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At this point everyone is undoubtedly aware of the school shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, though I am certain the method by which we came across the news varied. Some of us were notified of the event by friends with fingers closer to the pulse, and still more of us learned about it first-hand through a variety of content aggregation platforms, such as Reddit.

I would hazard that the majority of people learned about it first and foremost through social media;  primarily Facebook or Twitter. I certainly did. A friend first told me about it through Facebook Messenger, and almost immediately after she did, I started to see articles trickling into my newsfeed in the background of my Messenger window. And the moment that happened I shut my Facebook tab down, despite the fact that I compulsively, addictively, have it open almost all the time.

Facebook, when taken on the whole, is a fantastic way for people to compare each others’ lives and share pictures of kittens and children, but when it comes to a tragedy, the platform is woefully inadequate at allowing its users to parse and process the gravity of events as they unfold. It is a thorough shock to a system that thrives on irreverent links and topical memes, and when faced with an item that requires genuine reflection and thought, it is often simpler – indeed, even more beneficial – for users to turn their heads until the kittens may resume. 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...

Several weeks ago, David Strohecker wrote a post about Tattoos and the Augmented body.  In a response to this post, Ned Drummond wrote a thought provoking comment, in which she differentiates between “active” and “passive” cyborgs. I think this is an interesting distinction that deserves fleshing out.  A deeper exploration of this distinction will be fruitful in pushing the theoretical boundaries of of what it means to be a cyborg—or an inhabitant of augmented reality.

The first thing to acknowledge is that “active” and “passive” are necessarily fluid states, rather than hard dichotomies. This is something Ned and I fleshed out in the comments section of the above mentioned post. Specifically, I said:

I would venture to say that active and passive use of technology probably ranges on a continuum, and individual cyborgs are more or less active/passive in different moments.

I would add to this that individual cyborgs can be simultaneously active and passive—actively using one technology while passively using another, or even actively using one part of a technology while passively using another part.

Before I can offer examples of the activity/inactivity continuum, I must offer a definition of active and passive interaction with technology. When Ned wrote about it, the distinction hinged on rule following. Those who use a technology for its intended purpose(s) are more passive, while those who use a technology in unintended ways are more active.

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