Did you ever see the Matrix and wonder just how all of those green characters of weird computer code flowing across the screen corresponded to what was represented on the screen inside the matrix?
Well, today I came across a tool on the BERG blog, which shows this correlation very well with real computer [...]
Posts under ‘New Media’
Visualising computer memory
The myth of perfection
One of the bloggers I read regularly is the American journalist Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis provides insight into the changing media landscape, and has written a book called “What Would Google Do”, which uses Google as a case in point of these changes.
One of the most interesting aspects of this is what Jarvis calls the “the [...]
Roles for the 21st century artist
Recently, I’ve been fascinated with Douglas Rushkoff, and I came across this presentation, in which he does well to sum up some of the main themes of his work. His style is earnest and passionate, and though some of his arguments are very generalized for easy consumption, he does have some very good points:
Talking to [...]
Bootstrapping complexity
So, last week I posted my remix of Kevin Kelly’s book “Out of Control”. And soon after putting the remix online, I sent a note with a link to Kevin Kelly to make him aware of the remix, hoping that he would approve.
He did approve. Much more than I expected. And it didn’t take him [...]
Dunbar’s number and Facebook
Recently, I made a brief reference to the so-called Dunbar number in relation to my list of friends on Facebook.
Since then, I’ve spent some time reading up on Dunbar’s number and the concept of friends on social networking sites, and feel the need to delve deeper into this discussion. danah boyd, one of the [...]
Teaching it
A long time ago, I wrote a post about anthropologist Michael Wesch’s concept of anti-teaching. Since then, he has been refining it even further while teaching huge “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” classes at Kansas State University. And now he’s written a very worthwhile article [.pdf] explaining the concrete teaching concepts that he has developed.
Wesch [...]
Tapping into the cognitive surplus
Last week I began a 4-week internship at Social Square, one of the leading Danish developers of social software. “Leading” can be somewhat misleading since there’s almost no dedicated developers of social software in Denmark. Actually, the founders have spent the last two years giving talks and writing a book about social software, making the [...]
Online communities work like parties
Recently, I’ve come across several blog posts using the metaphor of a good party to describe well-functioning online communities. Paraphrasing Matt Mullenweg, founder of the Wordpress project, Service Untitled sums up the metaphor thus:
Parties that are successful bring the right number of people together. Those people end up having a good time and having fun. [...]
Witty gamers
The new trend among video gamers appear to be making video game reviews in the form of bile-overflowing, yet extremely witty films.
One of these reviewers goes by the supremely unfortunate moniker “Yahtzee”, who presents a new review each week under the title Zero Punctuation, which subtly hints that the main trademark of the reviews [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
