Tag Archives: Technology

I Click, Therefore I Am

01 Wednesday Jul 2009

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From Thinkers to Clickers: The World Wide Web and the Transformation of the Essence of Being Human

Essay about all things clicking and how it has become into a human need like breathing, eating, and looking for shelter.

As they click on one hyperlink after another, they often forget the initial question to which they were trying to find an answer. This is because the Web offers many distractions to its users in the form of ever changing content, links that are either obsolete or lead to completely new and different Web sites, and pop-ups and banners that advertise goods and services. Often times, as people aimlessly click their way through cyberspace, hyperclick hysteria sets in, and people lose their bearings in cyberspace and have to click their way back to more familiar cyber territories. 

Bolded to highlight that while I don’t think the above link is obsolete, the essay was written in 2003. So there you go.

Thought Leader Battle Royal – Round 3

30 Tuesday Jun 2009

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Malcolm is Wrong

In a surprising move, bald marketing guru Seth Godin tagged Anderson, and betrayed his intellectual buddy. The drama ensues.

Conde Nast (publisher of the Wired (Chris’s magazine) and yes, theNew Yorker (Malcolm’s magazine)),  is going to go out of business long before you get sick, never mind die. So will newspapers printed on paper. They’re going to disappear before you do. I’m not wishing for this to happen, but by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future.

In The Future We Won’t Need Bodies

29 Monday Jun 2009

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Get Smarter

Atlantic article about the future of how our intelligence will keep on expanding using exocortical technology (geeky way of saying gadgets and computers), artificial intelligence, etc. It’s an optimistic article about the future in a very Singularity/Ray Kurzweil type of way. And dammit, it even mentions Twitter:

As processor power increases, tools like Twitter may be able to draw on the complex simulations and massive data sets that have unleashed a revolution in science. They could become individualized systems that augment our capacity for planning and foresight, letting us play “what-if” with our life choices: where to live, what to study, maybe even where to go for dinner. Initially crude and clumsy, such a system would get better with more data and more experience; just as important, we’d get better at asking questions. These systems, perhaps linked to the cameras and microphones in our mobile devices, would eventually be able to pay attention to what we’re doing, and to our habits and language quirks, and learn to interpret our sometimes ambiguous desires. With enough time and complexity, they would be able to make useful suggestions without explicit prompting.

We are in the utopian wave of a future vision. Which brings me to ask this question: Why do we only understand how the future would look like in utopian/dystopian views? I know it’s science fiction influencing reality and vice versa, but we can’t just seem to look at the future as just a little a better or a little worse.

Thought Leader Battle Royal

29 Monday Jun 2009

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Price to Sell: Is Free the Future?

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker article takes on Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of Radical Price. As you would assume, Gladwell is very skeptical about the whole idea of “free” as a business model. Here’s Gladwell’s counter argument on Anderson’s idea about journalism turning into an “avocation”:

His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? 

The Changing Asian Beauty Aesthetic

25 Thursday Jun 2009

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japeneserobotfaces

The Changing Asian Beauty Aesthetic

Disturbing but equally interesting post filled with pics about how the pressure in Asian countries for women to look more “western” has influenced even how female robots look.

I used to quip that Korean women actors were starting to look positively “robotic” – but now, even the robots are looking…umm…absolutely…uhh…as humanistically artificially and Eurocentrically enhanced as the people? You’d think they’d get a robot right the first time. After all, we made it.

via HN

Who Was the First Blogger?

19 Friday Jun 2009

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Scott Rosenberg, author of the new book Say Everything, goes on a quest to track down the first blogger. Anil Dash says that tracking down the first blogger is like tracking down who started hip-hop. We will never really know and by this point it doesn’t really matter. The video however is a great history class on the roots of blogging and the first weblog pioneers.

via Waxy

The History of News and Information Flow

18 Thursday Jun 2009

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TheHistoryofInformation

Where is Everyone?

