katarina peovic's List: Technology

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• an idea stemming from the walls of Yale University
• Lifestreaming, an idea stemming from the walls of Yale University
• the idea was conceptualized and developed by Yale student Eric Freeman under the direction of Professor David Gelernter.
• Originally, it was conceived as a network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor and inspired by the desire to organize one’s electronic life.
• Later, the lifestreaming notion evolved and transformed into a social media reality
• Facebook uses a lifestreaming approach in its new version, displaying all kinds of relevant activity going on in your circle
• lifestreaming applications
• FriendFeed, a hot lifestreaming start-up, offers an application that enables users to be on top of all their sharing activities.
• Conceptualized as a moblogging (mobile blogging) tool, Jaiku is more restrictive on the character number limit than Twitter
• Organizations are not foreign to the idea of streaming data. But the “suits” call it dashboards
• In the enterprise situation, there is just too much data to be organized into widgets and dashboards.

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• On the other hand, open source's argument that openness leads to better software or a better software development methodology can be measured, tested, and declared right or wrong.
• I was using FLOSS in the early 1990s when GNU/Linux was indisputably less featureful and buggier than its proprietary competitors.
• Do people really spend their weekends helping annoying new people install free software because it has a more efficient development methodology
• he reason that hundreds of thousands have spent their time assisting FLOSS efforts has less to do with a passion for efficiency and more to do with a set of implicit principles.

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• In mainstream media, in most cases a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly but in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer

• Hindu Indian

• • Nisu li svi transhumanisti tako fiziološki tipovi (kurtzweilov nos)?
• Do you plan to live 150 years and beyond

  • Kako je uvijek ova misao povezana uz apolitičnost?
• Are you familiar with nanotechnology, genetic engineering, uploads,
• Are you actively seeking ways to enhance your intelligence and creativity
• Are you open to new concepts in sex
• Are you an Upwinger - neither right wing nor left?

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• The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism
• When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution
• student protests rocked Tehran
• the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations.
• Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
• ames K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook
• Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0.
• digital evangelism’s critics,
• Moldova
• very few Twitter accounts exist.
• n the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.
• we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
• This pattern shows up again and again
• study of the Red Brigades,
• seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization
• Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous
• re, at core, strong-tie phenomena
• the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
• The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have me
• But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.
• The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change
• entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia
• Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends
• The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960
• But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation
• Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice

  • Nije li to Zizekova laksativ cokolada, starbucks coffe...
• Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody
• hirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age
• Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade.
• But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections

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• The model of medium theory, proposing that the most significant cultural and social effects of media derive from the intrinsic properties of the media themselves, has historically been viewed with suspicion within studies of media and technology, especially on the critical Left
• enounced the technological determinism inherent in medium theory,
• However, the impact of digital information and networking provokes a reconsideration of the model of medium theory
• require a theoretical model more attentive to the intrinsic properties of technologies
• propose a theoretical model concerned both with the social-economic context of new media technologies and with the properties of those technologies themselves.
• it is necessary to summarise the characteristics of the model of medium theory.
• In 1882, Nietszche wrote of the typewriter: ‘Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts’ (Kittler 1990: 195)
• Around 370 BC, Plato warned in the Phaedrus that writing was the debasement of memory, the degradation of thought
• McLuhan’s sweeping generalisations a
• Raymond Williams' critique of McLuhan:
• doctrine of progress – ‘we have no choice’
• The social shaping of technology’ – analysed in detail by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1988 and 1999) and other theorists of technology
• Leila Green in her book Technoculture (2002).
• Brian Winston in Media Technology and Society approaches media history from a cultural materialist perspective:
• Dennis McQuail’s
• McLuhan, as we would expect, treats the social determinist perspective with open contempt.
• e numb stance of the technological idiot’ (1974: 26). O
• Yet a difficulty remains with the various attempts of medium theorists to avoid the charge of technological determinism. Even a moderate-strength version allows for a ‘pre-condition’ for cultural change created by a new medium
• Pierre Levy, in his otherwise freewheeling and utopian work on virtual technologies, sounds a note of critical caution in distinguishing '...causal or determining actions from those that prepare the way for or make something possible. Technologies don't determine, they lay the groundwork' (1998: 128).
• This cautionary note, however, is swept aside in the prophetic rush of Levy's writings,
• he point I want to make is this: perhaps we should not be so afraid of technological determinism.
• Edison did not realise the commercial potential of recorded music
• nineteenth century, the high age of literacy
• Everything was defined in terms of writing,
• Williams – that social need shapes technological invention.
• The phonograph did not initially answer a pressing social need: there was no pressing societal demand for the reproduction of audio and music
• the internet: the intended applications of the technology are quickly usurped by unintended uses, as voiced in the cyberpunk maxim,  ‘the street finds its own use for things.’
• he emphasis on social factors becomes as reductive as McLuhanite technological determinism
• Bruno Latour observes, a polemical ‘social determinism’ arguing, for example, that the steam engine was the ‘mere reflection’ of ‘English capitalism’, is no less extreme and one-sided a view as the technological determinism it seeks to contest (2005: 84).

  • !
• A more thoroughly elaborated theoretical model is Actor-Network Theory (ANT), developed by Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and John Law in the 1980s.
• bestowal of agency on non-human actors within a network or system
• echnology exists ‘in networks of things, actors, actants, institutions, investments, and relationships
• symmetry’ in the treatment of human and non-human actors
• atour responded to many of the criticisms in an extended essay available a
• Reassembling the Social (2005).
• echnologies are considered ‘actors’ within particular networks, along with human agents.
• objects too have agency’ (63):

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• The kids I celebrated in my early books as "digital natives" capable of seeing through all efforts of big media and marketing have actually proven *less* capable of discerning the integrity of the sources they read and the intentions of the programs they use.