Group items tagged

The changing privacy policy for Google came up in last class (I think Dibs mentioned it), and I thought this was an interesting article that talks about how difficult it is to navigate around the changes.

This article explains how social networking is changing our "interpersonal psychology" and what we can do so that it doesn't get the best of us.

McLuhan and Bogart would probably enjoy this article because it involves procedural rhetoric. It examines how "gamification strategies"--using games to change behavior in real life--can promote energy efficiency. Companies like SimpleEnergy are creating apps that let users track their energy usage, find ways to improve, and compete with friends and neighbors for spots on a leaderboard. Gamification succeeds because apparently social pressure can motivate people even more than monetary incentives, and these initiatives combine both types of incentives: An energy usage competition at the University of Hawaii led to some dorms cutting energy usage by up to 20 percent. This specific method also allows users to save money and conserve energy without "radical infrastructure changes" or the corruption and waste that often results from government subsidies to politically-connected "green" companies like Solyndra and possibly Sapphire Energy. In addition, the apps provide large-scale energy usage data that researchers can use to measure both change over time and the impact of energy usage on other variables.

Just have your computer change one word, and look at all the beautiful chaos it creates...

This is a module that traces the evolution of the Republican candidates' Wikipedia pages during the course of the primaries. Some of the yahoo user comments at the bottom of the page are quite entertaining too

Why? Good question. $1 billion seems like a big chunk of change to shell out when there isn't an obvious indicator that there will be a turn of profit.

Have you seen the Daily Show bit on this? Hilarious! Does seem rather odd, but I have faith that almighty Facebook has some sort of plan...maybe.

Publication of Simon Morris's retyping of Kerouac's On The Road. I find this interesting because I wonder how Goldsmith's discussion of Morris's retyping of the text onto the blog might change now that the text is found within yet another context (the published, printed book). I'm considering buying a copy. . .

This is a completely pointless website that kind of made me laugh. I'm one of those people of 50% of the time uses "Google" as a verb ("Just Google it") and who 50% of the time still asks an actual human being the question first but inevitably gets: "Well, did you Google it?" So...this isn't an article. But still kind of funny. Digital technology is certainly changing our language: Just Google it, Wiki it, I friended her the other day, when I was Pinning, I wish I had a "Like" button right now!, and so on...

Considering how often we look at TED talks, I thought it might be worth including this fake TED talk used as a clip for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus. I know this probably looks a little like getting off track, but I thought it was interesting that the author claims that humans have become gods through their acts of technological creation (in his case, "cyberkinetic individuals). Science fiction often does a great job extrapolating certain ideas or issues, and I think in some ways we can find links to the issue and use of Wikipedia in which we can freely take place in the act of creation or manipulation of a text and even the meaning behind the entries we change. Obviously this is not necessarily created in our own image the way a cyborg would be, but it is still using McLuhan's idea of the extension of man into the cyber world. The question we're left with here though, is whether or not we deserve the moniker of "creator" if we create anonymously.

This blurb is from the BBC: The new privacy policy is rolling out around the world on 1 March Changes made by Google to its privacy policy are in breach of European law, the EU's justice commissioner has said. Viviane Reding told the BBC that authorities found that "transparency rules have not been applied".

Empathy

Google's New Search Algorithm to Crack Down on 'Black Hat Webspam' By Ars Technica By Matthew Braga, Ars Technica Nefarious search engine optimizers be warned. Google is coming for you-again. Following previous changes to Google's ranking and page layout algorithms, the search giant is pushing yet another update to its algorithm this week with the hopes of curbing "black hat webspam" from creeping into search results. * Google thinks that by increasing the complexity of its algorithms, it can weed out malicious intent. Funny thing about complexity is that it tends to breed more complexity. This reminds me a bit of Bogost's book on games. This cat and mouse scenario between Google and fake SEO creators seems to lead to ever evolving code much like in natural systems where the adaptations of the prey animal to take advantage of an environment are eventually matched by a predatory animal with adaptations designed to match or exceed the prey's abilities...

A neat -WIRED- blog documenting new developments in software (mostly Internet based), also offering some tips-and-tricks kinds of features too.

Whoops

Furthering the potential of mobile applications.

I know I talked a little in class about how facebook has had an affect on dating and people's perceptions of flirtation, so I thought I'd share this short article that discusses some of the potentially negative affects of dating through facebook. I'm not propagating that idea (my finance and I just looked through our very first facebook messages yesterday and it was heart warming) but it's interesting to see how others view the potential friendships and heartbreaks of this particular digital social sphere.

"Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee, February 15, 2008 Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies."

There have been a lot of posts about web tracking in light of the recent changes in Google. This is an interesting article, but one of the things I like the best is the Collusion display of who's tracking your data.

This is related to my previous post on the SOPA backlash. Wikipedia decided to change domains based on GoDaddy's support for SOPA.

This brief article is related to our class discussion on identity and social networking.

Careful who you de-friend! I was interested in any news around the changing of language based on our use of technology - things like using "Google" or "Wiki" as verbs, for example - and thought of "friending." When I Googled this and looked at News, there were several stories to this effect!

The new Google CEO, who has been on the job for a year talks about the privacy policy which garnered a lot of criticism. Interestingly and not surprisingly, he presents this case a week before the announcement of Google's first quarter earnings