Posted on

Take Your Children Offline NOW: Twenty-One Years Later

In July of 2005, I published Take Your Children Offline NOW on this blog, and the comments arrived in two distinct waves. The first wave came from parents who said the article forced them to think, and several of them removed every photograph of their children from their websites within hours of reading it. The second wave came from parents and bloggers who told me, with varying degrees of contempt, that I was hysterical, paranoid, anti-celebration, and ill-positioned to speak on parenting because I was married without children. One commenter wrote that if he lived in fear of someone furtively masturbating to pictures of his kids, he would never get anything done. The post was held up by a few critics as a case study in childless people moralizing at parents.

Continue reading → Take Your Children Offline NOW: Twenty-One Years Later

Posted on

Always Open, Never Empty

The internet abolished closing hours. The new wave is abolishing the pause. Both moves are economic in origin and psychological in effect. Both promise convenience and deliver a different kind of cost. The first cost was paid in time. The second is being paid in attention. How that arithmetic finishes is the open question.

Continue reading → Always Open, Never Empty

Posted on

The Old Fears, Faster

The fears about artificial intelligence are the fears about the internet, rerun at twice the speed. When the public internet arrived in the mid-1990s, four anxieties traveled with it. One concerned human contact, a sense that conversation would erode as it migrated to screens. Another concerned regional culture, a worry that local identity would flatten under a single global signal. A third concerned the limits of knowing, the prospect that anyone, anywhere, could learn anything with no curator to vet the source. The last concerned gatekeeping, the dread that quality would dissolve once newspapers, publishers, and broadcasters lost their grip.

Continue reading → The Old Fears, Faster

Posted on

AI INTJ

I use some form of AI every day! I use it for fun, for images, for music, for research, for creative writing: FOR EVERYTHING! Having that sort of deep, ongoing, conversation with AI can lead one into many forests and discover a plethora of “tapestry” while “delving” into this “journey.” That familiarity with AI can breed contempt — always — or, perhaps, even insight… if only frequently, and on spec. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Bot has the ability to “remember” your previous interactions and here is a conversation I recently had with the “ChatGPT o3-mini-high” Bot from OpenAI.

Continue reading → AI INTJ

Posted on

On Branding, Own the Generic: Why I Became “David Boles” on the Internet

If you spend any time doing business on the internet — “Branding Yourself” — is an important part of the process even if it seems shameful and unseemly and selfish: Enjoy it! It’s what you’ve become by being here!

Continue reading → On Branding, Own the Generic: Why I Became “David Boles” on the Internet

Posted on

The Internet Others and the Art of Never Not Always Responding

Living and working on the internet provides many interesting and resistive conundrums. You want to share information, and learn things, and try to propagate knowledge forward with some semblance of permanency and purpose; but there are always — The Others — also online, who appear to live to thwart any attempt at compulsive fact collecting. Sure, we all know the Comments Troll — but there are other ugly demons that abound, just waiting to leap at you and waste all your time.

Continue reading → The Internet Others and the Art of Never Not Always Responding

Posted on

End of the Copper Line

I am concerned about the abolishment of reliable, mechanical, communication when it comes to “plain old telephone service” — POTS — and the future of voice and data communication.

Hurricane Sandy has shoved forward the end of the copper telephone line.  Big communication companies have decided it is in their best interest to push people onto cellular networks instead of rebuilding what was lost:  Traditional “communication by wireline” that has been a staple of everyday communication in the USA for almost a hundred years.

The changing landscape has Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies itching to rid themselves of the cost of maintaining their vast copper-wire networks and instead offer wireless and fiber-optic lines like FiOS and U-verse, even though the new services often fail during a blackout.

“The vision I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, said last year. Robert W. Quinn Jr., AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory issues, said the death of the old network was inevitable. “We’re scavenging for replacement parts to be able to fix the stuff when it breaks,” he said at an industry conference in Maryland last week. “That’s why it’s going to happen.”

Continue reading → End of the Copper Line

Posted on

When Google Burps, We Swallow

Yesterday, I was checking out the “new and improved” Google Now feature on my iPhone, and when I pulled up the weather card, I was met with this remarkable temperature:  125 degrees in the light rain in Jersey City at 11:18 in the morning.

What?

Huh!

I quickly checked my other favorite weather site — forecast.io — on my iPad, and learned the actual temperature in Jersey City was a balmy, but humid, 75 degrees with scattered rain.  A 50 degree bogus increase in temperature is a really bad result from a company you pay to trust.

It was a little alarming to see how bluntly and boldly Google Now delivered the absolutely wrong — and dangerous! — temperature.  Sure, mistakes happen, but there was no subsequent notification, or even acknowledgement later, that the 125 degree temperature was a hiccough in the Google world — and that should concern us all.

When Google burps, we all involuntarily swallow.

Continue reading → When Google Burps, We Swallow

Posted on

On Creating a Möbius Strip of Internet Event Boundaries

The University of Notre Dame published an interesting study on “Event Boundaries” that cause the everyday each of us to lose track of who we are and what we were planning to do:

We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.

“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

Continue reading → On Creating a Möbius Strip of Internet Event Boundaries