Reflections on Technology, Media & Culture

The recent ransomware attack hit some of the monitoring systems at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (See Guardian article.) The malware locks the data on your computer and you have to pay $300 in bitcoin to a specified account in order to receive the code that unlocks your computer. As it happens, the malware … Continue reading →

Chernobyl is a site of melancholy. It’s not just the grief, the loss, the cost and the risk of extinction. Chernobyl and Pripyat’s melancholy is inscribed in the landscape. Forest takes over the agricultural and industrial ground plane. Apartment blocks stood proud on this stratum of Soviet achievement. But the horizon breaks through, symbol of … Continue reading →

One way to demonstrate your wealth is to show how much free time you have. Freed from the drudgery required to keep fed, secure and comfortable, the wealthy have time on their hands to sit around in coffee shops, take long holidays, indulge in unprofitable hobbies, and acquire esoteric skills and affectations that are surplus … Continue reading →

Vast technological infrastructures rely on global capital. They also sustain it. As wealth is accumulated by the few, the rest are lulled into the role of acquiescent consumers, buying products they don’t need or can’t afford, in order to preserve existing concentrations of capital. Digital systems further exaggerate inequalities, providing new channels for exploitation and … Continue reading →

Digital money attempts to keep financial transactions reliable and trustworthy without the need for a bank. To achieve this it does two things that computer networks do well: distribute and encrypt. If I create a painting then it’s a one off. If I sell it then I pass on ownership of the painting to the … Continue reading →

Yes, but for facts, stats and authoritative accounts I would always turn to refereed sources: journal articles, books, and reports commissioned by publicly accountable organisations. We are more confident about something in print (i.e. on the page) if it has been through a process of review by others who claim also to know about the … Continue reading →

Singer Katy Perry has nearly 100 million followers on Twitter according to Friend or Follow. Close behind are Justin Bieber and Barack Obama, with Donald Trump ranked 34th in line with about 31 million followers. You don’t need to be a follower to find out what people are tweeting. You can just search on their … Continue reading →

Some would-be achievers like to position themselves as outsiders. An outsider can provide a fresh point of view. An outsider is also someone with an outside chance, as opposed to a front runner. That way others expect less of them. How can someone outside the mainstream be expected to capitalise on insider benefits, or know as much as an insider? When … Continue reading →

“You can’t always get what you want” is the puzzling refrain that echoed out over the PA at the end of Trump rallies, and was repeated at his subsequent post-victory reprieve rallies. The less audible punchline of the song is, “You just might find you get what you need.” Getting what you need is more important than … Continue reading →

France, and some other countries, use the two-round election system. If there’s no majority vote winner from among a set of candidates then there’s a second election. It’s a playoff between the top two candidates. Binary choices are often easier to deal with, and are decisive. Of less consequence than state elections, I find it easy enough to choose … Continue reading →

Art can bring into sharp relief aspects of life and the world to which people (some of us) previously paid little attention. Art can accomplish this through an ecology of signs — pointing stuff out i.e. by making direct reference. But art also informs by presenting the opposite to what we art lovers might expect as the object of … Continue reading →

Why do moods matter politically? Think first about economics. If you can predict the mood of a group of people then you might be able to predict how likely they are to buy (and sell) and how much they will pay (and sell for). So investors who speculate on the stock market have a lot to gain by accurately assessing and predicting … Continue reading →

Automatic translation is now mainstream. It’s simple enough to have text on a web site or in a text field translated between languages. The Google translate app on a smartphone combines (AR) “augmented reality” and translation algorithms to create a screen image that substitutes what’s in front of the camera with something like the same text in your … Continue reading →

Biologists have worked out how to use Google’s “reverse image search” to scour scientific papers for similarities between microscopic samples they have photographed and photographs reported in scientific papers by others — on the basis of image matching. This is very powerful. Can practitioners of art and design find equally useful applications of readily-available image matching technology? This weekend marks the … Continue reading →

What is (or was) postmodernism? “[T]ruth is relative, morality is subjective, and therefore all of our individually preferred ‘narratives’ that give our lives meaning are equally true and worthy of validation,” wrote David Ernst by way of definition in The Federalist (21 January 2017). It seems that the current US president is the first “to … Continue reading →

It sounds final. “You have reached your destination,” says my car SatNav. Achieving a goal is melancholic in several respects. Some achievers realise there’s nothing left. It’s not going to get any better. Then some think their achievement doesn’t accrue all the benefits they expected. Freud also explained melancholy as a tendency to focus on losing something, even if it is … Continue reading →

