Sept. 25

Matters of security and privacy online always seem strange and surreal compared to their physical counterparts. Maybe it's because online it's all just words and data swarming around, there aren't any human beings you can touch or see, just images and text that represent human beings. Your ability to hurt and harm and your ability to be hurt and be harmed only occur through the web as a proxy and a tool. The anonymity and distance make the actions and the consequences of those actions online seem so much less grave, so much less serious than any kind of dangers that exist in physical reality. There’s no bodily harm to be had online. I don’t know… classes like this one are always strange. Discussions based around fear and concern and worry tend to rub me the wrong way. They’re grating like fingernails on a chalkboard. I don’t really know why that is.

Sept. 11

I am guilty of being somewhat of a Web 2.0 agnostic. I just wish someone had come up with a better terminology for connoting sea changes in the development and evolution of the web than just appropriating version numbers. It’s not like Web 2.0 had a development cycle and a beta and was then released on January 1st 2000 to rave reviews. It’s not a product for sale or a service by a company. You can’t pinpoint the day the Web was legacy web and then the day the web was Web 2.0, the shift is gradual and slow and almost invisible and by the time we’re able to identify a big shift, the next one has probably already arrived. So the name is dumb and I don’t like it at all. It’s not as if the trends don’t exist, people just adopt ridiculous labels for them. But Facebook is cool and youtube is neat so whatever.