Abha Dawesar: Life in the "digital now" | TED Talk | TED.com
One year ago, Abha Dawesar was living in blacked-out Manhattan post-Sandy, scrounging for power to connect. As a novelist, she was struck by this metaphor: Have our lives now become fixated on the drive to digitally connect, while we miss out on what's real?
Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now | TED Talk | TED.com
Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.
Big Mother Is Watching You: The Track-Everything Revolution Is Here Whether You Want It Or Not
If you keep your fitness-related New Year's resolutions in 2015, it'll likely be thanks to the new wave of devices and apps that have taken monitoring things like newborn sleep patterns and blood oxygenation from geek hobby to mass-market juggernaut. But what happens when companies have access to the most mundane details about our bodies?
The Early Disruptors: 7 Masterpieces of '90s Net Art Everyone Should Know About | Art for Sale | Artspace
Much of the art made today has some kind of digital component, but the movement known as net art—the Internet-based artwork created in the 1990s, the first decade or so of the World Wide Web— still looks radical. Taking to heart early net artist Heath Bunting's credo “do something different,” net artists took advantage of suddenly ubiquitous personal computers and the first user-friendly web browsers to evoke a de-physicalized existence with infinite possibilities. Building on other movements of the decade such as street art, relational aesthetics, and installation art, they made art even more accessible and participatory. Some of their efforts coalesced into broad movements like net.art and THE THING, loose, web-based communities of international “makers” who exchanged ideas and artworks online (generally without financial compensation or institutional support). Two decades on, the art world is just starting to integrate these intangible and otherwise difficult-to-grasp pieces into the canon. Some have simply vanished, as the technologies they were based on have become obsolete, but many others have been preserved or upgraded for contemporary viewing. Below, Artspace has collected some of the most important net art works that remain available, based on Rachel Greene's excellent historical review Internet Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004). While perusing them, remember that you are experiencing these artworks in their “true” form and proper setting—no museum, gallery, or auction house required.
The "net-art.org" web site is an online-only exhibition of the early (and continuous) history of Internet art. This site provides links to original content to net-art projects and related websites made since the rise of Internet art in de '90 into the mainstream art world. This site also features links devoted to critical theory and the history of digital art as well as links to software or computer generated art and sound art, but the aim is to collect and retrieve art that is produced for and throught the WWW. Since the nineties many net-art projects went obsolete due to link fail, lost services, damaged code, or incompatibility with players/ browsers. Net-art.org aims to collect traces of these lost net-art projects: url's, code, screenshots, user experience, artist statements etc. This digtal archeology project for lost net-art will be exhibited in the Digital Mortuary.
The outcry about teens photographing themselves misses the fact that—like novels, film, or, yes, self portraits—selfies can express all sorts of things.
'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology | The Guardian
An ex-YouTube insider reveals how its recommendation algorithm promotes divisive clips and conspiracy videos. Did they harm Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency?
The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
Stop waffling! Five steps to a successful research ‘Elevator Pitch’ – The Supervision Whisperers
So, how can we improve? How can we – and our students – better communicate our research? Developing a polished ‘EP’ – ELEVATOR PITCH – can help us build connections and our reputation, so it is worth putting some time and thought into how you communicate your research IN A SHORT TIME FRAME. Below, I outline my ‘5-S’ approach to EP for researchers… maybe set your PhD student the task of crafting and presenting an EP at your next meeting (or do it yourself! In many ways, this is an informal version of the annual ‘3 minute thesis competition’, so look at those for guidance).
The GIF as an increasingly important visual communication tool - Future Tense - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
There’s been an explosion in the use of GIFS – those little looped videos that seem to be everywhere. The GIF is often misunderstood as a component of modern communication. Sure, it has an obvious entertainment value, but linguists like Gretchen McCulloch believe it has an important role to play in making modern digital discussion smoother – reducing friction. And according to digital researcher, Tim Highfield, there’s also a cultural dimension to the GIF which makes it perfect for conveying multiple meanings - and that includes political dog-whistling.
The punk rock internet – how DIY rebels are working to replace the tech giants | Technology | The Guardian
Around the world, a handful of visionaries are plotting an alternative online future. Is it really possible to remake the internet in a way that’s egalitarian, decentralised and free of snooping?
Tackling the Internet’s Central Villain: The Advertising Business - The New York Times
And if you want to fix much of what ails the internet right now, the ad business would be the perfect perp to handcuff and restrain — and perhaps even reform. Ads are the lifeblood of the internet, the source of funding for just about everything you read, watch and hear online. The digital ad business is in many ways a miracle machine — it corrals and transforms latent attention into real money that pays for many truly useful inventions, from search to instant translation to video hosting to global mapping. But the online ad machine is also a vast, opaque and dizzyingly complex contraption with underappreciated capacity for misuse — one that collects and constantly profiles data about our behavior, creates incentives to monetize our most private desires, and frequently unleashes loopholes that the shadiest of people are only too happy to exploit.
