golge011/cyberculture

From the page: "Second Life, meet real life
The online game world gets still more realistic: now you can be sued"

A very interesting experiment on reading. Download the program and read. Then come and lets discuss the story.

From the page:

"...Grown-ups don't understand that (or they wouldn't be teaching it) but Macbeth is the true authentic story of my generation. This is Macbeth's world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those "Three Weird Sisters", who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great - only, in real life, it totally sucks? Well, those "Three Weird Sisters" are the "Internet of Things", they're "Ubiquitous Computation", they're "Ambient Findability". The truth is written all over the page (or the screen - my school can't afford to give us any "pages"). Just read that awesome part where they're boiling pseudocode in their witch-cauldron! They talk like web designers!


Macbeth stumbles around seeing ghosts and virtual-reality daggers. That sure makes sense. Every day of my life, I see people with cellphones yelling eerie gibberish in public. The world of Macbeth is totally haunted and paranoid! You can't get one minute's privacy, even inside your own bed!

...

We can't "find ourselves" - the market's already found us and filled us with map pins."



A very good short story from Bruce Sterling. Sterling has a eerie way of storytelling. When I stumbled this story I thought it was an article, maybe because of this story seems like a prediction. A future where we all lost ourselves between jumping bits of life. So does this mean technology is a bad thing? Nope. Tech will conquer new frontiers and new gadgets new technologies bring us new lives. Problem is to be aware of what you get from this rumble.

Today's technology can be effectively used to form a police state. However tech today is a boon for most of us. So learn your way in this world of ones and zeros.

From the page: "All confessions are anonymous.
There are those that may contain ideas
or words offensive to some. Confessions
are as we see ourselves. It is not always
pretty but it is often illuminating."
There is a Turkish site about confessions. But I like this more, because there is no editorial staff or any login. Great, check these.

From the page:"Swedish researchers said last month the use of cellular phones over a long period of time can raise the risk of brain tumors. Their findings contradict a number of earlier studies and are "difficult to interpret," the FDA said in comments posted on its website."

So is it safe or not. My guess is heavy usage might be dangerous, but there are a lot of modern equipment with great benefits and some problems. That means I'll carry my cellphone around, an emergency call is more important than a supposed to be higer risk of brain tumor. If this is a definite risk engineers will find another solution.