A new word for Facebookers and social networkers who cavalierly post embarrassing information about themselves to the web: thinvisibility: Here’s a starting definition: Thinvisibility: n. Being neither completely visible nor completely invisible. Being a tiny, shiny needle in a haystack of information overload. Being invisible to everyone except data aggregators and digital preservationists such as Google, […]
This summer has been a wonderful three months of reading and writing. Currently, I’m reading Alex Wright’s Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, a book about information and information overload, a topic of long interest to me. Wright’s book includes interesting discussions of just how basic information management techniques are to humans and others, including how […]
Is too much of our life wired? Below Reihan Salam and Rev Grossman discuss on bloggingheads.tv the addictive quality of social networking: IMHO, information overload is addictive, and it doesn’t necessarily lead to knowledge or wisdom. I don’t know about others, but the biggest thing that clears my mind is getting away from the computer, […]
Having read about the blown call that cost Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game on the 27th batter, I became interested in the umpire, Jim Joyce. After making a bad first-plate safe call that cost Galarraga a perfect game on what should have been the very last out, Joyce acted with grace, apologizing directly and profusely to Galarraga. As SI notes, Joyce was “crushed.” Galarraga also acted with class, saying “I give a lot of credit to the guy saying, ‘Hey, I need to talk to you because I really say I’m sorry.'” Both of them are professionals with class. After all, it’s when you screw up, or when somebody’s error screws you, that your character really shines (or doesn’t).
Too bad that some of the amateurs on the Web don’t have similar class. Shortly after the bad call, somebody vandalized Joyce’s Wikipedia page to declare he was dead. That’s just sick. Yesterday, I saw that Joyce’s name was a trending Twitter topic, but the results were polluted with Twitter spam.
Such online foolishness illustrates what Andrew Keen derided as the “Cult of the Amateur” in his book by the same name. Keen says:
We — those of us who want to know more about the world, those of us who are the consumers of mainstream culture — are being seduced by the empty promise of the “democratized” media. For the real consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information. One chilling reality in this brave new digital epoch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth.
