August 2010
1 post
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What comes after the Privacy Parenthesis?
Last Friday, I watched a live stream of a fascinating discussion between Danah Boyd and Jeff Jarvis at the Supernova conference. The conversation touched upon several interesting issues related to the tension between private and public data in the Internet age. Boyd (as always) did a great job of articulating what people are concerned about when they talk about losing privacy online. Jarvis on...
July 2010
4 posts
7 tags
The future of lifelogging, reputation management...
Singularity Hub had a great post today about the ‘lifelogging’ trend and what we can expect to see in the years ahead. Here’s the bottom line – it all sounds like bad news for people who worry about their privacy. Keith Kleiner does an excellent job of highlighting the potential benefits of having a detailed recorded memory, coupled with the tools to access and retrieve the data efficiently. He...
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Billboards with eyes: smart ads invade the real...
Image Source: http://distilennui.com/photos/space-Subway-10.jpg
A consortium of 11 Japanese railway companies and their advertising partners recently launched a one year trial of digital billboards that use cameras and facial recognition technology to distinguish a person’s sex and approximate age. The data gathered will be analyzed so companies can provide interactive ads which meet the...
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The Twitter Mood Map
The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University has been doing some interesting work on what data from social platforms like Twitter tell us about our collective state of mind. Here’s a video they have created, which displays a 24-hour Twitter Mood cycle in the United States.
Visit the Complexity and Social Networks Blog to read more about their work and how to...
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Paper meets pixels
Image Source: les éditions volumiques
When one thinks about the future of books, magazines and other paper-based media products in general, it’s easy to imagine a world of digital screens dominating. It’s inevitable and will happen in spite of romantic ideas about the sensory experience associated with reading a real book or the joys of collecting and displaying physical media...
June 2010
6 posts
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Checking out (of) location-based social networking
After reading some glowing reviews, a group of friends walk into a new restaurant. Prior to being seated, the first thing they do is pull out their Smartphones and “check-in” their location. 5 minutes later, they’re seated and the menus arrive. Not a word is exchanged but the Smartphones are in action again (checking recommendations on what’s good on the menu). I’m not...
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What's Next? Ad-supported Apps in Cars?
Read the New York Times Article: Despite Risks, Internet Creeps Onto Car Dashboards
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Your Brain on Computers
Interesting series of articles in the New York Times about the price of being attached to technology:
Hooked on Gadgets and paying the mental price
An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness
More Americans Sense a Downside to an Always Plugged-In Existence
If you want to try life without your cellphone, your online social networks or e-mail, the New York Times is also starting a...
The Answer is "Yes"
Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
Vs.
Does the Internet Make You Dumber?
Related Post: Social media, privacy and morality – will the Internet make us better or worse?
May 2010
7 posts
7 tags
Living in a Game
Yes, Game Mechanics is the new black.
Here’s a fascinating talk by Jesse Schell (@ DICE 2010) about the role that games will play in our daily lives the future of advertising.
Related Post: The Social Data Balancing Act
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Crowdsourcing change
We’re living in interesting times, where media and communications technologies, driven by the Internet, smartphones and social media are bringing about monumental transformations in our lives. Computing power and web-based services continue to grow at a pace that’s practically impossible to keep up with. In the midst of all this innovation (and hype), its great to see platforms and services emerge...
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Brave New World?
“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather...
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The Social Data Balancing Act
Is life so boring that you need to turn it into a game? Millions of people seem to think so and that’s why companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt and others are the new start up darlings. To the uninformed, these services appear to be similar to Facebook or Twitter, but only scarier, because you pretty much broadcast your precise geo-location every time you “check-in”...
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Say hello to the Zettabyte!
So, how rapidly is the Digital Universe expanding?
Last year, despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). Picture a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.
This year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes.
This explosive growth...
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Beyond Privacy – the need for value sensitive...
I’ve written previously about the need for a simple volume know-like control panel for controlling information we choose to share via various social platforms on the internet. The basic idea behind this approach is that notions of privacy vary and continue to evolve as personal and social norms and attitudes change. Therefore, it’s important to let individuals manage their own expectations...
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Gripe, grumble, whine and vent at BLAHtherapy.com
Random chat sites don’t seem to be going away any time soon. BLAH Therapy is the latest entrant that’s trying to put its own unique twist to the Chatroulette model. The easiest way to describe BLAH Therapy is that its like Chatroulette, with a specific purpose and no video (for now). You can either choose to be a “Listener” and help another user or be a...
April 2010
9 posts
8 tags
Digital Air and Digital Oil – why privacy matters
“Data is digital air”, proclaimed Danah Boyd in her riveting keynote at the WWW2010 conference. She makes some excellent points about Big Data, privacy and the importance of context in this highly recommended read. So if data is digital air, what does it mean for the future of media? We’ve seen some monumental shifts in the industry during the last few years and we’re...
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Can you disappear in the digital age?
Erasing David trailer from Green Lions on Vimeo.
A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT PRIVACY, SURVEILLANCE AND THE DATABASE STATE
David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear, a decision that changes his life forever. ...
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Social media for social good
My fundamental gripe with a lot of social media buzz these days is that most of the services that are all the rage are nothing more than entertainment and marketing channels. Here’s the basic trend — they all start out simple and stupid, but eventually the popular ones grow into real businesses and start monetizing the rich conversations and user profiles for advertising purposes. The users...
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The Afterlife of Dead Technology -- from the...
