Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
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Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#2This reads more like a comparison of "old money" and "new money" to me, than of rich and poor. I have more than one rich friend who would hate to be disconnected.
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#3The article was thought-provoking for me, as I hadn't heard the Sterling talk, but she lost me here:
I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious ....
I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regular beatings give you character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.
And what is stopping her from doing that? Her Twitter usage seems to be very much self-promotional and one way, so it's not as if she's leaving a community she has a stake in. What's she whining about?
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#4The article was thought-provoking for me, as I hadn't heard the Sterling talk, but she lost me here: I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious .... I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regu…
Bruce Sterling is awesome! He's one of the very few people who I'll at least skim pretty much anything he writes, watch all his talks, think about what he says. Sometimes he's wrong, but it's always a great ride. Love the guy.
Funnily enough I basically hate all his books but who cares.
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#5I like the web and connectivity because I like making shit, he doesn't address the developer side of it all.
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#6[deleted]
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#7I like the web and connectivity because I like making shit, he doesn't address the developer side of it all.
he doesn't address the developer side of it all
Well, not to put too fine a point on it: We're a vanishingly small percentage of humanity.
What we think about the web is disproportionately important, because people who build the web have a certain amount of power to control how people use it by tweaking the design. But, ultimately, we don't get to choose how the medium is used, any more than the makers of the atomic bomb got to choose how that was used... or the people who write music and books get to decide how their work will be reviewed and who will quote from it.
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#8Damn and blast, where is the podcast of the Bruce Sterling SXSW talk? It doesn't appear to be up here yet:
http://sxsw.com/taxonomy/term/44
I'm tired of all these bits-and-pieces leaks. Sterling's one-liners are much more fun -- and often make rather more sense -- in context.
I suppose, if I had been willing to spend more money, I could have just gone to SXSW and heard Sterling in person. But, instead, I have to wait like a mendicant for them to get around to dribbling it out to me. Maybe this is what Sterling was talking about.
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#9Of course poor people love their cell phones! But rich people too (even more sometimes)... And what's the point? How you use Twitter is a pretty different story. I find the article has a pretty strange structure anyway, I'm sort of searching the point the writer wants to make. Some more tweeting could help the author to get more concise maybe :)
Re: Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones
#10Bruce Sterling "Poor folk love their cellphones."
"Poor folk" don't have cellphones. They can't afford them.