While Bird

'While Bird' is an anagram of 'Whil Bride' - the internet pseudonym of William McBride.| A While Bird is winged, and seemingly weightless, but, instead of soaring to limitless heights, it will dance and flit about just at the level of the treetops, looking down, checking back, bearing a quiet, melancholy patience. | This is my favourite website, and it changes according to my tastes.| These days you are likely to find here: Proust quotes, AU and US politicking notes, Burt Bacharach Feel Goods and the odd piece of patented Proesy. Other interests include: the ways in which theinternetchangeslives, quotes about hard work, and, of course, Sex and the Dead. Get in touch: will.bride[at]gmail.com
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Posts tagged theinternetchangeslives
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Google Alphabet

A is for Amazon.com

B is for Best Buy

C is for craigslist

D is for Dictionary.com

E is for eBay

F is for Facebook

G is for Google

H is for Hotmail

I is for Internal Revenue Service

J is for JetBlue

K is for Kohl’s Department Stores

L is for Lowe’s Home Improvement

M is for MapQuest

N is for Netflix

O is for Orbitz Travel

P is for Pandora Radio

Q is for Famous Quotes at BrainyQuote

R is for Redbox

S is for Southwest Airlines

T is for Target.com

U is for USPS - The United States Postal Service (U.S. Postal Service)

V is for Verizon Wireless

W is for Will Smith

X is for Xbox 360

Y is for YouTube

Z is for Zillow

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Instant

At my work in a fairly large private media business all of the people who work in the same position as I do use Google.com at an extremely high frequency. We use the website to check the spelling of proper nouns, usually places, companies or people’s names (politicians, business spokespeople, police officers, criminals, victims of crime and their family members and legal representatives, experts, social researchers or celebrities). Due to the expectation we complete our tasks in a very short and prescribed time frame we are each of us constantly clattering away at Google.com, making literally many hundreds of searches in a working day.

Some months ago, I noticed a discreet link to Google Instant had appeared just below the Google search box, inviting me to a slightly different version of the search engine. Some time after that, I noticed that on the browser on my work computer Google.com would now automatically load Google Instant, but offer, by way of a discreet link just below the search box, the opportunity to “Turn off Google Instant.” Now, when I load Google.com it is also Google Instant—they are now one and the same—and there is no longer any link to turn off the ‘instant’ aspect.

Insistent

Meanwhile, the computers at my work are all relatively quite old and slow, and the technological requirements of the Google Chrome browser means it often wildly outpaces the computers’ capabilities. The frenetic zeal of Google Instant, sweeping the entire Internet in an instant, will frequently leave my computer, which has dust and old crumbs caked in the crevices of its keyboard, wheezing and exhausted. On these occasions I may be typing out my proper noun, but only two or three letters will make it through to Google’s search box before the computer freezes, and yet Google Instant will industriously return a result anyway: Werribee’s ‘Wer’ becomes ‘Werner Herzog’; Deputy Police Commissioner Ken Lay’s ‘Dep’ becomes ‘Major depression’; Victoria Police’s ‘Vic’ becomes ‘Victoria’s Secret’; etc.

Name book

On Google, I’ve seen there have emerged very clear celebrity monopolies on given names. Type in any given name into Google Instant, and pages and pages of results will be returned for just one celebrity: after an instant, ‘kylie’ returns pop singer Kylie Minogue, ‘rebecca’ returns pop singer Rebecca Black, ‘chris’ returns pop singer Chris Brown, my own name, ‘will,’ returns movie star Will Smith. 

gay

Lastly, when searching Google for the names of certain male public figures, like some lower-profile sports stars, news readers, and both lesser- and well-known entertainers, the second or third search suggestion alongside their full name is very, very often ‘gay’: ‘sam gilbert gay’; ‘joe o’brien abc gay’; ‘george clooney gay’; ‘vin diesel is he gay’; etc, indicating speculation about the possible homosexuality of male public figures is a significant preoccupation of people using Google.com.

…

Methodology

The above list was composed by typing just the single letter into the Google Instant search engine, and then waiting an instant for the top result. To conduct the search, I signed out of my Gmail account (I use Gmail), cleared my browser of all that I could see could be cleared (‘history,’ ‘cache’), and went to Google.com, instead of Google.com.au (reasoning universality, though finding America). I believe Google’s results reflect the popularity of searches made, and so these results reflect the popular enquiries of the world (America), but of course they also shape them.