Today, Sony announced the death of floppy disks. Tomorrow we will hear about the end of compact discs, USB drives, laptops, DVD players, iPhones and ultimately every physical storage medium that we’re familiar with. Have you wondered where mediums that are rendered obsolete go to die? And what becomes of the heaps of electronic trash they leave behind? According to most recent U.S....
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The Value of Over-Sharing?
This New York Times article about the “too much information movement” will probably alarm a lot of people (at least those that don’t follow every new social media trend). But I have good news. Those that avoid these services have nothing to fear when it comes to their privacy (for the most part) and those that choose to participate are doing so because they truly believe the...
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The iPad has arrived...and we're one step closer...
The 21st century is undoubtedly turning out to be one in which we’re collectively moving past the need for physical media products (cds, records, newspapers, books, etc) and embracing the ease and efficiency of bits and bytes. But we haven’t really liberated ourselves from physical objects yet. The digitization of media has only shifted the focus of our obsession from physical media...
March 2010
11 posts
7 tags
Managing the privacy impact of Internet...
You’ve probably heard the news by now. The Internet (and social media specifically) is making us all attention-seeking wannabe celebrities, killing privacy and giving birth to an age of voyeurism. But how did it come to this?
We sowed the seeds that are leading us to this inevitable end thousands of years go — by developing visual and oral communications mediums such as signs, language...
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Rediscovering the grid (while trying to escape it)
I spent the last 10 days looking for adventure in an exotic land. This was no resort vacation and daily comforts that I tend to take for granted were few and far between. The places I visited had unusual food, bad plumbing, limited electricity and ancient customs that hold true till today. It was exciting, disorienting, and strangely liberating at the same time.
Getting away from it all not only...
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Transcending the digital vortex: why slowing down...
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. Wise words from the book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan (published in 1964). According to McLuhan, all technologies or mediums are extensions of our capabilities and our senses and are means of enhancing human functions. For example, language is an extension of thought and memory, writing is an extension of...
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Technology becomes us -- Heidegger meets Apple &...
The Singularity is here! According to a new study, people have already fused with their computing tools. We are so entwined with the technology we use that they become part of our mind and bodily functions. The study conducted by Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental philosophical concepts known as “ready to...
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Mind over Matter: The Singularity is Near
Singularity 4 by *james119 on deviantART
No matter what your opinion is on the feasability of hard Artificial Intelligence and the emergence of concioius machines, you have to admit that it’s fascinating to wonder where the digital age will take us in the next 50 or 100 years. Luckily, you don’t have to think too hard, because a few big minds recently weighed in on how advanced AI...
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Rock n' Roll is alive and digital
I suppose its old news that the Internet has transformed the music industry. We know how that story turned out (so far at least). Surprisingly, it happened sooner than anyone could have predicted. In less than 10 years we went from passionate debates about the digitization of recorded music and the legality of peer to peer file sharing services to barely talking about the issue. The problems...
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The Problem with Talking Refrigerators
According to a new report published by scientists Adam Waytz from Harvard University and Nicholas Epley and John T. Cacioppo from University of Chicago, humans have no difficulty identifying other humans in a biological sense, but from a psychological standpoint, things are a lot more complicated. Their report analyzes the psychology of anthropomorphism, which is basically our tendency to...
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Social media, privacy and morality – will the...
A lot has been written and said about some of the negative impacts of social media that range from privacy concerns to harming children’s brains. These concerns may be valid (I have mine too), but the voluntary loss of privacy that comes with being active on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare may have some unintended benefits. As blasphemous as this may sound, if you’re really looking for a silver...
February 2010
8 posts
11 tags
Low-Tech Art in a High-Tech Age
When I was young, I knew I could draw. I didn’t have to try hard or take classes to realize I could create images using a pencil or a crayon — it just came to me. I obviously got better with practice, but I had the skill. My father did too, so it wasn’t surprising that I inherited the talent. I wasn’t the most skilled or creative artist and I didn’t turn my talent...
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Curiosity killed the Internet cat -- malware,...
We can’t help it — We just have to know. And that’s no longer enough because in this age where everything that happens anywhere almost never escapes a digital camera, we also have to see it all. When tragedy strikes, we’re no longer just curious onlookers feeding our morbid curiosity, but we’re all armed with cameras in our pockets and powerful phones that will help...
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Social networking ourselves to death
So you’ve probably heard about Chatroulette by now. EVERYONE is writing about it and postulating about its significance — how it’s reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, how its growth reflects our desire for anonymity, how it’s the anti-Facebook and how Twitter is ‘so 2009’ as celebs like Ashton Kutcher and Chris Brown jump onto the Chatroulette bandwagon. The New York Times even...
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You are what you tweet -- be discreet!
The digital revolution has ushered in the apocalypse for some and a rebirth for others (depending on which side of the old/new media fence you happen to sit on). The old media ways have been left behind to choke on the dust kicked by empowered consumers, as they sprint ahead and embrace the ever-expanding array of new media consumption mediums and channels. Yes, this is great — this is...
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5 real problems in an augmented world
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
It’s finally here — our view of the real world need not be limited by what our naked eye can see. Gadgets and terminals are not the be-all and the end-all in our quest for more information, real time access to data and most importantly, a reliable secondary storage mechanism for our memories. Why miss out...
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digitally numb?
Admit it. You love technology. You love the way every new medium for creating, consuming & communicating media that has emerged in the recent past (from email and instant messaging to social media and smart phones) has all seamlessly managed to transform the way you live to the point where you’ve seriously started to doubt if you could survive without any of it. I ask myself that all...