Group items tagged

I found this site for a company that creates products that allow us to mix our real-world and digital experiences at once. One interesting product creates the image of fire or waves on a pool table that chases the pool balls as you hit them. I wonder in what way this is like e-literature.

Eric, some of these technologies reminded me of Hayles's explanation of site-specific installations for interactive literature. I'm not sure how "literary" these things would be considered, but I found there to be an interesting parallel between the two ideas.

This is a short cartoon that satirizes the experience of using twitter to communicate. It has some funny phrases including when one friend inquires about people on twitter "who are they talking to?" the other friend responds "this is how we communicate now in bite sized yippity-yap!" Once the first friend becomes extremely cynical and essentially awakens the people in the "twitter-sphere" from a zombie-like slumber, the whole reality begins to crumble. As silly as it is, it says some interesting things about social networking and the public's perception of the different forms of communication.  Also, it's worth noting that the video was made prior to some of the Iranian and Egyptian conflicts in which twitter played such an important role in empowering the masses (but is it the opiate of the masses?).

This is another satirical look at what's going on online and how sites like myspace seem to be loosing relevancy. In some ways the video is actually a little disturbing, but it does at least partially bring into question what makes a good social networking site and what causes us to favor sites like facebook over sites like myspace. For instance, was myspace too customizable to the point that it left the user with too many choices and left visitors feeling out of place every time they visited a page that blasted music at them they didn't actually enjoy?

An article addressing how twitter can actually be damaging to use in a crisis.

Of the different online accounts I have, Tumblr is one account I don't have and after reading O'Reilly and looking at the site I have to admit I'm a little fascinated by it. It seem like in many ways it's taken the parts of Myspace, facebook, and twitter that work and pasted them all together at once. In some senses this seems overwhelming, but just from the sample pages, what I see doesn't look entirely unlike what I'm creating for this class. I intentionally linked to the about page since I think there is a great deal of interesting info that feels like it came almost came straight out of O'Reilly's book especially in regard to building communities and allowing for participation, customization, and interaction. The home page also has some useful pieces worth exploring I think.

Keeping track of passwords is definitely a hassle for most of us, so a service that groups all of them didn't seem far off. It will be interesting to see how this develops, and if it will catch on and be secure.

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

This article is extremely interesting as we think about online "spaces" because the author describes how he pictures the literal "space" of each social networking site he uses.

NPR discusses how the use of social media has brought the Treyvon Martin case into national spotlight.

This article examines the use of emotional attachment and building of unique stories to create buzz through social media sites like twitter and facebook.

A smart political article about the relation between communication and capitalism. Useful especially on the way technical networks both present themselves as political and foreclose the political.

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.

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...

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!

A little late in the game, but the wording here is really interesting because the censorship of bloggers by the Chinese government includes works with imagined information. In addition, they specifically cut off the comments option. We have a direct moment here where the 2.0 and call and response of online writing is considered poisonous to government action, even if the work is a fictional piece. The most important thing to note here is that China is now requiring all microbloggers to use their real names. We talked about how useful a tracked name can be, but in this case practicality loses over privacy.

This is a web site of a friend I used to work with, and thought it was a nice example of designing a web site for a professional portfolio as well as including personal interests and links.

Lovink's latest book is all about social media. It addresses a number of the critiques we offered in class - which is not to say it answers or does away with them - but also reinforces that he offers less a theory than a report or journalistic take. (One example is the way he looks at the uneven use of blogging world wide, so that blogging becomes much less monolithic in this account.)

Apparently employers will soon be using a Facebook rating scale to determine what kind of employees we'll be.

This is a google book that discusses some of the same things I mentioned in my post regarding the use of wikipedia and other networks and how that shapes our ideas of freedom.

How e-mail users are using ZigMail to sort through spam.