A little pointed humor re: Meta-Hell
Monday, February 1st 2010 @ 12:41 PM (not yet rated)
I've been researching, working on, and writing about Digital Asset Management and joking about our being on the road to Digital Nirvana here at MyPhotoMentor. Over at TheDAMBook.com I found a reference to a well-written essay on the perils and pitfalls of Meta-Uptopia, listing a number of reasons why we're NEVER going to get 'THERE' from here. With sections headed "People are lazy" and such like ... both humorous and informative!
I"ll quote a bit here as a teaser, and suggest you ALL go take a look-see. Thar be wisdom 'bout human-critters there!
"In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing stuff carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines the stuff's properties, noting those results.
Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling, America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer presents: "My daughter dresses like a slut!"
Ask a programmer how long it'll take to write a given module, or a contractor how long it'll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic Southerner how far it is to the creek. Better yet, throw darts -- the answer's likely to be just as reliable."
From "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" by Cory Doctorow, found here: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
The point is: though you can't trust everybody else to actually do their part, you can do yours so that at least YOUR "stuff" can be found. Not like your bosses' "things", like the twenty documents on his "desktop" labeled (oh so helpfully) "Untitled.doc", "Untitled-1.doc", "Untitled_2.doc" ...
Enjoy!
rNeil
