society

cachemonet.com

sites that rely heavily on simple voting have much higher percentages of male users

an ideology that sees every person as a potential threat & every communication as potentially worth surveilling

How does someone that with an obvious resentment for the social sciences, also make a joke about how we were always already alienated?

ViralNova does not exist. Those who speak of ViralNova miss the point of ViralNova

the gruff man taking drags from the e-cigarette may also have conceivably traversed the space-time continuummore...

Computer Virus TV News Report 1988

a prior exposure on Facebook will lead to increased arousal during a face-to-face encounter

we have to build the community as an online audience and hold it together by performing for it perpetually

I cursed the gendered nature of tech design that has written out women from the group of legitimate users

The billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events and began meditating just over a year ago

The cruel trick is that “the internet sucks” is a self-fulfilling prophecy

everyone who has ever masturbated understands the limitations of the [openness] paradigm

misogyny doesn’t come from the internet, it comes from contemporary culture. It won’t be fixed by the internet & it wont be fixed by women

seeing yourself do something to make yourself become somethingmore...

Franzen’s 6,400-word piece in The Guardian may be the last cry of the last dinosaur going down for the last time in the tar pit

the Internet is where we live. It’s not a place we go to anymore; it’s a layer over everything

Unsolved Mysteries injected a sense of the enchanted in an otherwise mundane suburban landscape

the tools used to make film, the science of it, are not racially neutral

why must a photo of my face be justified when a photo of my bookshelf is not?

selfies suggest the world we observe through social media is more interesting when people insert themselves into it

Week 5: Feedback: Bruno Latour comments on your blogs

the “government as a platform” agenda assumes that private industry is the best way of delivering public services

The problem with the relentless “search for meaning” is that it extinguishes all meaning in favour of pure emotion

the Internet is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

giphy-2

When I was young, Robert Stack would visit me in my dreams. His monotone voice and sharp eyes would come through my wood-paneled RCA cathode-ray childhood TV and settle in my subconscious until I went to sleep.  During the day Unsolved Mysteries was an opportunity to, “solve a mystery” from the comfort of my own home. If I watched the dramatizations closely enough I thought I might recall some repressed memory of an alien abduction or I might notice a telltale tattoo that marks the new neighbor as a relocated serial killer. Solving these Lifetime-disseminated mysteries was a sacred trust that I did not take lightly. Everything from persistent hauntings to serial killings were on my plate. When you grow up in South Florida, extra terrestrial abduction and friendly serial killers seem so plausible. If we were able to fit over a million people on a sandbar and intoxicate them long enough to stay through hurricane season, anything could happen. But no matter how much I investigated I always seemed to disappoint Robert. My neighbor with eight fingers that loved ham radio was not the man suspected of murdering two teenagers in Ohio; he was just really racist. The lady across the street was not a reoccurring spectral phenomena; she was just 90 years old. None of these people were particularly extraordinary —let alone extraterrestrial— but Unsolved Mysteries injected a sense of the enchanted in an otherwise mundane suburban landscape. more...

The drone is a sonic paradigm grounded in neoliberal values and conventions

Blurring the lines between machine and organic humanity, Haraway-like, shows that those lines are in fact blurrable

Replicants are obsessed with photographs

the visual regime of the drone, its will to omniscience and precision

A Predator drone stays aloft for 18hrs & the pilots were pushed to be as tireless as the technology they controlled

they had not yet grown comfortable playing themselves before the camera

Soft Culture is hard for some to look at

a grocery shelf that comes equipped with sensors to determine the age and sex of passing customers

Tinder feels like a stopgap solution

the question of whether or not something is digital is no longer really important

Apple announcements are the opposite of a guilty pleasure; they are a burden that I take on with pride

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

Raw video of the quadcopter drone flight and crash on the streets of Manhattan

you cannot take a picture without involving an act of selfishness

The anxiety some people feel over the mass advent of digital is not unreasonable but their response to it often is

the Bluetooth RoboRoach, the first cyborg to be commercially available to the general public

TV has gotten a lot more intimate, more entwined with our subconscious, closer

Facebook’s temporal orientation puts undue pressure on its users to conform to its systemmore...

damn girl are you horse_ebooks because so many dudes got upset when they found out that you are a real human being

the Horse e-books fiasco suggests that we are more than ready to mistake bots for humans and vice versa

Why is it so much easier to blame Facebook than look at the misogyny & hatred it reflects?

the ipad pathetically asks: “Do you still think I’m pretty?”, shifting the gendered allusions into full culminationmore...

The fact that the Supreme Court itself has links to its own Web site that no longer function shows the depth of the link rot problem

In some circles, being inaccessible is a status symbol

the intention behind the looking matters the most

clothing that does not move, rigid materials that force a body into an idealized appearance

romance was alive and well in the Instagram iteration of their marriage

“That’s boring,” thought BuzzFeed, deciding to place photographs of five nipples above that explanation

Guys who try to hit on you by asking if you want to try on their Google Glass

Jesse Pinkman’s Roomba Starting bid: $200more...

gif of a gif

‘Like’ Is Protected Speech, Appeals Court Says

Since the promise of money is broken, far out of reach, young people’s currency is attention

The imagined traces of my would-be scrobbling seemed like photographs for sound: scrobble, or it didn’t happen

The organisms are probably not alive, but, excitingly, probably do contain DNA

“Work” trains us to pay special attention to tempo, and this habit follows us into our leisure time

Social media, of course, is both a mirror and an audience at once

War on Instagram: Framing conflict photojournalism with mobile photography apps

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...

toward an understanding of being human that contains being online

it’s mind-boggling that Business Insider hired a CTO who doesn’t even understand that the Internet is real life

Titstare got “very loud applause.” Bros are pack animals

a larger project to make Facebook’s public interactions not just public but visible

Siri might not want to be like you. Siri might want to be Siri

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].