Blob
>the personal blog of david n wallace
[aka Dave the Lifekludger]

“What matters is context. I’m tired of having companies guess at what my context is. I know what my contexts are. I know how they change. I want my own ways of changing contexts, and of informing services of what those contexts are. In some cases I don’t mind their guessing. In a few I even appreciate it. But in too many cases their guesses only get in the way. The Google search case is just one of them.”

What underlines Doc’s experience is this issue of control.

Anyway, seeing Doc write about this got me thinking about what I was hung up on when I wrote back in 2005:

“These different modes we operate in. This is our context and this is what is getting me hung up about attention. Attention only measures what we look at not why we are.”

http://dnwallace.com/blog/2005/11/11/im-hung-up-on-the-concept-of-context/

Assumptions sap our ability to control what is ours.

Dave

One of the reasons that self-tracking is spreading widely beyond the technical culture that gave birth to it is that we all have at least an inkling of what’s going on out there in the cloud. Our search history, friend networks and status updates allow us to be analyzed by machines in ways we can’t always anticipate or control. It’s natural that we would want to reclaim some of this power: to look outward to the cloud, as well as inward toward the psyche, in our quest to figure ourselves out.

“And that’s how we get the American Cinternet. Don’t encircle it yourself. Get the feds to make ISPs into liable intermediaries forced to practice “self discipline” the Chinese way: a “graduated response” that encircles the Net, reducing it to something less: a spigot of filtered “content” that Hollywood approves. Television 2.0, coming up.

Maybe somebody can draw us the Content-o-net”