Random Interesting Thoughts

Reading Hannah's blog, I was most struck by the contrast between nature and technology.  She was exploring many exotic places and doing lots of interesting outdoors activities, like climbing sand dunes and volcanoes.  In general, she was very actively involved with the world around her.  However, she was sharing her experiences online.  I think this blog exemplifies anything that is good about the internet, and that it does not have to isolate you from interacting with the outside world and the people in it.  Also, the use of pictures was excellent.

I am here posting a link to one of my favorite sites, TV Tropes.  Hopefully no one takes this as incentive to waste several hours. 

I am surprised I didn't think of it sooner when we discussed resorting genres, to be honest.  TV Tropes has myriad pages about tropes, cliches, themes, character types, and anything imaginable that is present in books, movies, anime/manga, comics, television, internet culture, and even real life.  By doing so, works of all different genres and even mediums are completely resorted based on common ideas that are present in them.

The Internet is a wonderful place.  However, it's also very dangerous.  It's easy to think about the dangers the Internet presents when you first shop on a new website, and you wonder whether or not giving them your credit card information is really a good idea.  Or when you meet someone new online, you wonder if they're actually who they say they are, or if they're really twice your age and incredibly creepy.  I think the most dangerous thing about the internet, however, is the way it allows us to mask ourselves in anonymity and pretend like that makes it okay for us to behave badly. Or even the thought that using nicknames means that no one will find out who we are.

Dictionary.com says the definition of a database is "a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access, generally in a computer."

The same site recognizes an archive as "any extensive record or collection of data."

Laurie McNeill's article "The Diary on the Internet" was published in 2003, meaning all the examples cited were from 2002 and sooner.  Many of them were even from the nineties!  I did not become acquainted with internet culture until I was nine, in 2001 (when I actually had a website on Digimon), and of course, I was nine and did not frequent any serious parts of the internet.

The evolutionary model is often mentioned in the context of the evolution of genre.  As I read Owens' essay, I was reminded of something I read about evolution itself - that humans only see themselves as a drastically different species because all the intermediate species between humans and monkeys are extinct.  When considering every species that has ever existed, classification is much more difficult because things that seem very defined start to run into each other.  Humans have to search for patterns over long periods of time and then categorize them.