“Cases like this are a boringly eternal return of the same. They are attempts of appropriation of the common goods through forms of modern enclosures where public spaces, places, the environment are taken away from the sphere of the public and are subjected to the logic of private profit-making. These operations bare no collective benefit, especially to the local residents who should be the primary holders of the right to the city. This is not only the right to have the city work also for them, but foremost the right to take part in the planning process about how their city should be built and organised.”
—This IS about a park
June 2013
“Sous” and “sur” are French for “under” and “over” respectively. Hence, surveillance is when the masters watch over the masses. Sousveillance is where everybody has the capability to watch over each other, peer-to-peer style – and not even the rulers are exempt from the universal collective eye. It’s generally meant to imply that citizens have and exercise the power to look-back at the powers-that-be, or to “watch the watchmen.”
—David Brin on the Path to Positive Sousveillance from hplusmagazine.com via Findings.
“The growing mediation of everyday life by the Internet and social media, coupled with Big Data mining and predictive analytics, is turning the Internet into a simulation machine. The collective activity of humanity provides the data that informs the decision making processes of algorithmic systems such as high-frequency trading and aggregated news services that, in turn, are owned by those who wield global power and control: banks, corporations, governments. The Internet is no longer a space primarily of communication, but of simulation. By simulation, we do not mean a reproduction of reality “as it is out there,” but rather a sort of reality-in-parallel, one that generates its own sets of tangible quanta and its own “realities”-to-be-calculated. The issue for our times, then, is not that we Netizens – nor the inhabitants of Simulacron-3 – need to grapple with the idea that we are living fake or fictitious virtual lives; rather, we must come to terms with our own online activities feeding the appetites of algorithmically-driven machines designed to facilitate the expansion of profit and power by quantifying and modulating our desires. We’ve become more valuable to the Internet and its scanbots as aggregate data inputs than we ever were as consumers of banner ads.”
—We are what we tweet: The Problem with a Big Data World when Everything You Say is Data Mined from culturedigitally.org via Findings.
“Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.”
—The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ by Julian Assange - NYTimes.com
May 2013
“If we are going to create an economy of self employment — which is to say an economy of mass uncertainty — then we need to simplify things like the tax code, healthcare, and retirement (if that will even be a relevant term two decades from now). But instead of asking to simplify institutions and thus expand their capacity to adapt and help, we’re talking in nonsense circles about internet things.”
—The Future and Its Discontents ← Joshua Foust
“Search engines and social networking find ways to extract value from activity regardless of whether it is ‘work’ and without paying for it. It’s a kind of vulture industry, parasitic on frankly successful popular struggles to free vast tracts of information from the commodity form and circulate it freely. But having beaten back the old culture industries with this tactic, the social movement that was free culture finds itself recuperated at a higher level of abstraction by the vulture industries and their ‘gamification’ of every aspect of everyday life.”
—McKenzie Wark
“These days scientists have a much clearer picture of our inner ecosystem. We know now that there are a hundred trillion microbes in a human body. You carry more microbes in you this moment than all the people who ever lived. Those microbes are growing all the time. So try to imagine for a moment producing an elephant’s worth of microbes. I know it’s difficult, but the fact is that actually in your lifetime you will produce five elephants of microbes. You are basically a microbe factory.”
—The Human Lake
“That was the amazing part, but the equally important realistic part was that nobody was pretending this tool would be used to deliver final code on your website. It was not a responsive Dreamweaver I saw, but a prototyping tool, to help designers figure out how their responsive design should work (and maybe show the prototype to a boss or client for approval). Just prototyping. Nobody pretending they had a product that would make the difficult craft of front-end design redundant. No such intention behind the product. A product for the real work-flow of 21st century design teams. No marketing puffery, no inflated claims to set designers’ teeth on edge.”
—Adobe Love – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
“And even if you do outsource everything, having people on board who understand systems and processes and can make sure you get what you want are invalulable.”
—Which job roles are essential to a digital publishing business? | TheMediaBriefing
April 2013
“So how can we establish better information? Journalists need better BS meters, for one, but I don’t blame a reporter for getting a finding like “when debt to GDP exceeds 90%, growth slows because of it” from a prestigious economist and running with it. I do blame them for not checking with others first–there are many equally prominent economists who immediately wondered about reverse causality driving R&R’s findings. Checking with skeptics is especially important when the intellectual climate is one that provides knee-jerk support for anything that explains why we should fear high debt levels.”
—The Reinhart/Rogoff Mistake and Economic Epistemology from jaredbernsteinblog.com via Findings.
Time to kill the media fallacy and start concentrating on the role of interface in reading.
I feel compelled to question just how scientific these studies that test reading comprehension on paper vs screen actually are. To approach paper or screens as monolithic entities that can be assumed to contain absolute qualities particular to each’s own medium is a bit obtuse. My guess is that cognitive function and reading comprehension differ within certain media as much as across different media. I’d be interested in seeing studies of how paper weight or ink density or words per line affect comprehension. I can’t imagine it would take much to upend the notion that media or substrate play any sort of definitive role in these matters. The distinction, it seems, is completely arbitrary and purely cultural in nature.
In any event it would be nice to see these studies give some consideration to the simple fact that what they are testing in paper is essentially an interface that has been tuned and perfected over hundreds of years while their tests of the effects of reading on screen are measuring an interface that has only been in common use for a few decades. A simple glance at the trend indicated in the following quote from Ferris Jabr’s piece in Scientific American would seem to bolster the idea that as “screen” reading becomes more sophisticated, and the affordances of that medium are blended more organically with the reader’s expectation, the division between print and screen will rightly be rendered meaningless. Perhaps then, when the media fallacy has been fully exorcised, we can get down to the real work of understanding the overall role of interface in reading.
Since at least the 1980s researchers in many different fields—including psychology, computer engineering, and library and information science—have investigated such questions in more than one hundred published studies. The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales.
