Lizkdc Dislocation

Coffee Shop: A Perilous Journey

I just drove to the coffee shop on autopilot.

I was suddenly driving down Centre Street and the lights came up in my head and I said "where the hell am I going, anyway?" And self said, "you're on your way to that coffee shop on Amory Street. Shut the f*ck up, I got this."

Which is good, because subconscious self actually knew what it was doing. Usually subconscious self isn't so reliable and tells me stuff like "sure, have another beer," and "say it! that client will love your sense of humor," and "What the hell, let's marry that guy!"

A Roundabout Farewell (to Sarah Palin)

My own mother took me to task for what she termed the heartlessness of my reaction to the Sarah Palin resignation.

Now she's a woman who is so soft-hearted that she's a hero and a prize and also, incredibly annoying.  Like the other day there was a pot of dead flowers and I was throwing them away and she was, literally, trying to talk them back to life:  "you're gonna be okay, you just need a little more time!", and I was all, fine, I'll take them out to the back garden and plant them in a corner and we'll see if they come back to life, ok? Humoring her like a five year old. I poked a hole in the soil with my finger and jammed them in the ground. 

We went off on our trip to Ohio and it rained a lot and we came back and not only had they returned to life but put out little pink blossoms. The little floral bastards.  Mom still talks to them, commiserating in a condescending voice when I am in earshot: "See! Some people are so mean, but I knew you just needed One More Chance."

Twitter's Two Weeks: "Over", and Now, the World's Attention

Here's a startling and ironic juxtaposition

From the headlines of last week:
Twitter hype punctured by study (BBC)
"Nobody Tweets" (Harvard Business Review)

Both pieces responded to the same study, and both took a skeptical look at the hype surrounding the Fail Whale, and with good reason. A nugget which drew special attention was the discovery that 10% of Twitter users--the power tweeters--produce 90% of the tweets, while most users sign up, tweet a few times, then don't appear to speak again. 

Was this a sign that Twitter was yet another over-hyped plaything of the knowledge classes, a successor to the Blackberry in acting more as a sign of belonging than a tool that would actually be of use in the larger culture? And scariest of all for the immensely reputation-sensitive wired classes, was Twitter's aura fading so fast?

But wait! Just as the critics began drawing a bead on the tool's limits, the ground shifted with the dramatic events in Iraq.

Social Media: Recession-Fighting Machines?

Late winter grass blades, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Will social media help us from the worst economic downturn of our time?

One of the key destructive effects of a market collapse is that things of value aren't being connected to, and exchanged by, people who would value them. The contents of social media are people, their skills, creativity, insights, and communities, and the most powerful thing that media can do is help those valuable brains, hands, and hours not go to waste.

Flog the Pony

Uh oh.

I fell off the blog pony again. Have not gone more than a week without posting since last December.  My systems kind of got overloaded in June and July, and then a week at the Cape with limited web access kind of dishabituated me. I've been editing photos in a desultory way, and using Flickr, but just kind of ....out of it.

Climbs back on pony: Git up!

Wordle me this, Batman!

I made this Wordle by entering the text of this blog's front page.

It cracks me up.

You know, if we'd had this shit way back when I was an English grad student a) I might have finished that doctorate and become an academic, which is a horrible idea b) post-modernism might have got itself over with in like two years and Michel Foucault would have sloped off and run a coffeebar or something, which might have been a happier ending for all.

Dance With Me

There are at least five things I love intwined in this video.

*BSG,old 97's, Whedonesque, action, irony

Technology Question of the Day: Does Google Make Us Stupid?

IMG_2188.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Zakim Bridge and drawbridge

Nicholas Carr asks a serious question in the current Atlantic, serious for those of us who write, edit, research, or otherwise try to produce high-quality information for a living.

Does spending an increasing amount of our time online actually detract from the quality of our thinking process? 

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Of course, I have a counterargument.

Post as Wishing Well

IMG_2077.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Path of light, Fort Point Channel (ICA with DBomb walk)

This is a post of wishing myself good luck in a conversation I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

Good luck, self! Throws in penny.

In an interesting moment of referentiality, the witty and helpful Chris Brogan,a Twitter contact of mine (I connected with him at a social media event and via his blog), happened to tweet mysteriously: "Are you sexy in person?"  (uh, not to me personally but to all 9000 of his followers)  which led to this great post.

It's about the ever-comes-in-handy confidence and value in one self, actually, rather than literally the sexy. But yay for a subject line that everyone will click on!

Gracias, Bostonist

IMG_2076.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Riding the reflections,  Fort Point Channel (ICA with DBomb walk)

Excited because this image was picked as Photo of the Day on Bostonist blog.