Hiatus

Grooming the Avatar is taking a break while I focus on the realest of real life events: the birth of my daughter.

I am still collecting links at http://delicious.com/sawinkler/groomingtheavatar

Iam writing about fatherhood (when I can) at http://newbdad.wordpress.com/

I am still on twitter at http://twitter.com/sawinkler

back soon.

The Big Delete

The Long Now blog recently ran an item on a service that allows people you designate access to your online assets in the event of your death.

"Online assets"? No, we're not talking about bank accounts, credit card accounts, and all of the online places that handle your money. We're talking about places like facebook, flickr, ebay, gmail, LinkedIn.

I don't think I'd ever considered these "assets" but if this is the information economy, then information about me must have some value. And if they have value I guess they should be dealt with as part of my estate.

It just seems a little...ghoulish...to have someone go through my online life and erase my tracks. It feels they'd be erasing the evidence that I existed.

Maybe my wife could use my assets as therapy, and update my status to "channel" me. Of course, those friends of friends who read "Stephen has updated his status: dead." on their facebook home page might get a little freaked out. But they'd get used to it, eventually.

There might even be a business to be made out of posting updates from loved ones who have passed on. A twitter John Edward, if you will.

And what about the avatars I have created? What happens to my Second Life avatar, or my World of Warcraft characters? Maybe they're out there in the servers of Linden Labs and Blizzard, having their own electron adventures? If they are, it really wouldn't be fair to end their little existences. I'm a benevolent creator. . .

And I'm not convinced that we should delete all of our digital breadcrumbs. I guess I'm just hoping that my small contribution to the epochal data will be useful to future anthropologists sifting through the layers of this time.

(photo from djaquay)

Where No One Has Gone. . . in a long time

I'm chalking this one up to: cool!  Google Maps reveals unexplored (at least to modern science) areas of the world and, according to National Geographic:

In the fall of 2008, an international team of 28 researchers hiked into the wilderness, where they found a new species of snake, a rarely seen orchid, and more than 500 plant specimens. 

This strikes me as a good reminder that we can't fully understand the world around us by limiting ourselves to either the digital world or the physical world. The digital world can bring things to us that were previously unknown, but it's still up to us to go verify, explore, and experience.

I'm glad I can still wonder at the fact that there are undiscovered places left on this earth. I like the idea that we haven't stopped searching from them, or trying to learn from what that search tells us. It's one of the best parts of what makes us human.

And some day, we'll wind up doing this:

  

Marshall Yourself

Earlier this week my twitter stream tipped me off to a news story with the headline "Martial Arts Expert Challenges Chris Brown to a Fight." Basically, the owner of a boxing training center in LA created a Facebook group challenging Chris Brown "to step into the ring against him and see what it’s like to face a real opponent."

There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know where to start. But I'll try.

First I'll say I don't think Chris Brown should get a pass for allegedly doing this to Rihanna.  Domestic abuse is a disturbingly difficult problem to try to solve and needs to be dealt with when it happens. But it doesn't need to made into a circus, no matter who is involved. 

My issues with this promotion by LA Fitness are threefold:

As a PR guy, I have a problem with trying to capitalize on this incident to promote your business. One, it's just tacky. And two, the promotion smacks of "come to LA Boxing and learn how to fight." One implication being that, if Chris Brown trained there. . .he'd REALLY know how to throw a punch?

As an aspiring martial artist, I'm insulted by the idea that this guy is selling martial arts as a way to gain revenge or mete out justice. The paradox of martial arts has always been that the more you know how to fight, the less you actually want to or need to fight. Yes, you learn how to efficiently fight people (meaning, disarm/disable them quickly) when you study martial arts. But the key is that you learn how to control that knowledge. You learn that your first impulse is not necessarily to attack.

As a man, I have a problem with the thinking that the answer to a man who has problems with violent impulse control is to. . . threaten him with violence.  Way to try to break the cycle, LA Boxing dude.