How can EEG (electroencephalography) help us understand people’s responses to outdoor environments? Due to its constraints, the technology lends itself to two tasks. The wearer of the head-mounted EEG technology is either (1) stationary in the environment, passively observing and listening, or (2) mobile. In the latter case, the EEG wearer just walks, slowly and deliberately. I … Continue reading →

In what sense is nature ended? It is not just that natural environments have been polluted, over-managed, or subjected to human control, but nature has changed its meaning. This question provides a further touch point for nature and semiotics. Writing in the 1980s, environmental writer Bill McKibben said of nature that it  “is now a category like … Continue reading →

Perhaps the term “deconstruction” is in for a comeback, as the US White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon said, “That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” (CNN). He was talking about cutting back on government regulation, though he misused the term “deconstruction.” Anti-Trump conservative US commentator Glenn … Continue reading →

The natural is in opposition to the artificial — or so we think. Some oppositions lie at either end of a spectrum, with gradations between. e.g. light versus dark. That’s an opposition with an inverse relationship. The more light you add to an image, the less dark it is. The louder things get, the less quiet; the hotter, the less … Continue reading →

One Republican senator said after the historically “extraordinary” unpresidential press conference this week, “He (@realDonaldTrump) should do this with a therapist, not with the country” (The Hill). The occasion came across as an open and public catharsis. The rest of the world got drenched in the outpourings of his singularly troubled unconscious. Long term care institutions (asylums) for psychiatric patients are mostly … Continue reading →

The blog medium invites disclosures about work in progress. So here’s the how the table of contents is shaping up for my new book: Coyne , Richard. Network Nature: Digital Technology and the Semiotics of Place. London: Bloomsbury.  The draft is due end of March, including 30 illustrations, and it is on track so far. Table of … Continue reading →

The domestic garage is adjunct space without heating, insulation and wall coverings. It’s often physically connected to the rest of the home, but homeowners treat it as an outside space, or at least a buffer between inside and outside. Garages are less common in inner city dwellings (where I live), especially where there are row houses, terraces, flats and older … Continue reading →

The presence of an unregenerate tweeter in the White House places social media in the spotlight. The current state of the White House reveals it as an extreme locus of power, division, anxiety, instability, temper, ignorance, deception, self-interest, and antipathy. Trump’s use of Twitter provides an excellent case study illustrating what people can do with social media, and what it can do to them. Why should any … Continue reading →

To inaugurate is “to take omens from the flight of birds.” At least, that’s how the OED explains the word’s derivation — from the Latin inaugurāre. Nature as a source of signs related to events that might affect human beings comes under the category of what the American Pragmatic Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) called an “indexical … Continue reading →

“There’s no more behind the scenes,” said a colleague as we discussed 360 video. The camera operator can’t hide behind the camera, but has to retreat some distance away, unless they are content to be part of the act. That explains why 360 camera operatives need to control the 360 camera with a hand-held smartphone … Continue reading →

Nature, the organic and the biological exhibit growth, decay and disorder, or at least an order that is outside of human mastery. Technology equates to function, control, precision, efficiency and factory production. It’s easy to place modernity at odds with nature, and on the side of technology. But as any student of architecture knows, there was a … Continue reading →

I retain fond memories of Biology 101 — a lab-based undergraduate science elective in which we lab-coat rookies dissected Formaldehyde-soaked frogs and weighed the collective scalps of lamented snap-frozen drosophila. Not least, we learned the language of nature: zygotes and gametes, monocots and dicots, dominants and recessives, liverworts and mosses. But no bio-vocabularizing prepares you for the zoo of terms … Continue reading →

Nature and health are closely aligned, but not always positively in the case of buildings. Left unchecked, nature delivers invasive plant life with root systems that unseat brickwork, and break through water barriers. Fungus, mould, lichen and other spore-producing organisms (cryptogams) invade architectural cracks, pores and surfaces. Invasive nature invokes a kind of “disgust” according … Continue reading →

Architecture has more in common with geology than biology. At least this is one of the conclusions I take from a series of interesting articles from a special issue of Arq (Architecture Research Quarterly) on architecture and biotechnology. More accurately, it’s the skeletons, hardened excreta, dead tissue, and shells that provide the structural support for … Continue reading →

Is a Gothic arch a meme? According to John James, historian of the Gothic,  “A meme is like a catchy tune, a new fashion in clothes or a way of building an arch. When an architect hears about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students, and if it catches on … Continue reading →

Some tweets are a bit like genes in that they get reproduced many times over, they mutate, they thrive and persist if the environment is right, and there’s a lot of wastage — most don’t get retweeted, liked or remarked. So there’s something like natural selection going on. One of the nice propositions about genes is that humans … Continue reading →

