When Isolation and Disconnection are Desirable

In his article on Scuttlebutt, Bogost asks, “What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network?” He says this in the context of describing how Dominic Tarr, the creator of Scuttlebutt, lives largely offline in a sailboat in New Zealand, but it makes me think of the not-yet-wireless phone in my house growing up. Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You t...

 Cultural Differences

The Italian model has a sign like a wave, meaning, “Come here.” Greek girls cause problems for non-Greek boys by saying “No” with a nod, not a shake, of their head. In New Zealand you can do one kind of V-sign but never the other. Americans look posh when they look neat; Europeans look posh when they look as if they’ve just come through a hedge backwards. A very fine linguistic example of model difference lies in the way the Irish and the English express themselves. Where the Britis...