'The assumption that people want to have community, indeed that they would agree to be forced into it, is denied by tale of the suburb. Housing prices are highest in the suburbs, places that often look very village-y but are in fact built to provide each person with solitude. Soft barriers protect suburban residents from too much interaction. Yet unlike residents of rural areas, suburbanites are not completely alone. Suburbanites are alone together. Over the past decade, online game communities have evolved from forced grouping models to alone-together models... We've moved from massively multiplayer online games to massively singleplayer online games. Our virtual worlds are becoming like suburbs – places where most people, most of the time, are doing whatever they please and having no effect or interaction with anyone else. Protected from others, but not separated. The massively singleplayer outcome is perhaps a very solid equilibrium between the competing tensions freedom and community. ...it spells doom for all kinds of social engineering projects. The New Urban neighborhood? The Global Village? The online game that purportedly makes people into good citizens? These will all remain as empty as the dead little towns that dot the rural landscape, or as decrepit and bully-plagued as the once-vibrant urban neighborhoods that dot the cities. In the end, people just want their space.'

'Rather ironically, most of the mechanisms required to observe and control subcultures are being invented by subcultures themselves. External forces are merely stepping in to co-opt them. The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions. Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing. Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions. And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. ...once marketers working with Big Data get ahead of the cultural curve, you can expect the balance of power to shift decisively in their favor. From detecting subcultures before future members themselves do, to actively seeding, breeding and shaping desirable subcultures, is not a big leap to imagine. It will be a world of pre-cognitive marketing, run by quants in data vats.'

'The pre-Interent double-take zone was fairly stable. Double-take events were truly serendipitous and generally didn’t go anywhere. Most relationship options expired due to low social and geographic mobility. A random encounter was just a random encounter. Since double-take encounters temporarily dislocate people from the default context through which you know them, and make them temporarily more alive after, you could say the double-take zone is coming alive with nascent relationships: relationships that have been dislodged from a fixed physical or digital context, but haven’t yet been socially situated. There is an additional necessary condition for more to happen: the double-take moment must also destabilize default assumptions about relative status. ...one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context. You never know when you might turn a barista into a new friend after a double-take encounter, or renew a relationship with an old one via a Facebook Like. The sane default attitude today is the world is small and life is long. Reinventing yourself is becoming prohibitively expensive.'

'Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.'

'Electric speeds create centers everywhere...This is the new world of the global village.' -- 'The "human interest" dimension is simply that of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that occurs with instant information.' -- 'Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.'

'There has been a lot of talk on Twitter about using Pachube to aggregate geiger counter readings across Japan in light of mounting concern about the Fukushima nuclear power plant. We want to make this as quick and easy to set up and, since there are already geiger counters registered with Pachube, we will be upgrading the accounts of all users that send radiation data to Pachube if they make them public so that they have complete long term permanent storage of every datapoint ever sent, and extra datastreams.' -- Global readings, please.

'American youth are slowly realizing that the old system is broken, and no longer holds the answer to all their dreams and desires. Together, we’re learning that instead of waiting for politicians and corporations to fix the system, it’s possible to create a better one of our own, right under their noses. A new way of living, in which access is valued over ownership, experience is valued over material possessions, and "mine" becomes “ours” so everyone's needs are met without waste. Consumption is no longer an asymmetrical activity of endless acquisition but a dynamic push and pull of giving and collaborating in order to get what you want. Along the way, the acts of collaboration and giving become an end in itself.' -- Long list of schemes and services. Also: http://www.shareable.net/how-to-share

'What matters in the new era is not your physical wealth, but your reputation. As long as you’ve built up a rep for trustworthiness, there’s no reason you can’t benefit from access to a wealth of products and services when you need them. The trend isn’t entirely new — we’ve had toy libraries since the 1930s...'

'The tribes of the world are uniting. Tied together by the arteries of the information superhighway, citizens of common dreams and common causes are forming human bonds that transcend national borders, religious beliefs and political ideologies. Bigger than blogs and more influential than the social networks, TechnoTribes will rally masses with calls for action when rights are violated, lives threatened and/or change is needed. Distrusting of politicians and critical of their leadership skills, the egalitarian tribes will unite those who share civic interests, follow moral codes and believe in universal truths. These Global Agers will garner wide support from the intellectually disenfranchised that don’t dutifully respect institutional authority or blindly follow the leaders. Whatever the issues, wherever the events, armed with information and filled with data, TechnoTribalists will conclude for themselves what to believe rather than looking to others to be told what to think.'

Tweeted store front: @KennethCole: 'Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo - KC' -- (Site video: "The collection is influenced by our global landscape...")

'It’s getting more difficult to know where a global news story stops and my actual life begins.'

