Robot Writing

In real life, our days are often driven by conversation. Communication is how human people get things done. It is a call and response, a discussion that flows freely from its participants, taking its own form and building upon itself, steering in expected or unexpected directions.  Conversation has been defined in the following ways: Dictionary.com  Informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc. by spoken words This definition requires that conversation be spoken. MerriamWebster.com an informal talk involving two people or a small group of people; the act of talking in an informal way something that is similar to a spoken conversation This definition specifies that the number of a conversation’s participants must be limited somehow. It also, interestingly, includes the second definition, “something that is is similar to a spoken conversation” that is vague enough to include the internet. Wikipedia.com Conversation is a form of interactive, s...

Is the internet distracting and dizzying? According to David Weinberger, it is. (He says it with affection, though.) And, I agree. It is. With the advent of high-speed connection, wifi, and tabs (tabs!), the amount of discipline and self-policing required to actually, like, get shit done is staggering at best.  But it's also the most fluid, unrestricted means of accessing information or conducting research. Using search engines to find articles or websites or blogs, to answer a question (or, at least, to approach an answer to a question) is fantastically easy. From those articles or websites or blogs, you can often find one or several hyperlinked articles with relevant or related information, turning what could look like a linear pathway of information into a twisting, amorphous tree of information, with many pathways leading up and outward, like reaching branches. This model of an information network is daunting and enormous. The pathways are infinite, and the information ...

A friend of mine recently revealed to me a bit of the wisdom by which he leads his life: "If you're the smartest person in the room," he says, as the saying goes, "you're in the wrong room." The dated phrase may be gathering dust or suffering from arthritic joint pain, but I abide it. I find that surrounding myself with brilliant people presents me with the daily challenge of keeping up, meeting their knowledge, approaching their understanding. Being in the company of smart people makes me want to be smart enough to earn their company, and that motivates me to exercise my brain often and well.  In his book  Too Big To Know  (Perseus, 2011), technologist and author David Weinberger demands a recalculation of this useful maxim. The network, or the internet, he claims, is changing knowledge. By changing the way we access and interact with knowledge (relocating information from books, libraries, and our physical brains to networked webpages), the internet has ...

Does real life interaction outweigh online interaction? If so, then by how much? How can we quantify the growth of a relationship, the growth of a love, in either case, and then compare the data? Is real life interaction really more significant than online interaction? I'm not really sure. Technology has had a profound effect on the way humans communicate, and an equally drastic effect on the way we communicate privately. Email, Myspace and Facebook messaging/chat, PMs and DMs, text or SMS messaging, (dare I mention AOL Instant Messenger or, if you'll indulge me, SnapChat?) have all changed the way that we think about intimate communication. Conversations can last for seconds or for days. A story from my own experience: When I was in high school, I went to a bakery/café with one of my friends, and her friend. Let's call them Eliza and Beth, respectively. I was meeting Beth for the first time that evening, and wanted to get to know her more and spend time with her i...

If you've had access to the internet any time within this past week, it's likely that you came into contact with this film:   Directed by LA-based filmmaker Tatia Pilieva, "First Kiss" is an intimate short film that offers a real view of the rarely-seen first kiss between two people. This provocative video has received an impressive amount of attention, garnering over 36 million views within the first three days of it being posted to youtube.  I first came across the video via a Facebook post that linked this article  at Gizmodo.com , an article with which I can totally get down. This film is beautiful. It shows human beings in a moment of vulnerability and giddy discomfort and follows their transition to a moment of confidence and joy, using a kiss as a catalyst. A kiss does that . A kiss does all of that.  This article  from Jezebel.com (as well as a choice few of my Facebook friends) has beef with this video, lamenting the fact that th...

To save you the trouble of watching the really-not-so-great-in-terms-of-quality youtube video , I'll just quote Will Smith's 2005 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award speech here: "The key to life is running and reading....W hen... you’re out there and you’re running, there’s a little person that talks to you and that little person says, “Oh, I’m tired, my lung’s about to pop, oh, I’m so hurt, I’m so tired, there’s no way I could possibly continue,” and you wanna quit. ...If you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running, you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life. ...The reason that reading is so important: there have been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There’s no new problem you could have (with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything), there’s no problem you could have that someone hasn’t already solved and wrote about... in a book.” I have a dis...

Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody , writes, "When we change the way we communicate, we change society." This is the legend on the map. The cypher.  As I'm sitting in a library, I see form influenced by function. Book shelves are lined so that people may pass between them, scanning titles and call numbers. Each shelf has a long, rectangular space in which many books can be placed. Each book is a rectangle folded around flat, rectangular pages. The form or shape of each of these structured objects is a direct result of its function. Things are shaped the way they are because of the task they preform. Chairs must have a surface that keeps our butts off the ground, and their shape falls victim to that aspect of their function.  This opposite true of communication. The form of our communication shapes the function. For instance: a book is a medium of communication. The form of it, the pages and spine, lead to its function as shelf matter. (That's not ...

What is it about human culture that makes us gravitate toward binaries? We thrive in the realm of ‘black or white,’ ‘male or female,’ ‘good or bad,’ ‘us or them.’ And it’s the last one, us or them that is presently causing me the most grief. Is it the fault of our language, or the fault of our thought processes as determined by nature or physiology, that leads us to rely so heavily on categorization as a means to organize and understand our perception of the world? People love groups. We love to group things. This is this type of thing. This is that type of thing. They are this type of people. There are some pretty basic incarnations of this often limiting habit: grocery store aisles, restaurant menus, a phonebook (if anyone remembers what those are.) The danger in accepting this worldview as the norm is not its necessarily inclusion, but exclusion. By including filet mignon on only the ‘dinner’ section of a restaurant menu, we are saying “filet mignon is neithe...

Today, I flex my HTML muscles.  Welcome to Table 1.0! Its features include: Vertical Columns! Horizontal Rows! Text! Font that is emboldened! Font that is not emboldened! Let's get started. Table 1.0 - English Basics Words Used to Open Communication Words Used to Close Communication Words Hello Goodbye marrow Hey Bye subtle Yo See ya decomission Sup Later precursory Oh, you again Fuck off satellite Howdy Toodle-loo oxen That was actually pretty fun for me.

Tonight, I saw a film about bees. Swiss film director Markus Imhoof's documentary,  More Than Honey (2012) , talks about the current situation of honey bees on Earth, the change in their relationship with humans over the last century, and what may be in store for their future. I don't consider myself a bug guy, but I was moved by this film. "One-third of what we eat wouldn't exist without bees." I have spent a lot of time loving capitalism. Because of the culture in which I was raised, it always seemed unequivocally right to me that every human should earn a salary proportionate to their work output. You work hard and you see the benefit of that hard work in the form of a satisfactory pay check. The free market seems, naturally, the correct and good economic system in which to live: if you want to start a business or offer goods to consumers, you can do that, and you're free to grow your business and increase your output and production and gain prop...

On page 98 of her book Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century , Cynthia L. Selfe quotes computer scientist Seymour Papert's answer to a question that plagued parents during the rise of the PC's pervasion in the American home.  "Q: What can a parent do to get over his or her fear of computers? Seymour Papert: You can sit down with your child and prompt him to show you something– perhaps how to play a game. By learning a game, you're getting close to the kid and gaining and gaining insight into ways of learning. The kid can see this happening and feels respected, so it fosters the relationship between you and the kid." This is a pretty nagging issue that I've had with the generations preceding Gen Y. Too often have I heard members of older generations take issue with the "lack of respect" in the younger generations. The "apathy" or "laziness" inherent in people around my age. But, like, no. Seymour Papert is ...

I'm going to briefly mention and, in doing so, undersell the crap out of Tia Baheri's the Toast article " Your Ability to Can Even " about internet language and linguistic evolution in a world dominated by technology. It's fascinating and well-written and supports/explains linguistic development in online communities.  The reasons I mention it are several; it's a good read, it pertains to subjects that interest me, and it got me thinking. Since the dawn of the videogame, there have been two very divided camps in a culture war that revolves around them and their effect on us medically and emotionally and spiritually, et cetera. As a result of the conjecture-based conflict, my parents refused to allow video game consoles into our house. I did get to experience early console games at my cousins' and friends' houses: the early nineties saw the explosion of the video game due to Nintendo's success with Super Mario Bros. for the NES, the late...

The acronym on everybody's lips these days is HTML. It stands, I recently discovered, for "How To Make Latkes." Hm. Just kidding, neither of the above sentences are true. HTML actually stands for HyperText Markup Language; it's a language of letters and symbols and it looks like this: I hope this doesn't translate to something unpleasant. Which is only a little  scary at this point in my life. This language makes the internet be. The pages we go to every day are built with this code. Each section of code is a marker that acts as a command that provides information that determines how a webpage will look and function. Actually, as I write this post, I'm eyeing a slew of little buttons that can help me add images, videos, and links to my text, as well as buttons that we might consider standard for any contemporary word-processing program. It looks like this: Click me! And this is very useful to me. Because I don't know how to do those thi...