Digitálogo

What's the Use of Wings?

2007-06-25T13:02:00.000+04:00

by the John Wright Band

"I could have been a giant" said the bonsai tree
"But someone bound my roots and held me down."
"I could have reached the Heavens" said the snowy owl
"But they clipped my wings and kept me on the ground."

"I think I heard them tell me that they loved me
That they'd care for me--without them I would die
But what's the use of roots if you can't spread them?
What's the use of wings if you can't fly?"

"I could have been a singer" said the Myna bird
"But they caged me and told me what to say."
"I could have run forever" said the pony
"But they bridled me and made me go their way."

"I think I heard them tell me that they loved me
That they'd care for me forever so it seems
What's the use of voices without freedom?
What's the use of living others' dreams?"

Why do people cage the things they love the most?
Is it simply that they fear to be alone?
If you give you're love it's freedom, it will stay awhile
If it leaves you, it was never yours to own

"I could have found adventure" said the angelfish
"Now my world's so small there's nowhere left to go."
"I could have ruled a kingdom" said the lion
"Now this land inside my head is all I know."

"I think I heard them tell me that they loved me
That they'd care for me, and tell me it's alright
But what's the use of life without adventure?
What's the use of strength if you can't fight?"

Why do people cage the things they love the most?
Is it simply that they fear to be alone?
If you give you're love it's freedom, it will stay awhile
If it leaves you, it was never yours to own

"I know I heard them tell me that they loved me
That they'd care for me, without them I would die
But what's the use of roots if you can't spread them?
What's the use of wings if you can't fly?"

Yeah, right

2007-04-29T00:23:00.000+04:00

La verdad es que... people write when they are lonely. (Ok, that was some kind of provocation and shouldn't be taken serious...) I am drunk and my Netvibes says that I have several new posts to read. It's saturday and I wonder what makes weekends more appelable (I will find the right word to write here later, sorry) then week days to write on blogs. Actually, that's not true as well, so... just forget about it. (I am sounding like Douglas Adams here).

So, yeah. That was just a thought.

The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Incommunicado Reader

2007-04-10T01:01:00.000+04:00

I am reading (simultaneously) The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Incommunicado Reader. Both make me somewhat unhappy.

Cluetrain Manifesto (that is an absolutely out of date critique, but it doesn't matter), seems to assume there is only a duality human beings X corporations. How not true is this? How complicate it is to put under the same umbrella people that actually don't really like each other at all and don't want to talk to each other? Don't want to stabilish a conversation?

The incommunicado readers seems to notice this: the discourse of just separating the good from the bad. (I know I am judging, and I promise I will come back and apologize later, when I understand them better. If needed).

El poder justiciero de los blogs

2007-03-21T17:50:00.000+03:00

This blog is passing through a sleeping period, but I thought that the message below was worth. Please, if you read this, spread the word. Thank you. From Edgar:
El poder justiciero de los blogs

La idea es la siguiente. Necesito conseguir cualquier material audiovisual (fotos, videos, audios) de la madrugada del 21 de febrero en la estación de RENFE de Sitges (Cataluña, España) y de las actuaciones policiales de esa noche. ¿Por qué? Porque "el proceso" (Kafkiano), entra en su segunda fase, la de defenderme del poder disciplinar. Entonces apelo a tres premisas teóricas y de paso pongo a prueba el poder de La Red para lograr una buena causa. Si hay alguien que tenga algo de este material, pueden enviarlo a: justiciabloggera (arroba) gmail.com Y si alguien quiere echarme la mano "espejeando" este post en su blog, pues se lo agradeceré infinitamente (no importa que no esté en España, ver la premisa 1).

Premisa teórica 1

"La teoría de los 6 grados de separación, se refiere a la idea de que, si una persona está a un "paso" de lejanía de cada persona que conoce, y dos "pasos" de cada persona que es conocida por cada persona que uno conoce, entonces, todas las personas no están a más de seis "pasos" de mi" Via Wikipedia

Premisa teórica 2

La Red (en su versión mercantil de lujo: la Web 2.0), aparece como una nueva forma de percibir al Internet como una plataforma horizontal, democrática y "social", con una "nueva arquitectura de participación-colaboración", donde la persona importante: "eres tú".

Premisa teórica (utópica) 3

El mundo es justo, las instituciones son sólidas, la solidaridad existe y el karma acaba por imponerse.

Can I import my posts to Wordpress?

2007-02-15T18:26:00.001+03:00

From blogger? Is this allowed? Uh.

The network IS the society

2007-02-15T18:19:00.000+03:00

It is not as simple as it sounds, and it is not new at all. But sometimes we have insights, and sometimes we write them down in our weblogs, and sometimes they're useful to something. (Hey, Edgar, I am giving a gift to someone, I believe. That's somewhat a presumptuous way of thinking, don't you agree? Jeje...)