Data

Of the 26 listings above, 15 (ABEJKLMNOPRSTVX) are all explicitly commercial enterprises, selling goods or services as their primary focus. Of these, six (ABEKLT) offer what I’ll call ‘conventional retail,’ selling a broad range of general household goods, like clothes and electrical appliances. While the remaining nine offer more specialised services, including four entertainment companies (NPRX), three travel companies (JOS), one maps company (M) and one Internet and telecommunications company (V).

Eight of the remaining 11 (CDFGHQYZ) are also profitable commercial enterprises, largely making their money, I think, through advertising revenue. Of the remaining three, two are government services (IU), and and there is only one individual out of the 26 (W), though it could be argued Will Smith is also a profitable commercial enterprise.

Of the 26, I’d put 11 in a category of ‘Internet-specific,’ i.e. organisations that did not pre-date, and came about in response to the Internet, and which depend on the Internet for their existence: ACEFGHNOPYZ. Of these, I believe seven could be considered Internet ‘pioneers’ (ACEFGHY), of which four (CFGH) could be considered administrative services, two (AE) facilitators of commerce and one (Y) an entertainment medium (though F, and to a lesser extent G and H, could certainly also make the claim to entertainment, or at least pass-time). Two of the four non-pioneer Internet-specific services (NP) would also be classed as entertainment, and the other two (OZ) as industry-specific administrative services.

Eleven (BIJKLRSTUV) either clearly pre-date the Internet, or theoretically do not depend intrinsically upon/are not based exclusively on the Internet for their existence (JR), or profit very particularly from the Internet, and use its technologies, but pre-date it in earlier forms (VM). A category for these could be called IRL (In Real Life).

The remaining four are a little less certain. One is a computer game medium (X) which can be seen to exist separate from the Internet as experienced in a web browser, but is obviously a heavily digitally-grounded pursuit. One is a movie star (W). And two (DQ) are the only two generic terms, describing language-based reference tools, which have, nonetheless, under Google Instant, also become commercialised, presumably trade-marked, presumably highly profitable businesses.

In a name

Of the websites’s names, 13 are neologisms: CEFHJMNORVXYZ, of which eight (CEFHJMRY) are basic portmanteau or compound words whose implied meanings are immediately apprehensible, and the remaining five (NOVXZ) consist of made-up or intentionally misspelt words, which are usually nonetheless reasonably transparent portmanteau words, for example: ‘Zillow,’ the real estate data company’s own website explains, is a portmanteau of “zillions of data points for homes accessible to everyone,” and ‘pillow’ since a home “is where you lay your head to rest at night.”

Of those names that are not neologisms, three (KLW) are family names, either the surnames of company founders (KL), or the full name of the only individual on the list, Will Smith. The two US Government services are bureaucratic titles more commonly known by their acronyms (IU). Five (BDQST) are simple, non-proper nouns, used to short, sharp effect as brand names (BT), or adhering to the prior, literal meaning (DQ, and there is something literal about S). The remaining three (AGP) are re- or misappropriated terms, from the world of science (G), the natural world (A), or mythology (P, and possibly A).

Google/googol

The brand name of Google is actually an alteration of the word googol, which describes the very large number of a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name googol was apparently coined in 1938 by a 9-year-old named Milton Sirotta who was the nephew of an American mathematician named Edward Kasner.

On Wikipedia (which it seems is less popular as a stand alone search term on Google than Will Smith), a googol is described as having “no particular significance in mathematics, but is useful when comparing with other very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetically possible chess moves.” Kasner, Wikipedia says, used googol “to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity….”

A googolplex is an even more preposterously large number, and on its Wikipedia page there is a number of amusing demonstrations of just how large it is. Apparently the same 9-year-old nephew came up with the term googolplex to describe a number that was a “one followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.” Popular astronomer Carl Sagan is said to have estimated that writing a googolplex (which is formally 10 to the power of googol) in numerals would be physically impossible, “since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides.” Another example explains that the time it would take a human to write out a googolplex by hand would be many, many times the age of universe.

Google, Inc. have named their corporate headquarters Googleplex. (It is located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, United States, near San Jose.) 

The difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity

Though Google will never know me completely, it does know an awful lot about my search habits, which would indicate to some extent my interests, the nature of my day job, the gaps and uncertainties in my knowledge, my passing health concerns, and also some of my insecurities, fixations, longings and desires. Like a ‘pinpression’ board, or a well-worn pair of shoes, or my bedroom when I am not in it, somewhere within the immensity of Google is a very detailed outline of me, but I realise the same also has to be true for millions and possibly billions of other people.

“ However, with this crisis also come opportunity: the field for imagining new types of society made possible in the last five years is wide open as never before. As William Burroughs once opined on camera: “Every particle of the universe contains the entire universe”. For Burroughs, cutting up fragments of media at any time still opens up new corridors of possibility. ”

From the foreword to Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back, by David Cox.

