Group items tagged

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.

Ted talk on the culturnomics/ngram project. According to Bonnie: "I think this TedTalk does a really good job of summarizing what the ngram article was all about and adds a little interest as well."

A brief history of storytelling.

Unique TED talk from Kellee Santiago who claims that Roger Ebert's claim that video games can't be art is wrong.

Talk on the behind-the-scenes filtering that goes on of your individual internet experience.

Evan Williams, CEO of twitter, discusses how users influenced the evolution of twitter.

Johanna Blakely discusses gender and social media in relation to demographics and women's popular use of social media.

Below you'll see a link to Code for America. Here is a related TED talk.

I apologize for all of the posts about WikiLeaks, but I'm fascinated by Assange's views of his work. One minute I feel like he's a hero and that these leaks really can open the masses' eyes to political corruption and scandal, but the next minutes I feel like he's playing with fire and am fearful of the consequences of uncovering these documents.

Paul Conneally describes the future of humanitarianism in a hyper-connected world. The idea of re-typing and transforming texts to tweets to websites and digital maps in disaster situations etc. seems like an act of uncreative writing--something that is, in a way, re-presenting information while at the same time creating a profound new piece of writing.