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Our Re-Future: Limitless Lifecasting and Shiftless Re-Winding

In the comments stream for — Cracking the Fiery Core: We Are Not What We Have — I said this, that has, ever since, had me thinking about the unfolding of such future events:

I think the next wave push is going to be “Limitless Lifecasting” — where you just stream video of your life all day and all night long. You’re online 24 hours a day. Google Glass will be the first step into the bloody morass. Re-winding will be the new Re-tweeting and Re-blogging.

With the revelation this week that Google Glass, Part II is set to debut soon — along with the news that current Glass users now able to invite three of their most gullible friends to shell out $1,500.00USD to share in the pioneer experience of getting punched in the face — our new, shiftless “re-” future is officially embedded among us.

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Cracking the Fiery Core: We are Not What We Have

How many of us live to be defined by our possessions?  How many of us find value only in what we have achieved and won and coveted?  I wrote about this nagging issue of human governance on November 22, 2006 — “Worthy of History: Only Expensive Things Survive” —

The perversion of the historical accuracy of how our ancestors lived, and how we currently live, is created by preserving only expensive possessions — tokens, icons, valuables – and in the purposeful construction of indestructible architectural monuments used by the privileged few.

History is skewed by this preservation technique because it only pretends to tell future generations how people actually lived. When we visit museums we are only seeing what the powerful majority of the culture of that time deemed important enough to save and pass down.

We only get to know what they thought was worth saving and inevitably those things are the expensive, the pretty, the unique and the tokens of the wealthy. Even pioneer and Native American museum dioramas are idealized with hardy items and the most beautiful things. The ordinary is forsaken for the power of the inherent value in the preservation of the perceived best.

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Have You Wasted Your #Hashtag?

I have never been a fan of Twitter or Facebook or the other social nooses that now pass for content creation, and I’m glad when I read — every so often — that I am not alone in my disdain for the lonesomeness of a hooligan world gone viral:

Twitter

It’s toast. Over. Done. History. Soon to be as behind the curve as Facebook, someday completely forgotten like Friendster.

Huh?

It’s the cacophony.

You see there are too many people on the service. As a result, very few are heard. It’s happened over the past six months, tweeting is like a stone in a waterfall, or more accurately, pissing in the wind. In other words, if you tweet and nobody reads it have you wasted your time?

Today Rick Warren tweeted something I wrote. He’s got in excess of a million followers. The fact that I can reach him stuns me. But despite his only tweeting twice since then, the retweets have not gone nuclear. Oh, there are plenty, a double digit number, nineteen to be exact, but if it had been six months ago, I’d be a hero at the Saddleback Church.

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The New York Times Confirms Our Boles Blogs Comments Policy

Here at Boles Blogs, we have always had a strict and unbending Comments Policy — that you had to use your real name, you could not insult other commenters or authors, and absolutely no curse words allowed — among many other rules.

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Please LIKE the new Boles Blogs page on Facebook!

As the man I am, I have over 5,000 friends on Facebook.  As the blog I want us to be, we currently have seven “Like” friends on the new Facebook page for this new old Boles Blog that I created last night.  Oh, the good old wild days when I could blink and I’d have too many friends to count and Facebook would warn me to be less popular:

Getting to 5,000 Facebook friends was a fascinating experience. It was easier to move from 2,500 friends to 5,000 than it was to go from zero to 2,500. I thought I’d hit that 5,000 friends limit in June, but it took to the end of August to get there.

Today, I am asking you to help build up Boles Blogs on Facebook by clicking the link below to “Like” us now and forevermore:

http://Facebook.com/BolesBlogs

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The Dramatic Arc of a Manhattan Murder

Now that we know the shootings last week in Manhattan near the Empire State Building were a curious mix of both murder and bystander-gone-wrong, I’d like to take a moment to deconstruct the dramatic unfolding of events that happened that morning over a 2.5 hour arc to demonstrate how the social news spread first, as a terrorist attack on the Empire State Building, and ultimately became the truth of a revelatory revenge murder.

Continue reading → The Dramatic Arc of a Manhattan Murder