'McLuhan described how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time. In bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion, electric speed heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. -- No chapter in Understanding Media, or later books, contains the idea that the Global Village and the electronic media create unified communities. In fact, in an interview with Gerald Stearn, McLuhan says that it never occurred to him that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the Global Village. McLuhan argued that the Global Village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions. The Global Village is far more diverse.' -- Every village seen globally NOT one globe-spanning village.

'Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters. ...any people who legitimately enjoy all the trappings on hipsterhood must psychologically distance themselves from the demographic group of which they are so clearly a part. And so their subconscious brains have to work double time so that they can convince themselves that the things they buy do not reflect on their true character. The deeper irony is that those who try to assert their independence from the commodification of identity wind up tapping into another marketplace myth, what the authors call "the myth of consumer sovereignty." This is the idea that by assiduously selecting from all the identity markers available for purchase, a person can assemble one that authentically reflects their true self independent of the marketplace.'

'...the nation-states of the world are on their way out; they're anachronistic at this point. Most of your fellow citizens today are basically liabilities to you, recipients of your tax money. The Internet lets people relate to each other purely as individuals, instead of viewing themselves as American or French or Brazilian, seeing themselves as citizens of some nation-state. I think in the future people are likely to see each other as citizens of informal organizations – not countries – and will seek each other out on the Internet and join together on that basis. The nation-state is going to be replaced by groupings of people that find each other on the Internet. I expect the Greater Depression is going to last quite a while, and it's going to turn a lot of what you see today completely upside down, things are going to be very different. I think the world is going to re-organize itself in ways that are going to impress people in the future as very different than what we have today.'

'...twitter is an instant window into the lives’ of people. A chance to track the distractions that are filling up people’s lives’, momentarily taking over their brains. An impact significant enough to process a lil thought/meme about it. Whether it is a human, a product, a political scandal ... or a celeb death, the twitter’s portal into a generalized human psyche is priceless. We must embrace the power of this tool. We must embrace all tools that allow us to reflect/share/digitally mourn. We are growing up, learning how to use social networks to experience life together. We are learning how to mourn, celebrate, and crucify miscellaneous celebrities. We are learning that death memes are the memes that unite us. The internet/internet meme is a coping mechanism/opportunity. While events happen in ‘reality’ our opportunity to reflect upon them in a ’sillie lil online world’ helps us to cope with how deeply rattled we are by the underlying themes of highly bloggable events.''

'The geographic nomenclature of GeoCities gave those new to the Internet a familiar shorthand for how social interaction could unfold. Sure, the tools might be different, but the concept of neighbors and like-minded groups of people, would, GeoCities promised, operate the same online as in the real world. The demise of GeoCities is not just the disappearance of a gif-riddled online ghost town--it's the death of a pioneering online community. And it's a reminder that we should think critically about who owns online spaces, how they are managed, and what happens when they are razed ..once online identities are created, are they the property of the users or the corporations that host them? David Bollier calls corporate-controlled spaces like GeoCities and Facebook, "faux commons." For him, true online community spaces are defined by users having control over the terms of their interaction and owning the software or infrastructure. Corporate spaces come with "terms of service" agreements.'

#Flow #Faces: Indeed, what you see are the faces of people you know with the notes they wrote next to them. This taps into deep mental structures that we all have to looks for faces and associate the information we receive with people we decide to trust, through what we feel about them. This is also why automated tweets not by them are so obtrusive, as they break the trust. Using friends' faces in ads is even more pernicious, as ads are by definition recommendations from people we don't trust. #Phatic #Following #Publics #Mutual media: Mutual media: The alternative model is one that is less familiar, yet is all around us - the spontaneous order that emerges from people communicating in parallel. ...we are each others media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. #Small world networks'

'Web users who choose to move to the desolate village are guaranteed an environment free from Google products and natural light from the sun.' -- <3 u google dont let the h8rz get u down :(

TV

"Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools. So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited." -- "There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening. The hubs are generally not people on the ground, and many are not in the country." -- "Governments like Iran, Syria, and Egypt are really struggling with how to continue limiting information. No matter how hard these governments try to block communication, now there is always going to be a hole. This really is a case study in how technology can affect closed societies."

