Yearly Archives: 2011

Number station broadcast 13/11

  • Stop Thinking Outside the Box : “The exhortation to think outside the box has become ubiquitous in business. So much so that it has become the new box inside of which everyone thinks. It pays lip service to the notion of transformation without really understanding the difference between transformation and change, and often without tolerance for the real thinking that must occur for an idea to be truly outside the existing paradigm.”
  • Archive Ahoy!: A Dive into the World of Game Preservation : “Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 is an ongoing project funded by the IMLS that builds on the work of Preserving Virtual Worlds. Rachel Donahue, doctoral student at the University of Maryland iSchool and research assistant at MITH, recently wrote a post outlining the work of PVW2. As Donahue states, PVW2 focuses on ‘what exactly accessing a videogame meaningfully entails’”.
  • Architecture of Fear : “Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. The cause of fear seems interchangeable and constantly fluctuating. Shifting from one thing to the next, often relating to invisible or indirect phenomena’s (terrorism, viral diseases, pollution, financial crisis), anything has the ability to become a potential threat. Rather than an immediate emotional strategy for survival fear is becoming a constant low level feeling in the background that gives rise to a new global infrastructure based on security, prevention and risk-management.”
  • Media, Youth Activism & Participatory Politics: Case Studies in a Digital Age : “The growing use of digital media for social change is nourishing a dialogue about its impact on young people’s involvement in civic and political affairs. The Media Activism Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, an undertaking of the MacArthur Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP), was created to further that conversation by examining youth-led organizations that encourage productive forms of participation in the public sphere.”
  • Getting in on the Act: New Report on Participatory Arts Engagement : “Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act, about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. Authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard pack a lot into 40 pages–an argument for the rise of active arts engagement, a framework for thinking about ways to actively involve audiences, and lots of case studies.”

Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors

When I have spoken about augmented reality at conferences, I like to discuss the material infrastructure of the Internet and how the physical nature of the so called “virtual” impacts us socially and culturally.

“Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors” by Ben Mendelsohn is a short documentary that focuses on this materiality by looking at one data center in NYC.

Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible.

Featuring interviews with Stephen Graham, Saskia Sassen, Dave Timmes of Telx, Rich Miller of datacenterknowledge.com, Stephen Klenert of Atlantic Metro Communications, and Josh Wallace of the City of Palo Alto Utilities.

Nimble : concept video shows a smarter way to read

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Sures Kumar, an interaction designer studying at the National Institute of Design, India, posted this interesting concept video demonstrating Nimble,  a possible future solution to the problems of browse, search and their intersection with technology, combining the library card with augmented reality, multitouch, digital media and physical materials.

Number station broadcast 12/11

  • CIA Tracks Revolt by Tweet, Facebook : “In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.”
  • Building a More Interoperable Net with Paul Hartzog : “Paul Hartzog is a political scientist and futurist at the Future Forward Institute and the University of Michigan. His most recent project is Flows, a “meta-API” that aims to turn the Web and the Internet of Things into a real ecosystem by enabling interoperability.”
  • Piracy is NOT Theft: Problems of a Nonsense Metaphor : “…piracy is often referred to as theft. This is a problem according to Stefan Larsson, lawyer and socio-legal researcher at Lund University in Sweden. Larsson addresses the issue in his thesis “Metaphors and Norms – Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society,” for which he just received his doctorate. Talking to TorrentFreak, he explains why copyright infringement isn’t theft, and how this problematic metaphor keeps the gap between public norms and the law intact.”
  • Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto : “The ground beneath the book publishing industry dramatically shifted in 2007, the year the Kindle and the iPhone debuted. Widespread consumer demand for these and other devices has brought the pace of digital change in book publishing from “it might happen sometime” to “it’s happening right now”—and it is happening faster than anyone predicted. Yet this is only a transitional phase. “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto” is your guide to what comes next, when all books are truly digital, connected and ubiquitous.”
  • Free the Network, A Secure Private Network for Occupy Protestors : “Free the Network by the Free Network Foundation is a project to build a secure, private network to connect the various occupy protest groups to one another and to the Internet. Prototype “FreedomTowers” have already been installed at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Austin to provide Internet access to protestors.”
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