Just when you thought CRT monitors were dead….

LG’s new retro TV. Includes B&W and Sepia modes, rabbit ears, and knobs for adjusting channels.

Christine Smallwood, writing at the Baffler blog, examines the question, “What Does the Internet Look Like?” It’s a long way from the question to the answer, and the journey is well worth it.

After noting that many visions of the Internet rely on images of connectedness, she explores the essentially solitary nature of the Internet search:

We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or “comment” on someone else’s blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending). But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its Internet-ness, is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit “If the Internet Were a Real Place,” in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransacking CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the door—the exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home. But it’s hard to find. How do you know when you’re done doing nothing?

Please, read the whole thing.

(h/t to Dr. Hoo for noting that Thomas Frank is one again producing The Baffler in print!)

Last year I became one of the millions to join the Borg of the social network known as Facebook. I had been apprehensive about joining (why would I want to spend more time online?) I have come to enjoy the ability to stay abreast of what my friends are up to (or at least what they are bragging or complaining about).

But as FB has worked itself into my life I have also come to wonder if it really is beneficial to me in the end. Do I really need to maintain relationships with so many folks I barely know? Do I really want to be publishing my life to friends of friends of friends?

Well, there’s a new solution called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine which helps you “commit” the deed and get back to your real life in meat-space.

With all the news chatter on the recent CES in vegas, here’s a look at some of the hottest technologies from 1983

AT&T recently posted a new app, “AT&T Mark the Spot,” which allows iPhone customers to use GPS to report the location of their dropped calls, poor voice quality, and so on.  (Via CNet News.)

I have to say that I’m on the fence about it.  On one hand, it is an acknowledgment that they need to improve their network, and actually a very clever way of optimizing their efforts.  On the other hand, I really hate systems that push the burden of poor service back onto customers.  I suppose that, as these kinds of efforts go, this is pretty innocuous.  It’s certainly better than selling customers IP-based femtocells, which I believe amounts to charging cellphone customers for the privilege of building out a network that they’re already paying to use.

What’s your opinion?

Maybe I’ve just not been paying attention, but in this age of micro-blogging, I’m surprised that Paul Klee’s 1922 The Twittering Machine hasn’t gotten more play.

Embiggen.

uh, cool.

so can i, like, print it out on something…
like maybe,
a real wall?

I can’t decide if I like either of these…

A beautiful infographic by Bryan Christie Design graces the the IEEE Spectrum special report, Why Mars? Why Now?:

…it was in the stomach of this baby albatross. Photographer Chris Jordan explains:

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

He and a team of creative folks are documenting what they find in the Midway Atoll and posting their work on a blog. It’s devastating.