random ranjeet on 24 Sep 2007 07:04 pm
The Things I Do For You
If you spend much time with me you might think that I’m gadget obsessed. That I’m the person who camps out to get products on opening day, that I replace my computer every 3 months, that I’m liveblogging my life through Twitter via updates from my cell phone. That I’m a member of all the social networking sites and have a vibrant MySpace page. That I live my life on the cusp of technology.
But really, I’m not like that at all. I like technology, but there’s really a limited subset of it that I find useful. Honestly, I don’t want people to know that much about my life. I prefer to keep it a secret. Part of that is just the hope that boringness is mistaken for mystique. But really, I don’t really see the point of much of it. I use my phone to call people, not to web browse or text. I have a computer, and I try and stay technologically aware so I can fix it, but my processor is 3 generations behind state-of-the-art and I’m perfectly fine with that. Frankly, the level of degeneracy on the internet is frightening, so I try and maintain a few levels removed from it, as a form of barrier.
With that said, I’m totally Web 2.0 now.
My iGoogle page is set up with various things that I want to know, such as WikiHow pages (in case I need to run away from a bear), a Dilbert RSS Feed, or a Pitchfork Media RSS Feed. The last one is especially nice; it contains the most recent Pitchfork Reviews. Every morning I click through and skim them, looking for high scores and album descriptions that sound interesting. If I like it, I tag the review through Delicious, so that I can return to it later. Then, when I need to spend some time at my computer, I pull up Rhapsody and queue up a bunch of music. You can see my list of “prospective” music here. You can also see the “related tags” box to the right….after I listen to an album, I give a tag that’s a brief description of the album genre and then a verdict, either GoodAlbum, ShowsPromise, or MehAlbum depending on if I like it, decide it warrants further listening, or didn’t do anything for me. After I listen to my backlog I’ll go back and further weed out the promising ones to see if they’re worthy of putting into the good category.
Why do I do this? Well, Delicious is nice because I can easily get to it from home as well as from work. And there’s the added benefit of letting other people know what I think as well, which of course assumes that (a) people actually visit this webpage and (b) people actually care about my music opinion. But that’s the beautiful thing about the internet — when I talk to myself in real life, people look at me crazy; when I do it on the internet, the illusion of audience is maintained.