Cisco/@theconnor, safe spaces, and eternal/ephemeral thoughts

Today I ran into the Cisco/@theconnor story, summed up nicely by Oliver over at the The BrandBuilder Blog:

1. @theconnor gets job with Cisco.

2. @theconnor posts less than enthused opinion about the Cisco job on Twitter (actually naming Cisco as the new employer).

3. Cisco employee on Twitter spots the post and promptly responds.

4. @theconnor blocks her Twitter updates (hides them from public view)... but it’s too late. The damage is done, and he probably spends most of the day wondering if Cisco will now rethink its job offer.

This is certainly not the first time this kind of thing has come up (re: FedEx and @keyinfluencer), because it reflects an idea that's becoming increasingly more true: online, everything is archived - instantly and forever. And anyone can/will find it, eventually.

I've had a few related thoughts recently on some of the emerging implications of collecting more and more of "all the worlds people and information together at our fingertips."

This is one of the most salient ones, that there are fewer and fewer "safe spaces" for expressing thoughts and feelings online (ask any teen who's gone from myspace to facebook to twitter to ??? as their parents follow suit).

Particularly relevant here: as the amount of exposure of any particular phrase increases throughout the net, so does the capacity for the phrase to be taken completely out of context.

Not that this is at all an attempt to argue the case that @theconnor should be shown some understanding, it is more an attempt to get a glimpse of how our actions, behaviors, beliefs and social norms will adjust over time to the inevitability of this massive public forum where context is non-existent that we're inching our way towards.

Where will we go to make a comment that is anything less than glowing about someone/something/somewhere without fear of the hammers coming down when the people close to those things inevitably catch wind of it? Will this kind of speech just go away? (ha. not likely.)

Will we develop more efficient methods for clarifying/expressing our true feelings? (waiting for the "lol the following is a joke, if you take it seriously it's probably because we're in no way close enough to understand each other, hey how about we go get a drink I know this place you'll probably like" emoticon/convention to emerge/catch on)

In a world where written statements are increasingly more permanent and pervasive: will we be able to recognize individual statements as one of infinitely many in a persons' life?

Not to long ago I started asking: "what is it that we'll be nostalgic for, 25 years from now?"

One answer that's starting to look good: "that time long ago when we could share thoughts online and have them exist as they do in our heads: temporary, changing, and subject to many more fleeting influences than permanent ones."

(btw it'd probably do you well to read Connor's thoughts as well.)

arcades, digital archives, and nostalgia 2K30

Today I ran into Classic Arcade Sounds over on coinopvideogames.com. Apparently one day back in 1982 a couple of guys got the simple idea, "Hey. Let's carry around a cassette recorder every time we go to the arcade, and just record the sounds onto a series of tapes as we're playing.  We'll do it over an 8 year period. Future generations will thank us."

27 years later it's a hit with me and countless others.

I've been doing a lot of thinking on nostalgia lately because it's such a fascinating and incredibly pervasive thing. Stronger and more pervasive than we realize, I'm thinking. I've been diving around doing some analysis that'll certainly share soon.

But on the tapes, what caught my attention is this:

Is there a 2K9 equivalent? Things like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the rest of the cloud have certainly changed the nature of how we collect and save things.

But nostalgia's been around forever and likely isn't going away anytime soon.

What could any of us be archiving now that others will be truly nostalgic for? We're quite proud of our "store anything, anywhere, forever" mentality in this digital world. But as our methods for archiving things change, we're sure to leave behind other intangible things that we'll no doubt be longing for.

What does nostalgia mean to you?

(by the way I've been collecting this and a lot of other stellar things here at yesthisisawesome.com; check it out.)

cartoons, memes, and retrospect

From what I can tell the "nostalgic groups of stereotypical characters are metaphors for my friends" meme has taken off well on Facebook. So far I've only gotten "the flirty one" but maybe "the one who never recognizes me until I wave my hands in front of him three or four times" is coming up soon.

The thing that we love about old cartoon characters now is that once upon a time before the internet we all had these shared experiences (saturday mornings and the like). And we can now all collectively reflect on them together. But we never really knew them as shared until people started calling us GenY's. There was no viral in the moment, only in retrospect.

I think that dynamic is no less true today. In fifteen years the guys and gals of today's youth aren't going to remember the memes, rather: "hey remember back when we used to want to be on FACEBOOK?"

"Yeah I think my brother did that or something?"

(the meme will be 'old twitter personality archetypes')

Nerf, nostalgia, and shared culture

So Gizmodo highlighted the automatic-fire, belt-fed Nerf machine gun turret earlier this year.

I really want one.

See, I think I'm something of a half-millenial. Me and the others who grew up on the generational cusp looked up to our Nirvana/Pantera/G'n'R/Pearl Jam listening older brothers and wished we were Gen X'ers. I remember talking to a friend in jr. high, convincing ourselves that since some report we saw in the news said something like "Gen X is the range of those born from approximately 1968 to 1983," and '83 was our year, we were totally legit.

Eh, we weren't. But anyways, we pseudo-milennials had all this shared generational pop culture, Nerf being a part of it. I got to thinking about how Nerf is still very much a part of life among young-to-not-so-young professionals - I'm sure we're not the only office with the cast of Nerf regulars and mini-battles.

But it's not just Nerf fanhood that has stuck around with us since we were growing up. It's the Minibosses and tons of others remixing nintendo-inspired music. It's our continued facination with Legos. We're sharing old PSA's, cartoon theme songs and commercials via Retrojunk.

I'm of the mind that for the most part, human nature is human nature - so part of me thinks that the same has been the case for every generation.

But also, I can't help but wonder about how the us being the first to hit our nostalgia stage in the internet age has impacted the whole notion of shared culture in a very unique way for our generation. I mean, check the Facebook groups - it's everywhere.

Any of my readers from other generations have some insight on what your shared culture experience has been?