technology

What thrill does one imagination hold, after all, when we can program a bot to voice the imagination of everyone who’s ever uploaded their words onto the web?

What happened at Zuccotti Park was not wholly unlike what had happened a few months earlier on Delicious and Google Reader

What happens when, as a result of social media, vigilantism takes on a new form?

In event of power or Internet loss, just shout 140-character comments out window

There aren’t enough terms of service to manage all the publics and space in the world, or the people who live in them

When disaster strikes, make sure to bring your sandbags of skepticism to Twitter

Death is denied when a Facebook activist can never prove it

the [cyberspace] metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining

a dualistic offline/online worldview can depoliticise and mask very real and uneven power relationshipsmore...

“Hey, don’t let me forget to TiVo Two and a Half Men”—said nobody ever.

NPR has been running a series that looks at the ways in which new technologies are changing how we consume television[i].  The latest installment, based on an interview with Jessica Helfand, author of Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture has a troublesome tone. Helfand worries that on-demand television is ruining our attention spans, as we consume only what we want, when we want. She worries that we watch on our own time, rather than as part of a collective schedule-following community. She worries that content will have to get shorter, more easily consumable, and that the focus will shift from away from the story, and towards the medium itself. Referencing a colleague, she labels today’s media consumption environment as a “narrative deprivation culture.”  Below are a few representative quotes from Helfand: more...

The digital and the physical are becoming one

Design is one of the linchpins of capitalism, because it makes alienated labor possible

My hologram rendered somehow less complete. A broken stream in the data mind

Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world

Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users

“Invisible Users” is one of the few texts explicitly dealing with the Internet that will not feel dated in five years

Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars

Given a city block, the challenge will be to excavate and present that information which the most people are curious about at the precise moment they walk through it

Scrobbling might be “social,” but it’s not very personal

Wikipedians may be their own worst enemy

a Predator parked at the camp started its engine without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed

I would challenge the idea that trolls, and trolls alone, are why we can’t have nice things online

Memory on the Internet is both infinite and fleeting

EDM lets listeners experience what feels like risk, and excess but is actually very tightly and carefully controlled

In this climate, it gets hard to draw strict distinctions between living systems and mechanical ones

A machine does far more than the task it performs. It is forged of historical moments, acts as a flash-point for contemporary questions, and always, inevitably, produces new cultures of its own

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if you haven’t visited the Deep Web, you ain’t seen nothing yet

nothing in society makes sense except in the light of power. And that goes for speech, too

it used to be hard to connect when friends formed clicks, but it is even more difficult to connect now that clicks form friends

how did the Awkward Party Comment shift from “I know, I read your Livejournal” to “You read what I posted on Facebook, right?

Red Bull will most likely never fund a trip to Mars or a high speed rail line

It became very difficult to look at the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building without thinking that they looked CG

self-broadcasting always feels like agency, even if it only builds the walls of our own personal terrordome

A 3-year-old shouldn’t know which of her actions are worthy of being documented

gamification seems to invite false consciousness arguments because it’s scary that “play” can be so completely non-transgressive

Are we using technology to stylize our unease with the present, our feeling of disconnection from the past?

Why I felt OK outing Violentacrez: Anonymity should be valued mainly to the extent it helps protect powerless from powerful. VA wasn’t that

Trecartin’s characters, like the modern-day technophiles they satirise, are umbilically linked to their Blackberries

Surface is going to make some kind of history for Microsoft, one way or another

I always react negatively against the idea that technology is a foreign body inside the human” (1997)

You do not hear about a YouTube video in the press w/o hearing about how many views it has, and that’s not accidental

over the past two years social media has also become an increasingly hostile place for women writers and journalists

to design with an eye to how clothes look online, perhaps sacrificing how they feel on the body

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There is an essential lack of any heroic narrative in most films about the second Gulf War

In twenty years universal television will be an everyday affair” (1927)

Romney campaign’s presence on Tumblr is more subdued

the apocalypse of the coming Reputation Market, in which all humans will be searchable, sortable and assigned a value by a judge, jury and executioner of their peers across the Internet

The pay-to-promote feature disrupts the interest-based algorithm

social media encourages thinking of authenticity as moment of external confirmation; others decide if you have been true to yourself

The symbiotic relationship between us and our apps will be seamless

there are two different settings for the privacy of your phone number in two different places. Because that’s the way Facebook rolls

ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out”

the concept of ‘internet addiction’ relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is

Will there ever be a laptop that needs to be broken in, and improves as you use it?

