Cyborgology

“no sense arguing with the digital humanities. They don’t really exist. This is the age of the managerial humanities”

“The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium”

“Microphones + Crooning + Nazis + Radio + Bing Crosby + $50,000 = Silicon Valley”

“MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much”

“Jane Austen’s internet success isn’t so surprising”

“a handful of people wearing Google Glass, now standing next to me at their own urinals”

“during this period, it was more common for digital animation to be emulated using hand-drawn techniques”

“Cars didn’t end up awarding us freedom, nor did they serve to better connect us to our friends and communities” (more…)

“paying in Bitcoin could be more convenient than converting to local currency while traveling abroad”

“Paul Miller was never more aware of the internet than when he made himself live without it”

“Airbnb indulges the fantasy that we might temporarily inhabit another life”

“the MOOC threatens the liminal space currently held by colleges and universities within the life course”

“after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information”

“Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr or Sherry Turkle a tastefully brief Snapchat”

“no one remembers what YOLO meant” (more…)

“attorneys have taken to Yelp to complain about prison procedures that delay or prevent them from seeing clients”

“The nostalgia that attracts a fan to “Garden State” is of a particular Internet variety”

“Next, simply disassemble the computer, shove the fragments back into those clams, harvest the clams, and puree them into a thick slurry in your home blender”

“there’s a lot of “reality” in the virtual, and a lot of “virtual” in our reality”

“this is a new way of expression that does not have a direct correlate offline”

“The mockdate is a type of status update that uses humor to publicly condemn all forms of “improper” bodies”

“Teens are the ideal tweeters because they are never happy and always interesting”

“the cell phone’s ability to signify status has given three beeps and vanished like a dropped call”

“they buy up thousands of dollars in pizza currency & then trade it for Bitcoin currency”

“Of all the millions of dollars of purloined bitcoin that’s floating around out there, not one Satoshi of it has been spent”

“Just because he used the acronym LOL in a text message and on Twitter doesn’t make him evil; it makes him a young person who sends text messages and uses Twitter. He is evil because he allegedly helped bomb the Boston Marathon” (more…)

“Cable news is dead, but something keeps animating the corpse”

“Human genes do not augment the body, they are the body”

“memes circulate us rather than vice versa”

“many of the declarations whizzing around Boston look like sympathy but smell like attention-seeking”

“social networking sites are not a separate realm of political activity”

“We need a multitude of what I call “Denial of Positivism (DoP)” attacks from various directions”

“the Google car was treated with deference no matter how recklessly we drove”

“iPad painting: just of the many similarities between George W. Bush and Churchill” (more…)

Data Based is a weekly Cyborgology feature producing original, insightful, and fun data visualizations.

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“On the whole, academia is quite anti-popular writing”

“Mainstream sociology & history have a bias towards thinking that nothing is new, ever, & thus ignored the internet”

“Use the emoticons & gift-wrap your message for data-miners or stick to plain English & limit yr audience to humans”

“I was hoping one of my cat vines was popular, not this tragedy”

“Think very carefully about whether tragedies belong on Vine, and about whether you should put them there”

“Goatse was the perfect totem for a burgeoning web culture that prized free speech and unpredictability”

“Jenna Marbles already embodies the future of celebrity”

“Digital dualism can blind us to the real and serious problems of online vigilantism”

“Facebook invites us to forget we even had a self before Timeline was there to organize it”

“the emoticon scheme makes us shoppers for new, bonus feelings à la carte”

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

Are human genes patentable? At the beginning of this week, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) heard arguments to answer just that question. Specifically, the biotechnology company Myriad Genetics, Inc. wants to defend their patent on the isolation of BRAC1 and BRAC2—two genes related to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers. Such a patent grants the company 20 years of monopoly control over the genes for research, diagnostic, and treatment purposes. A group of medical professionals, scientists, and patients are challenging the patent.

The criteria for a medical patent are such that while tools, medications, laboratory produced chemicals etc. can be patented, “Nature” cannot be patented. That which is patented must therefore be created, not merely discovered (regardless of how costly or effortful the discovery). Opponents of the BRAC patent often evoke Jonas Salk, who famously said in response to the potential patent of his Polio Vaccine: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” (more…)

Data Based is a weekly Cyborgology feature producing original, insightful, and fun data visualizations.

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“the collective value of all bitcoins has passed a billion dollars”

“Pa was a simple man, a techno-anarchist by trade, and long after the Bitcoin bust, he stayed on with the mining. “Don’t know nothin’ else, Ma said”

“Irene Serra chose the name -isq for her band deliberately to make it hard to find online”

“the public quickly accepts all the miracles that science provides (1948)”

“From paywalls to jargon to a tacit moratorium on social media, academics build careers through public disengagement”

“watching videos on the Internet & maybe writing a few very short essays that the professor never sees isn’t college”

“it is often difficult to distinguish between organized trolling and media linkbait” (more…)