Internet: April 2009 Archives

New in China: Buy a House, Get a Wife for Free

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An old Jewish joke says that modern society is based on the ideas of three old men: Marx said "Everything is about Money". Freud said "Everything is about Sex". Then, Einstein arrived and concluded that "Everything is Relative".

The Chinese economy has slowed down dramatically over the past six months and demand for real estate in China's major cities declined sharply. Concurrently, new data has been published about the disparity between China's male and female citizens and the subsequent troubles Chinese men face when trying to find a wife. Now, a local Real Estate Developer is trying to strike a new balance between Marx and Freud in order to get the market going again.

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By Dror Poleg on April 24, 2009 5:58 PM 3 Comments

Twitter, Facebook, and the rise of Verbography

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In 2004, I analyzed the experience of posting short messages online. I used my mobile phone to post 'anything that grabbed my attention' directly to a web site built using a customized version of blogger.com's platform. And so, I started posting little snapshots of my life, made of short sentences, in real time. Today, the world has a dedicated platform for this type of messaging, Twitter.com, and such messages are refered to as Tweets. Back then, I called it verbography - verbal photography. Roland Barthes once wrote that a photograph is unique since it is not only a representation of an object, but also a testament that the depicted object really existed. In this way, the photograph confirms the existence of the object but also destabilizes it by taking it out of the present and into an unknown future, when the photo will be watched (in Camera Lucida).
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By Dror Poleg on April 14, 2009 2:37 PM 0 Comments
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