How the web made way for the $2000 vibrator

This is an aside titled 'How the web made way for the $2000 vibrator' dated 3/30/09

“This is what retailers are making way for on their shelves. A woman who subscribes to the Atlantic, travels for business six months out of twelve, buys most of her music online, and even now, long after her undergrad years, still reaches for Anaïs Nin at the end of a long day — she won’t feel her intelligence is insulted by sleek, well-designed toys.” – Melissa Gira. Or, as Debauchette once said about Njoy wands, they want something that feels like “fucking a Brancusi.”

Posted by Joanne on Mar. 30, 2009

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- Caring for Your Online Introvert is one of the posts I was super embarrassed about after pressing "publish," but it has since received a reaction better than I could have dreamed, from Kottke to Brainpicker to a bunch of tweets and retweets that mean a lot to me. Anyway, I submitted a proposal to turn the post into a panel at SXSWi next year, and would really appreciate your vote. Also, be sure to check out the other panels on Alexis Madrigal's list at the Atlantic. Thanks.
  2010-08-25 13:41:33
- Summer hours at The Tomorrow Museum. This may sound silly, but I'm cutting back my internet use this summer... as I work on writing a book about the internet. I've got a few long posts in progress, I hope to have ready in the coming weeks, but the short link posts require monitoring the web in a way I just can't handle right now.
  2010-06-16 06:09:13
- Mefi on "collapsitarianism," (linking to my post on Survival Creativity,) wonders why Kevin Kelly's revival of the term never caught on. But here it is in a recent NYT story on "life without oil."
  2010-06-16 06:06:16
- “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” - Mark Zuckerberg
  2010-05-13 19:07:21
- "We heard from a guy in Toronto who’d hosted a Kill Your Facebook account party. The price of admission was to delete your Facebook account. Over 200 people attended." - Sabbath Manifesto's Dan Rollman, also founder of URDB, in an interview with Make Work Meaningful. Meanwhile, there's this group and this pledge.
  2010-05-12 15:24:14
- Here's a nice roundup of commenter communities by New York's Doree Shafrir (who along with Sam Anderson keeps writing these great Fast Company meets New Yorker style articles for the magazine.) I don't often read comments, except on funny sites like Wonkette, where they seem to keep a joke alive. As I've written before, commenting seems driven by the same "annotation impulse" as bathroom wall graffiti. Every once in a while you'll find something poignant, funny, brilliant, clever, but it's also a place (and largely) for unpleasantries. Anonymous free speech is one of the most powerful things the internet provides us, that doesn't mean it can't be used for dumb or hateful things. Eventually I plan to disable comments since I don't have sufficient time to monitor them. I'd much rather people responded to my posts on their own blogs or over email. This is true for most single-author sites. It's easier to keep up a lively discussion with multi-author sites because already the other bloggers are there to chime in (or rush to your defense.) Doree also points out that "Gawker introduced comments in 2005 by sending out invitations to a select group of readers, making access seem (relatively) prestigious." Gawker comments were hilarious then. I'm not sure that this kind of roll out of a self-selecting community could sustain today as 2005 was before Twitter and Tumblr. Also, I'd really love to see a Venn Diagram of former Gawker commenters and the first thousand Tumblrs, as there seems to be a large intersection.
  2010-05-11 15:08:47
- Sorry. Deleted previous post, which was a draft I began to write. I love MarsEdit a lot, but I'd love it a lot more if the "send to weblog" and "save draft buttons" were not so close to each other and had more distinctive icons
  2010-05-10 02:27:15
- Sean Bonner deleted his Facebook account and wrote an interesting post about it, "am I only staying in touch with those people because it requires absolutely zero effort on my part? What kind of a person does that make me? What does that say about how much I value their friendship?" I deactivated my account two days ago. It's not valuable to me. Certainly the latest privacy fuss set me in that direction, but as I explained before, I've never been a heavy user. In the same way it's easy for me to be a vegetarian since I never really liked the taste of meat, deactivating Facebook isn't going to cause me the kind of stress is might for someone with 2,000 friends and pretty active feeds. I just find the website very unpleasant. Facebook made me feel like I was hoarding people, and yeah, I mean it in the trashy reality TV show sense. I'm a pretty introverted person to begin with, and this probably comes across in my online presence. I'd rather be a considerate friend to fifteen people than a negligent one to 1,500. And if the "post-privacy" future means having the same conversation with your boss, your boyfriend, and your grandmother, I'll be that like that old lady who faxes replies to all her text messages. More smart points from Barry Hoggard, who also canceled his account this week.
  2010-05-08 16:02:04
- I've got a post on NiemanLab today, Tracking memes on their native turf: Viral anthropology at ROFLcon. If you missed the conference, Benjamen Walker interviewed a number of guests for WFMU's Too Much Information. Hilobrow's Matthew Battles had a very different take. (That's me in yellow in the second photo, btw.) While I certainly recommend reading the post, I don't agree with his point that most of the audience was there to crack the viral code. In fact, I'd say the prevailing wisdom is a meme is unpredictable. I also felt the conference was more "warm-fuzzy web" than snark (with one notable exception as Nav rightly points out. Many bar room conversations I witnessed started out, 'what's the chip on Buzzfeed's shoulder?") If anything, the conference shows the term "internet culture" has long expired. In the end, ROFLcon is about internet celebrity. More Comic-con than ETech.
  2010-05-05 13:44:56
- Gary Shteyngart's new novel Super Sad True Love Story, is "about a middle-aged, overweight Jewish man in a dystopian future where everybody is too occupied with social media to realize that their living through Shteyngart’s version of 1984." Can't wait to read it.
  2010-04-27 23:58:02
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