Lens4anEye

Union Station, Washington, DC Social media was suppose to be "all things to all people." Its promise was to be an avenue of access for everyone to to have access to everyone else. The lure was for everyone to have a voice and be able to express themselves. But then it became its own worst nightmare. For early adopters it was like being able to walk around the town square listening to whoever was speaking, singing; looking at the sidewalk art and performers. It was the place to make yourself known for your message, art, politics, philosophy, etc. The atmosphere was more like a Renaissance Fair than livestock auction. The free exchange of ideas and culture became overshadowed by the sellers and professional advertisers. Every message was "brought to you by" some other paid entity. In short, the fun became serious. The content became business. The debate and exchange of ideas became propaganda. Information became co-mixed with disinformation.  Crevices and and cracks f...

The Benefits of Link Shorteners Making your links more stylish and readable makes people more comfortable in clicking on them. A long cryptic URL is not inviting. It doesn’t confer any information about where it leads. https://bit.ly/BraddockAlbum says that the subject is “Braddock” and it’s an “Album”. The person looking at the link may not know if Braddock is a person, place or thing but the context of the link or the search can narrow the interpretation.   Likewise the word “Album” could be music or photos. Context will again give clues to its nature. When you create a short URL with Bitly  it points to 1 location forever. The second part is yours the /BraddockAlbum part is a unique identifier. For example on the ClickaSnap photo sharing platform file names and album names are not exclusive to until user. Actually, a subscriber can use the exact same title on any number of photos. That is not a wise idea but it works. Within CAS many subscribers may create an Album u...

Staying in front of an internet audience is a difficult task.  Even if you were the only one on the only 24/7 channel which could not be turned off, you’d have to attract attention to that channel from all the other audio and visual stimulation being pushed at the audience.  Click here for picture albums The major plot arc of the TV series, Max Headroom (1988-89), was competing media networks which blasted their content to screens all over the city. Each network needed to keep one-upping the others in ratings to keep the advertisers happy and rolling in revenues.  Nobody could ever relax and reap benefits of accumulated standing. The audience was notoriously fickle. Even in the middle of a police chase or 5 alarm structure fire the competition could siphon viewership with a more sensational story.  The story was the essential element, one which was supported by the “footage”. Live cameras would catch raw reality and broadcast it as is.  That near fu...

New URL Format at ClickaSnap I haven’t seen the new CAS format for URLs yet that will start being generated on August 10 but there will be some far reaching connectivity outages.  This posting has been written without links to CAS to avoid having to change them later. The current URL format is scheduled to be “redirected” to the new locations through October 10. After that date all current links between CAS and subscribers’ media will go dark.  Going dark means all existing published links will show as broken. Possibly a “404 - file not found” error will result. Such a condition reflects poorly on the owners who has that show up on their web pages. People who maintain their own web presence will be able to edit the HTML of their pages to accommodate the changes but… there are places where editing is not possible.  Tweeted images, album links, and the profile link itself are not editable. I believe (X) will still have the image which was used but the link wil...

Viewing Online Imagery  via ClickaSnap and other online platforms  [ Lens4anEye ]   The fast paced level of activity in today's media is a fabrication of the industry.    Whether the behavior of people is driven by the media or the media behavior is driven by the people, the end result is flashes of cognition not a continuity of presentation.    Three-second sound bites is all that politicians can convey. And the most memorable messages are the three magic word phrases: Vote for me; where’s the beef?; Stop the war. There are a million of other such PR utterances.    Pop culture music videos flash images so fast one only gets an impression of what was shown. That is acceptable for the purpose. When everything is the same choosing is an unnecessary activity. The buy is supposed to be instantaneous and reflexive.    Bidding on an NFT of a funky ape generative art figure is an example of the immediacy if the buy. Waiting a s...