Search results for twitter

Just some of my favorite quotes from what I read this past week on tech&society:

“If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, he should have an outfit for that”

“As people become brands, we expect not friendship from them but customer service”

“I’m left wondering why we’re typing so breathlessly, like we’re all skydiving into prom”

“Are 3D printers ontological white holes that produce reality from their printer heads?”

“My mental map was no match for the crisp precision of the iPhone’s…being in that place meant something different”

“TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering”

“The horrendous ramifications for privacy are obvious…yet they have not deterred anyone from using social media”

“drones are the most anthropomorphized of killing machines…so easily endowed with human subjectivity”

“the Amish are paradigmatically modern in that they have made the need to think about technology a defining feature of their culture”

Recently I’ve started to wonder if certain friends of mine aren’t receiving kickbacks from the social music streaming service Spotify. I’ve started calling these friends the “Spotivangelists,” and have jokingly insisted that recruitment bonuses are the only reason they could possibly have for being so intent on getting me to sign up. What I’ll try to examine in this post, however, is not why my friends are so intent on getting me to join Spotify, but why I’ve been so intent on resisting. By rights, I should be some kind of Spotifanatic; music is a huge part of my life, and I discover almost all of my new music through friends. So why am I still holding out?

more...

The price of 3D printers is plummeting. Like all complicated pieces of technology it is quickly moving from large, confusing, and expensive to small, simple and cheap. This year has been full of consumer-level 3D printers that are cheaper than some professional grade photo printers. Right now, these little things are capable of making plastic do-dads that are, admittedly, of lesser quality than some dollar store toys. But just like a magic trick, you’re not paying for the physical thing, you’re paying for the ability to do the trick. Design an object in a modeling software suite like SketchUp, convert it into some kind of printer-friendly format, and -so long as it is smaller than a bread box and made out of plastic- you can build whatever you want. 3D printers give an individual the ability to transform bits into atoms. In some ways it is a radical democratization of the means of production. For a fraction of the price of a car, someone can gain the ability to fabricate a relatively wide range of material objects. What are the implications for this new ability? What does it say about the relationship of atoms and bits? more...

Below is the full text of a two-part series that I wrote and posted last month

In what follows, I delineate a language with which we can think about the body as technology, and in particular, politicized technology. We can do so, I argue, with Ernst Schraube’s conceptualization of technology as materialized action. I begin by laying out this theoretical framework. I then apply this conceptualization to the body, with a focus on body size. more...

I made my digg.com account on March 15, 2007. I think I had an account before the current one because I clearly remember using Digg in high school, after I saw Kevin Rose demo the site on The Screen Savers. My enjoyment of that tech community, at the time, was so complete. It felt like my tribe. I dutifully listened to This Week in Tech and I am even willing to admit that I watched the bro-tastic video podcast associated with the site “Diggnation”. My late teens and early 20s were consumed with tech news and I loved every moment of it. The community fell off a cliff somewhere around 2008 as a few big users were banned for violating rules against scripting and gaming. The site hemorrhaged users through the last few aughts. By the summer of 2010, AlterNet reported on massive gaming and censorship by gangs of conservative Yahoo newsgroups. Within a month of the scandal, a terrible revision of the site crippled the service, causing day-long outages and spotty service. Now, the site has been sold for a mere $500,000 to a company called Betaworks. They plan on relaunching the site on August 1st after a massive overhaul. While a server might still point to digg.com, I know that it is not the site I grew up with and the Digg Diaspora has been cast to the edges of the internet. more...

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”

“The obsession with the Minority Report computer is a betrayal of everything that is human about computers”

“lets situate our Western New Aesthetic w/in its global context. What kinds of New Aesthetic are we blind to?”

“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?”

“AUDI’s e-sound essentially turns the automobile into a rolling instrument for playing the sound of the engine”

“the modes of constraint operating through [the Web] are material, while liberation is semiotic”

“the flight path of a digital artifact never fully stops unfolding, so the range of possibility is never fully formed”

“typewriters alter the physical connection between writer and text“

In the last part of my recent essay “A New Privacy,” I described documentary consciousness as the perpetual (and frequently anxiety-provoking) awareness that, at each moment, we are potentially the documented objects of others. In this post, I use a friend’s recent ‘Facebook debacle’ as a starting point to elaborate on what documentary consciousness is, how it works, and whether it can be diminished or assuaged by the fact that “nobody… wants to see your status update from 2007.” I draw on Brian Massumi’s distinction between the possible and the potential to help explain why documentary consciousness entails “the ever-present sense of a looming future failure,” whether anyone reads that old status update or not.

more...