hyalineskies

In a parallel between an acclaimed novelist and a mad-scientist Internet creator, both leaving unpublished works after their untimely deaths, we see a great disparity of the different traces of their archives left behind. How much culturally valuable content do we lose in an accelerated information age? The answer may be more than we would have ever imagined.

A freak accident leaves my beloved 2004 iBook G4 incapacitated with a bad logic board. Since Apple has told me the wait for a new logic board may be up to a month, I’m forced to move to my backup laptop, a Sony VAIO VGN-FS660W. With a fresh Windows XP install and a full day’s worth of hacking, I’ve gotten Windows back to a usable state — and, still, Windows shows its nasty, aesthetic-lacking teeth.

As faux-vlog lonelygirl15 picked up tons of press for being a smash hit on YouTube, lonelygirl15 was picking up something of its own: a user-created alternate reality game, known originally as “cassieiswatching.” In the world of social media, the rest of us should be watching too: cassieiswatching proves plenty of valuable observations in how social media — as well as the platforms it exists on — are mashed up, acquired, and used.

With the PlayStation 3 going for nearly $2,000.00 on eBay, I’m left trying to figure out what kinds of people pay so much for what is little more than a bigger/better/faster PlayStation 2. Putting the insane consumers aside, though, I’ve learned that something in the economics of this Christmas is just a little skewed: the PS3 is not the real star of the season.

Social media has prevailed in humanising what was once a very mechanical Internet, but it’s no different than the abstraction that’s been happening since the beginnings of computing. Could business actually abstract even further into an entirely human virtual workspace?