The Internet With A Human Face - Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk
Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference. "Marc," I told him, "my talk is perfect for closing the conference! The first half is this incredibly dark rant about how the Internet is alienating and inhuman, how it's turning us all into lonely monsters.” “But in the second half, I'll turn it around and present my vision of an alternative future. I'll get the audience fired up like a proper American motivational speaker. After the big finish, we'll burst out of the conference hall into the streets of Düsseldorf, hoist the black flag, and change the world.” Marc said that sounded fine. As I was preparing this talk, however, I found it getting longer and longer. In the interests of time, I'm afraid I'm only going to be able to present the first half of it today.
The fiasco I want to talk about is the World Wide Web, specifically, the advertising-supported, “free as in beer” constellation of social networks, services, and content that represents so much of the present day web industry. I’ve been thinking of this world, one I’ve worked in for over 20 years, as a fiasco since reading a lecture by Maciej Cegłowski, delivered at the Beyond Tellerrand web design conference.
Discussions about fake news has led to a new focus on media literacy more broadly, and the role of libraries and other education institutions in providing this. When Oxford Dictionaries announced post-truth was Word of the Year 2016, we as librarians realise action is needed to educate and advocate for critical thinking – a crucial skill when navigating the information society. IFLA has made this infographic with eight simple steps (based on FactCheck.org’s 2016 article How to Spot Fake News) to discover the verifiability of a given news-piece in front of you. Download, print, translate, and share – at home, at your library, in your local community, and on social media networks. The more we crowdsource our wisdom, the wiser the world becomes.
This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive's software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software) For this initial collection, we've hand-selected a few dozen ground-breaking and historically important software products, many of whom started entire industries or pioneered new genres of programs. While they lack the later features and graphics of modern counterparts, these programs were either big sellers at the time or recognized as first of a kind. They are now a single click away in a browser.
The Internet Archive Software Library is the ultimate software crate-digger's dream: Tens of thousands of playable software titles from multiple computer platforms, allowing instant access to decades of computer history in your browser through the JSMESS emulator. The intention is to ultimately have most major computer platforms available; currently, the collection includes the Apple II, Atari 800, and ZX Spectrum computers. In each case, sub-collections contain vast sets of disk and cartridge images. Genres include games, applications, utilities, demos and operating systems.
How Parents Can Curb Kids' Obsession With Smartphones | Here & Now
Parents are grappling with how to prevent their children from becoming too tied to technology. And others are worried about it as well. Earlier this month, two major Apple investors called on the company to help curb heavy smartphone use. But there are other ways of implementing parental controls. Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Brian Barrett (@brbarrett), news editor at Wired, about some possible solutions.
A recent report of the Interactive Advertising Bureau revealed that online advertising generated in 2016 $72.5B worth of revenue only in US, representing an increase of 21% with respect to 2015, which in turn exceeded 20% the revenue of 2014. A great advantage of online advertising over more traditional printed and TV advertising is its capability to target individuals with specialized advertisements tailored to their personal information. For instance the ad campaign planner from Facebook™ (Facebook™) allows defining an audience using more than 13 different attributes related to personal information of the end-user. Therefore, an online advertiser can launch a campaign targeting a well-defined audience based on personal information attributes, thus an important part of the Facebook™ business model is built up on top of the personal information of its subscribers. Although there are no doubts of the legality of the business model implemented by Facebook™ and other major players in the Internet, there are some actors raising the request of generating tools that let end-users knowing what is the actual value of their personal information. In other words, how much money Facebook™, Google, and other companies in the on-line advertising market make out of my personal information. Providing Internet users with simple and transparent tools that inform them of what is the value that their personal data generates is not only a civil society request, but a demand from governmental forces. The goal of this project is to develop a tool that informs in real-time Internet end users regarding the economic value that the personal information associated to their browsing activity has generated. Due to the complexity of the problem we narrow down the scope of this tool to Facebook™ in this project, i.e., inform Facebook™ users in real time of the value that they are generating to Facebook™. We refer to this tool as Data Valuation Tool for Facebook™ Users (FDVT).
Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud - 99% Invisible
Author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud has been making and thinking about comics for decades. His classic volume explores formal aspects of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used.
The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young – A Documentary Film
A famous prison escape sparks the idea for a cult-like race that has seen only 10 finishers in its first 25 years. This award-winning, oddly inspiring, and wildly funny documentary reveals the sports world’s most guarded secret.
The Building Consentful Tech Zine is out! – And Also Too
A lot of us know about consent with regard to our physical bodies, like in the context of medical decisions or sexual activities. But when it comes to our digital lives, there’s a lack of discussion about what consent means for our data, our identities, and our online interactions. This zine is intended for anyone who uses, makes, or is affected by digital technologies and wants to build a more consentful world. It is by no means a comprehensive resource, but rather a collection of thoughts and questions we’ve gathered in the hopes of growing this conversation.
Data Selfie is a browser extension that tracks you while you are on Facebook to show you your own data traces and reveal what machine learning algorithms could predict about your personality based on that data. The tool explores our relationship to the online data we leave behind as a result of media consumption and social networks - the information you share consciously and unconsciously.
