I feel like getting off the grid

over to me

I'm over at my own (hosted) site : www.michaeljmaguire.com fixing it up and playing around with stuff, I plan to post up some of my work there - and thus retain my own copyright.

I've temporarily stopped using blogger....

Game changing creativity, erm.... not yet

Below is one of the latest TED video releases, which my Friend Ty brought to my attention via Facebook this morning. There's a postulation / suggestion, inference that delivering this technology to mass market will have a major effect at several different levels, should we be .... certainly the TED audience seemed.. impressed.



Now I was very fortunate a few years ago while working for Microsoft Game Studios doing some liaison with Media LAB Europe in Dublin to see their development of some, what I considered at that time to be, genuine game changing technology, specifically their 'Mind Balance' alpha brain wave monitoring and response game implementations, which allowed non GUI, none physical interaction, response and control between Man and PC. Stunning and awe inspiring are what springs to mind when I recall being one of their guinea pigs.

I may be missing the point in the TED talk but it is suggesting innovation in that sort of sixth sense' sense, and despite the gasps of the TED audience, and a sort of reverse engineering of the semantics of 'sixth sense'itself, it didn't meet it's billing or my expectation regarding 'intuition' i.e. it merely struck me as a wear a mobile device that allows a sort of 'minority report like' superimposition of data onto a projective mobile screen'. All of which purports to combine six areas of communication. It's not as suggested by the title, a non physical, beyond the seen realm revolution, thus it sorta strikes me more as a kinda 'combinational creativity exercise' rather than genuine innovation or actual original development. Which further suggests more of a PR, patent public declaration activity that might impress weary mobile/Cell handset manufactures, for me it screams :

iphone + projector + additional data access (revenue) + additional Peripherals (more revenue)

In truth I enjoyed Barry Schwartz's advocacy for practical wisdom much more.

Cull the Dull

I just couldn't endure the crap anymore, I couldn't wait until April, I just locked my updates and told the truth.

I'll sit back and see what happens to the follower numbers as I cull the dull from my twitterstream.

five weeks left of open twittering right do do

I joined twitter Oct 1st 2008. April 1st will mean six months openly using that social media tool. From then on, I will protect my updates, prune my account and use Twitter a lot more judiciously, carefully even. Several Reasons, all personal:

Six months microblogging has proved a major distraction in terms of personal productivity. I write, I'm involved in digital creativity, specifically games, screens and interactive narrative yet my interests are spreading wider and wider using twitter.

140 characters does not allow me to develop depth in asynchronous exchange. Great for intros, catastrophic for detailed explanation or meaningful exchange - uber-lite Skype.

I have become entirely underwhelmed by any intrinsic creative potential of the tool.

Some truly inspirational people, marvelous individuality and insight but the vast majority: self serving egotistically materialistic assholes. Wouldn't recognize 'art' if it came up and vomited the inside of their empty heads bright green.

As a consequence of my using twitter openly its now about 2 many numbers: Twitter has over recent months and weeks become numbers centric, twittergrade, twittercounter, what was once a bit of fun for me and some others I knew on the net has shifted towards something status centric almost unsociable social media.

As I suspected over at stolentelling, the bubble of insignificance has burst for me.

I get it but I don’t want to get it the way it has begun to shape up.

How can I possibly retain my ‘outsider mentality’ if my twitter persona is a sorta electronic crossroads of almost 4000 twitter accounts ?

Need not Greed - I need to feed my creative rebel not become popular with internet strategy marketers and direct channel social media gurus because I understand the psychological and spiritual motivations that power their greed, myopia and lust.

Sanity rather than inanity is my priority. 'Do Do' is only funny if explained in full and in context.

And then I paraphrase in my head what Jung said about looking at oneself when something in someone else annoys one. Testing one, two, three,.. fook almost 2K.


Here's a longer do do explanation:
While I have enjoyed almost every exchange I’ve had on twitter, using the tool in such an open way is obviously best suited to promotion, PR, direct selling or the dispensing of advice and information – all that contrived drivel about customer care concern matrices, subliminal influence effluent, careful commercialism etc, is just something I simply don’t do, nor if I did do, would want to do so simply or indeed blatantly, preaching such pontificating claptrap at people is really do do of the highest or is that lowest? order. By all means motivate others, do that yes, just don't do do me please. I'm already all peaced up with my inner self and rather than just close the twitter thing down and lock my updates immediately, I thought I'd give myself a bit of a countdown to do that, to motivate myself in a proper do do way, hence those counters I stuck on the right hand side of this bigger than micro blog.

Think I'll give the INTERNET thing a rest for a while.

Here's some shared items from my google reader.

Publish and be Ham ed.

Some of my digital writing work has been published in The New River Journal over at Virgina Tech.

Genuine thanks and appreciation to Ed Falco, both managing editors: Nick Kocz and Manisha Sharma and also Jeremy Hunsinger and Akshay Sharma.

Faces of conversation

I've just culled a whole field of followers from twitter after recent debacles with marketing gurus, I just couldn't take any more premium internet marketing advice at this point.

Thankfully Walter Higgins of sxoop technologies in Cork has developed this wonderful application which allows me to create an image of real people who kindly follow me on twitter. I think it's really cool to be reminded of the human faces behind the twitterstream landscape.