where are you now?
What many of you may or may not know, is that that question is a Jack’s Mannequin lyric to a great song called “the mixed tape.”
[ADDED ON 4/25: since my professor mentioned this, I will assume more than my class will read it. therefore, I will add this NYT article about cassette tapes that is vaguely relevant and that i just found. i'm bad at staying on topic, ok? shoot me.]
That’s mildly unrelated, but it is a very good song, and since I feel a lot of the nonsense on here is heavily academic, you could always use with a good music video. I’ve got a couple more I’d like to link, but for now I’d like to talk about location technology, which is very relevant to a question like ‘where are you now?’
Foursquare, GPS technology, and that kind of stuff – changed the world forever, wouldn’t you say? Well, my favorite website ever, mashable, made up a lovely little infographic about this. as i love infographics and mashable (not crazy about location technology, though), i’d figure i’d talk about it a bit.
click for larger images. as always.
My favorite thing about this image? How fluid it is. Unlike the previous image I talked about today, this one is so seamlessly smooth that all the different pieces of information meld together. Everything is connected. I like connectivity. Another thing I notice about this is that as we get into the present, the information blurbs seem to be shorter: the whole top part of the infographic is about smoke signals, but satellite, automotive, and smartphone GPS all share about the same amount of space.
And what’s with the font choice here? Call me a serif elitist, but I despite everything about whatever font they’ve used here. There is really nothing I like about it. It seems too casual, too high-school, too white board-markerish, and all those things you don’t want in a font. I know that this isn’t really a serious OMG FACTS!! graph, but STILL. god, this font makes me want to punch babies. This must be Comic Sans’ bastard brother. like all good font elitists, I hate comic sans. Generally though, I like the images: simple, cohesive, all in the same style, with the same general set of colors, and they well-illustrate the point of the graph itself. The one thing i DON’T like is the timeline at the bottom. I wish there some greater image for social network-related location tracking technology…. kind of a let down, to be honest.
Also, why isn’t Please Rob Me on here somewhere?
