Welcome to Linkville.com

Greetings from Margaret L. Thornberry, Linkville Mayor and First Citizen.

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This is your front door to the mythical town of Linkville, a smallish community that might be located somewhere in Northern California, very like Dunsmuir, while at the same time existing anywhere in the world that the connections of the heart are enhanced by data transmission technology. What is a 'connection of the heart'? It's not buying books on-line. It may be found where discussions about books are being posted, or perhaps where the author joins a chat line. It's where The Oracle lives, and Blue Dog Can Count.

What are your 'connections of the heart', and how is data technology going to affect them?

As mayor, city manager, and webcrafter, it's my job to put Linkville on the map. Not too clearly on the map, though--it's awfully nice here just the way it is.

The Mayor's mansion is a farm house built in the early 1880's, located near the beating heart of Silicon Valley. I've found that the twice-a-day commute between the past and the future has created an atmosphere where assumptions about information transmission, acquisition and transmogrification are questioned and new practical real-life configurations experimented with. How does digitizing, enhancing and adding sound bites to old family pictures modify our experience of the past and our relationship with the people who lived there? How can we best retain authenticity and continuity with the past and integrity in the present while immersed in digital video?

Many of Linkville's citizens are consciously developing ways of integrating new information transfer technology into their daily lives, regardless of their level of technological sophistication.

  • Posting pictures on the on the web, to share with friends and family, or just because, on sites such as Shutterfly.
  • Developing web sites on-line--free at sites such as Yahoo Geocities.
  • Sharing your diary, thoughts, musings, writings, art work, and short videos with the world through blogs and podcasts
  • Communicating directly with friends and family in Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti, bypassing traditional news media.
  • Using a hand-held unit customizable through modular units to be a cell phone, pager, organizer, MP3 player, web browser, calculator, PC interface, GPS unit...well, not quite there yet, but headed that way with Treo Smartphones
Posting your pictures or creating a home on the internet that is truly yours, and being able to access the internet from a pocket device anytime, anywere is technologically marvelous--but the tools we use do change us and our perceptions as we use them. Will we use these tools to build Linkville or Dystopia? Can YOU ignore a ringing phone, no matter what you might be doing? How many times a day do YOU check your e-mail? Does the proliferation of disgusting and irritating spam affect your attitude, even when you step away from your computer? Are you concerned about Google's ability to track every search request through their portal? Do you think music sharing via peer-to-peer software is destroying the music industry, or do you agree with the analysis of the issue by artist Janis Ian? How much is the control over digital music distribution now wielded by the recording industry going affect the free flow of other digitized information?

E-Mail: Linkville
Page last modified: 26 December 2008