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The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  "With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are a fundamental part of our reality. We cannot live outside this construction of ourselves in the networks of communication." Ever wondered why people try to redefine themselves by nationalism, regionalism, membership of small subcultures, even though the world is globalizing fast? I think Castells has some anwers on that too:  "The more we are connected to everything and everybody and every activity, the more we need to know who we are. Unless I know who I am, I don't know where I am in the world, because then I am a consumer, I am taken by the market, I am taken by the media. "And therefore people decide that they are going to be different. But to do that, they have to identify themselves as individuals, as collectives, as nations, as genders, all these categories that sociologists have already constructed time ago." Castells explains how people in this crisis engage in co-operative or non-profit work. It's a kind of 'non-capitalism'.  Putting now on my list: his new book Aftermath. 

"We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware." And also: "We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still misty yet glowing with some inner light, eerie but compelling." An interesting and beautiful post, but then again, I'm not entirely convinced, more specifically about the implicit conceptualization of our own Paleo-past. I think our ancestors and many animals had something called consciousness, while all those fascinating machines and networks of today don't have any consciousness at all. The fact that we add cameras and sensors to the networks does not yet mean these networks acquire something like a body. It would be interesting to study how the proponents of cyborg-thinking conceptualize the relationship between mind, body and consciousness. Or am I mistaken here? 

"Is there a new political philosophy emerging from things like open source software development; massive community sharing hubs like Wikipedia, Kickstarter, and Reddit; peer-to-peer social networking; experiments in "Liquid Democracy," and the rapid spread of resource sharing tools like ZipCar, AirBnb and Car2go? Is it time to start talking about replacing the "welfare state" with the "partner state"? On Monday September 24 at 7:30pm at the New York Law School, we're looking forward to exploring all those questions and more with noted author Steven Johnson, whose new book Future, Perfect is must-reading for people who believe in the power of open, collaborative peer-to-peer networking to achieve real social progress."

"Thingiverse is also introducing a new "Follow" button that will connect you to the things, digital designs, designers, users, tags, categories: all the stuff you care about most. By following a Thing, you'll get a notification when someone comments on it, makes a copy of it, or remixes it. Some new digital designs inspire a whole family of new Things, and the Follow button helps you keep track of those.  " As Bruce Sterling says, it's almost a social network of things. Now just imagine to have this affordance in augmented reality - you just point your smartphone, tablet or google glass to a thing, you activate some app and you get all this information. Also in the press release, the guys from Thingiverse explain how users have been tagging their uploads with useful descriptors - and so now you can follow tags or categories to get updates in a dashboard. We're talking here about the annotation of our physical reality, bookmarking no longer just the digital world of websites but of the objects which surround us. 

An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life.  Wagner James Au on New World Notes says this is probably also true for other virtual environments, not onlt for Second Life. He also points to the bigger question of the shifting boundaries between virtual and real.  Social media help extend immersive experiences to so-called real world networks. Virtual money is convertible in real money, and solidarity actions for real world issues can start out in virtual environments.  Manuel Castells says we live in a cultural of virtual reality - I think the deconstruction of the boundaries between real and virtual is becoming fairly obvious. Virtual is not some exclusive feature of 3D environments, and reality is ever more being augmented and digitally annotated.

"As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them."

"Fab labs are a global network of local labs, enabling invention by providing access to tools for digital fabrication" Bruce Sterling has some comments on Beyond the Beyond http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/09/the-fab-charter-draft/

Introduced this past June with Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean," Google Now is designed to ambiently give you information you might need before you ask for it. To pull off that ambitious goal, Google takes advantage of multiple parts of the company: comprehensive search results, robust speech recognition, and most of all Google's surprisingly deep understanding of who you are and what you want to know.

In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery.