Vice President of Newfangled.com, Writer for PRINT and F+W Media, blogger, infrequent designer, reader, science fiction enthusiast...

March 16th 2011

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Freeman Dyson, How We Know

Posted at 3:24pm and tagged with: quote, science,.

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The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions…Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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March 16th 2011

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Jaron Lanier on the effects of the flood of information.

Posted at 1:14pm and tagged with: quote, Information-Overload,.

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It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.
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March 4th 2011

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Kevin Kelly, on the myth of heat death

(Source: kk.org)

Posted at 1:45pm and tagged with: quote,.

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In case you think this tidys up everything with a neat explanation, please note that we have no idea what gravity is, and no idea what causes the universe to inflate. Other than that, all is clear. :-)
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December 4th 2010

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Helena Fitzgerald

(Source: thenewinquiry.com)

Posted at 8:10pm and tagged with: quote,.

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But we no longer rely on the made-up events of made-up people’s lives. Thanks to social media, we are no longer obliged to disguise our voyeuristic impulses. Voyeurism has been culturally legitimized. We can turn to the real events of our lives as we have retold them and to the reactions they have prompted. On the internet, our personal lives have become our television shows. Rather than turn on the television to see if anything was happening in made-up people’s stories, we now switch on the internet to see if anything is happening with our own emotions.
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December 3rd 2010

30 notes |#

Kevin Kelly, speaking to Google

(Source: youtu.be)

Posted at 9:23am and tagged with: quote,.

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We are the sexual organs of technology.
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October 29th 2010

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Sven Birkerts

Posted at 1:52pm and tagged with: quote, digital-literacy,.

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I have brooded about the rise of the Internet and the waning of the print culture for decades. I think it through this way and that—analytically, nostalgically, apocalyptically and defensively—and the question I always return to is simple as can be: What is the import of our collective love affair with keypads and screens? How is it affecting the great intangibles—our thinking, our sense of initiative, our subjective self-grounding, our formulations of private and social meaning? I don’t think the Internet (never mind the myriad other technologies of linkage) would distress me if I had faith that it could deliver, as its loudest boosters say it does, the values and virtues encoded in the system of print. If I thought that the digital realm could foster and sustain the kind of calm, linear, reflective thinking [Nicholas] Carr describes, I would quiet my inner Cassandra. But it is undoubtedly, as Carr suggests, a system with enormous shaping power. And if he is right about the plasticity and wiring-and-firing of our neurophysical human endowments, then we must seriously consider the possibility that we are, as users, taking on with eyes wide shut the attributes of the medium. If this is so, then it must raise questions not unlike those Paul Gauguin used as the title for his monumental triptych: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
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October 27th 2010

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Steven Johnson

(Source: Wired)

Posted at 9:28am and tagged with: quote,.

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If you knew nothing about the Internet and were trying to figure it out from the data, you would reasonably conclude that it was designed for the transmission of spam and porn. And yet at the same time, there’s more amazing stuff available to us than ever before, thanks to the Internet.
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September 17th 2010

5 notes |#

Tim Maly

(Source: quietbabylon.com)

Posted at 1:01pm and tagged with: quote,.

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So when you think about cyborgs…don’t think about total loss of self, bodies encroached and erased by technology, humanity swallowed whole. Instead think of cellphones. Think about off-loaded memories, of constantly renewed enhancement and new abilities. But also think about insistent ringtones, and demanding interruptions, think of externally controlled access, and a reliance on a sprawling infrastructure. We are shaped by the technologies because in integrating them, they become us. And though we can discard or upgrade them, this is no less true of our cultural selves. Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow but those possibilities are shaped and constrained by the biology, culture and technology that is part of you.
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September 8th 2010

2 notes |#

Carlin Romano in an essay on educational trends

(Source: chronicle.com)

Posted at 11:59am and tagged with: quote, digital-literacy,.

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The younger people you pass on the street or sit next to on a bus are simultaneously there and not there. They shake their shoulders and tap their feet to music audible only to them inside the cocoon of their digital systems. They seem to be wired differently from their elders, whose orientation to machines comes from another zone of the unconscious. Many college-age sorts study their phones, put them away to try to focus on something else—the passing scenery outside the Amtrak train, a magazine, the old-fashioned book they’ve brought along—then yank the phones back out three or four minutes later and start tapping away again. Reading a book, however, requires concentration, endurance, the ability to disconnect from other connections. You have to be there rather than not there. Hyperwired young people may be making it to age 17 without acquiring that ability, let alone losing it.
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September 8th 2010

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Parag Khana, for Foreign Policy

Statements like this confuse me. How can you isolate an economy today? Surely New York City’s economy is heavily influenced by imports, which makes it and other “isolated” economies codependant. So what does this really mean?

(Source: foreignpolicy.com)

Posted at 10:07am and tagged with: quote,.

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New York City’s economy alone is larger than 46 of sub-Saharan Africa’s economies combined.
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September 7th 2010

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Robin Nagle, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s anthropologist-in-residence

Posted at 6:30am and tagged with: quote, the-future,.

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Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. So we are surrounded by ephemera, but we can’t acknowledge that, because it’s kind of scary, because I think ultimately it points to our own temporariness, to thoughts that we’re all going to die.
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September 6th 2010

9 notes |#

Jaron Lanier

Posted at 7:17am and tagged with: quote,.

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There is hope. Only a few years ago, to challenge the supremacy of the new nerd religion was to invite scorn from most undergraduates. This is no longer so. A post-Facebook generation is appearing, and its members are questioning the legacy of their predecessors. Recently, when I asked students not to tweet or blog during a lecture, so that they might exist, they stood and cheered. The new question will be how we extricate ourselves from the antihuman software designs that suddenly run everything.
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September 5th 2010

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Ian Tait

Posted at 12:01pm and tagged with: quote,.

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If we want to create provocative, challenging and culturally relevant digital work, we need to smash the hen-house and go free-range.
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September 5th 2010

2 notes |#

Andrew Pettegree, on the history of print technology

Posted at 10:11am and tagged with: digital-literacy, books, quote,.

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Most narratives of print have relied on looking at the most eye-catching products — whether it’s Gutenberg’s Bible or Copernicus or the polyglot Bible of Plantin — these are the ones which seem to push civilization forward. In fact, these are very untypical productions of the 16th-century press. I’ve done a specific study of the Low Countries, and there, something like 40 percent of all the books published before 1600 would have taken less than two days to print. That’s a phenomenal market, and it’s a very productive one for the printers. These are the sort of books they want to produce, tiny books. Very often they’re not even trying to sell them retail. They’re a commissioned book for a particular customer, who might be the town council or a local church, and they get paid for the whole edition. And those are the people who tended to stay in business in the first age of print.
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September 4th 2010

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Virginia Postrel

Posted at 11:00am and tagged with: quote, time, the-future,.

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But changing that picture means exchanging today’s architectural metaphor, “building a career,” for another one: adaptive reuse. This is the human-capital equivalent of turning industrial lofts into apartments, factories into medical schools, power plants into art museums, or saw mills into shopping centers. Your original career may be economically obsolete, or you may just want a change, but your knowledge and experience still have their charms. Instead of equating success with a steady progression of better-paying jobs, each related to the previous one, this model emphasizes taking on new challenges and making new contributions, even if that means going back to school, taking a pay cut, or starting as a trainee when you’re middle-aged.
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