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Public Face Private Persona

In my article Virtual RelationShaping we discussed how we deal with each other in the real and the virtual.
Over the weekend we revisited some of the arguments in that article in my Fining Sacramento Kings Bad Taste piece where I said this in a comment:

I think when behavior is tamped down in public it gives rise to dirtier and nastier exploitations in private. One could make an argument that the public expression of a distasteful thought needs the public correction of the majority in order for perception and a frame of reference to be constructed around it for a continued socialized series of checks and balances.

When the nasty is hidden and shared only with like-minded people, terrible things happen because the light of reason is never shined upon the dark wonderings. I think we have all been numbed down by too much pressure on the perception of being wrong and wronging the whole of society in public. Making a public mistake should be fine as long as a remedy is offered and if no apology is offered then public shunning is the next appropriate step.

Transparency and evenhandedness in all situations is vital for an ongoing public discourse that may offend, that may be in bad taste, but should never be shut down because it threatens the bottom line or the constant flow of dollars between the entertained and the entertainer.

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Virtual Relationshaping

We have been discussing the idea of living online in Virtual Plantations and we have explored how opportunities can arise from interactions on blogs.

Now I would like to expressly focus on the human interaction that forms our virtual lives. I call this idea: Virtual RelationShaping.

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Virtual Plantations

How many hours do you spend alone online a day and, at the end of the day, do you have anything real you can hold in your hand or is everything you experienced only stored in the core of your virtual existence? When you are online at home or at work what are you doing and in what percentage? Reading? Writing? Watching something? Buying something? Something else? What things do you do online that requires an ongoing payment or subscription?

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Need Plesk MIME Help

I need help getting my Hand Jive .MP4 (.MOV) video files to play on my new Media Temple virtual server:
http://hardcoreasl.com/handjive/
The video at the bottom of that page has played fine on other servers without me needing to do anything. When I asked Media Temple for help today, their response was this:

You will want to install darwin which is available at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streaming/
Please let us know if there’s anything else we can help you with.

That seems like overkill. I don’t need to really stream Quicktime, I just need my server to realize a .MOV file is the same as an .MP4 file so your browser’s Quicktime Plugin will recognize the file type but I cannot figure out how to tell my server to set those MIME types.

Do you have a solution?
If not, do you know someone who might know how to fix this?
I am running Plesk 7.5.3 if that makes a difference.

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Technology Bends Time and Compresses Spaces

I understand the romantic notion of clutching a book to breast — some clutch their laptops with the same passion but one can also embrace electronic revisions of writing in the same way. Scholars need to be vigilant in protecting their process of creation and thought and that means saving revisions and first versions so future generations can track the mind process of those who marked paths first. Imagine our scholar’s website that not only catalogues a C.V. and Bibliography, but also every nuance of every correction made in each published article or book.

Publishing on the web generates an enormous wealth of goodwill because our scholar’s verifiable thought patterns become accessible to anyone with the impetus to make the discovery and the thinking process is no longer limited to those who live within human reach of the scholar’s in-class voice. Learning how to use a computer begs the same curve of learning for those who moved from horse to car: Change or get left behind and it is the job of everyone to make sure equal access to information is a right and not a privilege.

Technology encourages revision and rewriting more than ever and the preservation of the process needs to be honored. I’m sure someone can always print out hardcopy of the early revisions of our scholar’s work for those who prefer breast-clutching.

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Does Porn Rule or Ruin?

In the August 1, 2005 issue of Newsweek, the rise of Porn Podcasting is investigated:

Aug. 1 issue – Podcasting, that baby medium, is suddenly home to a lot of adult content. Introduced to a mainstream audience just last month, the technology — radiolike programming for your iPod — that was once the chaste province of “Geek News Central” and “Knitcast” is now reddening faces that sport those trademark white earbuds. “No matter what the technology is,” says Andrew Leyden, founder of podcastdirectory.com, “sex finds a way to get involved.”

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eBooks Smash Paper

One of the harbingers of how fruitful the continued marriage of technology and research can better serve the future is found in the status of the New York Public Library’s position on electronically borrowing books. One can head off to the NYPL eBooks online library and actually check out books by downloading them to your home computer.

These downloaded books are “time bombed” to expire at the end of three weeks so instead of taking the book back to the library you just let the book expire on your hard drive. There are certainly sticky copyright issues that must continue to be dealt with in the internet “borrow but don’t return” lending scheme for libraries; but for those who understand eBooks are good for authors and publishers and libraries the concern over digital rights borrowing can be resolved in the greater favor of the consumer.

Publishers will rent individual licenses for their books that will expire the same way a parking space expires after you purchase its limited use for a quarter. eBooks, for libraries everywhere, means they can finally sustain a relationship with their patrons beyond the walls of their libraries.

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