With these gardens as crypto-water-computers, they were taking measurements of the universe

A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes

The point again is Internet is REAL & deciding that it’s unreal, virtual, trivial etc. is a function of the privilege it accords the denier

the fighting of war is now augmented – war by physical and digital means are now inseparable

there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works

Ensconced in the home, the 3-D printer is a step toward the replicator: a machine that can instantly produce any object with no input of human labor

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Below is a partial transcript of the introductory remarks I gave at the Technoscience as Activism Conference held in Troy, New York and hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from June 26-28, 2012. The conference was funded by the NSF’s GK-12 Fellowship Program

I almost never read my presentations but we’re short on time and there’s a lot of stuff that I want to share with you and I don’t want to miss anything. Publicly reading an apology for reading in public is an apt metaphor for what this conference is about, or more precisely what it is a response to. When I approached Dr. Ron Eglash about putting on this conference I told him I only wanted to do it if I could make the conference reflect the kind of politics espoused in the presentations. I don’t want to invite a bunch of brilliant people to Troy, who want to talk about democratizing science and technology, and keep them in a single room all day. Troy should benefit from some of your unique experiences, and the people of Troy have done some amazing things that I think the visitors will enjoy and appreciate. more...

What will happen if more apps start to play more important roles in more of our lives?

Last week I wrote about a pattern I’ve been seeing, one for which I wanted to create a new term. I’m still working on the terminology issue, but the pattern is basically this:

1) A new technology highlights something about our society (or ourselves) that makes us uncomfortable.
2) We don’t like seeing this Uncomfortable Thing, and would prefer not to confront it.
3) We blame the new technology for causing the Uncomfortable Thing rather than simply making it more visible, because doing so allows us to pretend that the Uncomfortable Thing is unique to practices surrounding the new technology and is not in fact out in the rest of the world (where it absolutely is, just in a less visible way).

The examples I sketched out last week were Klout and Facebook’s new “sponsored” status updates (which Jenny Davis has since explored in greater depth); this week, I’m going to take a look at ‘helpful’ devices and smartphone apps. more...

I still want to be a cyborg

we’ll have a crack team of GIF artists cranking out instant animations of the best debate moments

And independent voters? The top term was “LOL,” short for laugh out loud

bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer

I am only as secure as the last time I was retweeted

everyone else seemed so natural in their tweeting. for me it was agony

the friction of the digital divide in academia requires only the slightest irritation to hit a rolling bubbling, um, boil

it’s strange to write a serious research proposal & have half of your bibliography be science fiction

“let’s stop shaming teenagers for exploring sexual imagery through the cell phone shutter, instead of our own lens of 1960s nostalgia

Pinterest is now jammed with inspirational quotes, some of which could have been lifted from fortune cookies

the hate-blog phenomenon is basically anti-fandom

low-tech objects that are the paraphernalia of hipster culture

the public assumes that what is printed or pressed or somehow physically produced is of better quality

the only way to not be used by the Internet is either to not use it, which is ridiculous, or to make something out of it

is Klout trying to smack a glossy veneer of Science™ onto social ranking?

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40% of Twitter users who log in on a regular basis never tweet

Going viral was crippling

cyberpunk romanticisation of the ‘virtual’ plays a cultural role in propping up [digital dualism]

Drones will make traditional fences as obsolete as gunpowder & cannons made city walls

For the poor, there will be cyberspace

Percentage of folks living on a Native American reservation who have internet access: 10

Also, I find it important to make sure someone is real before meeting them, so hopefully you have a FB. This way you know that I am a real person and I know you are as well

“Gangnam Style” signals the emergence of irony in South Korea

The Enterprise crew was driving a misfiring IBM PC in the service of a quasi-neoliberal agenda

Data’s positronic brain doesn’t have Wi-Fi

here’s the order of what was important in my life: 1- Facebook 2- Myself 3- Food / Shelter 4- My gf 5- Family

Desired Skills: Klout Score of 35 or higher

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PJ Rey just posted a terrific reflection on hipsters and low-tech on this blog, and I just want to briefly respond, prod and disagree a little. This is a topic of great interest to me: I’ve written about low-tech “striving for authenticity” in my essay on The Faux-Vintage Photo, reflected on Instagrammed war photos, the presence of old-timey cameras at Occupy Wall Street, and the IRL Fetish that has people obsessing over “the real” in order to demonstrate just how special and unique they are.

While I appreciate PJ bringing in terrific new theorists to this discussion, linking authenticity and agency with hipsters and technology, I think he focuses too much on the technologies themselves and not enough on the processes of identity; too much on the signified and not where the real action is in our post-modern, consumer society: the signs and signifiers. more...