Category Archives: Linklog

Brian Stelter warns that no matter what you do, or who you are, two things are probably true: You’re being documented somewhere, and it’ll get back to you:

Women who were online pen pals of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner similarly learned how quickly Internet users can sniff out all the details of a person’s online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and looted stores in the wake of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup defeat last week when they were identified, tagged by acquaintances online.

The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.

Whether it’s Anthony Weiner, the kissing couple during the Vancouver riots, or just some random lady on the subway, there’s no hiding from the Internet. Everything we do is in public, and "public" is a much broader term today, thanks to the Internet.

I got all pithy with my headline yesterday, only to be factually proven wrong by John Locke (neither thinker nor Lost character, though I suspect they’d both prove me wrong on some things). This John Locke is the author of books like Vegas Moon, Wish List, and Saving Rachel. He’s a New York Times bestseller, and doesn’t have a publisher, an agent, or a book deal to speak of. He’s also the first self-published author to sell a million ebooks, says ReadWriteWeb:

Rather than being published by major publishing house – and all the perks that have long been associated with that (marketing, book tours, prime shelf space in retail stores) – Locke has sold 1,010,370 Kindle books (as of yesterday) having used Kindle Direct Publishing to get his e-books into the Amazon store. No major publisher. No major marketing.

Locke writes primarily crime and adventure stories, including Vegas Moon, Wish List, and the New York Times E-Book Bestseller, Saving Rachel. Most of the e-books sell for $.99, and he says he makes 35 cents on every sale. That sort of per book profit is something that authors would never get from a traditional book deal.

Susean Orlean, at the New Yorker, takes note of a study that shows students have essentially no knowledge of history. And that’s a problem, she says, but not because knowing when the Civil War started has any value by itself:

So what to make of the news that American students are terrible at history? Unfortunately, this is of the very worrying sort of deficiency, not the you-can-just-Google-it sort. Most fourth graders can’t say why Abraham Lincoln is an important historical figure? Wow. This is far more distressing than if the news had been that fourth graders were bad at reciting multiplication tables, because you can, in fact, Google that. Like teaching cursive writing—which many schools are abandoning—memorizing things that can be easily figured out or looked up sometimes seems a little pointless, except that some neurons are probably engaged each time you plug information into your brain. Being able to reel off a list of dates in history, while useful, is so much less important than understanding why those dates matter, or understanding enough about the way civilization has developed to be able to figure things out from what you already know.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Derek Powazek, one of those guys who’s been on the Internet since before it was even a thing, and has been involved in about 40,000 things you’ve heard of but didn’t know he was involved in, has a new project. It’s called On the Network, and it started with a ten point manifesto counteracting how dumb people (and by people I mean the media) are about the Internet. As part of the project, he’s asked people to describe their first Internet moment. Here’s Alexis Madrigal, from the Atlantic:

I was sitting in rural Washington state, where I grew up in a year like 1994. We’d probably gotten the Internet through our old ISP Pacifier the year or two before, and I’d slowly started using it instead of dialing into the BBS’ I’d gotten into in ’92. In any case, I had some question about microbiology. I don’t even really remember what it was. The Internet! It could tell me the answer, I was sure. So, I dialed in, waited through the pops and hisses until our 14.4 baud modem connected, fired up Netscape, went to Yahoo, and typed in something like, “microbiology.” Up came Jack Brown’s webpage at the University of Kansas. Brown was a molecular biology professor who maintained a fairly extensive set of resources about various sciencey things including his “What the heck is…?” series. Most of it is still online. After reading through his work, I emailed him my question, probably beginning like, “Hello, my name is Alex Madrigal and I’m a sixth grader at Union Ridge Elementary School, home of the Tater Tots…” Or whatever.

A few minutes later, Brown fired back a response and we struck up a correspondence that lasted for a long time, years, IIRC. We were both big college basketball fans. He rooted for the Jayhawks, obviously, and I was (and remain) a huge UCLA Bruin fan. Brown became my first Internet friend.

This is going to be a fun thing to follow, but I promise to try my best to not post 8,000 times about it.