Camil Stoenescu's blog

Ideea unui american, Alec Brownstein pe nume, transpusă – cu doar șase dolari – în locul de muncă visat:

Meet Alec Brownstein, senior copywriter at creative advertising shop Young & Rubicam (Y&R) New York. Last summer, Alec was just another tired, 28-year-old copywriter at a large international ad agency who wanted nothing more than to work at “a really creative shop for really creative [creative directors].”

 

While Googling his favorite creative directors last summer, Brownstein noticed that there were no sponsored links attached to their names. Since Brownstein Googles himself “embarassingly frequently,” he assumed that the creative directors did so as well, and thus he decided to purchase their names on Google AdWords.

 

“Everybody Googles themselves,” Brownstein explained. “Even if they don’t admit it. I wanted to invade that secret, egotistical moment when [the creative directors I admired] were most vulnerable.”

 

Since Brownstein was the only person bidding on the names of the five creative directors he most admired, he was able to get the top search spots for a mere 15 cents per click. Whenever someone ran a search for one of the creative directors’ names, the following message appeared at the top of the page: “Hey, [creative director's name]: Goooogling [sic] yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too” with a link to Brownstein’s website.

 

Over the next couple of months, Brownstein received calls from all but one of the creative directors whose names he had purchased. And finally, at the end of the year, he received a job offer from two: Scott Virtrone and Ian Reichenthal of Y&R New York.

 

The whole campaign cost him $6.

Cercetătorii de la AVG au alcătuit un clasament al țărilor în care utilizatorii de Internet sunt cei mai predispuși a fi ținta unui atac informatic sau ai unui virus. Topul riscului e condus de Turcia, Rusia și Armenia, cele mai „sigure” țări fiind Sierra Leone, Niger și Japonia – primele două adevărate „pete albe” pe harta rețelei globale.

Dincolo de reclama implicită, rezultatele complete și metodologia pot fi găsite aici.

Vorbeam mai deunăzi cu un prieten – programator freelance – despre ipoteza (demnă de luat în seamă) a plecării din țară. Printre argumentele schimbate, acesta mi-a spus foarte sincer: „N-am niciun motiv să plec din România; ceea ce fac eu pot face de oriunde, fie într-o cameră de hotel, o insulă pustie sau metropolă europeană, cât timp dispun de conexiune la Internet. Așa că nu văd de ce aș emigra, să-mi las în urmă toți prietenii și tot ceea ce m-a format ca persoană, pentru a mă dezrădăcina în altă parte. Am stat un an în Germania, trei luni în Paris, știu ce înseamnă Occidentul și mă simt mai bine în România.”

Desigur, cazul este unul particular. Este greu să convingi un doctor, plătit mai prost decât un liftier, sau un profesor ce câștigă pe sfert din remunerația unui șofer de minister, să rămână în România. Nu pasiunea pentru profesia aleasă, ci doar un masochism latent i-ar (mai) reține aici. De altfel, aceștia pleacă în număr tot mai mare.

Despre nevoia de exprimare/comunicare – facilitată de dezvoltarea explozivă a ceea ce numim îndeobște „social media” – și despre cât contează cu adevărat ceea ce spunem, suprapus peste „zgomotul de fond” din mediul online, într-o formulare radical-sugestivă:

It’s not so much that I don’t want to write 300 words a day, the bigger issue is that I have nothing to say. In fact, I doubt many of us do. I, for one, wish to minimize my personally engraved bubble of meaningless drivel sent into the ether. Drivel seems to be a particularly irritating condition afflicting my generation: saying nothing and saying it often. Life has become one huge, amorphous glob dripping with status updates and twitpics. Timelessness and substance have been replaced with real-time perishables.[…]

As a social media whore, I pray for a time when updates are thought-provoking, interesting, funny or at the very least, worth 2 seconds of my brain function. Not always, not as a rule, but as a courtesy. We’re losing our filter. "Think before you speak" applies just as much to written words as it does to our face-to-face interactions.

O altă opinie ilustrativă în acest sens:

Then last night I noticed that my Buzzes were no longer showing up on Twitter (I use a service called Buzz Can Tweet that has been pretty reliably rebroadcasting my Buzz posts to Twitter.) I looked more closely at my Buzz feed and noticed that there had been considerably less engagement over the past few weeks. Then I noticed that I wasn’t seeing my posts in my Buzz timeline at all. A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 6. Nothing. Fifteen posts buried, including show notes from a week’s worth of TWiT podcasts. Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson.