Nature means different things to different people. The meaning depends on the context of discussion and action. According to geographers Phil Macnaghten and John Urry in their book Contested Natures, nature has to be negotiated. So we are entitled to ask what nature is for — as a concept. I’ve identified at least two main discursive uses of the … Continue reading →

Networks are everywhere. “Always think of the universe as one living organism,” said Marcus Aurelius the Stoic philosopher (and Roman Emperor — one of the good ones), “Remark the intricacy of the skein, the complexity of the web” (73). I’ve referenced this before. The sentiment is simple: if you only realised how interconnected your circumstances were to … Continue reading →

Self-reliance is one of the hallmarks of mature adulthood. By most accounts it takes time to develop. Self-reliance is also strongly associated with access to nature. Outdoor pursuits fall into the orbit of “rational” outdoor recreation as promoted by 19th century reformers intent on helping the working classes do something healthy with their spare time. Outdoor sports, … Continue reading →

If the universe can be represented in its entirety as data and programs then who is to say we are not living in a simulation, as in The Matrix? In the movie, human bodies are stored in silos as a power supply for intelligent machines, while the human minds attached to those bodies are preoccupied with a massive, shared simulated existence in something … Continue reading →

Symbols are getting a bad name. More precisely, symbols of bad things are gaining more airtime than symbols of good things — lately. Take for example walls. Last month Andrew Solomon wrote in the Guardian “Walls are concrete symbols of exclusion, and exclusion is seldom a diplomatic move.” There’s the prospect of a wall at Calais to curb … Continue reading →

Few would deny that architecture communicates, and in that sense is a language, or at least like a language. As pointed out by the philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco architecture does something else as well: it functions. So a substantial tiled roof not only communicates protection from the elements, but functions to provide such protection. Occasionally the two become … Continue reading →

High resolution display screens, motion and touch sensors, interaction with other people and virtual objects, channels that deliver sound, touch, taste and smell, stereo vision and sound, all wrapped into a 360 degree 3D sphere of experience — that’s the dream and expectation of VR (virtual reality). Is 360 degree video on the way to that ideal? … Continue reading →

The term “post-truth politics” was coined by journalist David Roberts in an article in Grist in 2010. The use of the term is convenient shorthand to indicate disagreement with some current political circumstance. The term also comes into play as a way of accounting for the strange unregulated world of social media. The term also helps mainstream media outlets account for their declining role as gatekeepers to truth, … Continue reading →

Everyone is talking about Pokemon Go. So I may as well join in. While on holiday last week in the town of Menton in the south of France I aimed my mobile phone camera at a cat in a laneway. Two young men glanced in my direction as they walked by, and I distinctly heard one of … Continue reading →

Biosemiotics is an area of research that studies living matter in terms of its communication networks, i.e. the transfer of signs. Biosemioticians think that the exchange of signs applies to whole organisms communicating with one another (as when humans or other animals communicate), but also the exchange signs at the microscopic and chemical level, including the way cells process … Continue reading →

“Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.” How do you read nature? Nature is a system of signs after all. The theory of signs (semiotics) is interesting not least as it repositions the discussion of nature away from the reductive notion of data towards the totality of experience (see post One … Continue reading →

Living human and animal skin is palpably different from a touch screen video display. Digital technologies lie at the far end of a spectrum that begins with completely unadorned, raw, nature as you find it (e.g. unadorned human skin, or a leaf), and stretches to the maximally manufactured, contrived, and artificial (e.g. a touch screen, or a microchip). What could be more synthetic and unnatural … Continue reading →

Modernism championed an image of the human as rational, in control, and improving. Now we human beings realise we are responsible for irreversible alterations to land, climate, and organic life on a geological scale. So we live in the Anthropocene, and those committed to its correction, rehabilitation and remaking are Anthropoceneans. Many geographers are counted in their number — but … Continue reading →

News of disasters and tragedies amplify collective loss and grief. Mass media and their online surrogates render tangible human tragedies due to error, injustice and war. Nature also delivers disaster. But we modern humans also grieve over nature. Those critics who identify the influence of human habitation on Planet Earth focus on the latter kind of grief. Officially, we homo sapiens and … Continue reading →

Who could miss the palpable cuteness of puppies and kittens on YouTube, and their mass produced surrogates in cartoons, video games, on logos, as branded accessories and as soft toys. The word “cute” is an abbreviation of “acute,” meaning clever, keen-witted, sharp, and shrewd, according to the OED. In her extensive exploration of cute as a viable contemporary aesthetic category, … Continue reading →