In all the chaos of the September 11 attacks — I got the first report of the planes flying into the Twin Towers while I was getting ready to go to the University of Toledo for my classes that morning, my first class actually met like usual before the campus closed for the day, I didn’t get the afternoon off work (but I was able to leave long enough to fill my gas tank before prices spiked), and I spent hours in a “how could…
HBO Max locks down exclusive access to new Sesame Street episodes (The Verge) The first iPhone was released a little over twelve years ago. This means that students who entered college this year were about six years old when the iPhone came out, and although I certainly have memories of my life from before I turned six, I don’t have that many. If we aren’t yet at a point where new college students can’t remember a world without smartphones, we will be in the next…
Dominatrix Community Condemns Netflix Show ‘Bonding’ As ‘Inauthentic’ and ‘Problematic’ (IndieWire via yahoo.com) I’m old enough that my first explorations of my sexuality online weren’t done on the Internet, but on local computer bulletin boards. I got regular Internet access when I first went off to college, and as wonderful of a resource as the Internet proved to be for that purpose, it also provided me with my first lessons about how “nothing ever really leaves the Internet,” long before anyone thought to coin that…
Russia or tax cuts: Are MSNBC’s corporate bosses causing a coverage dilemma? (salon.com) Social media, like so many Internet technologies that rose to prominence after the turn of the millennium, is both blessed and cursed by the fact that its capacity for human-generated content is basically limitless. If you throw out the people who use bots to post online at inhuman speed, it’s basically impossible for one person to shut down a social media service by making post after post. Most of us have at…
The original Star Trek television series was the backdrop for a lot of the bonding I did with Mom when I was young. Back before we had cable, reruns of the original Star Trek were one of the few things my mother made a point of catching whenever they were on, because she’s always had a huge crush on William Shatner dating back to before he even appeared on The Twilight Zone. For my part, I identified a lot with Spock, if only because he was the closest…