#4 - bullet points

Mapping the web passage was a challenging task - making the connections the priority is not something we're prepared to do with a visual way of looking at things - actually almost any way of looking at things, for me at least. we're taught to make bulleted lists (i'm really bad at this) that eliminate all the connecting tissues of language. I have a friend that refuses to use bullet points, and it drives me crazy. Are the lean, space-saving conventions of bulleted lists an anti-deluzian in nature? Or by trusting other minds to read the connections, be they made of logic or otherwise, an overall enriching endeavor by not forcing your exact thoughts on someone? by not having complete specificity, the chance of a comment revealing something about your project you hadn't realized was there is increased, much more so then by pulling people through your exact thoughts using word filler.

#3 - self-sustaining systems

in reading the multiple articles on linux, i was struck by how unique a working situation the linux development was. this actually seems to approach democracy and an ideal working altruistic society would work. the necessary presence of one mediator perhaps has warnings for the attempted application of the system to a generic community... anyway, i found it sad that this was the kind of endeavor i would love to be involved in, community working to get things done, work on it because it's interesting and will help you eventually somehow. the sad part came when the articles mentioned that the reason it was working so well was because only the impassioned=really good=top 5% of hackers were really working on it and the rest of the computer programming community had to be forced into drudging work by a cranky boss. Being able to spread the boring jobs to people who can handle it easily and with a minimum of fuss seems like an ideal strength of the linux work-mode, but to the majority of people that have have no real passion for anything, enduring that bit of boredom for the cause of the passion is impossible and they stay useless in this type of work-society. dealing with the kind of person who is completely willing to let everything fall through the cracks because of any urgent interest is draining and frustrating. this type of person seems to be encouraged by our society of plenty - it's easy to get enough to live on, hard to find a challenge to meaningfully take ahold of your time. um little off subject, ::shrugs::

Question 2 - agents reading

It is sad how often predictions of the past are overturned by actual experience. I felt as if I were reading ancient history when I picked up 'Interface Culture' by Steven Johnson. Maybe not ancient, but definately immature in information. Some things it said were so self-evident to someone in today's technology it was suprising to even see them mentioned. Others were a little far-flung. I definately think that if agent technology was going allow advertisers to bury us in ads for things we couldn't live without, they would have done so already. Last time I checked my spam folder though, the spam is as generic and un-targeted as it was several years ago. No spam gets into my inbox in hotmail OR yahoo, and i'm pretty free with giving those addresses out to any shady site i might be signing up for.
The text-only Google ads that show up on nearly every site now are very unobtrusive and occasionally helpful, or pose as such anyway. They are so on-target usually with the content of the site that it's hard to resent their presence. A little supporting sidebar text is much less obtrusive and directly relevant then gentleman's club and antidepressant billboards seen driving down the highway. Other then that, as a general rule i turn most auto-updates to an 'ask me first' setting and i don't worry about my computer running things and pawning my information behind my back.

Question #1

It is interesting to see how the mind rebels on the premise of the flanerie. It seems to be a barely justified trip (literally) across a city, being 'scientific' about experience, which is fairly inherently not. It seems that a flanerie through cyberspace would be much easier to be scientific about, because although the contents of specific pages change, they do not do so drastically to really cause each trip there to be a significantly different experience. With a flanerie, I feel like the exterior conditions, weather, time of day/sun angle or lack, would lead to the documentation to be very sketchy. When you add in the tendency to take drugs of some sort on your trip, the impressions formed would be about a third formed from the 'permanent' surrounding actually to be documented, one third atmosphere, and the other third formed from the social interactions and mentally altered state. Quite far from any truth or credible opinion.