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Very good article on the invasion of technology in one's family life, via smartphones.

The writer of the article I just posted pollled NYT readers for how they use technology to manage the many directions their lives are pulled every day. So far, there are 69 comments...

Sherry Turkle has a new book out...

interesting: in the new book, turkle, "takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies - including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots - have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings."

One of the reasons why I will likely never be good at joining virtual communities such as Second Life is that I get really, really nauseous when moving through images on a screen when I'm sitting in a chair. Apparently, people call this "cybersickness."

This is an interesting use of a social media tool to better connect four homeless men with the "community around them," to quote one of the people involved in this project. There are interesting comments, everything from someone calling Mr. Wiggins' followers "compassionless voyeurs," to others praising the fact that these men are given a voice that might one day help their plight. I think only good things can come from giving voice to people on the edges of the digital divide, but that's my opinion.

And so artificial intelligence type software is now threatening the livelihood of those in the legal profession. I have a friend who's a paralegal doing the type of work these "e-discovery" software programs can now do. I wonder if he's been aware of this kind of technology developing. I also wonder what will come next....

NY Times article on how using a game life like virtual reality aids in the teaching of literature.

Great minds...both you and Laurie found this! Fascinating article!

This book was mentioned in the NYT article on SXSW that I just posted. Instead of arguing whether technology makes us dumber or smarter, the author provides insight on how we can better adopt technology into our lives, which involves periods of disconnectedness.

Thanks for sharing this, this is very useful for my term project. Making tools work for us, rather than ever feeling the other way is key.

Interesting roundup of the South by Southwest Festival and the proliferation of movies and panels about the effects of technology.

This Newsweek cover story from March 7 gets into how information overload is hindering our ability to make clear decisions.

While attempting to read this article, I found myself constantly distracted, not by interruptions, but by the completely goofy banner ads on the right side of the page and bottom. Maybe someone could invent and app for that? Or in the meantime I should use a piece of cardboard to cover the nonsense on the screen. A low budget app!

Really great talk on the Brian Lehrer show from two days ago about content curation. The angle has a lot to do with what journalists/bloggers are doing, there even was talk about a Pulitzer Prize for curation. The featured author talks about how "search is broken." There was a caller (with whom I once worked at People magazine!), who has a site that curates human interest content about the developing world, filling a niche that she says has been greatly under-served. I'll also post a link to her Web site.

Here's a link to a Web site described as a "global humanitarian internet portal to feature engaging stories about the lives of real people in even the most remote parts of the developing world." The creator saw a gap in all content aggregator-type sites, which tend to cover breaking news, and launched something aimed at human interest stories from the developing world.

Did anyone else notice this link from the previous week? Left wing gad about Douglas Rushkoff starts to question the unintended consequences for the user of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. may have created exciting new ways for us to interact "virtually", but we pay for it, even when it's free.

I really like that he advocates that students (& all people) learn to program. People resisted learning to type too! And while it is harder, no harder than learning to read or write.

How has the distribution and viewing experience of watching a movie changed in the instant netflix age? "There are moviegoers and probably critics who don't care about the kind of box that images come in, how those images were created and how they are consumed, though it seems important to mark these changes and how they are affecting our modern or postmodern selves. Television and home video shrank movies, turning them into more easily obtainable images that are perhaps no longer (as) sacred. The new 24-hour movie, meanwhile, has brought other changes, filling our eyes and sometimes flooding our heads with an unending stream of visions. "

This is data that will cause some privacy issues. Now one can really be connected.

wow, and the data persists even when you upgrade the phone! The article says "In some ways, this shouldn't be surprising. Back in June of 2010, Apple updated its privacy policy to include a paragraph that allows Apple and "partners and licensees" to collect and store user location data." But of course hardly anyone reads the fine print.

Here is the open source tool the researchers made with the location data: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/