Excellent article describing the history of how information and news has been transmitted since the 1800 to today, and how it will probably look in 2020. Here’s a snip of how it was back in the day:

In the 1800, the only way you could really interact with other people was to go out and meet them. It was all about face-to-face communication. If you wanted to sell a product, you would go to the local marketplace, where you would setup a stand. But this also meant that the only way for you to get information – or to give information back – was to be at the right place at the right time. You didn’t really know what happened in another part of the city, nor could you sell your products to people in another place.

Some people did talk about this new thing called the newspaper. But it wasn’t really the same. You had to meet people in person. That was the only good way to interact.

People in the 1800 were really weird. Face-to-face communication? That’s just so ancient and gross.

via Snarkmarket

The Internet On Television – Television On the Internet

15 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by in Film and Television, Technology and Web

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yourtweetsonscreen

Jimmy Fallon makes jokes about Facebook updates, CNN’s Rick Sanchez reads your tweets, Tosh 1.0 curates stupid video memes, and everyone else is mostly making fun of Twitter. I don’t know about you, but every time I see this on TV I cringe and feel awkward.

The web is finally mainstream. Or is it? 

TV networks are scrambling. They know that they’re loosing viewers to the web. Particularly the younger viewer. The 18 to 34 crowd. So they’re looking for ways to get them back to watching Television. But the TV industry’s days are counted and this attempt to merge with digital culture is failing. We get it. You’re internet savvy and are catching up with the times. But are you really?

Part of the problem is that the people that watch television mostly watch television and people that use the web mostly use the web. It’s a simple conclusion, but that’s the reality. Instead of focusing on bringing back lost viewers, they should focus on keeping the ones they still have. But doing Twitter and Facebook jokes is not the best way. The jokes are not transferring because while the majority of viewers are familiar with these web services, it sounds more like an inside joke.

I’m giving the news networks like CNN the benefit of the doubt however, but I dare you to watch Rick Sanchez without a laptop on your lap. Seriously. Try it.

So yes, the web may be mainstream and the new medium of entertainment, but it’s still and would probably always be (I hope) a utilitarian medium. TV networks strategy of embracing the web is coming from the premise that the web is something people consume. But the web is still very much something that people use. Maybe one day it will all merge together or the industry will die, but right now they’re not focusing exactly on the best the web has to offer.

Semiotic Promiscuity

12 Friday Jun 2009

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Lingering

Simply brilliant essay about how the internet is changing the way we’re communicating and consuming media. Here’s an excerpt that really caught my attention and really punched me in the face:

The distinction of newer communication technologies is really to promote a intense kind of semiotic promiscuity: more messages are sent and received, and more “content” posted and consumed, while all of these communications—often competing for our attention on one or two screens—tend to become shorter, more frequent, more spontaneous, and more casual. On that much probably everyone would agree.

Critiques, as opposed to mere descriptions, of internet culture emphasize the informality or (more judgmentally) the vulgarity of our promiscuous messages. These communications, in their ease, inexpensiveness, and abundance, suffer less pressure than before to be or seem important, meaningful, or definitive—in other words, to last in our minds. In their clamorous competition with one another, they more often strive to be the first noticed.  

The critic and erstwhile blogger Lee Siegel, in Against the Machine, a polemic against online habits, makes a list of “five open supersecrets” about bloggers:

1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.

2. Few people have anything original to say.

3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.

4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

5. “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.

A must read.

via Give Me Something to Read

Another End of Print Books Prophecy

22 Wednesday Apr 2009

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kindle-2How the e-Book will Change the Way we Read and Write

Steve Johnson over at WSJ makes some interesting speculations about how the book industry could change. He writes about the “aha” moment he had with the Kindle, which everyone that reviews a Kindle has. (I haven’t seen that much negative “aha” moments when people write about the Kindle.) Here’s his take on how with the marriage of Google, books could become into some sort of “booklog”:

With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”) You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.

Via Kottke.org

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