Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn't matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web; nor does it matter what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.
Users' endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, DIY electronics, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement …
Some simple advice for Apple and app developers: It's not about you
When a company stumbles, it's often not because it made a bad decision. It's because it made a decision that benefited itself rather than its customers.
Twitter cuts suspect users from follower counts again, blames bug
Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) made another attempt to make users' tallies of followers more accurate on Friday, subtracting millions of suspicious followers which had reappeared on the social media service since a major purge in July.
The Gradient is a digital magazine covering research and trends in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We provide accessible and technically informed overviews of the what's going on AI, as well as a platform for perspectives on recent developments and long-term trends. In short, The Gradient points in the direction of the field.
We are a non-profit and volunteer-run effort run by researchers in the AI community. We were founded in 2017 by a group of students and researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).