“Ten, 20 years from now, the legacy of [Facebook] should be, we have connected everyone in the world”
“Becoming yourself is largely a matter of becoming someone who is paid attention to”
“Human self-awareness is multiplying itself onto an altogether new plane”
“Instagram is the new go-to platform for saying “I live a full life and here is photographic proof””
“Analog stuff is popular online”
“Number Of Users Who Actually Enjoy Facebook Down To 4”
“Grindr officially announces its plan to mobilize gay men as a political bloc in the 2012 elections”
“I can’t put Twitter or the little blue bird in jail, so the only way to punish is monetarily”
“About four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year”
“Google Glass is changing the implicit social contract with everyone in his or her field of view”
“Having opened up a chasm between the informational and material, we’re rapidly trying to close it”
“Imagine being excited to see what the Internet looks and feels like in a new town”
“remote sensing and screen culture might displace today’s commonplace demand for airbuses”
“human beings have not always tried to make sense of emotions through numbers”
“we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between offline and online”
“technologically-mediated storytelling is every bit as world-destroying as it is world-creating”
“75 percent of all [Wikipedia] articles score below the desired [Flesch] readability score”
“We all participate in this strange authorship of the now”
“to really understand “the Internet” we need to forget it as a unified “it” altogether”
“The porn industry is on the same trajectory as all media: content itself no longer holds value”
“the internet hive mind might begin producing a new kind of anti-gonzo journalism”
“personal relationships seem to be the blurry edge of a quantified field of vision”
“All physical spaces already are also informational spaces”
“Once you’re running at Internet speed, is there any turning back?”
“there is no option to “roll back” the impact the Internet has made on human existence”
“there is life after the compass, maps and even GPS”
“Why does Bokeh matter? First of all because there’s more of it than there used to be”
“social media functions to uphold or replicate hierarchies of print capitalism”
“our attack on Armstrong speaks to our collective discomfort with a cyborg nature”
“this is the most boring thought about technology that can be had”
“the successful troll expends much less time and energy on the interaction than their targets do”
“If ‘digital’ isn’t a place or a world or a reality, can it be a practice?”
“our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience”
“facebook asks you to produce yourself in terms that are corporate”
“We love books for what they carry within them, not for what they’re made of”
“Already, [QR code] technology boasts a certain retronostalgic appeal”
“Internet shopping and drone flying can happen in the same remote space anywhere in the world”
“where fiction generally resists reader alteration, board games take it for granted”
“The result is a private, digital ranking of American society unlike anything that has come before”
“It won’t be enough to touch our screens, some day. Our screens will touch us back”
Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“cupcakes match—& attempt to assuage—our cultural anxieties of the moment”
“Each second, I observe friends on Facebook contributing to a shared space of disposable moments”
“I’m wondering, now, if machines are, by default, gender queer?”
“the modes of constraint operating through [the Web] are material, while liberation is semiotic”
“typewriters alter the physical connection between writer and text“
Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:
“there’s blood dripped from fast-clouding retinas onto all of our computer chips”
“Why is it that, unlike buildings, old websites never have any prestige?”
“Do templated spaces of identity construction necessarily do violence to experience?”
“using social media the same way a rat in the maze “uses” the scientists to get cheese”
“Our idea of “nature” owes something to the advance of technology”
“now the novelty isn’t being online, it’s being offline”
“Friendship’s path,” a 1937 AT&T ad declared, “often follows the trail of the telephone wire.”
“what’s the point of doing something awesome if you can’t brag about it online?”
“Kids don’t as deeply distinguish between online & offline bullying”
“anything that you see in the real world needs to be in our database“
Since you are probably going to spend today arguing about Occupy Wall Street with your conservative family members and helping your parents with computer questions we figured you would appreciate some slightly ligher fare: internet cooking shows. But because we are social scientists, we can’t be satisfied with uncritical review. Therefore, I want to discuss how these cooking shows interact with, perform, reify, and probelmitize constructions of gender and nationality. The three shows I want to cover (I’m gonna have to pass on this and this. There’s a great article at dailydot.com that lists most internet cooking shows.) are Epic Meal Time, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time, and My Drunk Kitchen. Full disclosure: I have a profound weakness for all of these shows, with increasing affinity in the order I just presented them. In case you’re unfamiliar with these shows, I’ll briefly introduce them and then get into the theory. [Images after the break might be considered NSFW.] more...
This is the first of a two-part series dedicated to answering the question “Do we need a new World’s Fair?” It is an honest question that I do not have an answer to. What I aim to do here is share my thoughts on the subject and present historical data on what these sorts of events have done in the past. In the first part, I explore what previous World Fairs have accomplished and what we must certainly avoid. The second part will investigate what a new 21st century fair might look like, and how it would help our economy. Part 1 is here.
Yesterday we looked at the last few World Fairs that were held in the United States. Those 20th century fairs demonstrated technologies that today we take for granted as common-place. Everything from Juicy Fruit gum to fluorescent lighting has been introduced to the world through these massive fairs. World Expos still take place, but are now found in China, Japan and South Korea. The 2012 expo will be held in Seoul, South Korea. The latest World’s Fair, Expo 2010, was held in Shanghai, China and set historic records as the largest and most well-attended expo. But the success of the Shanghai Expo doesn’t quite translate to America’s shores. As The Atlantic’s Adam Minter wrote last year:
To American ears, the concept of a World’s Fair sounds archaic, and when applied to Shanghai, a contemporary symbol of all that is new, vibrant, and even threatening, it’s disconcerting. But in Shanghai, where the future is an obsession, this reported $46 billion hat-tip to the past makes perfect sense: just as New York once announced its global pre-eminence via World’s Fairs in 1939 and, again, in 1964, the organizers of Expo 2010 view the six month event as nothing less than Shanghai’s coronation as the next great world city. more...
Last Tuesday, Slate’s editor David Plotz wrote about a social experiment he performed last July.
I was born on Jan. 31, but I’ve always wanted a summer birthday. I set my Facebook birthday for Monday, July 11. Then, after July 11, I reset it for Monday, July 25. Then I reset it again for Thursday, July 28. Facebook doesn’t verify your birthday, and doesn’t block you from commemorating it over and over again. If you were a true egomaniac, you could celebrate your Facebook birthday every day. (You say it’s your birthday? It’s my birthday too!)
Plotz’s Facebook wall was filled by well-wishers on all three of his “birthdays.” He writes,
My social network was clearly sick of me. I received only 71 birthday wishes on July 28, down from more than 100 on my first two fake birthdays. And even more skeptics caught on to the experiment: 16 doubters, compared with 9 from three days earlier.
