Month: March 2017

Reclaiming My Digital Identity

Posted on by Jon K.

After deleting my Yahoo accounts and thinking about the stuff that’s gathered all around the web – I think it’s time to reclaim my stuff. So I made  a list of all the places I consume/create things on the web:

  • Faceboook – how I connect to family and friends, manage a band page
  • Flickr – still have some photos there
  • Tumblr – Hamilton Punk and Hardcore visual archive
  • Picasa/Google Photos – have quite a few photos from my phone
  • Instagram – yeah, photos here too
  • Twitter – my edtech tweets
  • Google+ – not really but some stuff there
  • various message boards – music, music and more music
  • LinkedIn – work related
  • PebblePad – ePortfolio
  • Trello – abandoned workflow/project management
  • Vimeo – portfolio related videos
  • YouTube – portfolio, music (two separate accounts), general watching (yes, a third account for stuff I’ve watched)
  • Discogs – record collection
  • Google Drive/Docs – three different accounts for three reasons (work, personal/travel, music)
  • Dropbox – filesharing
  • Diigo – bookmarks 
  • The Old Reader – RSS
  • Netvibes – RSS

Some of those make sense to reclaim (photos for sure), some don’t because the purpose is to leverage their platforms to communicate. The ones in italics make some sense to reclaim to me. The one benefit is that the storage for stuff out there, is paid for by someone else. However I’m thinking about how a website reflects one’s identity and maybe it’s time for a more holistic version of what I am, who I am.

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Shenzhen: China’s Cooperation

Posted on by Jon K.

I watched this documentary the other week. It really made me think about how cultural imperialism (ie. capitalism) might just not be a great thing for economics going forward. Work through this with me – if China can innovate quicker because of the sharing of ideas and materials, and capitalism restricts the sharing of ideas thanks to intellectual property, patents and copyright, how will western countries be able to keep up? Maybe they’ve lost already? In fact I think we’re seeing that the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries ascend to superpower status not on military might, but on economic. This, to me, is a very clear decline of the Western civilization that we’re living through.

The other thing about this is the absolutely stunning (I assume) drone shots, and the generally beautiful cinematography of the entire thing. I’ve been falling back on some of my media development background lately, and after years of hating films (mostly because we analyzed The Manchurian Candidates opening sequence over 14 weeks in frame by frame detail and that arduous process singlehandedly destroyed my ability to turn off the critical framework) I’ve finally come around to enjoying the beauty of stuff like this without thinking about how to make it better. Educational media needs to become far more literate with this sort of visual storytelling because it’s cheap to do now and really, really accessible. Every place of higher education has a media group – and they can do this if you can’t. It used to require thousands of dollars of equipment, studios, editing suites, but really if you have a modern DSLR (or mirrorless compact) and can get good photos, you can probably get good video. Sound might take a cellphone and a post-production sync with the camera – but that’s easy enough in iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro or Camtasia.

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Goodbye to All the Yahoos

Posted on by Jon K.

No, this isn’t some grandiose sign-off from public life (although I’m fairly certain I should probably do that…). Really it’s the end of an era where I’ve finally deleted all my Yahoo related accounts. I really only had two Yahoo accounts, one for life (dietsociety@yahoo.com) and one for “professional life” (jonkruithof@yahoo.com). But with stuff like Facebook linked to my life account at Yahoo (who’ve had some serious data breeches) I really didn’t feel safe anymore with it. I had the Yahoo account since the late 90’s, because I was a Rocketmail user, and Yahoo bought them out. It was a long process, to finally pull the plug. I started migrating mail from Yahoo late last year. I thought about migrating my band photos from Flickr but realized that I didn’t really care – I have them still and can post them in a gallery on my own website.Or maybe I don’t really care about them either? I don’t know. Flickr’s social aspects are a mere blink of what they used to be. I don’t know that they need to be online at all. The hardest part is all the places with logins tied to the yahoo account. Holy smokes, ten years of logins, some at places that don’t exist anymore.

The tipping point was my Instagram account being hacked, e-mail changed and then deleted in rather quick succession. I got on to the Yahoo account associated and deleted it. And that was it. Identity snuffed out. All the angry e-mails, pranks, early evidence transferred to Gmail for searchability and for it to exist somewhere (I do have some prized correspondence with now dead people that I treasure – as well as digital ephemera that is fun to dig up and look at from time to time) was comforting,

With all that said, I don’t think moving to Gmail is that great an idea but it’s what I’ve done. I keep the name dietsociety because, well, it’s in a lot of places, but 15 years since doing anything resembling a zine, maybe I need to let that go too.

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