A 2.0 moment: a reader writes me directly last night to say that the justusboys time stamps are at GMT +1. “I was wondering if you took this into consideration?” Although I wrote about the problems with time stamps early on in this meditation, I didn’t think to check this. So, tip o’ the hat to Mike for this. Then, I thought I’d got it right, revised, and reposted. But Steve and Patrick wrote me to point out that I...

The following entry is the “SFW” (i.e., PG-13) version of: This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by...

What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...

In Part 1 on Virtual Communities and Embodies Realities, I moved from Tyler Clementi’s virtual community on justusboys.com to the embodied community of his dorm. In Part 2, I will focus on a number of embodied communities at Rutgers and then, in the remaining posts in this thread, I will continue the discussion of Clementi’s correspondence with his virtual community. Here are a handful of examples of local efforts at Rutgers to...

At the end of my last post, I asked the question, “Is nothing sacred?” Here are some responses to that question, via the world of Web 2.0: After a day of denial, Gawker acknowledges that it has been hacked and that the private data of its 1.3M users have been posted to an open site for downloading by others.Meaning?If you have a Gawker account, your password is available to anyone who visits the bit-torrent site. (If you’re...

“This is not a ‘phone,’” Dr. Englander told the parents who looked, collectively, shellshocked. What you’ve given your child “is a mobile computer.” This quote comes from “As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catchup,” the latest cage-rattling piece in the Times’ ongoing coverage of technology’s disruptive influence on the family. It’s easy enough to interpret parental cluelessness of...