infojunkie's blog

Today an 80s song I was listening to on my iPod triggered a whole influx of emotions that led me to call an old friend. To our surprise, it turns out she'd been listening to that band's other hit just a few days ago. Synchronicity?

I have a very simple explanation to that recurring but unexplained phenomenon. Reality is a connected network of information, behaving according to a certain logic. In other words, every event has a certain meaning when considered alongside any other set of events.

I've been using the Internet as a culture box. I am referring to that part of TV that is supposed to enrich our personal and collective culture, rather than dumb us down by lowering our standards as consumers of media. That's what the Net can provide and in increasing quantities.

Here are the tools I am using so far in no specific order:

01 A computer hooked to the TV and to the sound system. In my case, I am running a Neuros LINK which is an Ubuntu box configured for HDMI TV and Surround audio output.

I've been shifting my home entertainment from TV to the Web. It makes me sometimes feel like I'm back to the days of Marconi and Farnsworth as far as maturity is concerned, but that's for another post. For now, I just want to congratulate Last.fm on the excellent job they've been doing at creating an enjoyable experience that traditional one-way radio will never achieve (unless it starts using the Internet).

The key to using Last.fm is to register an account and to feed your account's library with your favourite artists and albums.

Do I trust the Cloud to reliably hold my data, and for the arbitrary duration of my needing it?

Not entirely, yet. I guess it's an instinctive reaction of fearing the loss of something precious and thus wanting to keep it close to oneself. But there is survival merit in this attitude, and we all know software isn't always reliable at that scale, yet.

What to do? I guess first take regular backups of the data on the cloud to your local network.

One core tenet of media is "the more you repeat something, the more people will believe it." This is why we are bombarded with advertising - so that the brand name occupies a larger region of our minds.

Unfortunately, whereas advertising is simply driven by the desire for profit, other applications of media are even less commendable. I am referring to the political uses of media, that have given us among others the first tragedy of the 21st century, 9/11, as the century had just been born.

How does media - the discipline - manage such success?

It's all about timing.

Say you want to hit your enemy hard, but fear the repercussions with the world community? Choose the moment when the world will care least, or be absorbed with other issues, to make your strike.

It worked beautifully for Israel's attack on Gaza. Choosing the period between Christmas and the new year ensured that the Western world would be on vacation and half-drunk, unable to respond coherently to this event. Only this week, 10 long bloody days since the start of the campaign, are reactions starting to emerge worldwide.

It is no news that open source has challenged many established paradigms in the software world, and outside of it too.

If one's opinion of human beings is that they are fundamentally and irremediably:

• greedy
• unethical
• irresponsible
• sheepish

then one would agree with the position taken by the RIAA and its counterparts in all countries.

However, since the RIAA and co. are in fact made up of human beings, then those people necessarily believe that these are fundamental human traits, and therefore they themselves behave in such a way! Let alone forcing their clients, us the people, to react accordingly.

That to me is the psychosis of these organizations.

PS.

As a citizen of the Internet, I like to read up on topics that interest me. These include professional, social, commercial, leisurely, health-related, and intellectual topics.

Over time, one chooses some preferred sources of online information. For each topic there's a set of sites that I trust most to give me useful information.

What do you do when your government exerts a regime that is unacceptable to its people, and to you as a citizen? The historic thing to do is to start or participate in a revolution, but that can only be a temporary event, after which we must attain a better sociopolitical state. It helps to have a desired state in sight beyond the revolution.

This vision, or cause, is what must be supplied in order to rally the people, who are in everyday life a scattered, non-cooperative bunch.