28 APR 2024 by ideonexus
Modern Absence of Monoculture
It is difficult to, either quantitatively (through sales, net worth, or awards) or qualitatively (through an objective hierarchisation of cultural products) provide an indisputable metric for ‘fame.’ First, there are contextually contingent variables like streaming or internet relevance preventing me from drawing transhistorical comparisons with say, The Beatles or Michael Jackson. And then there is the reality that in our postmodern, globalised world, culture has expanded, mutated, and i...18 APR 2023 by ideonexus
Avoiding Communication Vexes Online Surveillance
‘The idiot does not “communicate”’,2 writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics. He may speak, sure, but not to convey a certain message. That makes the idiot instantly subversive in our time, where communication counts among the highest goods. Not so much because we value the exchange of information or because we can learn from each other. But rather, because the ever-accelerating, 24/7 communication cycle is what keeps surveillance capitalism going. It feeds the database and helps ...Folksonomies: resistance surveillance
Folksonomies: resistance surveillance
05 JAN 2023 by ideonexus
The Garden and the Stream as Metaphors for WWW
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens. The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations o...Folksonomies: metaphors digital distraction
Folksonomies: metaphors digital distraction
The author will later call the memex the original garden.
16 DEC 2021 by ideonexus
Principles of Technorealism
1. Technologies are not neutral. A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to c...28 FEB 2021 by ideonexus
Play Has Become More Personal and More Intense Through Te...
A similar trend is the rise of personal vacations and separate activities on family vacations. Children’s street games (such as marbles, Hopscotch, and hide-and-go-seek) have been replaced with video games. Face-to-face encounters have been transformed by e-mails, electronic chat groups, and web sur'ng. Revolutionary as all this may be, it represents the clear culmination of a century of developments in media technology. Twentieth-century technology privatized and homogenized play, but it al...Folksonomies: play recreation
Folksonomies: play recreation
28 JAN 2021 by ideonexus
Computing is Pop Culture without History
Binstock: You seem fastidious about always giving people credit for their work. Kay: Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field. Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music ba...Folksonomies: computing computer science
Folksonomies: computing computer science
09 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
A Quantum Game
Bell came up with “nonlocal” games, which require players to be at a distance from each other with no way to communicate. Each player answers a question. The players win or lose based on the compatibility of their answers. One such game is the magic square game. There are two players, Alice and Bob, each with a 3-by-3 grid. A referee tells Alice to fill out one particular row in the grid — say the second row — by putting either a 1 or a 0 in each box, such that the sum of the numbers in tha...07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
The Effort in Keeping the Internet Clean
Contract workers in San Francisco, processing thousands of complaints a day. Sweatshops in the Philippines, where outsourced labor decides what’s obscene and what’s permissible in a matter of seconds. Teams of anti-spam engineers in Mountain View, adapting to the latest wave of bots. An unpaid moderator on Reddit, picking out submissions that violate guidelines. So much of the internet is garbage, and much of its infrastructure and many work hours are devoted to taking out the garbage. For t...10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Being Against Technological Progress if Futile
Ron complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work. The transfer of labor from humans to our inventions is nothing less than the history of civilization. It is inseparable from centuries of rising living standards and improvements in human rights. What a luxury to sit in a climate-controlled room with access to the sum of hu¬ man knowledge on a device in your pocket and lament how we don't work with our hands anymore! There are still plenty of places in the world where pe...Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus