identitoogle

Have been learning so much about different industries in the last months.

Have also overhauled my computer more in the last days, getting rid of a lot of technologies and finding others. The whole google desktop thing is great, in my opinion. I've become so much more aware of the different companies out there and how they're competing with one another-- microsoft and google, etc. Google's done great work in terms of making a lot of products free to everyone-- most notably, web hosting and a number of applications which everyone else charges money for, and making the whole desktop scenario much better-- I do in fact think it's a work of genius. I think google's done great in terms of making things so much more accessible to more people. Also, it's easy to navigate to the point where I'd make sure all senior citizens had it if I ran a nursing home. I made sure my mom had it before I left after the recent visit. It was quite easy to import my online life into igoogle, though I only managed to get most but not all of everything before they killed my u. account. I was able to get my storage use down from 96% to 13% over the summer, which was a big task, but now that 13% is just gone and I have to just let go of it. Next project is designing a video project.

Before I sound anymore like an advertisement for google, my point is that all of this has given me a great deal of thought about privacy concerns and so on. Increasingly, the true currency of online things is identity; all of this online stuff makes it so much more apparent how much can be performed. Second life is one example-- one can choose to be male or female and design one's whole avatar body-- skin color, height, body shape, clothing, etc. however one wants. Now that they've added the voice application, it will be interesting to see how many male voices start coming out of female bodies and vice versa. It can be like halloween every day, and people can have as many identities as they want. Speaking of which, I don't yet have a halloween costume.

I am headed off to the opera now and will try to blog about it in the next day or so. Too much gorgeous weather these days to be indoors very much.