McLuhan on Twitter: "That one big gossip column that is unforgiveable, unforgettable, and for which there is no redemption, no erasure, no mistakes. Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness. Time has ceased. Space has vanished. We now live in a global village. The simultaneous happening; we're back in acoustic space. We've begun and again to structure the primordal feeling, the tribal emotions, from which a few centuries of literacy had divorced us. The tribalising process, the inner trip, the depth involvement in the experience of the unified human family, that is something of which we've had no experience for a many centuries. It is a process that is located so entirely in the present that it does not appear in the rearview mirror to which we habitually look for reassurance and nostalgic orientation. At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective." —McLuhan 1967

#twitter 'Twitter "works best in situations where the story is changing so fast that the mainstream media can't assemble all the facts at once," says Craig Stoltz. "The plane crash, the riot, the political event—these are the kinds of stories where time is important and the facts are scattered." -- In fact, Twitter can be a serious aid in reporting. It can be a living, breathing tip sheet for facts, new sources and story ideas. It can provide instantaneous access to hard-to-reach newsmakers, given that there's no PR person standing between a reporter and a tweet to a government official or corporate executive. It can also be a blunt instrument for crowdsourcing. When a vacant building collapsed in late April, New York Times reporters put out the Twitter equivalent of an APB: "Seeking any eyewitnesses to Lower Manhattan building collapse." Imagine the torrent of data that would have been available to the Times had Twitter been around on the morning of September 11, 2001.' -- 'Twitteur'

'As the Internet was taking shape in the late 1980s, an MIT professor named Tom Malone started thinking about how it could change the structure of industries. In a series of papers, he predicted that the big top-down companies of the 20th century would soon "decentralize and externalize" into industry ecosystems. "Imagine an AT&T that breaks up into not two or three different companies but two or three hundred thousand different companies," Malone told Wired in a July 1998 interview. "This sort of voluntary, radical disaggregation is an attractive alternative for some large organizations." The Web would be globalization taken to the extreme. Projects would be open to the best of breed anywhere, creating virtual flash firms of suppliers and workers that would come together for one product and then re-form for another. "Small pieces, loosely joined" was the mantra. But out in the reality of the world's great industries, the opposite seemed to happen.' -- Economies of small

"A simple message, less than 140 characters, is sent out to followers around the world and within hours, perhaps minutes, more than 100 million people have been mobilized to act. The message might instruct those who read it to look at a certain website, protest at a designated time and place, or perform any number of other acts, promoting an agenda or cause whose intentions may be either benign or downright evil. But whatever the message, whatever its agenda or intentions, the message has been sent and the world is shaken by its power. A tweetbomb. That is what this message is called. Although we haven’t seen one yet, you better believe it is coming, and it is coming soon." -- Monkey see monkey do

'On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect it is having on our society as seen through the eyes of the greatest Internet pioneer youve never heard of, visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner (DIG!), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.' -- I quit the interwebs

"The popular culture tried to warn us. For 20 years, we've had Homer Simpson's spot-on caricature of the quintessential American: childish, irresponsible, willfully oblivious, fat and happy. We knew, in our heart of hearts, that something had to give. The '80s spirit endured through the '90s and the 2000s, all the way until the fall of 2008, like an awesome winning streak in Vegas that went on and on and on. American-style capitalism triumphed, and thanks to FedEx and the Web, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint and unnecessary. During the '80s and '90s, we were Wile E. Coyote racing heedlessly across the endless American landscape at maximum speed and then spent the beginning of the 21st century suspended in midair just past the end of the cliff; gravity reasserted itself, and we plummeted."

"Hey, moron. Because of you, the future is hopeless." -- 9000 internets to you, sir. (Shame he gets all 'positive' at the end.)

"The site, as described by BusinessWeek, appears to operate as a defacto blackmail racket: Your "friends" submit "hilarious" pictures of you, often filched from Facebook. If you are in a picture and want it removed, you have to become a member of the site, which costs $20 per month or $50 per year. Best part: Your "friend" earns a kickback of $10 or $20 if his picture causes you to pay the membership fee. Better to accept the inevitable: Celebrity has been so devalued and democratized that we all have to learn to play the PR games of famous people. That means flooding the market with flattering pictures and blog posts (the equivalent of magazine puff pieces); bullying hostile bloggers and scandal websites (as celebrity flacks do with tabloids and other disfavored publications); and paying the occasional bribe, in the form of anything from flirting to a free lunch to cold, hard cash..." -- Real sick.

'Welcome to Pachube, a service that enables people to tag and share real time environmental data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned connections. Apart from being used in physical environments, it also enables people to embed this data in web-pages, in effect to "blog" sensor data.' -- Wow. This is seriously, like, WOW!

"We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize... and, all too often, we miss the fine point."

"I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world, although neither of these outdated and tinged terms can accurately capture what is new about it."

"The irony is that the Post Coldies are trying to create, with all this social(ist) media, what the Coldies have already being doing all their lives; albeit with global reach, greater transparency, less small talk and networking at the speed of light."

”what we have seen in the past year is that… people of all age groups are using social networking sites. It’s not a genre restricted to a demographic as much as an overall function being used across the Internet.”

"1962: The Telstar 1 communications satellite relays the first trans-Atlantic television signal in history."

OMG! It's the Internetz!!!