jurgenson

toward an understanding of being human that contains being online

it’s mind-boggling that Business Insider hired a CTO who doesn’t even understand that the Internet is real life

Titstare got “very loud applause.” Bros are pack animals

a larger project to make Facebook’s public interactions not just public but visible

Siri might not want to be like you. Siri might want to be Siri

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

how people use music when doing intellectual labour: people use it as a symbol to say ‘keep away from me’

Ever buy a movie on iTunes instead of downloading it for free on The Pirate Bay? Yeah, keep not doing that

the surprisingly broad overlap between prison & museum design

If schools follow dualist specifications, education becomes less in tune with the way students actually consume texts

the Introversion Meme is the newest face on a many-headed hydra of conservative backlash against a changing society

they’re more than capable of fucking with minds. I’m looking forward to more games that fuck with mine

with Glass, the contents of your screen are a mystery to othersmore...

A link that disappears after a certain number of people have seen it

the solution is not to imagine technology free of societal constraints but to fully engage with all of its messy human implications

as managing editor of CNN.com, I want our readers to know this: All you are to us are eyeballs

a place where CEOs, venture capitalists and startuppers can network

re: sonic/musical trolling, I would put forth Cage’s 4’33″ as the seminal example

Social media invite experiments in inertia, continual additions & variations on themes hard-coded into platforms

PornHub has just released a big, ol’ sticky mess of data about the country’s porn habitsmore...

or just get new friends
…or just get new friends?

The easiest, laziest, most click-baitiest op-ed, trend video, or thing to scream at a bar right now is how, with today’s technologies, we are more connected but also more alone. Ooh. Zuckerberg has 500 million friends but it was never really a spoiler to say that Sorkin’s The Social Network ends with him sitting alone at a computer. Ooh. The Turkle-esque irony is just too good for it not to zeitgeist all over the place.

That argument should not be altogether dismissed but I am quite skeptical of where it’s so often coming from and how it’s articulated. This trend might be largely disingenuous, and by that I do not mean intentionally insincere but instead a sort of cultural positioning: we-are-connected-but-alone not only drips with that delicious ironic juxtaposition, it simultaneously props the person making the case as being somehow deeper, more human, more in touch with others and experience. more...

technology and society quotes from the past week.

a religion based around getting Facebook Likes

Facebook has a ways to go before it catches up to coffee

it explicitly privileges communicative practices of speech and voice over text without justifying this gigantic assumption

I am now watching Twitter become morally depopulated

the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days

you provide such a neat explanation of technological determinism that I can’t wait to share it with my undergradsmore...

technology and society quotes from the past week

Facebook is useless without friends. My only friend is, like, my grandma

research about the Internet done by white ppl that rarely acknowledges the salience of race but clings to a fantasy of a color-blind web

when Google finally launches a search engine for women, we will be capable of locating the websites targeted at us

Social media seem like a new way to buy the bulk of us off with affect

The discourse of the comment section invites readers to round the essay up to scandalous

a person close enough to the toilet to connect to it via Bluetooth with their phone could take control of it

Aha, I am a Cultured person in a Cultured space and I am Experiencing Books

Cop Selfies are illegitimate selfies complicit in the fetishism of violence

Anyone who thinks that texting lacks nuance has failed to mine the vast emotional potential of the Emoji keyboard

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

There simply isn’t much of a market for tech-savvy haute couture

In this paper, we investigate if widely used influence scores are vulnerable and easy to manipulate

The TSA’s Instagram feed shows the artistic side of confiscated material

“cyber” has, in a way, returned to its dark science-fiction roots

What the NSA needs to do, clearly, is start giving away Jay-Z albums

Power moves through drones; so we can write and talk and think through drones. So we have tomore...

we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately

Edward Snowden will make a good character and the plot will be dark, but Poe would have devised a better ending

from whistle-blowing outlet to a full-service travel agency

Death is no digital dualist

the materials that make up refrigerator walls that could potentially turn them into anti-eavesdropping devices

I need a new arsenal of swear words that punch up and tear down destructive stereotypes

the Occupy stream is more akin to a broadcast, with just a few locations playing the role of net content producer [pdf]”

The drone will go down in history as the crucial invention that made war a managerial decision

Radical self-exposure and classically manicured discretion can both be powerful, both be elegant

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

Now that my father fit into a desktop-size box — my computer screen — the proportions seemed manageable

The chilling disciplinary effect taking place in the digital age affects everyone

street art is “so transitory” and ephemeral that without social media, “a lot of it would fall by the wayside”

The term “cyberutopian” tends to be used only in the context of critique

passionate game fans are willfully blind to the communication gap between the games industry and everyone else

#Standingman is good activism for the same reasons it makes for a good meme

drone fiction denies the presence of human operators; it renders drones autonomous

Uber meets AirBnB for Helicopter Transport

In the nineties, tapping the Web, if not impossible, was certainly a pain

we are open-source-extremists, the feminist virus infecting your thoughtsmore...

Newsweek-Privacy-554x600

One problem with taking social problems and re-framing them as individual responsibility is that it ends up blaming victims instead of pressuring root causes. This mentality creates a temptation to, for example, respond to the NSA scandal involving the government tapping into Internet traffic with something like, “well stop posting your whole life on Facebook, then”. Or less glib is the point raised many times this month that the habit of constant self-documentation on social media has made possible a state of ubiquitous government surveillance. The brutality of spying is made both possible and normal by the reality of digital exhibitionism. How can the level of government spying be so shocking in a world where people live-tweet their dinner? Perhaps we should stop digitally funneling so much of our lives through Gmail now that the level of surveillance is becoming clearer. Sasha Weiss writes in The New Yorker that, more...