myMedia

After the fifteenth slog up the Green Building stairs and one and a half hours of listening to my iPod, I start to tire of Less Than Jake. Panting, I take a break and scroll through my 30 GB collection of music. Damn, I forgot to clear out some of this junk and upload some AFI albums I downloaded last weekend. I'm not proud of copying gigabytes upon gigabytes of music, but my desire for new music would not be sustainable if I were to purchase through a brick and mortar store. I like to try new music before commiting to a purchase. Oh well, I'll just wire these guys $30 when I figure out how. It's more than they'd make in royalties anyway. If the RIAA can't figure out how to make online music distribution convenient, that's their problem.

After putting in twenty-one climbs of the Green Building for Putz, I crash in my dorm and queue up some of those songs I didn't have on my iPod. With frenetic guitars in the background, I refresh Slashdot an online news aggregator focusing on technology. On top is an article about the Facebook newsfeed debacle, but of course I already know all about it, being myself a casual Facebook user. I skim the article and check out the comments. Owing to Slashdot's old school hacker audience, the comments read like old folks wringing their hands about “these damn kids,” privacy, and the public nature of the Internet. Obviously none of them use Facebook, so I discount their opinions and head over to check my own account.

Facebook, a social networking site with a focus on students, now has a newsfeed giving me all kinds of information about other people that I never really wanted to know. This total awareness of information strikes me as modern yet disconcerting, something that is perhaps ahead of its time. For now, it's something that scares me, so I scale back the amount of information it publishes about my activities. A high school friend has sent me an invitation to join a political group supporting Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which I support, so I join it. On the discussion board someone is debating the merits of the Condorcet method as opposed to IRV. I weigh in for IRV and logout.

I check my email to find mass mailings, none of which require my personal attention right now. There is some humourous hall chatter about the Facebook crisis worth reading, though. Before tooling my p-set for the night, I quickly check for comments on my blog and check my listening statistics on last.fm, a site that collects and analyzes listening patterns in its user base to calculate recommendations based on the listening patterns of a given user. I lapse into work and then sleep.

After my 11:00 AM class the next day, I thumb through my copy of Make magazine, a quarterly publication about do-it-yourself projects. Some relate to electronics, biology, and even knitting. I fantasize about my own book bindings and homemade t-shirts. Before my next class, I open up my cell phone and snap a crummy shot of the firetruck on the dome. I upload it to Sprint's web site so I can email it to my high school friends later, raving about how MIT is awesome.