Anyways, point is: you don't have to include people "socially" AND "digitally". It's the same thing. You see? So, assuming that it IS the same thing, it's absolutelly essential that people that are working for social inclusion ALSO digital include people. Right? Ok. SO. Question: Are those people supposed to be socially including other people, digitally including them?

... does someone have any suggestion about a better of way of putting this? In the direction of transforming it in a research question? Thanks. :)

I am going to bed. In a minute.

2007-02-12T02:37:00.000+03:00

But before that, I wanted to write a couple of things here. This blog is a strange cold space still, and I do not feel home yet. I certainly like personal posts betters, it is like you are listening to someone talking about something. Dunno.

I'm sleepy, and, if I don't write here, it will never be home. (Maybe it won't, anyway). Fact is that, my residency request was denied on Wednesday. Crap. Yeah, it is bad, although you don't know much about the whole story anyway. But to make it short, we married (there's the marriage video on my Multiply), and we were sure Spain would allow me to stay here. But, gah, they did not. They will, of course. I mean, not of course, but I believe they will, eventually. There's too much pro and very little agains. Look:

About the Civil Partnership Act 2004, in the UK:

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/en2004/2004en33.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Partnership_Act_2004
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts2004/20040033.htm

About free movement, family and the European Union

http://europa.yo/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/06/179&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=es
http://www.europarl.europa.yo/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+PRESS+DN-20030211-1+0+DOC+XML+V0//ES#SECTION2

And... thats about it. I just thought I'd write something. And now bed. Yeah.

More Web 2.0 thoughts

2007-02-08T18:06:00.000+03:00

I saw the video:

in digeracy and passed it on to some friends. Adolfo and hdhd blogged about it. I did not. I am still not used to blog communition patterns. Oh well.

Anyways, then Adolfo wrote another post today, mentioning Web 2.0 and I left him a comment, that I thought it was worth to post here:

Pues yo, lo que pienso sobre Web 2.0 es exactamente tu última pregunta: "¿Hacia donde nos lleva esta web dos punto cero?" Creo que si no nos lleva a nada, pues entonces no es diferente do que había antes. Al final, antes de lo que se llama Web2.0, todos también podían poner sus vídeos online (pero nadie los encontraba), ponian sus fotos online (pero nadie las mirava), leían noticias y escribían blogs (aunque hoy hay personas escribiendo blogs que seguramente no lo podrían hacer antes que se utilizasen tecnologías 2.0).

Lo qué pienso es que las personas tienen una cierta resistencia a nuevos términos, porque algunos expertos los utilizan para ganar dinero. Pero, mira: si utilizar el término es útil para cambiar la actitud de la mayoría en la web, por que no? Lo mejor es que mas personas utilicen la Internet, las herramientas y todo eso. Y quizá si se dice "Ahora, con el surgimiento de la Web 2.0, tu ya puede tener tu blog, organizar las noticias que quieres, participar en comunidades...." las personas van a quedarse más motivadas, pues alguna cosa está, de hecho, diferente. (No estoy aquí diciendo que hay o no, eh? Solo pensando en como aprovechar el término, una vez que él fue creado... ;)

Five reasons for exile

2007-02-01T13:53:00.000+03:00

1) To get unconfortable about the place you are. (Seriously. I'm the kind of person who does that)

2) To realize you only know very little about life, the universe and everything.

3) To experience better and worse things.

4) To learn that things you thought absolute, are absolutely not. And values and ways of dealing with them are different. (And it's different to feel it and to know it).

5) To be away from your parents.

(They are not GOOD reasons in the sense that they'll make you feel good. But I believe they are THE reasons).

Blogosphere as a community

2007-02-01T13:36:00.000+03:00

Well, Adolfo passed me a "meme" (go and check, I didn't really know exactly what it was either. ;) and I will answer it. In a second. But, before that, I was thinking about the so called "blogosphere", which is, according to the Wikipedia,

"the collective term encompassing all blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture."

I thought about this because of Adolfo's comment on the fact that Meritxell is considering stop blogging. And, as if they are really part of a community, it seems he is traying to keep her around, and thus give some stimulation for doing it. Anyways. Point is: I have heard several times that the blogosphere was a community, but I had never felt it. Hernani, obviously, was the first one to defend the idea, but I had never understood it. I think I do now.

A question to Adolfo and Edgar: why do people stop blogging? Is there any research about that?

