January 2012
2 posts
4 tags
“Somebody like Coke decides to create content like a network does or like Netflix...”
– Every brand will be a studio. ReelSEO.com
Not that this insight is in itself particularly new - brands have often had their fingers in the entertainment pie, supporting rather than advertising - viz. The Colgate Comedy Hour. Sort of, a step to the side of integrated branding. It’s not the...
3 tags
December 2011
3 posts
6 tags
“The newspaper article is still idealized as a ‘final document’ – onto which...”
– But it’s a “final text” that - on the online versions of newspapers, at least - is being revised, but furtively. How can “comments” move beyond annotation or intrusion? Do they need to be a formalised part of the text - surely the future envisioned by this thought is...
“The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the...”
– Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”
I’ve read this passage so many times in the last few days that I’ve basically committed it to memory. This is as close as I’ll ever get to saying that reading Foucault feels like a giant philosophical hug. But there is hope in this essay.
(via modernandmaterialthings)
Watchthoughtyoushouldseethis:
So you know how I keep banging on about how designers have the potential to create a present (or future) that mere mortals can’t imagine? And then I generally grumpily add that it’s a shame the visions of the future are pretty lame? Well, today, perusing links over my breakfast, I near enough dropped my piece of toast after coming across this truly lovely installation...
November 2011
3 posts
6 tags
“Contrary to some of the rioters’ intentions, even the political grotesque of...”
– Ping me baby*: Digital pathology and the London riots by Nadim Samma.
(via hautepop)
Welcome to our own Gibsonian future. Does reclaiming the looter into a marketing narrative of “authenticity” (smashing a window for JB Sportswear as the last true & unmanufactured desire?) mean...
3 tags
October 2011
5 posts
3 tags
“The Social TV Trends Report, which questioned 2,025 internet users aged 18 and...”
– So for 76% of viewers (though possibly more) the television is the locus of secondary attention, or split attention. The watercooler moment is folded within the time of broadcast, watching as well as the performance of watching.
When it works, your broadcast is aware of it - entertainment shows...
culturalbytes - Tricia Wang: Design Research: A... →
culturalbytes:
For a long time, I’ve wanted to understand how ethnographically driven research is different from market research. While I intuitively understood the differences between the two, I didn’t take the time to fully sort it out.
I finally found someone who not only clearly explains the…
7 tags
“YouTube has been working hard on getting users to watch its videos on TV. For...”
– Twice as much content on TV rather than a desktop - holy hells, behaviouralism needs to get out of its transmedia ghetto and get right back in the boardrooms of broadcasters. How and where people watch clearly and elegantly relates to how much they watch. Is it still television if you’re...
“4SquareAnd7YearsAgo. The service plugs into your Foursquare “check-ins”—those...”
– Clive Thompson on Memory Engineering - this is fantastic - not just a scrolling vista or diary of your past (digital) life but rather, the equivalent of a particular smell jostling a long-forgotten memory for the digital age. Nostalgia is a powerful drug.
Later on the article describes a new Amazon...
September 2011
6 posts
3 tags
“The game’s perversity is what makes it provocative: we expect to have fun...”
– Article about a videogame inspired by Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” - games don’t have to be fun (and often aren’t, grinding in WoW is not fun but it is rewarding in other ways…) And here: what if the aim of a game is to introduce panic rather than...
5 tags
“On the day I stopped by his office, Schalk hit a button on his computer, and...”
– From “The Cyborg in Us All”
It’s worth noting that the use of an iPhone or any other smartphone makes you as much of a cyborg as a having prosthetic limb, a subtle point that this article seems gloss over. Nevertheless, an interesting read overall.
(via modernandmaterialthings)
“The algorithm that team developed for the five-year-old social network for...”
– Goodreads new recommendation system - it’s not just what you do but why. (We don’t just “like”, relevance isn’t strictly & solely about pure “enjoyment”)
4 tags
3 tags
“The list divides all animals into one of 14 categories
* Those that belong to...”
– Thinking about ontologies + playfulness, it was inevitable that my mind wandered in the direction of Borges - and in particular his rather apocryphal and pleasurably parodic taxonomy from the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. There is a sense of fun in Borges’s classification that...
“Storytellers must uncover ways to be replaceable.”
– Blair Miller, “The Next Phase of Storytelling”
June 2011
1 post
April 2011
1 post
3 tags
March 2011
14 posts
2 tags
“The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that...”
