Radical Transparency

at 1:28 pm on February 13, 2009 under Feb: Media Fast | 3 Comments

logo_s
Part of this month of media fasting has been about reducing my bad habit of sitting behind the computer for hours on end. But since my job involves about 6 hours behind a computer a day minimum, I end up taking my breaks behind the computer as well. Which often last about six hours, cumulative.

I knew when I started this that I could never truly quit, for the joy of strolling the web is too much of a temptation, especially when I am right in front of the computer for so long.

I was curious – if I could open up my web surfing habit to public scrutiny, would that change my habits? The only way I knew to do so would be to log every website I look at and for how long, and then share it on this blog. Or just share my viewed links constantly in a link sharer, like del.ic.ious, which would be obnoxious.

But a friend from Timelope just opened up an account for me. Timelope is stalled in its Alpha stage, but their site is still chugging along amazingly, with their snarky yet attractive interface, and, more importantly, their radical transparency-inducing behavior of sharing pure, unbiased information about habits – what sites do you visit, when, and for how long?

Thus, a plugin in Firefox records my surfing constantly, and my entire web history is now viewable in a beautiful twitter-like interface.

picture-1

Now that folks can view my surfing live, do you think this will this change my habits at all? Do people even care that I cheated on my media fast by reading Dr. McNinja for a few minutes this afternoon, really? We’ll see.

In the meantime, give me a look.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [MySpace] [Reddit] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Email] More »

  • sy said,

    oh, it’s been a long, long time since last i read dr. mcninja. thanks a lot. now i can look forward to wasting even more of my precious time staring at a screen.

  • Jillian C. York said,

    So what, you just manually remove all the porn?

  • Runako said,

    i cannot believe it! Dr MCNINJA does this stuff really draw you in?!

Add A Comment

home top