martedì, agosto 30, 2005

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

really busy days. Tania just moved to a new town for her job and I'm going to move back to Urbino tomorrow for the upcoming semester. the worst part (or the best one) is that I've rent a new (bigger) house that tomorrow I'm going to move there a huge amount of stuff. By the way... Few weeks ago I saw a nice movie that summarise what's personal memory in our society The movie (not really new) is "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (the horrible Italian translation is "Se mi lasci ti cancello"). If you think about how we are digitalising our personal history you gonna face the idea that in digital memories you can delete something leaving no trace of that action, what you've deleted is just disappeared as it wasn't never been there. Digital reality has no memory (if we call memory the relationship that occurs between past and present as it is in modern western society), but has only an eternal present.

domenica, agosto 21, 2005

SLOG

Jill Walker posted about a very interesting web service. Treasuremytext is a website to which you can send SMSs you've received to keep them safely stored and to create some kind of SMS log. The usage of writing received SMS of a diary is quite wide spread and this is in some way the digital version, but what's most interesting is that, if you want, you can publish your SMS on the main page of the website. You can broadcast your SMS. You can broadcast your life. Another step in the "becoming media" path.

sabato, agosto 20, 2005

summer rain

After some summer hard work I finished a paper I'm presenting in Liverpool. If someone is interested you can found the paper here(Probably this link won't work. I'm sorry about that but I'm sure the cool Guy who's managing the server will kix the problem as soon as possible. Meanwhile if you email me or leave me a comment I will send you a copy). Obviously comments are welcome. I'm not sure about how I feel about this paper. Obviously I like the topic (the relationship between digital technology and private property), it's the main topic of my PhD research but what I realised during this writing time is that's so a huge topic. Now I'm here watching at this mountain unable to focus the borders. Worst is the fact that while I'm stuck with this problem my mind is still looking for new perspectives and for new conceptual linkage.

martedì, agosto 09, 2005

blogging your own suicide

Luca K. (fake name as we are going to discover) few month ago started a blog to describe his own suicide (the title of the blog 'prima di partire' means "before leaving"). On July 12th Ciro (aka Luca K.) died. He jumped off from a bridge near Milan. He posted on his blog after his death using a well konwed feature of wordpress. Hundreds people commented the suicide, some claiming that it was just a fake, others wanted simply to say goodbye. Well, Ciro really died (it was on the newspaper some days later...) but that's not the point. I'm not cynical or something, but what I really would like to understand is why someone needs an audience to die? Ciro's story really shows how bloggers are simply looking for an audience. Ciro said "I started blogging my suicide because I wanted to make a show, and to tell to you my story". Are we really becoming some kind of "one-man-story"?