– An eyewitness report from the four Times journalists who were captured by Libyan army forces and released recently via Turkish authorities. The piece is disturbing and personal, all the more so because of the elisions and silences (they still have no word of their driver Mohammed, presumed missing...
3 tags
“Amor: Facebook right now is bringing us to a big paralyzed state, as there is...”
– From an interview with two Egyptian activists who each used the tools of social media in the recent Meidan Tahrir protests. Interesting that Amor Eletrebi - who participated in a facebook group that became emblematic after a NYT profile - hits upon a couple of big issues in the digital world today...
4 tags
4 tags
subjectivity in games
Playing Bioware’s Dragon Age II has sparked off lots of thoughts about subjectivity in games. I think it’s not a spoiler to say that you - Hawke - are an immigrant in a new city, part of a wave of refugees fleeing from a wartorn country. What’s interesting to me is that your immigrant status is constantly brought up in the game, in the way people react to you - as you pass by...
2 tags
“Every day, users spend 200 million minutes - 16 years every hour - playing the...”
– Wired on Angry Birds
Previously: FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1.
(via maxistentialist)
“Yes, online petitions and “like” buttons do not work to bring about social...”
– The Atlantic | Delusions Aside, the Net’s Potential Is Real
Brilliant response from Zeynep Tufekci to @evgenymorozov’s The Net Delusion. It’s particularly relevant in the UK given the recent student and #UKuncut protests. In a situation where the coalition lacks a coherent mandate and writing to...
4 tags
February 2011
10 posts
“The emphasis on standardized testing […] has forced teachers to spend more of...”
– The Case for Play – important new research from Columbia University and MIT. Essential companion read, out this season: A New Culture of Learning. (via curiositycounts)
5 tags
WatchThe City Never Sleeps - Achim Kern & Marc C. Woehr - using a projector to augment art, specifically graffiti. This is a beautiful example of two artists bringing together their different media, allowing the underlying image to change with time. “Painting light”.
4 tags
“Why did we allow our economies, our jobs, our society, to be founded upon wealth...”
– Jon Snow on the moral responsibility of the socially-networked protest movement - if we regard ourselves as participants (including behaviours such as retweeting, commenting, sharing, thinking, reblogging) then surely we have responsibilities. Social networks blur the line between “them”...
3 tags
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“If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global...”
– The New Yorker’s Alan Gopnik summarising the views of one faction of technofuturist commentators, the Never-Betters who argue for their position from a psychological rather than sociological perspective - sort of McLuhan taken to an extreme, internalised, the medium is the message & we are...
1 tag
WatchTV shows captured in miniaturised moments, really rather fun & clever- especially if you’re something of a television nerd.
2 tags
“[…] game criticism is a form of travel writing, a series of dispatches...”
– Nicely discursive, pleasurably rambling article by Kirk Hamilton from Paste Magazine, well worth a read.
1 tag
“It’s also important to remember that half of all players are below average, and...”
– Edge Magazine’s “Game Designer’s Pet Hates” article - makes a thoroughly important point - not everyone can play on Legendary. Not everyone wants to. Games must be pleasurable to players who are below average, to players who fail, as well. We’re half of your audience,...
3 tags
“But if protests on 25 January took place in the context of a veritable flood of...”
– Nice article which smartly distinguishes the use and value of twitter/social media in the Egypt protests with the necessity of twitter to the protest. Very relevant to thinking about protests in general, I think, outside the Egyptian context - and to the growing notion of “twitter...
January 2011
14 posts
2 tags
“This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground...”
– Today I’ve been thinking a lot about work - one of the things we’re currently doing is working quite a bit with web ontologies and linked data, ways of describing content in a machine-readable, linked and open manner. Moving towards the idea of the semantic web has many consequences...
1 tag
“Eliciting an emotional response from the player is a large part of the fun for...”
– RPS interview with creator of The Dream Machine, a hand-crafted point-and-click adventure game - absolutely spot on. There’s nothing wrong with fear-and-adrenaline, but the desire to experience this over and over (or elicit this reponse over-and-over) is lazy. We’ve found one button and...
1 tag
“We are born falling. We are conceived in the heavens and die in your sewers....”
– Internal Memo: Snow from the Observer, via @cdennaoui
3 tags
“That the brain is capable of such radical adaptation raises deep questions. To...”
– Wonderful opinion piece by Oliver Sacks about “neuroplasticity” - the ability for the brain to adapt and form new pathways. Often described after an incident of trauma, he points out, quite rightly, that the brain’s ability to adapt can therefore be harnessed all through life -...