Tag: webbing

not a good day on the internet

Valleywag: LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees.
CNET: LiveJournal clarified that it was “about a dozen” cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

The beginning of the end. Again.

Given the current situation, I’m going to start running my LJ Archive back-up daily, instead of monthly, and cross my fingers that someone out there finds a way to make LJbook run again. I don’t believe the entire site will evaporate overnight or anything, but I’ve been writing on Livejournal since 2003. To lose it would be a death in the family, as the site contains not only a clear and concise map of my life and a full history of my writing, it also holds all of you, my friends and family who daily sustain me. How many of us even have each others real names, let alone e-mail, address or phone number? This is the medium of the majority, if Livejournal vanished, so would our ability to keep in touch.

In the interests in making sure we don’t lose what we’ve built if it all falls down goes boom, I’ve whipped together a quick little poll. Don’t feel you have to fill it all out, but if you don’t give me, say, your phone number, who else will call you up on your birthday to sing you e.e.cummings?

If you don’t feel comfortable posting your personal information to a livejournal poll, e-mail whatever contact info you like to my hotmail address: bloodkrystal@. Also, here I am on: facebook – myspace – flickr – you.tube – del.icio.us – twitter.

society explains? someone help me ponder please

On-line, I rant less at people about how wonderful technology is, but I’ve been coming to an odd conclusion lately that I want to share; that language just might be devolving through the internet. I don’t mean so much words like WOOT coming into parlance, but that vocabulary is homogenizing. Meeting international friends has only added credence to this idea. No matter where in the world they are from, we are all speaking the same language.

I’m talking about expression through memetics, hyperbolic emphasis.

It’s like somehow we’re managing to slim down language to something that’s almost electronic gesture based, so non-specific that we’re reaching a plateau of zen communication that’s partially worrisome. The inflections that span oceans because we read the same news stories and know each other almost purely by interest have not been complex ideas. The common denominators are almost startlingly like a severe Californian infection once they’re noticed. Berkley as patient zero. Home culture barely impacts. We all say “like” and “yeah” smattered with the occasional “I win” acknowledgment of clever. We seem to be erasing language with porous words, as meaningless as the most commonly known word in the world, “okay”.