11/24/2010

Outside my window.

            I am beginning to feel better, and not so tired.  I took a walk briefly yesterday to help Jennida get some things from the store.  The whole process probably lasted an hour but it was nice to get out.  It was dark by the time we got back.  I took some photos with my new instagram app on my iphone.  I like the aesthetic, and the social networking premise is very interesting.  There are some things that could be better but then again I notice the cracks in social/locative media a bit more precisely as a traveler outside my own country.  The so-called convergence of media and intercoNETivity really begins to breakdown when one can only rely on Wi-Fi.  The allure of Instagram is the ability to take a photo, instantly manipulate, geo-tag, describe, and upload your photo to a host of services like Face Book, Tumblr, and Four Square.  However, if you do not have a data connection, Wi-Fi or otherwise that chain breaks and one must then regress to the standby operation of returning to the hub (usually home) processing the image through its progressions to its final destinations.           

            I don’t point this out to simply whine about not being able to adjust to the break in intercoNETivity, rather to point out the gaps and cracks in the waking dream a lot of us are living in since entering the cloud.  Since coming across the ocean I have been tripped up by the fact that I cannot watch programs on Hulu.com or cartoons on WB.com because of copyright restrictions.  While watching videos on Youtube.com I was informed that one of the videos from the channel I was viewing would not be shown due to Comcast Entertainment’s restriction on copyright.  Let me take an aside to point out that the channel was hosted by one person (meaning that all the videos had been uploaded by that person) and that the content contained in each video were apart of an ongoing dialog about the waitron experience and was disseminated though Xtranormal.com, the new text-to-movie website.  In a related an incident I was informed by GoogleVoice that I could not sign up for their service because it is not offered outside of the United States.  Now I challenge that in a post geographic world that if I were in the United States right now, I could sign up for GV and then leave the United States and still use it.  After all the service does not function in a location-based environment, in fact it operates in a locationless environment and thus is its main aim and purpose.  I access my Gmail everyday, participate in cloud computing with Google Docs, and oh lemmie check real quick….opening Google Chrome because it uses Google Translate, because despite not being ale to read Cesky Google knows that I am not in the United States and therefore refuses to render text in English unless I use “Translate” in Chrome so that I can navigate my way to using Google Latitude where It can pinpoint and track my location via GPS and share it between my friends, one of which apparently seems to be still in Short Pump as of 99 days ago.  We are on our way, but we are not yet post geographic.  Not as long as companies like Comcast uses the dissemination of the stream as grounds for controlling copyright. So in going forward the seamless digital freedoms that we all enjoy and pursue breaks down at the borders.  Oh wait, I dropped some money!  It is interesting to think that the average person might in the future understand the feud between the FCC and the multimedia conglomerates over net neutrality by simply crossing the pond as it were and not paying for the digital upgrade packages that are simple permissions for data and cell roaming charges to be incurred at an inflated rate.

            I wonder how long I would need to stay in Europe to properly understand the hoops and hurdles one would need to navigate in order to posses the proper tech to do simple locative media projects?