Behavioral differences on- and offline?

People have always been victims to trends, it seems. One of the later ones that I can think of are these freakin’ Internet communities; today, just about everyone is a Facebook user. But hey – if I was to complain I’d be a hypocrite, as I am a member too. But what’s the deal with Facebook, really? I just read these two articles; the first one was about friending (isn’t it kinda sad that this I a verb?) on Facebook. This dealt with how people tend to send friend requests to people they haven’t met that often, and even people that are their doctors and lawyers and alike. Does this really seem proper? The doctor-patient relationship ought to be professional, shouldn’t it? They shouldn’t be Facebook friends, sharing updates, pictures and playing Farmville together or whatever. One of my cousins actually tried to become FB-friends with my girlfriend recently. This may seem normal, but the problem is that my cousin lives in another city, plus she hasn’t even met my girl. One of my friends is also one of those people with a lot of FB-friends. This is due to her friending people she’s met once; in quite a non-sober condition. I mean… In real life, you don’t meet a person once and call them your “friend”; that’s only on Facebook, right?

These irrational actions bring me to article #2: how Internet users have down-rated the Godfather as the top movie of all times. This has been on the top for ten years, and when Batman: The dark knight came out, regular folks rated it as the number one. I too am a fan of super hero movies, but if one is to be considered the best film of all time, it really has to be art-like, which I don’t find the dark knight to be, quite frankly. If a super hero movie should have the right to this position, however, I think it ought to be the Watchmen.

Harrison Hoffman, the author of this article, added a quote from Wikipedia, shortly saying that people tend to be influenced by what’s been said and do the same instead of taking an own stand in the matter. I think that this is sort of like the Facebook friending-problem; to feel good, you have to have a lot of friends, which sort of leads to friending every person you ever meet.

Facebook article
Wisdom of crowds article

Modern day pirates

For as long as pretty much anyone can remember, there’s been pirates, the most famous ones probably being those who sailed the seas about 400 years ago. To this day, there still are pirates; however, these pirates’ primary victims aren’t merchants and big ships with valuable cargo, but the music and film industry…

I have loved both film and music for my entire life. Both are simply awesome; I don’t think there’s any need for an explanation why I think this. To get back to the point: movies and music may be awesome, but are we really willing to pay about a hundred swedish crowns to go see a movie in a theatre once, pay 150 for a DVD to watch multiple times at home or download the movie for free? Would you pay that kind of money for a CD when you can just as easily turn to Spotify? The answer seems obviously simple, but it really isn’t. The obvious answer for us, the computer generation, would be downloading (or Spotify for music, now as that excellent invention exists), but that answer isn’t suitable. About six years ago, when I was twelve or thirteen, file sharing was almost “okay”. At least, it wasn’t illegal. Today you can’t download more than just a few songs, then you are most likely to get a lawsuit on your ass.
I mean, I am pro pirating, but I actually don’t download files anymore. Spotify pretty much does it for me, music wise, and movies… Well, for starters, I have a friend who downloads every now and then, and second, I own quite a number of DVDs that I bought off the rack for about 20 SEK. That, in my opinion, is a price that I can handle for a DVD. But as a movie enthusiast, I know that that price isn’t going to be close to covering the costs for producing a movie. But on the opposite, they earn quite a lot in the cinemas…
And when it comes to music, don’t most artists earn most of their money touring anyways? Lets just hope that this “Big-Brother-has-to-know-everything”-society doesn’t go too far…

Overall, I don’t think that pricay should be considered a crime; afterall, it’s just kids that don’t wanna pay that kind of money for a product they can get for free off the net in some minutes.

Triumph of the nerds

Triumph of the nerds. Before starting watching this, I actually thought that this was some sequel to the Revenge of the Nerds-movies. It wasn’t.

This documentary shows a bunch of guys wanting to build the first home computer, some of them being Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer (was it a necessity to be named “Steve” to make a career within computers?). These guys all show us the “nerdness” you had to have to do this. Their passion for computers and programming was at first a try to impress their friends, but it grew to be so much more than that. They got totally sucked into their projects, which gave them no time for food, showers or girlfriends. But maybe it was worth it? Now they are big-time billionaires. I don’t know if I would have coped though, having no social life whatsoever.
The first real personal computer breakthrough came in the late ’70s with Visicalc, a calculator program, easying things up for accountants, for instance.

One thing that was really important, and still is I suppose, was to take credit for your actions and achievements. A really good example of this was the Graphic User Interface that Apple developed, but Microsoft took credit for at their Windows launch. This worked out just as they said in the documentary; “The prize doesn’t go to the inventor, but  to the exploiter of the invention”.
Another thing to watch out for was reversed engineering. Maybe these guys should have thought about getting patent for some of their products?

This documentary didn’t appeal much to me at first, but after a while I could see its fascination, and if I’d get tired at least I would have learned something. And I sure did.
Even though I am not a typical nerd or even “computer person”, I am glad we have computers today. Really, what would humanity do without them? We have turned into a lazier species than we are supposed to be.