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan.

Iar în tot acest timp, cunoștintele noi se fixează și creativitatea se dezvoltă tocmai când suntem „off-line”, decuplați de la zumzăitul informațional, mai mult sau (adesea) mai puțin relevant. Viitorul stă sub semnul solipsismului.

De la creatorii Nmap:

We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its "www." counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

Concluzie interesantă – aparent, Facebook este al doilea site din lume ca trafic, după Google, depășind Youtube, Yahoo! sau Wikipedia.

De aici.

Pentru a studia modul în care tehnologia modernă afectează creierul și comportamentul uman, cinci cercetători americani au petrecut o săptămână în Utah, izolați de lume și fără mijloace electronice de comunicație:

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots.[…]

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention — from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

Concluzia? Bombardamentul la care suntem zilnic supuși de către informația digitală – în cea mai mare parte neimportantă cu adevărat – creează o falsă senzație de urgență, de a fi mereu conectat, dinamic și ocupat, iar capacitatea de concentrare și atenția pe termen lung au de suferit.

Personal, găsesc o plăcere subtilă în a închide telefonul pentru ceva timp și a nu verifica e-mailul câteva zile. Dar până la dezideratul „o lună fără Internet” mai este de lucrat.

PS O lectură interesantă cu privire la dependența de Internet poate fi găsită aici.

Trei activități își iau partea leului: rețelele sociale/cititul blogurilor, jocurile și mesageria electronică. De remarcat creșterea substanțială a timpului alocat rețelelor sociale, de la 15.8% la 22.7%, în decurs de doar un an. Facebook ajunge la 500 de milioane de utilizatori iar industria farmaceutică prosperă vânzând tot mai multe antidepresive.

De aici.

Sau cum se „împăturește” o proteină:

Cei interesați pot arunca o privire aici.

Numărul de conexiuni de mare viteză (broadband) la Internet a crescut într-un ritm accelerat în ultimii 10 de ani. În imagini sugestive, BBC ne prezintă această evoluție.

Astfel, acum 11 ani, în 1999, existau doar puțin peste 4 milioane de conexiuni broadband în toată lumea. Peste doar 3 ani, în 2002, numărul acestora ajunsese la 66 de milioane:

Continuând tendința puternic ascendentă, în 2004 erau aproape 158 de milioane de abonați, 350 de milioane în 2007, ajungând la mai mult de 400 de milioane de conexiuni de mare viteză, în 2009.

Succesul fulminant al ceea ce numim „social media” a contribuit într-o măsură considerabilă la impulsionarea progresului tehnologic și la reducerea continuă a prețurilor, împreună cu răspândirea MMORPG.  În viitorul nu foarte îndepărtat probabil va fi la fel de greu să găsim o zonă fără acoperire broadbang (prin cablu sau Wi-Fi) precum este astăzi găsirea unei locații fără semnal GSM.

Un studiu actual confirmă un adevăr vechi de când lumea: oamenii se asociază conform preferințelor și afinităților, evitând relațiile și interacțiunile problematice:

A new study analysing interactions between players in a virtual universe game has for the first time provided large-scale evidence to prove an 80 year old psychological theory called Structural Balance Theory. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that individuals tend to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop a society, resulting in more stable social networks.

The study, carried out at Imperial College London, the Medical University of Vienna and the Santa Fe Institute, analyses relationships between 300,000 players in an online game called Pardus. In this open-ended game, players act as spacecraft exploring a virtual universe, where they can make friends and enemies, and communicate, trade and fight with one another.

Scientists currently study data from people’s electronic interactions, such as emails, mobile phones and online retail behaviour, to improve our understanding of human societies. Online games such as Pardus produce vast amounts of data that scientists can also use to study interactions between players, applying their findings to understanding the way that people interact in society.

Structural Balance Theory is an 80 year old psychological theory that suggests some networks of relationships are more stable than others in a society. Specifically, the theory deals with positive and negative links between three individuals, where ‘the friend of my enemy is my enemy’ is more stable (and therefore more common) than ‘the friend of my friend is my enemy’.

Din Science Daily.