We Are A Cloud, Together: From Social Media to Post-Communication
What if the sea-change is this: that we’re starting to experience whatever comes after the idea of communication?
Shards
We digital immigrants consider our (media-saturated post-modern) physicality as the ‘real’ world. For today’s young digital natives, their transmedial realities — the elseware of MySpace, Second Life and the rest — are equally valid. Unlike many, we don’t think they’re escaping from, or denying ‘real’ reality: they’ve just internalised the precept that all reality is socially constructed, and vanished off into someware more fun, of their own making. And why not? Their generation is busily — knowingly — creating their own be-ing. The rest of us, in denial, still privilege a ‘genuine’ reality, while all the time, we are also …
On Dotcom 2.0 & Hyperbolic Media Surfaces…
How Dotcom 2.0 Will Destroy Traditional Media
OMD Aggregators…
Where are all the online music service aggregators? And the lawsuits to follow…
Sensing and Modeling Human Networks
And from the INSA list: “[…] the first experiment in learning the face-to-face communication patterns of a large group by equipping the people within the community with wearable sensing devices. The main contribution of this thesis is to have demonstrated the feasibility of learning social interactions from raw sensory data. In this thesis we have presented a framework for automatic modeling of face-to-face interactions, starting from the data collection methods and working up to computational methods for learning the structure and dynamics of social networks.” I haven’t read this yet. Looks interesting.
A Glance at Heidegger
Heidegger makes the distinction between tools with are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) and those which are ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). We are, he says, only conscious of tools as tools when they are present-at-hand. When we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of the tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which ‘withdraws’ into the task. The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all… The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the …
net.sack Revisited
Ages ago, we had the idea for the net.sack; a small rucksack thing with stalk camera and headset mic/earpiece, and decent bandwidth cellphone transmitting it all. So you could rent yourself out to whoever is at the other end of the connexion, and they can watch and direct — for remote shopping, tourism in general, whatever makes sense ethically and/or economically.
Matisse
Hmm…have been tidying out the archives, and in the absence of some long-lost Syquest disks, the only screengrab I have of Matisse is this one, which is rather depressing, given that there used to be some much better ones… Ah well…and the source code is lost as well, unless one of you have a copy of it tucked away somewhere…?