Recently in Watching Category

To live is to remember; and how we choose to consecrate our memories is what gives texture and context to our lives as the Panopticon becomes public.  Google is good at creating the instant now for future recall, but The Wayback Machine is the granddaddy of soliciting who used to be.  Today we have -- Memento -- a new contender for scrapbooking our online lives.  So who is the king of our remembering?  Wayback or Memento? 

It never gets old catching Copyright infringers and yesterday was no exception.  There is a sheer disgust and yet also a shared, Panopticonic, delight in catching another website red-handed copying and pasting and re-publishing your writing without your permission.

We know I don't think much of Twitter, even though I Tweet Boles Blogs Network updates.  I'm sort of the lonesome stepchild standing in the street yelling to everyone around me -- "But the bird has no feathers!" -- while the restless crowd around me Tweets about Twitter's beautiful plumage.  Over the weekend, my Twitter rage was redeemed by Twitter itself as it finally confessed its utterly dark yearnings in an official blog post telling us they only value protecting the identity of celebrity and fame and not the everyday ordinary Twit like us.

As we are watched and surveilled by those around us -- is cheating in plan sight a clever plan against the purpose of the Panopticon -- or do we need to pretend online "study aids" are really helpful to the soul and not deceitful against the mind? Is Cramster.com a "community of learning" or is it just a chance to cheat better in class at $9.95 a month for access to all the answers?

In London, two Austrians were detained because they were taking digital images of buses.  The police invoked "fighting terrorism" as the reason they required the deletion of the images from the tourists' camera.

Bob Kerrey is under attack at New School "University" as their current president and I am leaping to his defense.  Bob is a good son of Nebraska and he doesn't take any guff and he isn't good at having to put up with b.s.  Those Midwestern values have served him well as a Medal of Honor winning Navy SEAL who left a leg in Vietnam, as Governor of Nebraska, as founder of multi-million dollar businesses and as a United States Senator. Those chits, however, are not enough to placate the crybaby faculty and whimpering student body at New School -- and the problems with Bob's leadership isn't Bob it is in the anachronistic and infantile "university" he is trying to drag into the next century of learning.

The slums of Kiberia, Kenya take on a special, enigmatic, glow when viewed from above.  The large face art is only visible on a grand scale in the surveilling, Panopticonic view: