NYTimes: The Flight From Conversation

We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.

Attention and focus are becoming scarce resources.

In our digital world, this is a beautiful little analogue story.

Now that I live in LA, I’m looking forward to visiting Caine’s Arcade (if it’s still open). The $2 Fun Pass looks like an awesome deal.
via Daring Fireball

What That Puppy Photo on Pinterest Says About the Future of the Internet

That fact is reflected everywhere on the Internet — a world that was born of text (the first HTML, the first linkblogs, the first instant messages and emails) but which quickly adjusted its architecture to accommodate images (emoticons! jpgs! Geocities! animated gifs!) and video (cats!). Today’s web, as an aesthetic object, is an advanced dialectic between text and image. (Comic sans, obviously, being the evil spawn of the two.) Online, text lives alongside decorative illustrations and share buttons and logos and embedded videos, the whole vibrant cacophony interacting so seamlessly that it’s easy to forget that text and image are, in fact, different mediums. Social networks, in particular, break down neatly along text/image lines: There’s Twitter, heavy on the text and low on the pictures, and then there’s Facebook and Google+ (heavy text/heavy image), and then Tumblr (heavy image/low text), and then, at the other end of the spectrum, Pinterest (heavy image/effectively no text).

Looks like there’s a good amount of exhaust on Pinterest.
Update: Okay, I just realized some of those pins are actually mine.

I lived at 100 East 7th Street in the East Village in NYC from 2000 until 2005 in my uncle-in-law’s rent-controlled apartment (I’ll make you cry a little – it was a 2 bedroom unit I paid $600 a month for).
It wasn’t until I got married and moved and my brother took over the apartment did I ever see who lived behind the door of 102 East 7th Street (and what was in there).
His name is Anthony Pisano, and he’s a wonderful old man:

Further validating the fact that the East Village is still the best neighborhood in New York.
via Dangerous Minds (thanks bro).

Clay Shirky responds to David Pogue’s stance on SOPA and how we shouldn’t be so quick to assume Hollywood’s legal dogs are savage, rabies-infected hounds:

If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time.

“All their signs look like Unicode errors.”
—Marco Arment on the public signage in Montreal
Build & Analyze podcast Episode 47

I’d like to welcome Bryan Larrick to Daily Exhaust. I owe him for catching many of my typos and grammar errors over the years on this site.
In addition to being a gifted front-end developer, he writes on a variety of topics on his site, Missile Test (he’s got a penchant for shitty movies). He’s also a pretty awesome photographer.
He scores extra points for the fact that shoots with analogue film on a Holga, a Minolta SR-T and a Mamiya.

Bill Gates wants to get rural Vietnam online:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has provided the donation, alongside $3.64 million worth of Microsoft software, towards a $50.6 million government initiative that is expected to provide basic computer skills and the benefits of the Internet to 760,000 people in the Southeast Asian country.

The project will see 12,070 Internet-ready computers set up at 1,900 public libraries (65 percent of the country’s total) in 40 of Vietnam’s most disadvantaged provinces. The price of access to the computers, which will be available for local Vietnamese to use until 2016, is varied with some free to use and others reportedly set to charge 50 percent less than typical local Internet cafe rates.

Donating software is nice, but you need hardware too. And the best form factor is the tablet, and since Microsoft still doesn’t have a Windows 8 tablet on the market, I say he buy and donate some Android tablets and some iPads.
After watching the video of Gates Jory posted last week, I’m sure he totally be down with the idea.
I mean, he says it himself in the video, that tablets and technology is “no longer his area of expertise”.
Do what’s right, Bill.

From Candy Chang:

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget what really matters to you. With help from old and new friends, Candy turned the side of an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans into a giant chalkboard where residents can write on the wall and remember what is important to them. Stenciled with the sentence “Before I die I want to _______”, the wall became a space where we could learn the hopes and dreams of the people around us. Before I Die transformed a neglected space into a constructive one to help improve our neighborhood and our personal well-being. It’s a question that changed her over the last year after she lost someone she loved very much.

Fucking beautiful. Just goes to show you the power of street art in the right hands.

I’d like to welcome my good friend Jory Kruspe to Daily Exhaust. He’ll be contributing posts on design, film, music … who knows!

What I do know is he’s a passionate designer and he’ll be bringing a unique perspective to this site.

Anything he could do for them would only comprise a small push in a positive direction before the tremendous momentum of their negative tendencies reasserted itself.

—George Saunders, from Tent City, U.S.A, GQ Magazine, September 2009

If you’re interested in counter-culture, outsiders or homeless, crazy people in a tent city, you’ll dig this.