Read this post on Ethan Zuckerman's excellent blog about all things Africa and techie. If you don't want to, fine, let me summarize. If you buy something on a website partnering with Facebook, like Overstock.com, Facebook can access the account information nested in the partners cookies for your web browser. In practical terms, if I buy The Complete Idiot's Guide to Super-Charged Kama-Sutra from Overstock, Facebook knows, and will put a little story in my feed, for all my friends to see, saying that, "Matt Allison just bought The Complete Idiot's Guide to Super-Charged Kama-Sutra". Now of course one can tell Facebook upon logging into Facebook that you don't really want overstock.com purchases to appear on your story feed, but as of right now there is no option to categorically deny permission for Facebook to pull stuff from partner websites. So for each and every partnership Facebook assumes that it has this right, until you say no. Putting the burden on the Facebook member like this is an ominous direction for Facebook to be heading in.
I would imagine that almost anyone would feel like this is a violation of our privacy, but what is there to do about it? One could just quit Facebook, but there's lots of reasons that we actually have grown to depend on Facebook to make our social world jell, not unlike cell phones, or IMs, or whatever. You could disable cookies on your browser, but then Facebook won't let you log in. Or you could buy stuff on a separate browser. But all of these options basically allow Facebook to continue violating a very basic assumption that many of us have about the internet. We expect that when giving information to one site when we buy from them that our purchase isn't going to be shared to our friends unless we share it, and more importantly, that that one site isn't going to tell other sites about what we're buying. Enter 2.0.
Things that are under the radar:
Mike Huckabee: People have moved into a binary framework for the Republican nomination. Either we will have Guiliani or Romney. But this assumes that the Rudy campaign doesn't self-destruct in the coming months. There is a good chance of this happening. And that leaves us with Romney. If Republicans are left with the choice of a former Mormon governor or a former Baptist Governor, I predict they go Baptist. Besides, Huckabee lost his 100 lbs the old fashioned way.
The Avett Brothers' Emotionalism: This album came out in March, but it just got a Pitchfork review today. What does this mean? That Avett Brothers have got some legs, and that no one saw this album coming. It's good too, BTW. It has the proper balance of pop, Americana, and rawkousness. I could imagine being at a show in between a frat boy and a 13 year old girl, and not really caring, because the show was that good. There aren't too many albums that I'd say that about.
Google Book Search: There's been a lot of talk about how Wikipedia is changing the way that we do research. Next year, as a teaching assistant, I'll probably have to give a little talk to my sections about it. But the power of Wikipedia to get basic information about pretty much anything quickly is not really that useful. In a pinch, if I can't remember who George Washington's first Secretary of State was, fine, but the uses are kind of limited. On the other hand, with Google book search I can search for words or phrases in pretty much every published book in most languages. The potential for scholars is huge. Previously, something that get's left out of the bibliographies of one generation of scholars is pretty unlikely to get picked up by the next. Now, there isn't really any secondary source that can't help us. But again, people aren't talking a lot about this.
There is a great interview up at the Onion AV Club with Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi. It's a great read. Mainly becasue Martel says some extremely insightful things, and because it shows that he's a first rate intellectual, who could probably do anything, but has decided to gift us with stories and not treatises. Thank you Yann Martel. Of particular, personal note, is this quote.
Christians—part of this is based on my personal experience, and part of it is based on my intuition—don't read fiction. The Bible is enough for them. Jesus is enough for them. That otherworldliness of the Bible stimulates their imagination enough. Ardent Christians are not novel readers. Now, having said that, I did receive letters from Americans who were very Christian. I remember one man liked the novel, liked the story, but didn't find the fact that Pi practiced more than one religion all that amusing. He said "I've been put on this earth to spread the word of Jesus, and Jesus is the only truth, and to claim to be Christian and do something else is to be muddled and lose your way." I haven't received any equivalent letter from a Hindu or a Muslim.
I think Martel is basically right. Christians are often sated by the richness of the Bible story. I think this is a very basic paradox of the faith. Christians find their faith in Jesus to be so good that they loose curiosity and hunger for the world around us, earning our reputation for insularity. This phenomenon is really annoying to people who don't find their imaginations satisfied with the Bible story, who hunger to go to other places too. I think beyond the inconvenience for more creative Christians, there is something quite wrong with our insularity. Our insularity of the mind translates into an insular sub-culture.
However, I'm a little uncomfortable with Martels characterization of Christians as a whole. While he's write that most Christians don't read novels as adults beyond the evangelical cannon of Lewis and maybe Tolkein, it's equally true that most Americans don't read many novels, at least the kind of novels that Martel's writing. Life of Pi was a huge success, selling into the millions, that's not but slim shaving of Americans. I don't know that Martel's argument, that thoughtful Americans, who read novels, are disproportionately non-Christian, is very persuasive.