The Inattention Age, part 2, or Why I love the Internet

So you may have read my idea on the ‘Inattention Age‘. This is of course in response to the concept of the Attention Age, which intellectually I find to be the wrong term entirely.

The Attention Age Wikipedia page is the first hit in Google, so it is a term that is defining itself. I created a Wikipedia page for Inattention Age and it was flagged for deletion in about 5 minutes as the mod googled the term and found nothing about it. Annoying but fair enough, I thought, so I have to get the idea out.

Ironically, due to the Inattention Age, the idea is unlikely to gain traction unless it comes from a ‘source’, and by source I mean some highly visible spokes-thing; a person or website. The volume and speed of updates assumes things will get lost in the wash, information needs a source that is publically weighty enough to give it traction.

That’s the way it has always been of course, politicians, stars, tabloid opinions hold sway, no matter how vapid, due to the fact they get ears and eyeballs. As an infrequent blogger, very much Z-list, my opinion online carried no such weight, again annoying but fair enough.

So how do ideas, concepts, new ways of looking at things get out into  public thought? They explode though a source or seep through the everyman. The latter is what the Internet allows, and bless the Internet’s cotton socks, it sometimes works. This is proven again and again by memes that take over, however briefly, those eyes and ears.

I’ve had conceptual ideas before that I felt made no ground, such as my concept of digital history degradation, where your online past is virtually forgiven or forgotten after a period of time. That concept was, of course, postulated by others as well and it has seeped out. I like to think I was a part of that.

If someone asks you ‘What’s the point of the Internet?’, or some subset of the Internet like blogs or Twitter, then you can answer to allow seepage. The Internet allow ideas from the everyman to get out, to be ignored or taken up, no matter how thoughtful, vapid or outright crazy, the Internet is present for the everyman.

Long live the freedom of the un-commercial and uncensored Internet.

“Akismet has protected your site from 151,588 spam.”

Wow. Seriously spammers? Just WTF.

The Inattention Age is an idea defining the current period of time, the early 2010-onward years. As we all have so little time to put into any one thing and have to parcel out our attention to many tasks the term Attention Age became the Inattention Age. This characterises the use of many Web 2.0 technologies such as FaceBook and Twitter, which are often accessed on the go while doing other tasks.

The Inattention Age overlaps and builds off of the Information Age, characterized by the increasing commoditization of attention as it relates to the increasing abundance of information available, particularly on the Internet. The Inattention Age is marked by the ability of individuals to create and consume information instantly and freely as well as share it on the Internet using social media, often while performing or between other tasks. The period this idea characterises is believed to have begun with the success of Web 2.0 technologies and social media around 2007, but represents the post Web 2.0 era of 2010-onwards.

Today sees the launch of iPhone 4, unlike the iPad this is a must buy.

3.5″ display
960×640 pixels
326 DPI
800:1 contrast
IPS instead of OLED
Apple A4
40 hrs of music instead of 24
6 hrs 3G browsing instead of 3

It’s a huge leap and I’m getting one as soon as it launches.

Ever asked How do I change my Yahoo password? Here’s how:

Pick a new 8 letter password from http://clubefl.gr/games/wordox/8.html

Mix up the letters a little using the basic number/letter swap. Include at least one number, for added security use the symbols in place of letters, !@#$%&*, but not all websites allow this.

E=3 4=A I=1 or ! L=1 O=0 or @ T=7 and so on – for a guide see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

Now that you have your new password lets change the old one

1. Go to yahoo.com (or .ca or .co.uk, whatever as it makes no difference)
2. Click the mail icon
3. Login
4. Look in the top right for where it says options, click it
5. Look on the left side for Account Information, click it
6. Enter your current password again
7. (Switch to the ‘classic view’ if you need to, stupid Yahoo has not updated its site fully yet)
8. Look on the left for ‘Change your password’, click it
9. Enter your current password, enter a new 8 letter password.

As if you didn’t know today is Snow Leopard Day. Yes OS X 10.6 is out officially today. Yes all you lot who have been using the torrent versions, it’s time to go buy and get the real deal. At 29 bucks it’s a steal. Though not literally as that would be 0 bucks. Whatever.

So yes it is faster, takes less room and is all round smarter. How do you install it? The basic way is throw this disk into the drive and double click, OS X will take you through the upgrade process automatically. Make sure you have around 6GB of disk space free before you start, ideally 10GB.

Disconnect your external USB/Firewire disks but do connect your printers and peripherals; OS X will check these and install drivers for them automatically during the install process. Remember that Rosetta, Apple’s backward compatibility option allowing you to run PPC (G3/G4/G5) apps on your Intel hardware, is disabled by default. If you need it customise your install to include it.

If you want to take the better but more advanced route OS X is different than all the other versions so far, no ‘Erase and install’ option exists, or at least no automatic way. Here’s how:

After booting from the Snow Leopard disk choose Utilities > Disk Utility from the first Installer screen, and then manually erase the drive; you can then exit Disk Utility and proceed normally with installation.

Slightly more complex but considering this is designed as an upgrade to Leopard and the functionality is still included, I’ll let Apple off for that.

So I’ve got mine, have you yet?

Currently 50% off, today only. If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone then you really have to buy one of these. I can’t tell you how many times it’s saved my screen from getting scratched.

Seriously, buy it now using the coupon code memday09

OK so I checked CR this morning and the site worked but had no content. So I went into panic mode, got myself a coffee (decafe) and chatted about the weather for a bit. It’s lovely and sunny, thanks for asking. Then tried to find out what was going on.

The posts table was marked as crashed, I found out using myPHP, and it needed repairing. I did that via myPHP again and everything is all working.

Remember to do backups folks, you never know when something is going to go wrong.