Reflections on Technology, Media & Culture
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Buying time
I stumbled across wikiHow‘s advice to students who need to buy extra time to complete an assignment. You upload a corrupted MS Word file to the online assignment submission system. Eventually someone will get round to asking you to submit it again, by which time you might just have it finished. There’s an art to eking out … Continue reading
Blog archive (and About)
What this blog site is about I draw on philosophy and cultural theory to help understand current affairs, architecture and developments in digital technology. These are not opinion pages, though my strongly held view that academic reflection really matters as we try to understand contemporary living may seep through. These posts are scheduled to appear … Continue reading
Site index
Results appear in reverse date order. You can also use the search box above or the Google menu. 3D printing 4D printing Accelerationism Activism Affective and emotion Africa Agon Alberti Ambience Anger Animals Anime Apocalypse Art Artificial Intelligence Attention Audience engagement Augmented reality Aura Ayn Rand Bad Actors Bauhaus Belief Big Bang Theory Big data … Continue reading
Executive secrets
Who doesn’t want some unstructured time, especially at work! The gaps in the US President’s daily schedule surfaced again this week. 60% of his time is labelled “Executive Time.” Like many others, I’m content to attribute his work patterns to sloth, contrarianism, disorganisation, and tv addiction. (See Axios article.) The main defence from his PR … Continue reading
AI and advertising
Most prominent web publishers such as Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Reddit and news sites, generate revenue by placing banner, side-bar and in-text adverts on their pages. The ads are tailored for your eyes, and may differ from what others see on the same pages. Programmatic advertising directs what ads you see on web pages and social … Continue reading
Why hackers have to work hard
A 4 digit mechanical combination lock is designed so that a person trying to break into your locker (a padlock hacker) would have to try on average 5,000 combinations (104/2). That’s about 2-5 hours work, which is a big investment in time, and before the hacker exhausts all iterations he or she may well be … Continue reading
Emotional targeting
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
Less of one and more of the other
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
On being unbalanced
Balance is one of the master metaphors of health, life and of nature (nicely sidestepped in Mark Zuckerberg’s recent plan to engineer a disease free future). The seminal book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, identifies balance as a ubiquitous concept easily traced back to the human body. After all, from an early age, the … Continue reading
Reading the book of nature
“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
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