Patient Zero of the selfie age: Why JenniCam abandoned her digital life
news.com.au
news.com.au
I think it's like asking an 18th century village dweller about urban life and its implications. Maybe that's not the right analogy. Maybe it's like asking a clan member about national identity or maybe it's like asking a scribe about university life in 2015, with parties and labs and counter culture thrown into the mix. Can you imagine walking by someone and not acknowledging that you just walked by each other? Barely noticing to the point that if you walk by each other tomorrow you won't remember them? What kind of people are these? Walking by someone without acknowledging them certainly is counter to human nature. It's against how people behaved since before people where people. It's counter to behavioral patterns we share with other primates.
What I mean is that all the "laws of nature" that make up the environment for our lives are thrown up in the air and rearranged as the world we live in becomes digital. How public something is, how permanent. Context. Feedback. Norms. Rules. Consequences. Anonymity. Empathy. It all changes.
How do you feel about this? What is your perspective on privacy in the digital world? What do you think of your boss seeing you twitter jokes? really?
How can we expect ourselves to really have a mature, realistic perspective on this? Imagine that no one has died in 500 years. We have trillions of digital and physical copies of ourselves that merge and reduplicate every 7 days. We an colonize worlds by creating copies of them here and copies of us there. We occasionally spend millennia examining fleeting moments of our lives and can experience and re experience every sequence of moments infinitely and uniquely each time. How do you feel about the social implications of this world. Does John Locke still apply? Demosthenes?
Im being purposely cartoonish and over the top (can you tell?). The point I think I'm trying to make is that looking at everything that's changing and where we think we're headed within our lifetimes is tricky to process. It's impossible. We can't have a clear perspective on these issues.
I think that is very much a function of your local culture, not some core "human nature". Here (Sweden) I regularly walk by people without acknowledging them, and that's in the office. Out in public, I would probably be considered mildly strange if I started acknowledging strangers.
If you happened across a stranger without at least thumbing your axe and giving him a good look it would also be very strange. Stranger = Danger. Strangers = Invasion.
The whole concept of people/strangers as a benign part of the background probably originates with cities, or whatever the earliest dense populations were.
What I am trying to say is that we're used to it now and its normal, but before a certain point it would have been extremely alien. The fact that you and some of your fiends can visit Lindisfarne without the locals heading for the hills is the remarkable thing, from a long enough perspective.
IE If we find that living within a family group is how humans lived from pre-sapiens times until recent times, does that "prove" that something is human nature (it's how we evolved to behave), isn't human nature (we don't behave that way now) or is that tangental (it proves nothing)?
For the purposes of the thread, I don't think it matters much if we disagree about a technicality. I just wanted to make an analogy about the future being very alien to inhabitants of the present to the point that the ways it will be different and how we'll feel about that will be hard to conceive. Walking through a group of strangers without looking up from your phone (or iStone, if you're a caveman) would have been as weird as walking through a pack of hyenas. Insane.
If a caveman had tried to imagine how he'd feel about that world, he'd probably imagine feeling terrified all the time. Do you play with everyone's kids or ignore them too. Do you have sex with everyone? What happens if you're eating a sandwich? They wouldn't even know which questions are relevant to imagining how they'd feel.
I'm making the case that self culture (JennicCam, Facebook, JustinTV) is the very start of something which is so alien to us that it's hard to address in a non ridiculous way.
I'd agree it's a cultural thing.
Also, just curious, is there any other kind of podcast besides an internet one?
Maybe it would be distributed via physical dead drops on USB sticks, or pirate wi-fi networks beamed from disposable drones flown by courageous freedom fighters, or maybe it would be distributed via IP over avian carrier: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149
(In all seriousness, my very loose understanding is that in a lot of countries without robust Internet infrastructure, music is often traded directly from phone to phone. It's possible that podcasts or spoken-word messages are traded this way as well...)
You are indeed correct.
https://sahelsounds.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-saharan-ce...
Africa has had a spoken-word radio radio culture for a long time AFAIK.
I love the idea of an "aural mobile tradition" (so to speak I guess). The idea of a content being traded via mobile untethered from a central server. I suppose that's kind of like Bittorrent for mobile?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/31/187374157/episode-...
Jenny is only one of many early online personas (of varying levels of sharing) who's largely gone silent.
As you can see, absolutely nothing has changed.