Scribe oN Technology

When I opened my copy of Twitterific today, I thought the application or Twitter itself had been attacked by a hacker. Some avatars had turned green. I didn’t think much of it until I came along a post by one of the people I follow. That post explained that the green colour is an overlay and the overlay is in support of the Iranian people who are still protesting against the ballot results of last week in which mr. Ahmedinijad won the presidential elections.

Now, Iran is not high on my list of countries that I would like to visit when I ever am so lucky as to win the jackpot, but this rare display of solidarity caught my attention for more than one reason. I’m not a big fan of Twitter nor of Tweeters, mainly because they use sloppy language. Twitter is about “the conversation”? Which conversation might that be? The endless stream of “life status updates” do not in any way merit the honour of being called a conversation. Intelligent people should use language correctly. The ability to call things by their right name on the other hand shows your intelligence level. In Twitter’s case, as in most hyped technologies these days, even the most intelligent throw their intelligence overboard and replace accurate language by marketing hyper talk.

Intelligence apparently also is thrown overboard when it comes to politics in a country we don’t know the first thing about. Iran is not exactly what we in the West call an open democracy. In Western eyes, Iran even is a country that is flirting with civilisation, but really still is a stone age country (except for “the bomb” of course). The Sharia or Islamic legal system that is part of Iran’s “system” to us is no less than barbarism. Women’s lack of rights we find disgusting, etc, etc.

Aren’t we forgetting something, though? First of all: Iranians were more or less happy when the Shah was overthrown and sent away to die in some anonymous French hospital. Iran isn’t the only country that thinks the Sharia is part of the word of God and therefore should be applied to a modern society as literal as possible. And as far as women’s rights are concerned: if that is such a problem, shouldn’t the world and the US in particular then reconsider the “excellent relationship” that is cultivated with oil states like Saudi Arabia –a state that is even whispered to actively support Islamic terrorism, and where women are kept more ignorant than babies?

Why are we expressing support for part of Iran’s population when you can’t really tell what is going on there? How certain are we that the news that we get is really what is happening? Have we forgotten about the nauseating and completely fabricated  story of the Iraqi woman who so-called saw her baby thrown against a wall by one of Saddam Hussein’s lieutenants?

The whole story proved to be fabricated but journalists from all over the globe swallowed it without doubting the origin or realism of this story. Why do we think the images we are seeing now are real? Because they appear to come from cell phone cameras? Who can tell if the 140 characters Twitter messages sent out by Iranian protesters are really theirs? Is it because we are hearing and reading horror stories in Western newspapers and magazines? Can we really judge by 140 characters? Or is that telegraph style type of message totally over the edge when you consider that it takes at least a couple of pages of text to explain how Iran’s political system works to form a well-informed, balanced judgment?

Now, pay attention: I’m not saying that we are getting fake information, but I am saying we should perhaps learn from the past and be more careful and not make such a futile statement as to overlay one’s Twitter avatar with a green colour. If we’re really that concerned for the Iranian people, we should welcome refugees from Iran as heroes. Yet, certainly most countries in the EU are not doing that –in large part because we don’t want Iran’s problems on our own doorstep. Remember the global death sentence that forced Salman Rushdie to live underground for many years?

If you want to paint your face green, please do so. It’s part of that folklore we call “freedom of speech”. It’s part of our fundamental rights, but keep in mind that you might be colouring your face green for all the wrong reasons, that the ones who started this might be manipulating you until you turn green in a natural way, and that the whole act is no less than futile and unhelpful.

The Iranian government is blaming the West as it is for the political unrest; how much more excuse do you think they’ll need to call the protesters “Western spies” and give their secret police a license to kill?

Squidoo is a collection of easy to create focal points around specific content. It’s been here for a couple of years, and when it started it was marketed as a way to publish about topics that you cared about, and to promote your own site. Squidoo promised to send traffic your site’s way. The traffic never amounted to much, but not surprisingly Squidoo did become a spammers’ paradise. Then a week ago, all Squidoo webmasters received an e-mail telling them the policy has changed.

One of the decisions made by the Squidoo team was to discontinue pornographic ‘lenses’. The message read: “Practically though, supporting X-rated pages no longer makes sense, and it invites more spam and empty traffic and wasted overhead than anything.” To reach this conclusion, Squidoo took well over two years. Most web masters of serious content sites and publishers could have told the Squidoo team this at the beginning of their venture.

But Squidoo’s decision to put a limit on promoting your own site is a different matter altogether. Most Squidoo lens masters used Squidoo to generate free traffic and back links to their own sites. That’s OK with how Squidoo first started and what it was conceived for in the first place. After all, Squidoo isn’t a social media site, and we don’t really need yet another blogging host –there are plenty of these and they are usually far better than what Squidoo can offer.

And doesn’t Squidoo profit from lens masters’ content –even with all the promotional links? The ads on the Squidoo lenses can be yours, but they can just as well be given to one of Squidoo’s charities. Nine links are still permitted. What if you use Squidoo to offer short summaries of articles to your site, with a link to the full article? Answer: Squidoo will review your lens. If this was a communist country, everybody would be shouting “censorship”! But Squidoo is Seth Godin’s baby, and mr. Godin is one of the US most renown marketing gurus. It’s impossible that mr. Godin would be involved in censorship.

We agree on that, but could we perhaps raise a different possibility for this rare move from the “Squidoo team”? Perhaps, we are weighing our words, Squidoo isn’t making enough money off the content lens masters publish.

If that were the case, that’s all right then. After all, isn’t the Internet all about money? And good, unique content, of course.

Often I feel as if I’m the only person on the planet. You know: you send a couple of e-mail messages that never receive a reply, you tweet your heart out, but nobody reacts. You write blog posts and nobody comments –well, except for the abundant spam of course.

I am certain I am not the only person feeling like this. There is probably no other place where loneliness can be so in the face as on the Internet. If you are alone in the real world, it’s bad enough. If you are lonely in the real world, chances are you’ll be lonely in the virtual world as well. And there’s no Twitter or Facebook that will change that.

That’s the topic this site will be about: the myth of the Internet with misunderstood concepts like “Friends” and “Conversation”. And with a focus on what the Internet really has become: a glorified marketing vehicle where only the biggest sharks survive. We promise that you won’t feel uplifted when reading ScribeNT content.

But at least you won’t feel deceived either.