web - Jeremy Price on Diigo

04 Jan 10

On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.

The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!” —from Tim Berners-Lee’s first message

21 Dec 09

The Decade Google Made You Stupid - The Daily Beast

www.thedailybeast.com/...full - Preview

technology neuroscience brain web

17 Dec 09

Browser Size

browsersize.googlelabs.com - Preview

tool technology web design

15 Dec 09

The S Word - A Repsonse :: Personal InfoCloud

www.personalinfocloud.com/...the-s-word-a-repsonse.html - Preview

social web internet business

08 Dec 09

michaelzimmer.org » If You Trust Google’s Results, You Can Thank…”PigeonRank”?

michaelzimmer.org/...sults-you-can-thank-pigeonrank - Preview

technology web trust google internet

08 Nov 09

NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth

www.techcrunch.com/...rnalists-cant-handle-the-truth - Preview

internet web information ethics technology

Her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of – as I said two weeks ago – “look at me looking at this.”
3 more annotations...
- What’s most alarming about Moore’s behaviour is that she probably thought she was doing the right thing. Certainly, looking at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the portrait of a patriot. Someone who clearly cares a great deal about others, and who – despite the rhetorical question “remind me why I joined the army again” on her profile – is proud to serve her country. In tweeting from the scene, and calling out the media for not reporting the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference.
  
  And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.
- the answer isn’t censorship (which won’t work), but rather in our social evolution catching up with the state of technology. We need to get back to a point as a society where – without thinking – we put our humanity before our ego.
- And what did he do when he saw a young girl bleeding to death? Did he run for help, or try to assist in stemming the bleeding? No he didn’t.
  
  Instead he pointed his camera at her and recorded her suffering, moving in closer to her face for her agonising final seconds. For all of our talk of citizen journalism, and getting the truth out, the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”

26 Oct 09

The End of Solitude - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

chronicle.com.proxy.bc.edu/...3708 - Preview

technology culture web self identity

Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants.
If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
20 more annotations...
- So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can.
- Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism.
- The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling's "sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.
- Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating.
- In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth
- The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity," where the essential relationship is only with oneself.
- Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticity is to look upon these visions without flinching;
- But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined.
- Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing.
- A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity.
- As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven't seen since high school, and wasn't all that friendly with even then) "is making coffee and staring off into space"? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.
- But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their 30s and 40s, the real problem is that it has become completely natural for people in their teens and 20s. Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.
- The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.
- There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation's experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern.
- Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state.
- Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom.
- And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct.
- But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind.
- The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
- The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.

The Way We Live Now - Going Offline in Search of Freedom - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...25FOB-WWLN-t.html - Preview

technology culture web information information overload

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

apophenia: Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates

www.zephoria.org/...some_thoughts_o_2.html - Preview

twitter facebook social technology web culture community

19 Oct 09

Digital Anthropology Report: Attitudes to technology = basis of future class divides

www.antropologi.info/...digital-anthropology-report - Preview

class technology anthropology web

18 Oct 09

Free Online OCR service - convert PDF documents to Word, JPG to Word

www.onlineocr.net - Preview

tools pdf web converter text

29 Sep 09

Your Guide to Music on the Web, Part II

www.techcrunch.com/...de-to-music-on-the-web-part-ii - Preview

music audio web reference resource list

Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress « Generation Bubble

generationbubble.com/...possibility-of-future-progress - Preview

social technology web history critique critical theory politics

Technologically mediated sociality, rather than becoming the means by which radical democracy takes hold, is simply a testament to that very idea’s impotence.
a person’s reading proceeds geometrically while tweeted content expands exponentially
2 more annotations...
- What’s more, we face a very McLuhanesque danger in which the medium quite literally becomes the message; all these romantic imaginings of spontaneous uprising are projected onto the technology, which consequently acquires a sort of messianic aura in the process and turns reportage into gospel. Perception management thus becomes more a bottom-up that a top-down affair purely as a consequence of situational constraints: a handful of tech-enabled eyewitnesses tweet their observations, which provokes a frenzy of re-tweets from which reporters, barred access to the scene of the action, cherry-pick with nothing to guide them but their intuitions as to the information’s reliability. The net effect is, then, that rather than offering immediacy, events like Twitter Revolutions introduce added layers of mediation, such that it is incredibly difficult to evaluate information sources. Call it crowd-sourced propaganda; it’s certainly not objective reportage.
- Prophets of social-media enhanced news reporting also tend to overlook the class element of their rosy prognostications. A trip to any library serving poor inner-city neighborhoods quickly reveals what social media’s revolutionary potential means to large portions of the citizenry. It means waiting an hour for a half-hour turn on a computer that was obsolete four years ago. This, I think, the dialectical image of the Twitter Revolution, which is really just an internecine power struggle between a monied superclass and its tech-savvy auxiliary. The former seek to preserve oligarchy; the latter to establish technocracy.

Youth-Media-Exchange-Final-Report.pdf (application/pdf Object)

www.tigweb.org/...edia-Exchange-Final-Report.pdf - Preview

research education social technology web pedagogy

26 Aug 09

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

personas.media.mit.edu - Preview

identity technology web internet art

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is
our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights
and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from
multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world,
where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods
of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.