its teh singularity

More on Facebook. Okay, I'm done now. It's out of my system.

Noah opted not to respond to Tuesday's anti-Facebook rant, but decided to comment in person, saying that it was unfair/naive of me to expect Facebook not to try to make money. Obviously, I know that people (programmers in particular) don't do things without expecting other things in return. So yeah, money is definitely the goal for Facebook developers, and they're entitled to it. However, what Facebook is doing is, simply, destroying the vibe that their community was founded upon. Once that's destroyed, why would you want to continue to hang out there?

From the perspective of a consumer, and not a FB user, I don't believe that the method Zuckerberg et cie. have developed is a bad one at all. They've successfully given a readable identity to a previously anonymous consumer. It will most definitely revolutionize the way advertisers target us, and put the products we want easily within our grasp. However, the social networking scene is NOT where that belongs. Aggregated consumer data juxtaposed with individual profiles on a social networking site has the look and, most importantly, the feel of living in an Orwellian nightmare. They should have known better.

As much as I was trying to cast my grievances in a humorous light the other day, I am seriously disappointed in FB for this new set of changes they've implemented over the past few months. We, the participants, are what makes that scene, not Blockbuster's ad revenues. And sure, there's always space for site developers to reign in some cash from corporate sponsors, but they have to find a model that does not intrude in the unique experience that site provides. Facebook has not done that.

And you know what? As much as I prefer Facebook's crisp, clean, aesthetic (or did), it's MySpace that actually succeeds at being a social networking platform that maintains its particular vibe while making plenty of money in ad revenue. MySpace, ugly as it is, never forgot that it was a community first, and as it expanded in scope, it did it in ways that were consistent with its user base and original goal. MySpace became a forum: for independent music, for political debate, for camwhores seeking the limelight, etc. And although some of the fruits were deplorable (Tila Tequila?!), they were lucrative, and still showed respect for the community.

And lo, the Beacon Ad campaign has been abandoned! Hooray!

An odd wikipedia entry

I was wikipedia'ing William Jennings Bryan this morning, and caught a funny defacement that will most likely be corrected soon.



Oops.

UPDATE Order has been restored, two hours later.

Facebook is unruly

Unruly like a child raised by wolves in the wild. I feel like a total Ted Kaczynski whenever I log on: the ads for stuff I don't think I'd ever want creeping up in my Mini Feed, the constant threat that even the most embarrassing of my personal purchases are going to be plastered all over my friends', family's, and mere acquaintances' News Feeds by those newfangled "Beacon Ads" (they couldn't have chosen a more draconian name), the ubiquitous application-du-jour that 12 of my friends have "invited" me to try out, hastily written by some third-rate CS student just hoping to have something, anything, linked to his name on the web, so he can pad his stupid resume enough to get in the door at some equally third-rate over-valuated techno-firm with its eye only on getting bought out for some crazy amount of money by some even-more third-rate VC firm. I was a kid in the late 90's, and I didn't really understand how the bubble burst back then, but it's oh-so-obvious now... Anyway, here's an interesting article by Alex Iskold about why my ranting is totally justified.

P.S. The Developer Application? It "lets you manage the applications you build using Facebook Platform. Edit your application settings, submit your application to the directory, and connect with other developers." It is either a joke or... I don't know. Too much. My head burns.



My friend Vicki Simon is currently tooling with the app-making app, working on what she likes to call "Facebook Suicide". Vicki, who's as fed up with FB as I am, says:

"its gonna allow you to kill yourself on facebook and then send a suicide note to all yo [sic] friends".

Once everyone on FB has committed "suicide," (and why not? the appeal is obvious) an angry email will be sent to Mark Zuckerberg telling him how much he sucks.

More Screenshots

Got a skype call from Sean, one of my best friends who has, like the majority of them, moved to China.

In this sequence, Sean is explaining the 5 greatest Roman emperors.