I sent my thoughts to the publicist who sent out the original tweet, but did not hear back. I'd love to hear why they think this promotion is a good idea, but maybe they don't want to take too close a look at this. That wouldn't be a good story.

Grooming the Feeds

this week's Grooming is a list of news that caught my eye. they're over at Delicious.

http://delicious.com/sawinkler/groomingtheavatar

I'm trying to figure out how to merge my delicious links into my feedburner. when I do, you'll be the first to know. Actually, you'll be the only one to know, dear subscriber.

Names Writ in Water (no more)

This murketing post got me thinking about how our digital lives remain after our physical existence has ended. 

When Keats wrote his own epitaph: 

"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" he was probably thinking about the transience of memory and that any fame he had achieved relied on someone else remembering him after his death. 

Of course, he will be remembered for as long as English classes teach Ode on a Grecian Urn.  But the rest of us will probably not write a line like "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" and earn a place in the cultural canon. 

Before the internet, there were few ways for a man's name to live beyond him because he had to be famous enough for anyone to want to record his life. No more: the barriers to recording life are astonishingly low in our time. 

Now, blogs and youtube record everything and search engines make everyone immortal. 

There are 22.6 million bloggers in America. We're not all Keats, we're not even the guys who nursed Keats on his death bed. If 98% of the blogs shut down tomorrow, the world would not miss our absence. 

Do we do this because we can, because after we're gone, these digital crumbs of our thoughts will still be around? That's probably part of it. I know that 100 years from now, if someone googles the word "avatar" this blog will be one of the results.  

Like that guy who left a red hand-print on a cave wall in Lascaux knew that someone would find it and know he lived, I know that someone in the distant future may see my name and know my life. May it be worthy of the immortality.  

(image of John Keats' gravestone from wikimedia commons)

Service for the Bullhorn-less

This week I had some customer service related experiences. The first was a disputed charge on my Comcast bill. Last year, when I had a disputed charge, it took me long phone calls for three consecutive bills in order to correct the error. Now, thanks to twitter, I got help directly from @ComcastGeorge, who had someone call and issue a credit. Total time invested by me: about 15 minutes.

Then I was setting up an event on my ning site and sent out a tweet in frustration about not wanting to be forced to include an image for every event, to which I got a reply:

Later the same day, I vented my frustration with Acrobat and got a response:

I'll admit I was half-testing twitter to see if someone from Ning or Adobe was listening. It's good to see that they are, and, in the case of Ning, that they are taking what they learn from the community and applying it.  

But it struck me that if I was not on twitter, like the other 95% of the people in the US, I would not be as happy with these companies. I know that Comcast is not getting any better with their call-center service because I experienced it and still hear about it from other people, I know that Adobe's on line support is basically an FAQ because I looked there for a solution before sending out that tweet.

David Armano shared a story the other day where Priceline had refused to issue a refund to a baby that had been burned.  Only after the child's mother enlisted her friend to spread the word on the internet, did Priceline credit the family. Yes, Priceline did the right thing, but only after being faced with the choice of being publicly outed for having no empathy for a...burned...baby. 

Until companies stop running the formula from Fight Club, and only taking care of the vocal minority because it's cheaper to do so, we're going to keep seeing that minority become more and more vocal to get what they want. 

This is not a Good Thing. Not only because there will be cases where the undeserving are rewarded, but also because the loudest voices are often the most extreme. I have seen our national conversation devolve into shouting matches between extremes, creating the false choice that we need to agree with one or the other point of view. From politics, to religion, to the economy, to education, the middle way is being lost. 

Thinking in terms of exact opposites is as childish as believing that you will get your way if you yell long enough.

Here's hoping we're in for an era of passionate moderates who are willing to bank their personal outrage in the cause of community peace and progress, and that companies will give people less reason to reach for the bullhorn in the first place. 

(photo from natebeaty)