Tag: lifestyle

One way to make sense of the change in the way we …

One way to make sense of the change in the way we live online is to consider how the language we use to talk about our digital selves has evolved. Take terms like cybercitizen and netizen, which each play on the metaphor that the Internet is a structured city or community. According to Google Ngrams, these words found their greatest use in the heydey of Geocities and have been in decline ever since. This happened as we began clicking friend buttons instead of writing in the guestbooks of neighborly strangers. It happened as we traded in our HTML editors for the sleek blue layouts and pre-set photo sizes of Facebook. In other words, we stopped being frontiersmen and started being consumers, conceding the role of maker in our Wild West to corporations. And build they did.

In short, we gave up our netizenship.

The death and life of great Internet cities

What’s the dark side of Silicon Valley?

I’ve been keeping an eye on this Quora question for a while now.  Indeed, we mostly hear about all the greatness of the Silicon Valley, but there are much be a few downsides to living and working there.  What are they?  There are many great answers in the thread.  Some are more insightful than others.  One particular bit that I liked is this one:

Sh!tty technology. This one might surprise people. Aren’t we in the center of technology? Well, here’s the truth. 95 percent of these so-called startups are marketing experiments that (a) don’t need great technology and (b) have to execute fast, which means they pile on the technical debt.

Paris syndrome

BBC reports:

A dozen or so Japanese tourists a year have to be repatriated from the French capital, after falling prey to what’s become known as “Paris syndrome”.

That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations.

Oh, really?  These people should steer clear of Russian then.  If they need psychiatric help after Paris, they will probably just drop dead on the streets of Chelyabinsk…

“But don’t you find it boring to wear only two col…

“But don’t you find it boring to wear only two colors?”

“Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don’t want to waste it thinking about clothing,” Malcolm said. “I don’t want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports.”

Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton