Why read up when you can listen up?

Apparently many otherwise hard-working visitors to this site would rather not eyeball their way through 2000 words of dense English prose – no matter how entertaining. Why can’t I listen to this stuff on the treadmill or while suffocating in a bus on my commute? Good question!

We didn’t need a focus group to tell us to get with the program and go multimedia. The real credit for that goes to our new collaborator Devin Harris – who can write, shoot, edit, analyze and kick yer ass with the best of them.

Dev is the man behind the mic and a survivor of more than 300 hours of David’s classes at York University. He’s keeping it real on Twitter (@Dahar84) with a new high of 8 followers, one of whom is the leader of the free world. A truly multimedia guy who’s already making this enterprise way more fun.

We’ve taken the sonic plunge with the item posted back on May 5 – Dumb things you can do with smartphones (part 2). We’ll have it up for your listening pleasure by Wednesday (or Thursday). Tune in and experience the positive side of market forces!

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Happy IPv6 times, now and forever

Your brain on Facebook

One of my favorite blogs is Techdirt, especially the posts written by Mike Masnick. Apart from being breathlessly prolific, he has a sharp eye – and tongue – for the idiotic measures promoted by governments, Hollywood and other would-be cyber-gatekeepers in the name of saving Western civilization from IP piracy and other putative evils.

Sometimes, however, Mike can be irritatingly dismissive. Witness the Friday post entitled “Sharing On Social Networks Triggers The Same Part Of Our Brains As Sex… Sorta,” which he files under the but-other-than-that-is-nothing-like-sex dept. He’s referring to a recent study by two Harvard psychologists that has achieved some notoriety, namely “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding” – pdf here. (And btw, self-disclosure is a lot like sex, at least the kind practised without a second party.)

Mike trivializes the findings of a series of lab experiments that have something important to tell us about the things people do and say on social network sites – and why they do them, based on lots of MRI brain imaging. Mike claims the authors have done nothing more than point out that sharing information about yourself is “intrinsically rewarding” – as in what else is new? (“I don’t think that’s a particularly surprising finding.”) The handy example is all those relentlessly annoying tweets about what you’re having for lunch – which people obviously indulge in “because it feels good.” We also learn that attention-getting is “the same kind of thing as getting a brief glimpse of attractive members of the opposite sex.” From which we conclude what? That “science has proved that talking about yourself to lots of people and seeing attractive people make your brain happy.”

Mike’s punchline: “Case closed.”

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