Comienza con una canción… improvisada… e inesperada… por ahí comienza todo… con una invitación sin pensar en la conclusión, sin pensar en la consecuencia… unscripted.

Fleet Foxes – A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

It’s a giant three-dimensional billboard for Goody’s Kodak, which sits atop an abandoned building that used to house the photograph development business on Ponce De Leon ave. The sign itself is in bad shape, having deteriorated continuously through the years. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but it certainly has a quaint look. I expect the building, sign and all, to be raided soon and a condo tower to be built in its place – such is the trend in the city. Or at least it was, who knows how long will the economy keep hungry developers at bay.

The interesting thing is that it’s so much part of the landscape that I think the neighborhood takes it for granted and I don’t know of any effort to preserve it.

After noticing the heavy proliferation of stickers on public street signs in Atlanta and other “non-traditional” methods of outdoor advertising, I thought of a way to relate that phenomenon to this assignment. Because of the fact that they are placed on “public property” they seldom get removed, which enhances their intrusive nature, and therefore, their effectiveness.

First an admittance: I didn’t know who Josh Harris was until yesterday. For better or worse I was oblivious to his existance and his uhm, visionary contributions to the world of social media.

He’s the subject We Live in Public, a documentary by Ondi Timoner, which screened at Sundace this year and will see a limited release in the next few weeks. Should you also need to look him up, I suggest reading his Wikipedia entry, then read Wired’s preview of Timoner’s documentary, and then listen to this segment about the film on WNYC’s On The Media (which is how I found out about the whole thing).

In her interview with Brooke Gladstone, Timoner says she realized Harris’ “We Live in Public” experiment was a precursor of sorts to the decidedly open lives most of us live in the age of status updates and 140-character answers to the question:”What are you donig now?”

She’s right. What’s becoming more apparent as Facebook continues to sign people up is the inevitability of losing control of what revelations can be made from the information we volunteer.

A group of MIT students, for instance, concluded an experiment in which they were able to predict, with mathematical accuracy the sexual orientation of men based on the information made available on their Facebook accounts.

And just yesterday, as I spoke with a relatively I hadn’t seen in months, he told me he’d seen a Facebook update in which I said something about New York, he couldn’t recall. And frankly, though I was in New York a few weeks ago, I couldn’t specifically remember which status update he was referring to.

Meaning he had some vague idea about me which could or could not be accurate based on his reading of the information I was broadcasting (what conclusions he drew from that, etc), and I myself wasn’t too cognaizant of what the hell I was putting out there.

What is apparent is how unprepared people really are to broadcast their lives to an audience of dozens (much less hundreds or thousands), and now that science can be executed to reach conclusions based on data that’s *already* out there, the concern can no longer be at the privacy-settings level of these social tools. The cat is out of the bag.

The implications are more profound now considering many of us rely on web-based tools for our calendars, work documents, email conversations, and more and more, our interpersonal communication, ie, relationships.

When the machine can effectively construct your identity for you, determining pieces of information about yourself not even you were fully aware of yet, and reveal that to the public before it does to you, the game’s over.

Photo by purplemattfish

Here’s an interesting contrast and a mixed message at the very least.

Si hemos de creer el titular de El Tiempo sobre la muerte del Senador Ted Kennedy, la “izquierda”, ese bloque de gente que está tan cláramente definido, anda en limbo y sin idea alguna de qué hacer.

Alguien debe recordarles que un tal Barack Obama ganó la presidencia del país con una amplia mayoría y haciendo campaña en una plataforma visiblemente liberal.

The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC, and News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, want both Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly to stop their feud. This is why:

Media opoly