Blog Posts

we live in public

the full movie is available on Netflix.

paralysis through overconnectedness

Several thoughts have been percolating over the last few weeks, from a bunch of different areas. Here goes a pretty random braindump to try to get the thoughts together…

I just watched the documentary No Impact Man, and a conversation between Colin Beavan and Mayer Vishner struck me. Mayer was talking about how Colin’s project may be harmful to the cause of environmentalism, and suggested that the only reason the project was being given any attention was because nobody thought it would make a difference. That if the project was really going to be challenging the status quo, and specifically in a way that harmed the players in the hegemony, that it would be ignored until it faded away.

motherfracking ants in a motherfracking scanner

François Vautier stuck an ant colony inside his scanner, and watched it grow for 5 years. The result is a fascinating hybrid of organic biological growth, and rigid, cold technology.

campus in 3D

I hadn’t taken a look at Google Earth for a while, but as I was adding a map to our department website, I noticed the “earth” button on maps.google.com - I clicked it, and got a nice 3D view of campus. And had a pleasant surprise - someone had started creating 3D models of buildings on campus. Only a handful are there now, but I’m sure the whole campus will eventually be 3D-ified. Someone’s been busy building models for downtown, as well (including cranes on the top of The Bow).

Fujifilm lust

I shot with a Fujifilm point-and-shoot 15 years ago, and with my trusted E510 just a few years ago. They were both nice little compact cameras. But Fujifilm’s new X100 is fracking gorgeous. It looks like it pulls the best of the old school 35mm camera designs, and mashes them into a full on decent digital camera. Metal case. Rings and controls that work when the camera is off. I love everything about this camera. Or at least the press release…

iPhone4 HDR test

I’ve been shooting almost exclusively with my iPhone4 for almost a month now. The IOS 4.1 update’s new HDR photo mode is pretty fracking amazing. Here’s a quick test shot I took in my extremely interesting living room. Hand held, in low light. The first/top shot is “normal” exposure, the one that the iPhone would have picked for a regular shot without the flash. The second/middle image is HDR tonemapped. The third/bottom is the HDR version, pumped through Aperture to apply my usual tweaks (adding some contrast back, setting white balance, vignetting, etc…)

Beyond McLuhan: Your New Media Studies Syllabus

An article in The Atlantic describes Christina Dunbar-Hester’s PhD course at Rutger’s. It sounds absolutely fascinating, delving into media theory, technological determinism and change, politics, etc…

>In order to answer these questions (or at least deeply consider them), the course starts with an introduction to theories of technology and technological change, drawn primarily from the scholarly field of Science & Technology Studies. From these readings, we gain a nuanced sense of how social relations get “inside” technology, including the assumptions about society that may come to be embodied in technical artifacts and knowledge. So for the first half or so of the course, we are mainly just getting our feet wet with these theories of technology.
>
>However, I teach in Rutgers’ School of Communication & Information, and this course is for our Ph.D. students. So the challenge is to make these general theories about technology, culture and change relevant for thinking about media and information technologies specifically. Fortunately, this is becoming easier to do: more work that forges links between these areas of scholarship is coming out all the time, which is exciting and makes now a great time to offer this course.

Open letter to my prospective political representatives

I’ve grown to feel completely disenfranchised as a Canadian citizen, at all levels of government. I’ve tried voting with my head. I’ve tried voting with my heart. Every election, I feel as though my vote is wasted. So, now I’m trying something different.

With the civic election next month, and with what will hopefully be a federal election in the next few months, I’ve decided to base my vote on a single issue.

everything is a remix

via Daring Fireball comes this video by Kirby Ferguson. Remixing isn’t new, and attribution is a shifting thing.

Everything is a Remix from kirby1 on Vimeo.

how to be alone

via Jason Kottke’s fantastic blog, this great, intimate video by Andrea Dorfman and Tanya Davis, on being alone.

puppetmaster

This was sent to me by a few people who know my fondness for crafting tin foil hats to protect myself from the all-seeing eye of Google.

> !One Password to Rule Them All

The full comic is worth a read as well. It’s possibly true that the puppetmaster has no evil intentions, but that doesn’t mean that we should continue to give anyone power over all of our online presences.

Priority Inbox without GMail

GMail’s new Priority Inbox sounds interesting - a special inbox with just the messages that are important to you, likely from people you care about. There’s likely some magic special sauce in the Priority algorithm, but a simple facsimile can be created using a Smart Mailbox in a standard email app.

I have a group in my address book:

It currently has 96 people in it. People that I would stop what I’m doing to read a message from.