Aside on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

Nick Heer on web hosting and user data

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 08:41:01 +0000

These are all concerning avenues for users. Adding advertising tends to mean user privacy is compromised, as ads become increasingly targeted by the day; shutting a company down means all user data gets removed, and it’s up to each user to find a new product or service to fill the hole. Rinse and repeat.

Arguably worse is when the company and all attached user data is acquired. There’s very little control any user has over that decision: they may like the original product, but are uncomfortable with the new owner. These decisions are impossible to foresee: if you signed up for Flickr ten years ago, or Tumblr five years ago, would you be expecting your photos and blog posts to end up in the hands of Verizon today?

desocialmediafacating

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 08:19:53 +0000

I’ve been frustrated by how much time I burn away fidgeting with social media. Lately, it’s been essentially a form of self-regulation or soothing as it feels like civilization is melting down. Trump stumbles to pronounce a 5-letter acronym fed to him on a teleprompter? Ugh. To Twitter! etc.

The world isn’t melting down. I need to snap out of the pattern of just pissing away time on social media. So, I’ve deleted the Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone and iPad. And I’ve added a handy /etc/hosts file to my Mac that will block everything (even MySpace and Orkut! Thank Jebus!)

You Don't Have as Much Control in Videogames as You Think | WIRED

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 13:18:28 +0000

Warren Spector on dialogue:

“It’s very easy for us to simulate the pulling of a virtual trigger, and it’s very, very hard for us to simulate a conversation. I defy anybody to show me a conversation system in a game today that isn’t identical to the conversation systems that Richard Garriott was using in the ’80s. The big innovation in conversation systems now is that there’s a timer on your choice on the branching tree. And I just don’t think that’s good enough. But again, if I knew how to solve that problem I would. I’m not disparaging everybody in the game business. What I am saying is, I wish we would spend a little bit less time on combat AI and a little bit more on non-combat AIâ€”on creating characters you can bond with on an emotional level.”

David Levy On the Agony Of Going Offline

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 31 Jan 2016 11:22:27 +0000

David Levy, in “The Useless Agony of Going Offline”:

(He went offline for 72 hours over the new year’s long weekend. Productivity ensued.)

I didn’t miss my smartphone, or the goofy watch I own that vibrates when I receive an e-mail and lets me send text messages by speaking into it. I didn’t miss Twitter’s little heart-shaped icons. I missed learning about new things.

During the world’s longest weekend, it became clear to me that, when I’m using my phone or surfing the Internet, I am almost always learning something. I’m using Google to find out what types of plastic bottles are the worst for human health, or determining the home town of a certain actor, or looking up some N.B.A. player’s college stats. I’m trying to find out how many people work at Tesla, or getting the address for that brunch place, or checking out how in the world Sacramento came to be the capital of California.

Zygmunt Bauman: Social media are a trap

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:30:35 +0000

Q. You are skeptical of the way people protest through social media, of so-called “armchair activism,” and say that the internet is dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the social networks are the new opium of the people?

A. The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.

Tyler Hellard on the state of journalism

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 07:49:14 +0000

Columnists, Gawker, ViralNova, porn and websites profiling other websites prove that the Internet was a wonderful thing and we absolutely broke the shit out of it. Well done, team!

…

So what’s the point? A lot of this stuff isn’t thought provoking, it’s rage provoking. Which, I suppose, makes it traffic/pick-up provoking, too. Newspapers are supposed to be for the benefit of public discourse, so it kills me that pageviews could be keeping these assholes in work. I love hate-reading as much as anyone (my entire Saturday is built around reading Wente’s column), but that doesn’t mean I think this stuff is good for society or that I’m not willing to go without. We don’t need these generic “person has opinions on all the things” columnists in our newspapers anymore. That’s what the Internet is for.

Downes on lectures

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 09:12:24 +0000

The point of a lecture isn’t to teach. It’s to reify, rehearse, assemble and celebrate.

via Stephen’s Web.

Stephen ended his post linking to Tony’s blog post with what appears to be a throwaway line. It’s not. This is where the tension is centred when it comes to teaching. Lectures aren’t teaching, but have been used as a proxy for teaching because how else are you going to make sure 300 students get the appropriate number of contact hours? Butts-in-seats isn’t a requirement anymore. We can do more interesting things. And we can then use lectures for what they are good at. To reify, rehearse, assemble and celebrate.

on after-hours work email

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 07:50:55 +0000

The results were immediate and powerful. The employees exhibited significantly lower stress levels. Time off actually rejuvenated them: More than half said they were excited to get to work in the morning, nearly double the number who said so before the policy change. And the proportion of consultants who said they were satisfied with their jobs leaped from 49 percent to 72 percent. Most remarkably, their weekly work hours actually shrank by 11 percentâ€”without any loss in productivity. “What happens when you constrain time?” Lovich asks. “The low-value stuff goes away,” but the crucial work still gets done.

