Monday, July 25, 2005
Eight Minutes to Creative Thinking
"The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state." /CNET News.com/
Media Viruses and Suicide Bombs
"Media viruses, which I first wrote about in my book of the same name in 1994, depend on our newly complexified mediaspace to exist. Like biological viruses, they have two main components: a sticky outer shell, and genetic code inside. The virus spreads if the shell is sticky enough to fool our cells into accepting them. The virus replicates if its code can successfully interpolate itself into the confused command structure of our cell's own code. If the virus succeeds in doing this, it turns the cell into a virus factory - the cell commits suicide in the viruses name. Early Madonna successfully challenged our faulty, confused, and unarticulated notions about female sexuality. The Rodney King tape successfully challenged the unarticulated rage at the way white cops treat black inner-city men. The viral code replicates as long as we're unable to talk about the underlying social agenda it provokes." /Douglas Rushkoff/
CafeSpot
CafeSpot is "a social guide to independent cafes, coffee shops, restaurants and more. Here you can find everything from the best espresso to the most authentic Thai noodles. It is possible to search for specific places or to browse by user chosen tags (inlcuding wifi." /CafeSpot/
Connecting the World's Youth via Digital Sorytelling
Bridges: "Our interactive online program connects middle school students in the developed world with their contemporaries in indigenous communities. Central to the program is digital storytelling mentored by professionals and created by students. We provide the tools and training that enable them to tell stories from their own lives and communities. These stories are shared through this website where our students can engage each other, ask questions about each others' lives and collaborate on creating multimedia stories exploring their cultures." /Bridges/
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Google Poem: Idoru Sunset
"idoru, idoru, idoru.
what was the kernel of "Idoru"? What did you start with?
So somebody took that one step further
and brought out an idoru
who didn't exist at all ..."
/Get A Google Poem/
what was the kernel of "Idoru"? What did you start with?
So somebody took that one step further
and brought out an idoru
who didn't exist at all ..."
/Get A Google Poem/
Artificially-Linked Nervous System
William Gibson: "We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially-linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it." /xer-files/
Monday, July 18, 2005
Smart Mob Activism
"Douglas Rushkoff, has a piece today critiquing SMS activism - or rather, examining both its power and its pathos. The power is in the immediacy, and the ease with which someone can receive an alert and take an action combined with the scale effect of thousands of those someones acting in concert at a critical moment. But the flip side of that ease is the lack of long-term commitment or participation required, which is both what makes smart mob activism attractive to busy mobile individuals as well as what perhaps dooms it to having a lesser impact than lasting coalitions of grassroots constituents contributing long-term effort to activist goals." /The Social Software Weblog/
Simulated Society May Generate Virtual Culture
"A society of 1000 virtual 'agents' - each with a remarkably realistic personality and the ability to learn and communicate - is being crafted by scientists from five European research institutes who hope to gain insights into the way human societies evolve.
Each agent will be capable of various simple tasks, like moving around and building simple structures, but will also have the ability to communicate and cooperate with its cohabitants. Though simple interaction, the researchers hope to watch these characters create their very own society from scratch... In addition, characters will be able to reproduce by mating with members the opposite sex and their offspring will inherited a random collection of their parents 'genetic' traits.
Perhaps most importantly, however, by pointing to objects and using randomly generated 'words', characters should be able to conjure up their very own language and communicate with others inside their world... 'A long-term aim is to see if we can get culture to emerge,' Paechter adds. 'This way, we might learn something about the way human societies evolve.'" /New Scientist/
Each agent will be capable of various simple tasks, like moving around and building simple structures, but will also have the ability to communicate and cooperate with its cohabitants. Though simple interaction, the researchers hope to watch these characters create their very own society from scratch... In addition, characters will be able to reproduce by mating with members the opposite sex and their offspring will inherited a random collection of their parents 'genetic' traits.
Perhaps most importantly, however, by pointing to objects and using randomly generated 'words', characters should be able to conjure up their very own language and communicate with others inside their world... 'A long-term aim is to see if we can get culture to emerge,' Paechter adds. 'This way, we might learn something about the way human societies evolve.'" /New Scientist/
Co-opting the Creative Revolution
"'For the first time since the industrial revolution, the most important means and components of core economies are in the hands of the population at large,' explains Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler. Computation, in other words, is in the hands of the entire population. And those computing tools are getting easier to use, more approachable, as well as more powerful." /BBC NEWS/
Friday, July 15, 2005
William Gibson on The Social Remix
William Gibson: "Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?)... We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going... We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us - as surely and perhaps as terribly as we've been redefined by broadcast television." /Wired/
Be Your Own Guru
Douglas Rushkoff"You start with the guru as the one perfect point in the universe, and from there everything else can fall into place... Slowly but surely, surrender to the guru requires you to reject pretty much everything that doesn't fit whatever model of the world he's offering you. But, honestly, that's what the devotee was after in the first place. An excuse to do or not do all that other confusing stuff in life like encounter people with different ideas, wrestle with the questions of existence, and accept that nobody really knows what happens when we die." /Douglas Rushkoff/
New Drug Offers Jitter-free Mental Boost
"A new class of drug may increase alertness without any of the jitteriness of over-stimulation, suggest the results of a small clinical trial released this week." /New Scientist/
Walking Hotspot
"Here's my Popular Science How 2.0 article on turning yourself into a walking hotspot by using a mobile power source and a cellular-to-Wi-Fi gateway. The Voltaic Systems backpack makes a great platform to build from due to all of the internal wiring and myriad power adapters included in the kit.
And I like the Junxion Box as a simple, clean appliance to handle the Wi-Fi to Cellular interface." /Wi-Fi Toys/
And I like the Junxion Box as a simple, clean appliance to handle the Wi-Fi to Cellular interface." /Wi-Fi Toys/