Sleepy thoughs on blogging, Second Life and networks

2007-01-28T04:28:00.000+03:00

I am sleepy. I had a blog once where all my posts started with this sentence. Not because I planned it, but because I was actually sleepy every time I wrote on it. That was a long time ago. I might write more about this experience one day. When I talk about it, people say I could be a case study.

Anyways, today I had an urge to write a long entry that I didn't write about Second Life. I haven't writen more here about it, but I kept thinking about it, and reading and researching. Haven't reached a conclusion yet, but I believe I'm on my way.

hdhd had an interesting post on his blog today. Not something new, it's actually a quote from a book by Yochai Benkler, but it fascinated me by the simplicity and clarity of the way the author managed to express a complex concept. Have a look there.

(Just a though: Hernani uses Drupal on his website. I feel bad. I could install one in my server, but for some reason, I just feel that it's lonelier to be in your own domain and not in a community, like Blogger. Although, Adolfo said WordPress is far better then Blogger. Hn. I don't know. I just feel like having it in my own server. Even if my last experience with that was horrible: I had all my TCC (the end of course monograph) in a wiki, fabulous experience, and it crashed, and it's all lost. Oh well).

Anyways. Today was a day of long talks about Life, the Universe and Everything. I am tired, tomorrow Madrid, for the first time. My hostess said it's 0.5 Celsious there. My mother laugh and said she had never heard that there could be a .5 temperature.

Sheeps and sexual choice

2007-01-25T14:40:00.000+03:00

Ana sent me this morning an article about a scientist who is researching genetics implications in gay sheeps. Obviously, written this way, it would make any sensible person freak out and say that it is an absurd. But let's look at the facts with a little more care:

So, yes, apperantly, Dr. Roselli is doing research to understand sheep homosexuality. His explanation is that his investigation will help to better know which sheep are better for breeding. Ok, fine, I guess. The rage of course comes from the natural conclusions that the research could lead to a way of avoiding homosexuality - both in sheeps AND human.

I was first repulsed by the idea as well, but then, thinking a bit further, I concluded that I completely agree with Dr. Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, when he says that the issue that has to be addressed in this case is not the research itself, but the mentality that makes it a problem. In other words: if homosexuality wasn't a problem at all, nobody would mind if they knew it was genetic. It's like eye color, for a silly example. Nobody forbids scientists to find out how eye color is determined, because, really, it's all normal.

This reminds me of an excelent article that I read sometime ago, by Contardo Calegaris, about the movie C.R.A.Z.Y. I haven't seen the movie yet, (we downloaded it, but it was in Spanish.... blah), but the article is a brilliant reflection about the use of the expressions "sexual option" and "sexual orientation". The last sentence (in Portuguese): "prefiro defender o princípio da liberdade de "escolha" amorosa e sexual, sem justificativa biológica. É muito "crazy"?"

PS: the link to the article is leads to another site, since the Folha de São Paulo, where it was originally published, requires paid login.

Get a first life

2007-01-23T14:28:00.000+03:00

What really makes me think about the importance of Second Life is the amount of people saying that it has no importance, or that it is dangerous, or that it's not inovative...

Another critic>
Get a First Life:

Information society - technology determinism?

2007-01-22T12:44:00.000+03:00

Just a quick though, so it won't get lost: I am reading Daniel Bell's “Foreword: 1976”. The Coming of Postindustrial Society" (Nueva York: Basic Books, 1999), written in 1976, for the advanced seminar offered by UOC and OII. Anyways, the texts for this week talk a lot about the transition from industrial society to post industrial society. Gee, was there an industrial society, first of all? Isn't this a quite linear way of thinking development? Isn't it slightly too generic?

I mean, really, do societies really develop in one linear way? ... ok, back to the readings. Just had to write this somewhere...

MP3, Feeds and women

2007-01-19T17:25:00.000+03:00

So... I am here loading music to my just bought MP3 (it's a crappy one, but oh well, can't afford an iPod yet. And when I can, certainly I'll give it to Ana, to encourage her "The soundtrack of my PhD" project. :)

I have actually a lot of things to do, specially a lot of readings, but go figure, it's difficult to concentrate. There are so many things to read when I sit in front of the computer that it takes sometimes more then an hour and a half until I can finally start *working*.

First, I read news, usually UOL, to know what's happening in Brazil. I dunno why, that's habit. I have feeds from many sources in my Netvibes, but I just can't skip the routine of actually going until UOL.

Then I reply e-mails. I am working at this project to develop a virtual store that is keeping me kind busy. It shouldn't, of course, since I earn by hour, but, gah, programming is definetly an adictive activitie. I should have been a programmer, I though the other day. I have some talent to do it. And if there's something really acomplishing is to watch something you programmed start working.

