Some stuff about me: I am obsessed with all things new and techy-like. I spend equal time getting bruised up on my bike and prancing around in pink and sequins. I dislike spit on the sidewalk, mayonnaise and the seams on the toes of socks. I enjoy french bulldogs, cupcakes, post-modern philosophy and fat snowflakes that fly back up. I have a tendency to social theorize everything, but I also have an appreciation for the just plain absurd.
Corporate Rule of Cyberspace, by Slavoj Žižek
To put it simply, Steve Jobs is no better than Bill Gates: whether it be Apple or Microsoft, global access is increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access. The more an individual user is given access to universal public space, the more that space is privatized.
This video was made for the Guggenheim / YouTube Play Contest. It is intended to be displayed in exhibit, preferably in a gallery projected on a large white wall. It was intended to be exactly 10 minutes: the limit of time allowed. In addition to what it means to you and as such, it is meant to express a point of view about language, experience, art, specifically video performance art, the philosophy of performance and ethics - the face to face
dude..
seriously tumblr can’t shut down.. this is like the only place I can actually be myself. I love all the beautiful pictures and all the beautiful people on here. tumblr is my escape. <3
This is why I study the internet. Because it is where people go to be themselves.
Um, yeah, @michaeldowell, there is some inside knowledge…
Early Bird Special: The Cameraman — Chris Ware illustrates Jeff Potter’s cautionary tale about “how being behind the camera can rob you of your humanity even if the camera’s not real.”
As told to Ira Glass. Animation: John Kuramoto.
[hitrecordjoe / ratsoff.]
This story is chilling. It will be part of my techno-ethics 101 course someday. :)
(Source: jaredgeller)
Flicker Flow from hint.fm
The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The image below is an early sketch from the piece. Summer is at the top, with time proceeding clockwise.
Gulf Oil Spill… Cultural Silver Lining?
I’ve been deeply troubled the last few weeks about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but haven’t known what to write about it until I stumbled on the streaming footage of the leaking oil. This oil spill isn’t the first of its kind, but the internet is revolutionizing the way we understand the damage. Just as Twitter provided a window into a social crisis in Iran, mobile carriers inspired millions to donate to Haiti’s hurricane disaster, and Facebook groups mobilized both sides of a debate about free speech vs. sanctity of religious symbols, technology is again completely altering the way we experience a crisis.
Unlike in the Exxon Valdez oil spill of the late 1980s, we’ve been presented with an image of how much oil is flooding the Gulf of Mexico in real time. The immediate result has been that the crisis has been impossible for authorities to ignore, but I think we’ll see a deeper cultural impact as well. What would have once been a distant, abstract problem is now a very real and in-your-face issue.
Further, the PBS News Hour YouTube channel invites users to submit video responses with suggestions about what we should do to stop the spill. People are invested in both this now very real crisis and in working together to come up with a solution. I think we’ll see more and more of this type of real-time community awareness and response in the future.
Hopefully, with greater awareness and involvement, we stop and clean this oil spill before it becomes too great a tragedy to appreciate the important step it has inspired in social media. So check out the footage and see how massive this crisis is, and then submit a suggestion of your own for how to help.
(originally posted on Getting Viral With Oddcast)
The Problem with Time
The concept of time is a favorite philosophical problem. For some, time is merely the measure of movement (think of the second hand on a clock). Others get more creative; Bergson rethinks time and consciousness for the concept of “duration,” a concept that I’ve been struggling to sort out since I first encountered it years ago (a simple version: time is both a series of discrete moments and is also the collection of those. It’s also neither of those things. In some ways, he’s concerned with how time feels). Levinas’ version of time involves a tragic awareness and repetition of “now moments” that can only be alleviated by the face of the other.
Why on earth am I rambling on about philosophy and time, you might ask.
I spend a lot of time thinking about time. I wonder how our experience of time will change as we develop technology to answer our demand for instant gratification. It’s both a phenomenological question (a la Bergson)—how will the passing of time feel to our bodies?—and an ethical one (a la Levinas)—in a world of technological mediation, where do we experience the face of the other that allows us to break from our own tragic sense of self?
Advancing technology will affect our human experience on every conceivable level (and even in ways we can’t yet conceive). Isn’t it time we consider the consequences?
