Stack is a brilliant sounding thing - a site/service that curates magazines for you. They sell all sorts of interesting and obscure independent titles and you can sign up for a subscription where they'll send you a title every month. This is the sort of media curation all the pundits were predicting yonks ago but which only seems to be starting to emerge now. Lovely stuff. And it'll make a good Christmas gift for that hard-to-buy-for Art Director in your life.
I'm going to miss Woolies. There was always one by the seaside. And you could always get dry socks if your child ran into the sea without warning. And you could get mugs there. And those things you attach to your keys to help you not lose them. And toys. And sweets. And kettles.
And even if someone buys them it won't be the same. Because they'll bring in missions and purpose and focus and rigour and we'll be stuck with the bland results of the pursuit of excellence. There'll be no room for the shambolic, miscellaneous and messy, for employees who are earning a living, not living the dream. I'm as guilty as the next person in moaning about queues and lack of stock and all the stuff that ruins shopping, but there should be room for something unkempt and rubbish in our lives too. I know that's not much of a selling point, but I'm going to miss Woolies.
I've been enjoying the flurry of discussion about Asymmetrical Follow sparked by this post from James Governor. I'm not really qualified to debate the ideas involved though it did make me suspect that every tool, even/especially those designed for intimacy will at some point be used for broadcast. And that every tool even/especially those designed for broadcast will at some point be used for intimacy.
But JP Rangaswami's splendid addition to the conversation brought politeness into the mix and that reminded me of Kate Fox's Watching The English and ideas of negative and positive politeness.
As I remember it, in a Positive Politeness culture (such as North America) your primary social responsibility is warmth and openness - making sure the other guy is OK/good. Whereas in a Negative Politeness culture (such as the UK or Japan) your primary social responsibility is to respect the other guy's privacy - not to intrude. Thus the ideal newspaper buying experience in Portland, Oregon involves a ten-minute conversation and the ideal newspaper buying experience in London, England involves no words and, ideally, no eye contact. (I speak from positive experience in both places.)
There's a more informed discussion of this idea here (the perspective of a Briton in America) and there's a Wikipedia entry on Politeness Theory here.
Now obviously these are sweeping generalisations and I'm sure proper Anthropologists, Sociologists and Readers In Rudeness would shudder at my crass assumptions but they seemed true enough to me to be useful when negotiating a trans-Atlantic life for a few years.
So it seems like it might be useful to think about this stuff when thinking about Social Networks too. Because not only are we trying to work out what's polite on IM versus Twitter but we're doing it with a bunch of people who have different assumptions about what's polite in the real world. And for all of our worldliness and globalism, miscommunication, mistakes, sleights and unintentional rudenesses happen every day and every time different cultures meet. And don't get me started on the Finns.
So, when we wonder whether silence is acceptable on IM, or whether asymmetrical follow is joyous or vulgar, it's as well to remember that there's no global consensus on these things in ancient channels like regular conversation. And that until the UN Working Group on International Loveliness reports there probably won't be. In everyday practise most people I know seem to have settled on a sort of mid-Atlantic compromise with the frequent use of no-longer-really-ironic Yays! And internet slang works to paper over some of these cracks by creating another culture/place you can be from. But as these social technologies become more evenly distributed around the world, I suspect frequent use of LOL won't (dread word) 'scale' to the planet. And I can't think what a global equivalent of 'mid-Atlantic' might be, a Lagrange point maybe.
Or something. Anyway. Sorry. (Negative politeness)
(PS - which has just made me realise. If you were going to be create a killer social application in the UK, the Social Object you'd build it around would be The Apology. Anyway. Again. Sorry.)
You hear a lot of talk about digital natives and how their generational swamping of everything will change the world. I don't really buy that. I don't buy many generational generalisations at all. But if we accept the general generational generalisation premise, then I think its time to start cherishing the skills and attitudes of analogue natives.
I was recently slightly involved in a sort of art project done by some alpha digital natives that involved sending a real physical object to people. It was a nice idea. But you could tell they hadn't given enough thought to the problems of analogue friction. My participation in this nice little idea required two specific trips to the post office and about 40 minutes of waiting around in queues. Which is too much for a nice little idea. A digital version of this idea would have required about 3 minutes of commitment while not going anywhere. And that would have been fine.
Of course, part of the charm of this thing is that it was physical/analogue/real - but I think an analogue native would have recognised that they'd have needed to work much harder to remove the friction, or make it much more than a nice little idea.
So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it's hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That's enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as 'digital natives' get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills.
Or something. Anyway.
I've had a few anxious emails from would be modellers, wondering where their Lyddle End buildings are. Suffice to say it's not you it's me. And it's not Royal Mail. Demand for properties has bucked the general down turn and it's proving difficult to keep up. (Partly because I'm only buying houses in sets of ten or so, in a feeble attempt to hide how much I'm spending from myself, and Anne.) If you've asked for one, please be patient, or if you'd like to pop out and get your own, let me know and I'll paypal you the money. This would be especially convenient if you're outside the UK where it's proving difficult to find online suppliers. Still, onwards. Or something.
I'm a big fan of ebooks. I've had a Rocket ebook. A Franklin eBookMan. Still got them somewhere. And I've read books on my palm pilot, my clie, my phone and my psion and newton (I think, but I might be imagining the last two.)
Apart from all the usual reasons for liking them I have particular requirements of ebooks. I love to fall asleep reading, I've always loved that thing of reading until your eyes are closing on their own and the book falls from your hand and you fall straight asleep with no time for left worring about tomorrow. Unfortunately my eyesight is now so bad that I have to have contact lenses, glasses aren't powerful enough. Which means that as soon as I get to that state I have to wake up enough to remove my lenses, which is a palaver, and then I'm awake again and I'm staring at the ceiling. Curses.
So ebook back-lighting and the option to make the type HUGE are perfect for me. But things like the Kindle and the Sony Reader aren't because they've got no back lighting. And they're pricey.
And then along comes Stanza for the ipod/iphone. It's lovely. Quick, free and simple and it's easy to download stuff. The type goes big, the lighting works.
But then you discover you can't turn the rotation off. So when you're lying down, the text is oriented the wrong way. It seems I'm not alone in wanting to be able to do this. It's not a big thing, and you can make it work if you're very slow and careful and don't jog the accelerometer, or whatever it is. But it's a shame. And it's another little example of the way the ipod/iphone is such an attention-demanding device. It doesn't orient to you, it orients to itself. Ah well.
UPDATE/CORRECTION
Well, it turns out Stanza's even better than I thought. You can stop book rotation from within the Stanza settings. You just can't do it for your ipod overall. Thanks to Tom for that.
