Ramblings by Colin
Last night when I posted about my outrage over Google taking down my middle finger profile picture I was being a bit facetious. It was a little annoying, sure. But I found it more humorous because it seems to be a silly policy with a lot of gray area that will be hard to enforce (and time shouldn’t be wasted enforcing it). I also didn’t like that Google removed my picture without warning, but I suppose that’s their right per their TOS.
But Rob Beschizza of BoingBoing took my predicament and made what I think is a much better point:
But Google describes Plus as “sharing in real life”. It describes it as an “identity service”. The middle finger, pointed at no-one in particular, is hardly a scandalous gesture; here it triggers a vaguely-defined policy that’s being applied to a service marketed heavily as a public venue for free expression.
Google could be more honest about Plus being no such thing, or it could allow Plus to become what it claims to be. The former seems an odd proposition, given that it’s so huge. But here we are, with the finger-detection squad in fine form. But is the latter really so hard? The present dissonance between representation and reality gives life to a caricature—that Plus is a sterile marketing research zone—which already seems to lurk widely in the imagination.
Google continues to walk this oddly vague line when it comes to Google+. At first it was all about real identity, like Facebook, but then when people complained, they backtracked from that. Now it’s all about “sharing in real life” — but it’s not real life. It’s some sterile representation of real life.
In real life, I give my friends the finger sometimes when they’re taking a picture of me. Childish? Sure. But funny for us too. I also call a few of them “fuckers” sometimes. Again, maybe not the most mature thing in the world, but lighthearted. And real.
If Google wants to create a sterile sharing ground, that’s fine, it’s their service. But don’t paint it as “real life”. It’s not.
December 2011
8 posts
iPhones, iPads, Laptops, Smart TVs, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, all these things were designed to “make our lives easier”, however what they’ve really all done is simply fragment and belittle what little actual human interaction we as a society already has had left. Any resemblance of nuance in the world is replaced with the binary “Like” or “Retweet”.
“Two of your friends like your post”, Facebook tells me. What the hell does that even mean? Do they find it funny? Do they actually ‘like’ it has it were? Or is it simply a statement of of acknowledgement? I have no freaking clue. Before the ‘like’ world in which we all live in today, I could say something and actually get a human response: a chuckle, a smile, a wink, a nod. Today all of these human emotions are boiled down to just one word, ‘Like’.
Some social services, like Path for example see this as a problem, and offer you multiple emotions to respond to a post. You can smile, or wink at a post for example. Although this is the right direction, getting a notification saying “John Doe smiled at your post” is kind of creepy in some respects. Feels a bit like I’m getting stalked.
Furthermore, the current means of communication, although created for speed, are quite a bit slower than those of the analog world. I could send you an email and it could take up to a day for you to respond, whereas if I just called you I could get the response right then and there.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The digital world has brought us many insanely great things that would just be impractical in the analog world. For example, my friend was studying abroad in Argentina, and we communicated largely through Facebook message and Skype. I know about how their time was there, because we stayed in touch throughout the experience. This would be impossible without modern technologies.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I love the analog world. I don’t want it to slip away.
Just contributed to open source for the first time (for something that could actually be used in production)!!
