With anything digital, the talk is always of the “next great technological innovation,” rather than how good something currently is. Case in point, the amazing facial recognition apps, we had all just about forgotten about. Almost forgotten about, that was until Google Goggles announced they had the potential to identify any stranger on the street, if you provide them a cameraphone image. Which of course, is GPS tagged.

On one hand, it’s sort of interesting that the Orwellian tagging of Facebook and Flickr has given rise to an Orwellian society. Surveillance databases and the fact that no-one cares, result from the disposable nature of information today. There’s so much of it hitting you at once, that people are only expected to glance at walls, updates and amateur hate blogs with a cursory interest. One that has no depth, beyond grabbing sound-bites to repost elsewhere. What Wikipedia has allowed, is for people to gain a Cliff Note idea of concepts, without actually having any knowledge of them. No different than people laughing at ICP’s Miracles video, only to be confronted later with the fact they themselves don’t know how magnets work.  They just thought they did, by glancing over keywords like “North Pole,” “South Pole” and “metal”  – yet coming to no understanding. You can read more about our amateur post-modern philosophy, blaming the marketing perspective of Baby-Boomer culture for the benevolent view of today’s shit-pile, here.

Whereas people have always claimed to like something like The Royal Tennebaums, because it makes them feel smart to pretend to enjoy something they heard was based on Salinger, this new false Read the rest of this entry »