Posted 2:28 PM by Dee Tremens
welcom back to the blogisphere, cyber-com blogopolis...we could discuss who is spying on whom, but that is the theme of ian's blog, que no?? so how should we categorize --not characterize--our blog-o-rama?? did you hear , some company just bought "us"??? our blog future may be changing...since i doubt we have much say over what happens to our "space" here... a few cheesy categories might be: email, blog, face to face , asynchonous (sp it dan quail)or quale, or quael))) ..so what happens to the dialectic in written or online comm.?? is it possible? i'll tell ya tomorrow/

Posted 1:36 PM by Dee Tremens
remember we were talking in class about the chinese govt among others having access to its people's email??? may be i misunderstood... but i decided to stir the crap a little--who you crapping??--i asked a chinese woman who i now in the library (besides she's cute but had the different task of helping me upload photos to my webpage amid a few outbreaks of my fledging tourettes syndrome). when i asked her her take on whether it is true the chinese govt monitors its citizens' email, her intial two word response was: "bull shit" (thru a nice accent of course). i told her about levy's book and she asked when it was written. she says people here have no idea what china is really like...my thought was that foreign and native students are not communicating much.

Posted 1:25 PM by Dee Tremens
Karen: does the experience with the guy who trusts the web over his quack doctor have a problem finding knowledge v. info on web?? or what was that distinction? that is one of the issues dreyfus brings up: search engines are not set up to help people find info; it's about the hits...if the word in your search is written in yahoo's bathroom wall, it will show up on the search...well, he doesnt quite say that---but

Posted 4:49 AM by Anonymous
Here goes the monologue again. But I thought of one of my favorite things about e-mail communication, and this is something that no one (in my life anyway) did effectively before e-mail: send out a trip update for all friends and family during an extended trip, particulary an overseas one. Nothing can replicate that--not little limited postcards that get lost in the mail, not trying to phone each of 30+ people to pass on the news, not letters you don't have time to write. A friend of mine is a nanny on a trip around the world right now, and I am so grateful that I get to hear about her trip week by week. Not only would she not remember all of that stuff by the time she gets back home, we all hear about it in realtime and can offer comfort and support when she needs it, and it's like we are experiencing the trip a little bit too. And the family she is with posts their digital photos on a website, so we get a visual idea too. Plus, when I wrote them on trips, it was like capturing a slice of time and I printed the e-mails off when I got home and put them in my scrapbook. All-around effective in my view.

I've read a lot about how some people dislike the informality of e-mail and think it should not be used to send important messages. But I think it is far more valuable than that as far as the sheer ability to pass information quickly and effectively. When a friend died last fall, I had the very hard job of passing on the news to many of the people that we went to high school with, and I was on a trip at the time. I ended up doing a lot of that through e-mail, since I had no other option for many of the individuals. It felt a little odd to be sending that information over e-mail, but it also felt odd to call people.

I have no objections to sending thankyou notes or emotional stuff over e-mail. And I often write things rather than call if I think the person will want to think it over--it's less pressure to make a decision. Some people miss the personalness of handwriting and paper, but I am willing to forgo those things for convenience. Plus, reading the handwriting of some people is more trouble than it is worth! And the person had to take the time to compose something that transmits his personality--I don't think that the informality of e-mail negates the value, and I welcome it into mainstream communication.

Posted 11:59 AM by Anonymous
Hey Joel, I'll finally get around to answering your questions now.:) I don't have any statistics at the moment of how many people have had/have cybersex, but I will keep you posted. And I meant the standard usage of the term single--as in not in an exclusive relationship, for example having a boyfriend or girlfriend or significant other or being married, etc. Internet relationships often encroach on the emotional intimacy of a real relationship and allow for an unrealistic picture of the other person, one article says.

But to introduce a new topic to our blog--does anyone else know someone who takes internet medical advice over a doctor's? I met a man recently who was convinced that his doctor was a quack because he found answers he liked better on the web. He was an educated, successful man; some people really scare me. While I think it's fabulous that you can get factual, reliable information about disease or disorder, people really go off of the deep end with their egos when they have so much at their fingertips.