UofC budget

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:38:09 +0000

I haven’t seen an official breakdown of the impact of provincial budget cuts on the UofC itself. Saw this mention in a related article on executive salary freeze:

In its 2013 budget released two weeks ago, the province cut the University of Calgary’s operational budget by about $32 million, or seven percent.

The university states that is equal to a nine percent difference in funding when it includes a two per cent increase which was promised in the 2012 budget.

Gehl, R.W. (2013). What's on your mind? Social media monopolies and noopower

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:03:25 +0000

Gehl, R.W. (2013). What’s on your mind? Social media monopolies and noopower. First Monday. 18(3).

On noopower¹ through marketing and repetition extended into ubiquitous social media:

Operating within the larger political economy of advertising-supported media, it is not surprising that Facebook, Google, and Twitter mirror marketing’s penchant for experimentation and repetition. Software engineers working for these firms pore over data about what actions users most commonly take â€” that is, what is most often repeated within the architectures of the sites. These engineers then constantly tweak their interfaces, APIs, and underlying software to reinforce these actions and to produce (they hope) new ones. The tiny changes in the Google homepage, for example, are akin to ripples on the surface of a body of water caused by motion deep underneath, as software engineers seek to increase the attention and productivity of users of these sites.

Bassett, C. (2013). Science, delirium, lies?

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:45:18 +0000

The potential for thinking through new reâ€“combinations, new ways to draw up code and language into a new media politics are suggestive. But I want finally to return to the question this article began with: more or less? This text has been framed by a belief that social media monopolies ought to be disrupted â€” and in the name of at least two of the things they are axiomatically understood to promote (social justice, solidarity as a form of community) and do not. It has been argued that this disruption might be attempted through a toolset â€” silence, disruption of language, and the exploitation of language’s capacity for polysemy (the metaphor and the lie) â€” that is not often considered as apt for such a task. My conclusion, and here I return to salute Ivan Illich, is that these tools can be deployed to produce other kinds of more convivial engagements â€” a better commons â€” than our apparently â€˜social’ media enable. Above all, I have wished to take seriously the idea that communication density, and increasing communicational volume, does not â€” in and of itself â€” indicate more understanding, freedom, openness, or â€˜good’. To make this case demands also taking seriously the idea of a media politics that begins with silence.

understatement

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:10:02 +0000

“At the University of Calgary we have built a strong financial foundation due to the hard work of many people over the last several years,” says Cannon. “We have contingency funding set aside, and we will continue to work to find operational efficiencies and grow revenue. We will continue to move toward our Eyes High goals. Nevertheless, a budget reduction of this size means that we have some difficult decisions to make in the coming months.

Post-secondary budgets cuts a surprise, U of C president says - Calgary - CBC News

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:10:02 +0000

Operational grants for Alberta colleges and universities are being slashed by about $147 million for the next year - almost seven per cent. University of Calgary president Elizabeth Cannon told CBC News the university was expecting a two per cent increase for each of the next three years.

via Post-secondary budgets cuts a surprise, U of C president says - Calgary - CBC News.

Alberta budget 2013 marked by deficit spending, increased debt | Canadian Politics | Canada | News | National Post

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:39:10 +0000

Although its economy is still strong, growth is high and unemployment is low, a decline in bitumen prices brought on by decreased pipeline capacity has thrown the province’s finances off the rails.

Alison Redford’s government announced it would cut spending and borrow billions to cope with a multi-billion-dollar shortfall.

via Alberta budget 2013 marked by deficit spending, increased debt | Canadian Politics | Canada | News | National Post.

(also, the National Post’s crazy “pay us $150 to quote an article as you are legally entitled to do freely under fair dealing” nonsense is disabled by Safari’s “disable javascript” feature…)

Smari McCarthy on freedom

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:35:59 +0000

From a great resource on P2P infrastructure, linked by @sleslie:

@brlamb I thought you’d like that one. cf bit.ly/L0x7hO for a list of emerging p2p architected projects

— Scott Leslie (@sleslie) July 4, 2012

Freedom requires infrastructure.

A man who has no tools to acquire his necessities of life is a slave to his necessities. Given those tools, he becomes a slave to the labour required to fruitfully use them. Only by transcending each difficulty as it comes, in a process not dissimilar to metasystem transitions, can the individual achieve freedom.