If you’ve been shopping around for new smartphone technology lately (or if you’ve just been hanging around any Verizon shop), you’ve probably noticed BlackBerry’s got its own answer to the iPhone. It’s called the Storm, and it’s been designed with the iPhone-seeking, but BlackBerry-savvy consumer in mind.
In today’s New York Times, there’s a two-page editorial filled with readers’ reactions to the new product. But nothing beats the quirky, inaugural Fawkward podcast, where Adam Stepinski and Sadie Lou’s former Managing Director Nevan Scott weigh in on what might become everyone’s chosen stocking stuffer:
If you’ve seen or read anything about the new Macbooks, you’ll know they were designed with the environment in mind. While Apple’s “green” goals aren’t exactly under-the-radar, the rest of the technology industry’s eagerness to jump on the bandwagon has been.
The other day, however, Wired published an article outlining the development, pointing to the recent recession as a main cause. Will the United States follow in the footsteps of Europe? Only time will tell:
Other than saving money, the industry-wide shift toward cleaner tech is also being driven by new laws regarding electronic waste. In 2003, the European Union passed the Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive Act, which requires manufacturers to take responsibility for recycling their products after consumers discard them. In other words, if Sony sells a TV to a European customer, Sony has to take the TV back and recycle it at the end of the device’s life. While the directive is only directly affecting Europe, it’s spreading to the United States and Asia, too: Many big tech manufacturers operate internationally, and it’d be both inefficient and costly to make an eco-friendly product for Europe and a dirtier version of the same gadget for another country.
While the Sadie Lou Blog is not about to become a place solely devoted to political thought, it is worth noting yet another election-related tidbit: the impact of the Internet. While Wired cites cyberspace as a propellant force on this year’s campaign trail, The Morning News goes for the personal.
How many times during this election season (and even before) did you receive Facebook invites to a group specifically devoted to the promotion of a presidential candidate? And how many friends of yours “donated” their profile statuses to help get the vote out on Election Day? In a piece titled Friending The President, Lauren Bans asks similar questions, using social networking sites as a springboard to see just how much influence the Internet had during Election 2008:
On Facebook, politics is just another flag to wave, to attract or repel. I never updated my status before this election. And often I try to stop and ask myself why, and why on Facebook of all places? Sometimes I have a quasi-valid reason, like I read a good article on Obama’s tax policy and I want everyone to see it—but am I caught up in altruism or actually the smug satisfaction of saying “Look what I found!” Other times it’s just a compulsion keeping up with the buzz. I feel a little like how Ted Haggard must have felt when he guiltily indulged in a male prostitute—guilty as sin, but oh-so-sated.
On the flipside of that, Bans also wants to know what the Internet can tell us about how we psychologically process major events like this year’s election:
At times it feels like my fellow Facebookers and I are posting our political opinions for the same reasons we’re posting pictures or updating our relationship status—to create an alluring, albeit one-dimensional, identity for our friends, potential friends, and total strangers to see. We may admire Obama for his lengthy and nuanced explanations, but we speak in Republican-ese, in catchphrases more in common with “drill, baby, drill.”
To put it another way: If diehard Barack supporters asked themselves, “What would Barack do?” one answer would be: probably not pen a pithy, show-off jab at Sarah Palin for the top of his social network page.
Andrew Sullivan, a writer for The Atlantic, penned an article in this month’s issue about why he blogs. The man behind political blog The Daily Dish, Sullivan’s piece is thoughtful and honest, as well as great reading for those who have wondered why anyone, really, would commit themselves so fully to the blogosphere. A brief snippet of Sullivan’s wisdom:
No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
At the beginning of the month, Michael Aggers, the writer behind Slate tech column The Browser, asked, “How do bloggers make money?”
While this question might not pertain to the Sadie Lou Blog itself, it certainly is fascinating for anyone who reads blogs and has thought to him or herself, “Wow, I wish that could be my full-time job!” From the aptly-titled Blogging For Dollars:
Once a blog hobbyist goes pro, he or she faces a daily pressure to churn out new material. In the wrong mind, that can lead to top-10 lists, recycled ideas, half-baked notions, lots of viral videos, and a general increase in information pollution. Is there any way out of this scenario? In 2005, Jason Kottke announced that he had quit his job to blog full-time and asked his readers to become “micropatrons” at a suggested rate of $30. He received $39,900 from 1,450 people but abandoned the experiment after a year. Kottke is vague about the reasons why he swore off micropatronage, but he suggests that he was worried that people wouldn’t donate year after year. In order to build a bigger audience and potential new donors, he would have had to do some of the cheesy things to drive traffic (i.e., “Top Five Best” posts) and/or become a cult of personality (overshare, start flame wars, social network relentlessly). These days, he accepts ads as part of the Deck network.
Similar to the Sadie Lou Project itself, TED is dedicated to spreading ideas. An annual conference hosted by TED assembles the world’s most fascinating talkers and doers and gives them the opportunity to speak—but only for eighteen minutes. The website hosts the best of the batch for free. Some of the most famous speakers include Bono, Bill Clinton, Dave Eggers, and Stephen Hawking…plus a parrot who has a vocabulary of over 200 words and sounds.
You can search by theme, talk title, or speaker. There are so many different topics and sub-topics that any Sarah Lawrence student worth his or her salt could be entertained for hours. There’s even a blog.
In an age where the digital world has become just as important as the real world, a project like the Internet Archive is almost too exciting for words.
Much like our own Archives, the project was founded with a need to preserve important aspects of the community at large. Established in 1996, it was also created “to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.”
The Internet Archive currently houses millions of texts, audio, movies, and software within its “walls,” as well as a blast-from-the-past toy called the Wayback Machine. It also has a section titled Open Educational Resources, which provides access to university lectures and the like.
The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet – a new medium with major historical significance – and other “born-digital” materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.
It’s an incredibly easy-to-use publishing system, but that ease comes at a cost. Tumblr is also very simple by design, and it lacks many of the features bloggers might be familiar with. Still, many view Tumblr’s lack of extra features as an asset, arguing that things like comments or an integrated search tool only complicate a clean interface. In fact, Tumblr is quite different than blogging. It’s a side-step, a subculture with its own verb: tumbling.
Note: If you weren’t at our meeting, but would still like information on how to be a part of Sadie Lou this year, please e-mail Joanna Harmonosky.
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Wired writer Clive Thompson takes this notion one step further, pointing out how the Internet and other forms of technology have depleted our memory systems:
[…T]he line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Often when I’m talking on the phone, I hit Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, harnessing the results to buttress my arguments.
My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.