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“the direct facial and self-valorizing imperatives of Facebook, the endless memetic re-postings of tumblr, fashion blogs, and so on”

“We’ve become better at choreographing ourselves and showing our best sides to the screen”

“75 percent of the world’s heads of state have a presence on Twitter”

“Forget about bowling alone: In Toffler’s future, we’d all be telecommuting together”

“A quarter million comments land in HuffPost’s assorted in-boxes every day”

“On Snapchat, sexual identity isn’t cemented through a series of boxes & menus”

“using drugged milkshakes to knock out the parents of one of the girls so they could log on to the Internet“ more...

This Christmas, we got my father-in-law an iPad. He’s basically never used a computer before now.

I knew that watching him start to get acquainted with it would highlight some interesting stuff. What I didn’t expect was exactly what stuff that would be. He’s been struggling to get the hang of it, of course – though he’s doing much better than he thinks he is – but one of the things that my husband and I have struggled with as we (mostly he) play periodic tech support is in getting my father-in-law to understand that he should learn by trying, that the device itself really is pretty much impossible for him to break, short of dropping it. That he shouldn’t be afraid of experimenting.

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As many of you already know, the third annual Theorizing the Web is fast approaching this March 1st and 2nd. We’ve moved the conference to New York City with help from CUNY’s Just Publics 365 initiative and we’ve also added a Friday event in addition to the main conference on Saturday. [Also, a reminder: the deadline to submit a 500 word abstract is January 6th!]  On Friday, March 1st,  the conference launches with a full slate of invited presentations at the CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery followed by an offsite social gathering. more...

Or: Lots of Words But Then An Awesome GIF, So Hang In There

Operating an automobile in an urban area is often quite frustrating. When you want to be driving, you’re often parked in traffic; when you want to be parked, you’re often driving around for a spot. Of course, there are apps for that: real-time traffic mapping apps from Google and others, and now we are also seeing so-called “smart parking” apps that display open parking spots by way of small sensors built in or near the parking space itself, fed into a network and then to a smartphone screen. A recent New York Times story on “smart parking” states that, more...

Science and Technology studies scholars have long understood that the physical structures and architectures of everyday life both reflect and construct human values, propensities, lines of action, and behavioral and social constraints. This was famously described by Langdon Winner with regards to the segregationist role of Robert Moses’ low bridges on the New York highway system.  Recently on this blog, David Banks (@DA_Banks) wrote a beautiful essay on the technology, and technological artifacts of Troy New York.  Indeed, the architectures of spaces in which we move shape how we move and reflect normative expectations about how we ought to move. more...

E. Gabriella Coleman’s new book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (2012, Princeton University Press) is an ethnography of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) hackers working on the Debian Linux Operating System. It is a thorough and accessible text, suitable for  someone unfamiliar with open source software or coding. It would make an excellent addition to an IT and Society 101 course syllabus, or a reading group on alternative work organization. Coleman’s greatest achievement in this text, however, is not the accuracy of her depiction, but the way in which she dissects the political and economic successes of the open source community. By claiming absolute political neutrality, but organizing work in radical ways, contributors to F/OSS “sit simultaneously at the center and margins of the liberal tradition.” (p. 3) Coleman argues that while F/OSS, “is foremost a technical movement based on the principles of free speech, its historical role in transforming other arenas of life is not primarily rooted in the power of language or the discursieve articulation of a broad political vision. Instead, it effectively works as a politics of critique by providing a living conterexample…” (p. 185) more...

“as Google begins to mediate interactions w/ the built environment, the scope for “algorithmic nudging” also expands”

“I’ve created a technique for converting digital audio files into 3D printable 33rpm records”

“IBM predicts that computers will soon have a sense of smell”

“Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, speak to us about human decency”

“the needed reforms, executives at Apple and Foxconn hope and believe, are falling into place”

“I think privacy controls prompt the comforting illusion that privacy isn’t a social relation but is instead something individuals can decree”

Nathan is on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson more...