Something I Found Terribly Interesting

While watching Rocketboom, I was linked to this Web site about Jamie O'Shea, a man living 2 seconds of time for every 3 of ours; in essence living in our past. The experiment ends on Jan. 19, which will only be Jan. 13 for Jamie. All elements of his life are being delayed by a computer program which keeps his e-mails from arriving, keeps the news on Web sites keyed to his "local" time and other sundry things that mystify me. They are even simulating night and day based on the altered clock. I just thought it was interesting as a way of showing how much we rely on media to keep us up-to-date and in-the-know.


On a related note, today's episode of Rocketboom was entitled The Social Construction of Reality which is taken from the name of a 1966 book by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The book sounds like it might have some applicability to how social networks are formed.

From Wikipedia:

The work introduced the term social construction into the social sciences. The central concept of The Social Construction of Reality is that persons and groups interacting together in a social system form, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalised. In the process of this institutionalisation, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conception (and belief) of what reality is becomes embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Social reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.