(I suddenly thought about something: Adolfo wrote a post about where are the female bloggers. And although many of the statistics say that the difference between the amount of men and women in the blogsphere is not so big, the women certainly have less visibility. And now, in the middle of this long post, I just thought that, well, maybe it's because women are less objective when they write? This is not a theory, just an idea).

Under pressure

2007-01-11T19:45:00.000+03:00

You know what? Maybe I do work better under pressure. I'm not sure if this is something I would ever tell a boss, but... maybe it's true. (And I guess good bosses already knew that). :)

Serenata moderna

2007-01-08T12:00:00.000+03:00

Ontem à noite, voltando para casa, eu vi uma cena digna de nota: um jovem apaixonado estava na rua, olhando para cima, às vezes subindo em um apoio, tentando fazer sua homenagem musical ser ouvida por sua amada, que lhe observava da sacada... porém o instrumento que o jovem usava não era nada mais que seu celular com MP3, onde ele gravara a música, e agora estendia o braço para cima, oferecendo-a para a dama da janela...

Mais Second Life

2007-01-02T16:19:00.000+03:00

Claro, como boa obsessiva que sou, apesar de estar trabalhando, também estou aqui lendo sobre Second Life. (Depois de ter ficado até tarde conversando com a Ana sobre o tema...)

E meu sentimento contínua ambíguo: não gosto dessa sensação de que se transporta a riqueza da vida real para a vida virtual. Não tenho certeza, na verdade, se poderia ser diferente, mas seria bom se fosse, não? Mesmo quando eu jogava Diablo, de alguma forma, existia essa transferência, apesar de existir formas de se ser "rico" no jogo, sem se ser rico na vida real. Me explico: se você tivesse dinheiro, podia ir no Ebay e comprar um item, comprar mesmo, pagando por ele. OU você podia passar horas jogando, desenvolver estratégias, e ter esses mesmos ítens, e até mesmo vendê-los. No Second Life funciona mais ou menos assim também: você pode ganhar dinheiro online (trabalhando, I suppose), ou então "comprá-lo", com dólares. Quem está ganhando, claro, é o tal do Linden Lab: acabei de descobrir que para registrar um casamento, paga-se 10 L$. Ok, é quase nada, mas ainda assim... Não sei. Claro, a solução seria buscar uma alternativa, mas existe algo no Second Life que chama muito a atenção... e, se minha intuição não falha, vai virar moda no BR, principalmente depois de lançada a versão em português...

Second Life

2007-01-01T18:18:00.000+03:00

I am going to write about this in English because it's being primarily an English experience, at least until now: Second Life, as far as I know, has not been translated into any other language, but I might be completely wrong about this. Fact is: everybody I met there until now was speaking English. It means something, doesn't it?

I created an account there because of a comment someone of the Onlife Facilitation discussion list made, about technics on facilitating interactions with avatar use. Naturally, I did not go there only because of the facilitating issue, but also because I am always curious about new ways of interacting on the net (the more you know about it, the more you can explore for important uses, such as learning and creating communities).

Well, until now, all I have done was building up my character and the feeling I got was much more of a visual chat then anything else. AND, also, it scared me a bit the fact that the monetary thing is so important there: there are people making money In-world, as they call it.

But, let's see how it goes. There were other similarly virtual worlds, but Second Life caught my eye, and I will give it a try.

Digitálogo 2007

2007-01-01T17:53:00.000+03:00

Todo dia tem gente recomeçando alguma coisa, mas no Ano Novo, muitas pessoas recomeçam muitas coisas, então cria-se um clima de recomeço geral. Mudanças exigem um certo esforço para acontecerem, é como uma barreira que precisa ser transposta. Se todo mundo faz um esforço conjunto, é como uma onda, uma corrente, é mais fácil mudar. Conclusão: é por isso que eu acredito em resoluções de Ano Novo. (Não tenho certeza se acredito no raciocínio inteiro, pra ser sincera, mas acredito que às vezes é necessário criar um artifícil lógico para nos motivar a fazer alguma coisa, então, ya está).

E por isso estou criando este blog. O Hernani um dia me disse que um blog é a nossa existência virtual. Na época não concordei com a afirmação, mais por preguiça de aceitar que minha existência na rede estava pendente do que por não acreditar nela.

De qualquer jeito, aqui estou (de passagem, como diz o Caetano), acreditando nesse "diálogo digital" ou "digitálogo", como diz o título. Para falar sobre o que? Tudo, a princípio: vida, internet, sexualidade, doutorado, vida de casada, aprendizagem, tecnologia, movimentos sociais, problemas domésticos, filosofia, tudo, enfim. A princípio, em português e em inglês, quem sabe mais à frente, em castellano e catalão.

E pronto. Chega que posts de apresentação devem ser curtos para não serem chatos.