jurgenson

2014 Ello was in with the new and by 2015 it became out with the old. It’s New Years Eve and I want to look back on a thing that came and went this year, which leaves me feeling bummed. You can only be really disappointed if you start with high hopes, and lots of people for lots of reasons wanted Ello to work. It became quickly clear that the site didn’t have a strong vision. Neither its politics or its understanding of the social life it set out to mediate were inspired or clever enough to be compelling.

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“sites that rely heavily on simple voting have much higher percentages of male users”

“an ideology that sees every person as a potential threat & every communication as potentially worth surveilling”

“How does someone that with an obvious resentment for the social sciences, also make a joke about how we were always already alienated?”

“ViralNova does not exist. Those who speak of ViralNova miss the point of ViralNova”

“the gruff man taking drags from the e-cigarette may also have conceivably traversed the space-time continuum“ more...

Computer Virus TV News Report 1988

“a prior exposure on Facebook will lead to increased arousal during a face-to-face encounter”

“we have to build the community as an online audience and hold it together by performing for it perpetually”

“I cursed the gendered nature of tech design that has written out women from the group of legitimate users”

“The billionaire-to-be co-founder of Twitter is a regular at Wisdom 2.0 events and began meditating just over a year ago”

“The cruel trick is that “the internet sucks” is a self-fulfilling prophecy”

“everyone who has ever masturbated understands the limitations of the [openness] paradigm”

“misogyny doesn’t come from the internet, it comes from contemporary culture. It won’t be fixed by the internet & it wont be fixed by women”

“seeing yourself do something to make yourself become something“ more...

“Franzen’s 6,400-word piece in The Guardian may be the last cry of the last dinosaur going down for the last time in the tar pit”

“the Internet is where we live. It’s not a place we go to anymore; it’s a layer over everything”

“Unsolved Mysteries injected a sense of the enchanted in an otherwise mundane suburban landscape”

“the tools used to make film, the science of it, are not racially neutral”

“why must a photo of my face be justified when a photo of my bookshelf is not?”

“selfies suggest the world we observe through social media is more interesting when people insert themselves into it”

“Week 5: Feedback: Bruno Latour comments on your blogs”

“the “government as a platform” agenda assumes that private industry is the best way of delivering public services”

“The problem with the relentless “search for meaning” is that it extinguishes all meaning in favour of pure emotion”

“the Internet is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

“The drone is a sonic paradigm grounded in neoliberal values and conventions”

“Blurring the lines between machine and organic humanity, Haraway-like, shows that those lines are in fact blurrable”

“Replicants are obsessed with photographs”

“the visual regime of the drone, its will to omniscience and precision”

“A Predator drone stays aloft for 18hrs & the pilots were pushed to be as tireless as the technology they controlled”

“they had not yet grown comfortable playing themselves before the camera”

“Soft Culture is hard for some to look at”

“a grocery shelf that comes equipped with sensors to determine the age and sex of passing customers”

“Tinder feels like a stopgap solution”

“the question of whether or not something is digital is no longer really important”

“Apple announcements are the opposite of a guilty pleasure; they are a burden that I take on with pride”

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

“Raw video of the quadcopter drone flight and crash on the streets of Manhattan”

“you cannot take a picture without involving an act of selfishness”

“The anxiety some people feel over the mass advent of digital is not unreasonable but their response to it often is”

“the Bluetooth RoboRoach, the first cyborg to be commercially available to the general public”

“TV has gotten a lot more intimate, more entwined with our subconscious, closer”

“Facebook’s temporal orientation puts undue pressure on its users to conform to its system“ more...

“damn girl are you horse_ebooks because so many dudes got upset when they found out that you are a real human being”

“the Horse e-books fiasco suggests that we are more than ready to mistake bots for humans and vice versa”

“Why is it so much easier to blame Facebook than look at the misogyny & hatred it reflects?”

“the ipad pathetically asks: “Do you still think I’m pretty?”, shifting the gendered allusions into full culmination“ more...

“The fact that the Supreme Court itself has links to its own Web site that no longer function shows the depth of the link rot problem”

“In some circles, being inaccessible is a status symbol”

“the intention behind the looking matters the most”

“clothing that does not move, rigid materials that force a body into an idealized appearance”

“romance was alive and well in the Instagram iteration of their marriage”

““That’s boring,” thought BuzzFeed, deciding to place photographs of five nipples above that explanation”

“Guys who try to hit on you by asking if you want to try on their Google Glass”

“Jesse Pinkman’s Roomba Starting bid: $200“ more...

what’s a bot and what’s human and where do we draw the line and should we draw that line

Yesterday, we learned that the most infamous Weird Twitter account, @Horse_ebooks, wasn’t a algorithmically-programmed “bot” but instead the product of a person tweeting as if. The revelation was accompanied by a live performance of the account in a Manhattan art gallery. While much is being written about the account, I’d like to share one thought about the live performance and what this all says about what is real and virtual, “bot” and human. In one day, @Horse_ebooks went from bot to human, and as I’ll argue, embodied in an art gallery, right back towards bot. more...

“‘Like’ Is Protected Speech, Appeals Court Says”

“Since the promise of money is broken, far out of reach, young people’s currency is attention”

“The imagined traces of my would-be scrobbling seemed like photographs for sound: scrobble, or it didn’t happen”

“The organisms are probably not alive, but, excitingly, probably do contain DNA”

““Work” trains us to pay special attention to tempo, and this habit follows us into our leisure time”

“Social media, of course, is both a mirror and an audience at once”

“War on Instagram: Framing conflict photojournalism with mobile photography apps”

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