What inspired me to finally sit down and write this is the literally ridiculous cover story in Newsweek: ”Is the Internet Making Us Crazy?“ It’s as good an example as you’ll find of something that overuses anecdotal evidence (‘one guy had a meltdown after he became internet-famous!’) and infers that correlations reflect causation (‘people who check their iPhones [...]
Tagged as:
attention,
autonomy,
behaviour,
change,
competence,
criticism,
culture,
distraction,
future,
ideas,
internet,
mastery,
memes,
motivation,
perception,
progress,
reality,
technology,
web
Chaos Monkey is a system Netflix engineers developed a couple years ago: The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most… As Jeff Atwood put it: Sometimes you don’t get [...]
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amazon,
aws,
biases,
chaos monkey,
cloud,
cognition,
ideas,
infrastructure,
knowledge,
metacognition,
netflix,
thinking
by Brian on 07-02-2011
in web
I’ll probably use Google+ for sharing photos, but not much else, for now. It seems great for that, giving me enough reason to recommend it. For conversation and news sharing I’ll have to wait and see. I’ve wanted a way to share family photos, etc., without sharing everything with every acquaintance — not because I [...]
Tagged as:
google,
internet,
intimacy,
privacy,
public sphere,
secrecy,
signaling,
social,
social media,
social networking
“You changed your website again?” “I know, I can’t help it. Once a year I get bored on some Saturday night so I start tweaking stuff and one thing leads to another and 10 hours later I’ve been up all night changing basically everything.” “Haha — you’re an idiot.” I love her honesty. “I like it! [...]
Tagged as:
2011,
change,
design,
dialogs,
personal,
web,
website,
writing
So I saw this SEO copywriter joke a bunch of times yesterday. I love it: “So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor” (If you don’t know what SEO copywriting is, it means writing with specific keywords in certain orders to help sites rank [...]
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humour,
jokes,
memes,
networks,
seo,
social media,
social networks,
twitter
The WikiLeaks story is really becoming a saga. It’s like a new chapter is added every week, with new characters and new ethical questions raised. The latest one helped me work out at least one big answer to move forward with. The answer hinges on trust. It used to be that knowledge was power: it [...]
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attention,
crime,
culture,
diplomacy,
feminism,
information,
institutions,
integrity,
julian assange,
justice,
keith olbermann,
michael moore,
news,
open government,
openness,
press,
rape,
society,
transparency,
trust,
wikileaks
I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link. The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing [...]
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change,
evolution,
facebook,
future,
generativity,
meaning,
philosophy,
progress,
social media,
society,
technology,
twitter
“Books are being replaced by reading,“ to borrow a phrase from Jack Shafer. Digital technology “distances us from the old magic conjured by books” by giving us better ways to get what’s inside them. Of course the tactile experience is lost, but that’s only a sentimental attachment — not without genuine value, but not without considerable influence from purely [...]
Tagged as:
blogging,
bookfuturism,
books,
future,
information,
publishing,
reading,
writing
Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration… This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of [...]
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attention,
blogging,
context,
culture,
distraction,
future,
generativity,
ideas,
james wood,
knowledge,
Links,
lionel trilling,
matthew arnold,
mind,
nicholas carr,
perfection,
process,
psychology,
reading,
web,
writing
I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least [...]
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authority,
expertise,
information,
internet,
knowledge,
learning,
lifestreaming,
medium theory,
social media,
technology,
twitter
Bob Lefsetz wonders whether Cee-Lo’s “F**k You” is going to be another here-today-gone-tomorrow novelty. He uses the song as a jump-off to appeal for music with more staying-power and quality. His point of comparison is the popular series of TED talks: These TED talkers didn’t start yesterday, most have spent years dedicated to their field, to [...]
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cee-lo green,
community,
hype,
internet,
memes,
music,
popularity,
quality,
relationships,
reputation,
ted
There’s an astonishingly bad article at Spiegel Online citing some research that has got a lot of discussion, arguing that notions like “digital natives“ and “the Net Generation” have been wrong because young people say that the Internet isn’t important to them. But the evidence all seems to confirm the ideas behind the “digital native” metaphor: Young [...]
Tagged as:
computers,
digital natives,
generations,
internet,
learning,
technology
