AgPerson

If you’ve been keeping track, I’ve had quite a saga of computer purchases, sales, repairs, and replacements over the past six months or so. In the process I managed to use up all of my five allocated computer activations for iTunes, meaning that with my most recent machine I was no longer able to play any purchased iTunes content. I got pretty angry about this, decided DRM is evil all over again, and started re-buying the songs I had from allofmp3.com in a non-DRM format and replacing the ones I had bought from Apple.

Then it occured to me to email iTunes customer support. I laid out my problem in three sentences, and within a day or two my account had been reset and I could once again authorized five computers. How awesome is that?

I’m still replacing iTunes music with allofmp3.com music anyway, as I find it and remember to do so. Its just more convenient to not have to worry about silly DRM restrictions and to be able to occasionally send a song to a friend or whatever. But I’m no longer pissed at Apple. I know their DRM is insidious, because it gets consumers to accept DRM. On the other hand, the reason its so effective is because its such a good compromise, compared to everything else out there, and the way they make it easy to use and generally keep it out of your way does deserve to be commended, even if I still can’t agree with it in principle and try to limit my purchases on iTunes to avoid the lock-in that DRM imposes.

Bill McGeveran discusses the availability of congressional staffer’s salary information on the web and suggests that in cases like these the goal of governmental openness are minimal while the privacy implications for those whose information is revealed are not, and thus on balance the public is not well served by having the information out there. I agree with him that openness is laudable but that disclosures should always be balanced with the right to privacy. For example, anyone can go down to the Middlesex County clerk’s office and find out how much I paid for my condo, but very few people actually will because the “speedbump” of having to make the trip and pay the fee is enough to discourage casual snooping. Often openness is good, sometimes it is bad, and sometimes limited openness is the best approach. Putting the salaries of young congressional aides online doesn’t seem to have much public interest benefit, but then again maybe we just haven’t figured out what that benefit is yet.

Danah Boyd has posted an essay called Facebook’s “Privacy Trainwreck”: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama that is an incredible analysis of a very interesting situation. From her blog post about the essay:

The key points that i make in this essay are:
* Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
* The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
* We’ve experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot. When are we going to learn?
* Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
* Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
* Facebook lost its innocence this week.

Her essay has completely changed my mind on this issue. I think the reason I didn’t feel about the issue the way hundreds of thousands of others did is because I’m not an avid user of Facebook and don’t see a huge utility to it, and so because I wasn’t already using it on my terms my life wasn’t upset by those terms being changed abruptly, without warning, and without recourse.

Danah also makes good points about how the internet mediates gossip as just another form of information, but throws out of whack the whole notion of gossip as a way of communicating and forming relationships. She mentions feed readers (aggregators that let one read many blogs at once from a convenient interface) as an awful invention that ruins the paradigm, and I can’t disagree — my feed reader feels much more like an obligation than an enjoyable way to catch up on what people are doing. Furthermore, she hints at the information overload problem that comes with aggregating so much data in one place — I thought I liked Facebook better now, but today when I logged in I started to feel that same sense of dread as I realized how much of my “News Feed” I would have to read through to see what has changed since last I visited.

And one final point. When I logged into Facebook to check out the new News Feed, I noticed Luis was using the Facebook “Notes” feature to syndicate his blog posts. I liked the idea and followed suit, and now even that is starting to make me feel icky. Random blog posts in someone’s information stream with no context or background is a bit creepy. They can’t turn it off, so in some ways I (with Facebook’s help) am pushing my thoughts at them against their will, and I cannot control who starts seeing little snippets of my life with no background or context. Icky indeed.

Read the article, it’s worth it.

Secrets revealed! Story broken! Internet wins again! The people behind lonelygirl15 are a few amateur filmmakers, the “professional production values” consisted of a few lamps and a webcam — they just knew how to use them correctly. The actor who played Bree hasn’t been hiding anywhere — she’s been living openly in LA and, as you might expect from LA, no one has noticed her. As for the producers, they don’t have any major corporate or viral marketing plans (at least not yet), and hope the story can continue to take its course, even though it may play out differently now. After all, says the _NY Times_, “[p]art of the appeal of the series was that the serious-minded, literate Bree offered an unbeatable fantasy: a beautiful girl who techy guys had something in common with.”

Okay, fine, we now know who the actor is that plays lonelygirl15. Big whoop. To the people who feel “angry” and “betrayed” for taking it seriously and being duped, meh. I don’t feel your outrage. I don’t really care *who* she is, what I care about is the *what* and the *why* of the videos. Perhaps its because I and the people I know who are watching the videos didn’t go in from the start believing they were real. Perhaps its because I’m not caught up in the current YouTube hysteria of “citizen created” crap and the hundreds of thousands (?) of people who put up boring, low quality, badly-edited video blogs. Or perhaps its just because some of us have been around the internet block a few times and know now to take everything so gosh darn seriously.

The lonelygirl15 storytelling is not amazing (perhaps a limitation of the medium they are emulating), but I find it captivating enough to keep watching, and I will continue to even though it is now “confirmed” that the characters are figments of some writers imaginations. The bigger question, I think, is what the story is about, where it is leading, why is behind it, and what they are getting out of it. Will it turn out to be some big viral marketing campaign with more effort behind it than any we’ve yet seen? Some filmmaker’s pet project? A promo for a video game or movie? I guess we’re just going to have to wait a month or so and see where we end up. I certainly hope the backlash doesn’t cause this experiment, or whatever it is, to end early, before the interesting bits are revealed.

Have you ever written an entire post and then, I dunno, forgot to hit the “post” button or something? Because I wrote something last night that would put that last remaindered link about lonelygirl15 into context, but it seems to have been lost to the ether. Eh, I’ve only been doing this newfangled blogging thing for five years, give me a break.

Anywho, the post in question eventually pointed at this _LA Times_ article about the lonelygirl15 phenomonon that tells you everything you need to know about the whole interesting enigma of the very popular (and mysterious) video blog, who may be behind it, and why it is captivating large numbers of webernetizens.

Brian Flemming posts a mashup of _The Passion of the Christ_ and the song “Sometimes When We Touch”. I had no desire to see _The Passion_ in theaters or otherwise, and if this two minute mashup is enough to make me feel sick, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to sit through two hours of it — and bring their children. And of course its another chance to reflect on the insanity of the MPAA’s ratings board that would give two hours filled with hideous graphic violence an acceptable rating because of its subject matter, but rate _Clerks_ NC-17.