My friend and fellow anthropological fieldworker, Geraldine, is currently doing her graduate fieldwork in Toronto, studying how young Canadians use mobile phones to manage social relations and the culture that arise around that piece of technology. After having some initial trouble getting access to the field (some bureaucracy and permit-juggling had to be negotiated), she’s [...]
Delivery of the Economist seem to be spotty at best around here, so it wasn’t until today that I got my hands on last week’s issue with its survey of new media. It considers, in some detail, the possible consequences of everybody having a medium of expression through blogs like this one. Participatory media that [...]
Apparently, what used to be known as Ubiquitous Computing, as defined by the late Mark Weiser, has hit a major semantic blizzard. The technology to make Ubiquitous Computing happen is finally getting somewhere, with RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) chips that look set to replace barcodes, and generally make objects carry information in a completely new [...]
I never really took time to read up on this talk of the Web 2.0, but now there’s an article celebrating the new wonderful things made possible with the AJAX scripting and all the other stuff that makes it so new and exciting. I haven’t actually used any of the sites they list in the [...]
Thanks to Front Bumper for providing a good selection of reactions from the Syrian blogosphere. They go a far to show how the Mohammed drawings are being used in the internal politics of Syria.
I guess it was just a matter of time before the growing field of ludology began using games themselves as a way to explore its boundaries. Finnish ludologist Aki Järvinen has made a game about games which he obviously had to call Game Game. He says that it is the same kind of meta-referential use [...]
The Internet is full of self-referential folk-lore, stories and jokes on how people have found in the Internet a whole new way of expressing themselves. Or, at least, expressing their frustration at not being able to work their computers as they would have liked to. There are anecdotes from the frontlines of tech support, struggling [...]
Had my Digital Rhetorics presentation and exam yesterday with the rest of the group. We each did a presentation on the YourStories project which we had developed as common project. The YourStories is meant to be a collective Mystory – an OurStory – a development of the term introduced by Internet theorist Greg Ulmer. It [...]
While I was in Manchester, I was surprised at how stunted and illegible the local students’ mobile phone text messages usually were. Every text message is limited to 160 characters or spaces, and if you exceed that, the phone company will charge you for two messages. Since the students are really cheap (except for when [...]
Today, I happened on a site which has collection of remixes of Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture. “Remix?” you say – well, yes. Lessig, a law professor, is one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Creative Commons licenses. These are simple, easy-to-use licenses that allow people to make their works accessible and [...]