“ The public relations industry has managed to virtually hijack the entire Internet via so called “social” media that offer “free” services in exchange for amazingly brazen access to personal information, ideas and creative output on the part of the population. The success and ubiquity of this online system for stripping people of ideas and innermost thoughts on a daily, hourly and minute-by-minute basis demonstrates the personal influence that powerful “players” like Google/Facebook/Youtube/Twitter/iTunes etc have on those all too willing to give ideas and secrets up for an ersatz immitation of a meaningful social life. ”

From the foreword to Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back, by David Cox.

“A national Harris poll this spring found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is in fact a Muslim (and, for good measure, 38 percent believe he is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,” and 24 percent believe that Obama actually “may be the anti-Christ”). Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says. Today, no single media figure or outlet has that power to end debate, and in pursuit of “objectivity,” most honest news outlets draw the line at saying flatly that something or other is untrue, even when it plainly is. At least one news organization—Fox News—is waging a fiercely partisan war against the administration. When Obama flew to Prague this spring to sign the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, continuing a process put in place by Ronald Reagan, the Fox News midday anchor, Megyn Kelly, took note of the trip as she cut to a commercial break, then added, “Now critics are asking, Will the new deal leave the U.S. defenseless until it’s too late?” Kelly’s face disappeared from the screen and was replaced by grainy black-and-white footage of an exploding nuclear bomb.” From Vanity Fair’s “Washington, We Have a Problem.” Click through for a depressing read. [By Todd Purdum•Illustration by Edward Sorel]

“A national Harris poll this spring found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is in fact a Muslim (and, for good measure, 38 percent believe he is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,” and 24 percent believe that Obama actually “may be the anti-Christ”). Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: “Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media,” she says. Today, no single media figure or outlet has that power to end debate, and in pursuit of “objectivity,” most honest news outlets draw the line at saying flatly that something or other is untrue, even when it plainly is. At least one news organization—Fox News—is waging a fiercely partisan war against the administration. When Obama flew to Prague this spring to sign the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, continuing a process put in place by Ronald Reagan, the Fox News midday anchor, Megyn Kelly, took note of the trip as she cut to a commercial break, then added, “Now critics are asking, Will the new deal leave the U.S. defenseless until it’s too late?” Kelly’s face disappeared from the screen and was replaced by grainy black-and-white footage of an exploding nuclear bomb.”

From Vanity Fair’s “Washington, We Have a Problem.” Click through for a depressing read.

[By Todd Purdum•Illustration by Edward Sorel]

“ We have to acknowledge at once in seeking a meaning involving the complex concerns of the world that the philosophic, the aesthetic, and the mechanical are likely to stem in their development from the same root. One may be much in advance of the other in its discoveries, but in the end a great equalizing process is involved so that the discovery of the advance in the structure of the poetic line is equated by an advance in the conception of physical facts all along the line. Man has no choice in these matters; the only question is, will he recognize the changes that are taking place in time to make the proper use of them? And when time itself is conceived of as relative, no matter how abstruse that may sound, the constructions, the right constructions, cannot be accepted with a similar interpretation. It may take time to bring this about, but when a basic change has occurred in our underlying concern it brooks no interference in the way it will work itself out. ”

William Carlos Williams in his introduction to Walt Whitmans’ Leaves of Grass (the ‘deathbed’ edition).

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By screen culture, I mean literally that; a world of two dimensions where for six hours a day or more, people in the western developed world, more particularly kids, are spending time either playing games or on social networking sites and thereby putting themselves in an environment that is very much in the here and now, that has very strong audio and visual sensations, where at the press of a button you get instant feedback from whatever you’re doing.

But at the same time, you’re perhaps removed from some of the aspects that we take for granted. Those of us who are older or those of us who are born in the 20th century, that we taken for granted. Things like metaphor, abstract concepts, logical narrative, conceptual frame works, long attention spans, imagination. The kind of areas we can explore in more detail, if you like.

But it’s primarily a world of a small child, a world of the here and now, a world of a sound byte, a world of an instant frozen moment where nothing has consequences, and where everything is literal. Where nothing has a meaning, you’re not saying one thing in terms of something else, you’re saying literally, what you see is what you get.

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Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield on the 7.30 Report last year.

Split attention and its grave consequences being the hidden epidemic in our midst (this generation: drunk on the Internet and its possibilities).

“I do believe that if you are not a programmer, you are one of the programmed. It’s that simple. You move from being a passive, almost a hearer of the game, not even, just a person who’s in the game, doesn’t even know the rules, what can be bent and what can’t, to being a cheater, to being a writer, to being a programmer. Those are the stages our civilization has moved through in successive stages of media.”

