Face Time 2.0

October 9, 2006

I’m not talking video conferencing. It seems there are rumblings afoot. Focus your value statements people…

“The superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt,” Henderson wrote in a column in the student newspaper at Iowa State University, where he studies history. “It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails.”

Across campus, journalism professor Michael Bugeja — long an advocate of face-to-face communication — read Henderson’s column and saw it as a “ray of hope.” It’s one of a few signs, he says, that some members of the tech generation are starting to see the value of quality face time.”

It is inevitable. A frenzied application of social technologies to every previous form of sociality will lead to most models failing or becoming boring, just as many, many new takes on old and abiding core relational patterns have. The bloom will come off the rose, but the process merely focusses the development community on what really works, and where the value really lies.

On the horizon: a new TANG CYA

October 4, 2006

With the Mark Foley scandal at full tilt just weeks before elections, watch for a little trick we’ve seen before. An accusation against him will surface. Something worse than we’ve heard so far. It will come in the form if some kind of document. That document will subsequently turn out to be inaccurate or even a forgery. This will turn the scandal into a story about the accuracy of the reports about Foley and the veracity of his accusers, not Foley and his gross misdeeds.

Ring any bells?

Hopefully the news media are not going to bite on this kind of thing again, but I wouldn’t put it past them. I wouldn’t put it past FOX or someone of their ilk to knowingly run with something like that so they can be the ones to turn things around.

Yes, I am that cynical and jaded.

Yes, I DO think US politics is that sick.

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