Category Archives: The Interwebs

Zuckerberg

What hath Mark Zuckerberg wrought? Only a few years ago, his Web site’s purpose was to help college students see who was hot. Now it’s the primary way for adopted children to announce their existence to unknowing relatives; for bored, married, middle-aged people to start affairs with their high-school classmates; and now for elderly parents to monitor their offspring’s every “like.”

—Dear Prudence

Shared our lives online

At the end of 2006 I met my best friend. We met online. I didn’t know she was my best friend then. I just knew she was cool and had great taste in room porn. It didn’t take me long to find out that she was warm and kind and funny and fierce and loyal and smart and feisty and strong and loving … with great taste in room porn. She was always there for me through thick and thin and for both of us there were thick and thin times. Before too long she was a part of my life, a very special part. Kim and I have never met. We haven’t even spoken on the phone. We have shared our lives online and today I wish I could actually run up to her, throw my arms around her and wish her all the happiness in the world.

—Jo Walker

The edges of the work

[T]here is a great deal of personal narrative on the Web – some of which carries over to the print world as memoirs, some of which doesn’t. I think the online work is marginally more interesting: because there it’s unclear where the edges of the work are. The reader can pull at it; writing can stretch across time and space. Granted, most of isn’t very interesting. But it does seem like we are moving into a celebrity culture, where readers tend to follow personalities rather than their writing. Maybe ten years ago Momus said that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people,” and I think the way the web works now does tend to encourage that.

—Dan Visel

Vacuum of Enthusiasm

[The acid of the Fug Girls is] what I want from my design blogs (among other things), but I can’t find it. I feel trapped in the vacuum of enthusiasm.

It is nice to be part of a supportive community, especially in a downturn. And there is a lot of beautiful work out there. But the economics and tempo of blogging mean that most design sites present us with pictures of up to ten beautiful things per day. The text is often just a tweaked press release. I am not sure what I am supposed to do with this, beyond a second’s admiration. If I happened to be looking for wallpaper, or tea towels, or a new poster, I might click through to buy, but most of it just passes unprocessed before my eyes.

—Alexandra Lange

A surprising e-mail conversation

Two weeks ago, I saw a review on our Weddings page of a book called “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” (HarperCollins). Without much thought, I blurted out in a tweet that it sounded pretty stupid to me. But that started a surprising e-mail conversation with one of the authors, Christopher Ryan. It’s interesting not only for what Mr. Ryan says, but as an example of the way patient authors can profitably engage even caustic critics[.]

—Ron Charles

Open and Connected

[T]he online world outside of Facebook is already a very open and connected place, thank you very much. Densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets are all visible to anyone and everyone. Instead of contributing to this interconnected, open Web world, the growing popularity of Facebook is draining it of attention, energy and posts that are in public view.

Every link found on the open Web, inviting a user to click and go somewhere else, is in essence a recommendation from the person who authored the page, posted it or broadcast it in a Tweet. It says, “I’ve taken the trouble to insert this link because I believe it will be worth your while to take a look.”

—Randall Stross

Like arguing that you shouldn’t use online banking

So … we should never share anything with a portion of the world that we wouldn’t be willing to share with EVERYONE ELSE? The thing is, Facebook persuaded millions of people to share stuff about themselves under the guise of privacy. If Facebook hadn’t promised its users privacy, many of those people wouldn’t be posting pictures and updates in the first place. This is like arguing that you shouldn’t use online banking, even if your bank guarantees security, because they could take that security away at any time, and that would be your problem for willingly posting account information on the Internet. Or arguing that even though your email account is supposed to be secure and encrypted, Google or Yahoo could decide at any time that your email archives should be public, and you’d be shit out of luck—you shouldn’t have been sending all those private emails over the Web. The Web is inherently insecure!

—Elisa Gabbert

This.