Douglas Rushkoff on programming reality. 

(via: sciencefiction)

INTER VIEW 

INTER VIEW is the first collection of visual interviews, an innovative ideas exchange that only happens through images. More cruel and more honest than words, INTER VIEW visions write a new history of the XXI Century: artists, designers, musicians, architects and thinkers draw an unexpected landscape of biographies, projects, relationships, news, rumors and fakes. INTER VIEW is the expanded universe of contemporary culture.

“ This week Senator Conroy said there was “a very strong case for blocking” other legal content that has been “refused classification”. According to the classification code, this includes sites depicting drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence or “revolting and abhorrent phenomena” that “offend against the standards of morality”. ”

“Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end,” from The Sydney Morning Herald.

“ As Internet culture has grown, we’ve come to romanticize certain kinds of unmediated, old-fashioned “human” interactions. But this fantasy ignores how much of normal social interaction is fleeting, bite-size, instant, tweetlike. Humans have always talked to each other via a kind of analog Twitter. These new technologies just get us there with maximum efficiency. Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way—your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again; it privileges it over actual conversation. Eventually, I realized that clicking “next” was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible. ”

Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? New York Magazine (via somethingchanged)

…

I’ve had this quote saved in my drafts for a few days as I tried to come up with something that captured my own experience on the site. But this guy sums up this strange new phenomenon pretty well. Recommended reading!

I wanted to say something about time spent on ChatRoulette as, almost more than anything else, a mirror-experience: as hundreds and hundreds of strangers faces (penises) flicker past the top screen in your window, your own mug staring back at you from the bottom screen is the constant visual; you can observe your own prejudices at play, as your base impulse to skip or stay plays out before your conscience has time to catch up; you can measure you own sensitivity to rejection or shock, your prudishness, your vanity (chatting with black screens when you’re completely visible is surely vanity?), and even your erotic predilections as you maybe linger before one of the many, many furious masturbators. (The thought that, at any one moment, there are thousands upon thousands of guys online masturbating before an anonymous mass-audience is, in itself, a remarkable fact.)

But ChatRoulette isn’t only about flesh and vanity. I had heaps of conversations with people from France, Turkey, China, the US and the UK, including a half-hour chat with three slouchy art-kids who lived probably twenty minutes walk from my house.

Tonight, my friend and I were debating the longevity of the site, whether its appeal would endure beyond the huge novelty of the initial experience. I said — and this was one of my first impressions — that I thought it could become a space for something like a post-religious confessional experience. For, surely, at those sombre, dark-night-of-the-soul moments, there would be something cathartic, something grounding, but also complimentary to existential crises, about opening up a window to gaze upon the entire world in all its boring, banal, fleshy, erotic, lonely, sneering, but also nice-and-fine, smiley-and-plain, immensity?

However, the MAIN REASON I decided to pull my finger out and post this tonight was because it occurred to me that, with all of the wild smut and ‘danger’ inherent in ChatRoulette’s anarchic format, it will probably be one of the sites that disappears under the proposed (it’s still only proposed, right?) Australian Internet Filter Censorship Legislation. The plan is to block any sites with material that would be Refused Classification by Australian censors in other media, like film, video and television — stuff like violent porn and child pornography — with the intention to protect children from stumbling upon inappropriate content. (The strong arguments against the legislation say that, firstly, it simply won’t work because people trade illegal material in very private, coded ways, and will continue to do so; and, secondly, it’s ludicrous to make the whole Internet child-safe — under this logic, shouldn’t you also get rid of legal ‘Adult’s Only’ content?).

Considering people using ChatRoulette will behave according to their own impulses, under the Australian government’s logic the mere potential for ‘RC-rated’ behaviour would make the site a risk, n’est-ce pas?

Opposition to this legislation isn’t about ignoring-thereby-trivialising horrid stuff like child pornography, or callously exposing kids to disturbing stuff they shouldn’t see; but it is police work, private/institutional net-nannying and attentive parenting that needs to look after that. It is a dangerous and terribly fucked-up precedent for the government to impose such sweeping moral decisions on its people. (ed note: I get that all laws in a democracy basically are a moral consensus/majority, but this is too big, too far-reaching, people don’t know enough about it and won’t be told which sites are banned, and Hill-dog would never go down this path.)

P.s. Did you know Australia was the only country in the world to ban Larry Clark’s Ken Park? Police came to shut down the one attempted cinema screening (which was put on by one of the nation’s most respected, stalwart film critics Margaret Pomeranz); my friend owned an import dvd copy from the US, which meant he was breaking the law.

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