as i was saying…
this morning tiffanie and i were chatting, and it went like this:
2:07 PM
me: i am pissed at itunes because it’s going to make me want an ipod just because it’s easier than dealing with my current mp3 player
2:08 PM
Tiffanie: bacon!
me: and i don’t like feeling forced like that
Tiffanie: that is annoying
we were also talking about what we want to make for brunch this evening, so that bacon comment wasn’t actually as random as it seems.
but it sure is funny as hell out of context, ain’t it?
:)
anyway, then i go to work and google tells me to read this article about how how norway is squabbling with apple about this very issue, and other european countries may follow suit (no pun intended, but that interpretaion is true, too)
this makes me feel somewhat redeemed, and yet it also compels me to ponder on what i really think about the matter.
my kneejerk reaction to itunes has so far been that it is annoying in some ways and brilliant in others, which makes it pretty much balance out and i don’t think about it much.
i don’t really use it, but that’s just my choice. i don’t mind other people using and loving it, and i never really thought of their preferential treatment of the ipod as something on par with bundling IE into Windows… i really just thought of the proprietary format business as a hassle, and a hassle born of the larger IP debate more than anything else. itunes has done a lot to bring a lot of music to people at a good price and in a way that kicks back to artists, so if they feel like they have to make their own file format to keep that going right now?
shrug
pick your battles.
but then i think about the deathgrip that ipods have on the mp3 player (or m4p player, as the case may be?) market, and i wonder…
when i say that they shouldn’t be bitches about their proprietary format, is that a “you shouldn’t tease your sister about her haircut” kind of shouldn’t, or a “you shouldn’t stab people in the eye with forks” kind of shouldn’t?
really, of course, it’s neither.
it’s a “you shouldn’t cramp information’s style” kind of shouldn’t, and the problem is that people disagree about where on the shouldn’t spectrum that particular transgression lies.
i, for one, think it’s pretty damn bad.
so should that change my relationship with apple?
we’ll have to wait until next time for the dramatic conclusion to this moral quandary, because i need to go make a quiche. but i thought i’d drop in and post the thought nonetheless.
i’ve been away for too long, and josh is encouraging me to blog about my switch, which is a grand idea, and thoughts on itunes at least get me into the general vicinity of that goal.
and yes, in case you were going to say something snide, i do realize that i said that tif and i were chatting “this morning” despite the fact that the timestamp on the chat itself suggests otherwise.
but i am also having brunch at 7 PM, you see?
welcome to my summer.
:)
June 12th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
[…] As the youngsters are saying these days: “Bacon!“ Posted in BlogSchmog, Respectfully Submitted, Of Course, In the News | […]
June 15th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
I take the bacon comment as more evidence that chat is not synchronous. In synchronous communication, people stay…well…synchronized. In chat, the feedback mechanisms we use break down because of the delay between typing and transmission.
Though I really like chat, the fracturing of conversations that always occurs is frustrating. I wonder (out loud) if there’s a way to design a chat program so that it is easier to have a normal conversation and harder to have a fractured conversation (unlike now, where it is the reverse).
Any thoughts about how this would work?
Bacon!
June 20th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
i had some thoughts on this one day when chatting with erik and it gave me an idea, which erik was kind and astute enough to put on his wiki, where the other josh has already added some good thoughts.
i think it would be interesting to pursue further.
i also feel cautious, however, because i don’t really Want chat to be synchronous. much of what i love about it derives from it’s “fractured” nature. it’s a little hard to follow one train of thought, but it makes it easier to keep more than one train going because it keeps a record for us of everything that has been dropped so that we can find it when we want to pick it up again, without having to remember it ourselves.
it also supports random interjections of whatever we are thinking in ways that don’t necessarily break the other person’s concentration – we can each focus on structuring what’s in our minds, and Then we can go back and respond to what the other person said.
and that’s really cool sometimes.
so the goal i see is not to abolish the asynchronicity, it’s to find ways of minimizing the confusing complexity while simultaneously nurturing the creative complexity.
then perhaps the asynchronicity could blossom, and we’d find out that it would have been silly to treat it like a weed and nip it in the bud.
June 20th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
Thanks for the link to the wiki. I agree with the other Josh — I’d really love to see it in action and see what people actually do with it, whether they use it, etc. I agree with you (Kynthia) that there ups to the way the system is now…but if the horizontal options could be added smoothly, that would (maybe) be great…sometimes I spend more time disentangling my chats than chatting…
As long as I’m thinking about chat…
There might be other useful features when chat is used for teamwork or business interactions, where that chat is going to be used for making decisions, etc. One could be a summarize feature…so I could select a chunk of interaction and write a short summary of it. The original text would be hidden (but retrievable, of course) in favor of the summary. Thus the chat can stand as a record of decisions made, arguments tendered, and the like, without being so long as to be unwieldy — and yet all the discussion is kept available and in context.