From high tech to low tech, Scott McLoud (Understanding Comics) penned for google a fascinating comic-style tour of Chrome’s development. Damn those google guys are smart!
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Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Samsung is trying to get on the iPhone bandwagon with its F480 or “Tocco”(”touch” in Italian). Hey, why not just call it the “Taco”? It’s something you eat with your hands… Anyhow, as I argue in my book, one of the greatest distresses of media users is a lack of a sense of place. Samsung is well aware of this problem, so it offers us this alternate reality presented in its “Drag and Drop World” ad.
As an old zine publisher I often feel a tension between manipulating pixels and actually working with my hands. I prefer scissors and glue, but I’m old school. The use of traditional stop motion animation and collage to create this ad is an excellent example of “media composting,” which is to repurpose/recycle/remediate dead media into new media as a way of enriching and tapping into authenticity. The struggle of all marketing right now is to appear authentic, and of course to grab our “inattention.” Riffing on the successful HP “Personal Again” ad campaign, which has famous creative types changing the world with the wave of the hand, here Samsung shows not only how this is possible, but maybe it leads to too much information, overcrowding, and complexity.
As mentioned elsewhere, these new touch devises are remediating the body– trying to bring it back into the fold. So rather than the mouse or button pad being finger surrogates, we can manipulate the machines more directly. This also may be a step closer to direct manipulation with our minds. But as I have noticed with my infant daughter, she maps space through touch before the mind patterns it for her to design expectations of how reality should present itself. Without touch, there is nothing there.
Unfortunately the ad depicts the aspirations of a wannabe– a young male who desires the luxuries of the old industrial world: space, the mastery of nature, compliant women and material wealth with no one to intrude upon that realm. Notice how the forest scene has a bulldozer clearing forest for the new house and truck. But in typical hypocritical fashion, it’s OK for the individual to do that, but not everyone else! Which is what the ad is showing our young protagonist. He wants the wealth of the world, but only for himself. Dream on, the ad tells us, so instead construct your own virtual world in your isolated electronic reality. Your home is the hybrid world of Samsung electronics and Ikea furniture. Let your browser master the world, while you sit back and enjoy a microwave dinner with your virtual wife.
PS
You can view this user demo of the Samsung F480 on YouTube– note the difference between the speed the ad shows and its actual use, kinda like the difference between a McDonald’s Big Mac ad and the real thing.
This unboxing video demonstrates how the refined hunter gatherer can experience Christmas everyday!
Earthscape is an interesting application for the iPhone that will allow you to “geobrowse” by zooming in and out of Earth images that change perspective according to how you tilt the phone. I’m a bit fascinated by our ability to view earth via images. McLuhan observed that once we saw Earth from satellites, the planet became a work of art. Others have argued that we are simultaneously leaving our bodies and looking at ourselves from the outside, creating a curious dynamic of being and observed at the same time. Does the reduction of Earth to a 3-D photo map mean we are interacting with it more, and seeing more “truth,” or is it simply another way to conquer the territory by thingifying it as an image? It’s probably all these things are true at once, so it’s difficult to know what the consequences of these kinds of apps will be. One thing is for sure, you gotta love the new euphamisms coming out of tech, such as Earthscape’s promise that with its software you can “experience social geobrowsing.”
Via Daily Galaxy
Rising Voices published a report on successes and challenges of the OLPC XO-1, AKA the $100 Laptop. This comes from a sixth grade class blog in Uruguay.
Bloggers Desde La Infancia » Blog Archive » Analyzing the use of laptops in the first month of class:
Use of Laptop:
Weaknesses:
They freeze up and it is slow to fix them
I lose my work every time they freeze up
They are very slow
The keyboards have different layouts
The battery life finishes quickly
It continuously disconnects from the internet and I lose the connection to the web page I am reading
You can only connect at school because the wi-fi antennas don’t have much range
It lacks a Flash plug-in and so there are websites and activities that we can not see
We can not upload images to make slideshows.
It takes a long time to load images.
We are not able to see the videos on the Internet
We lose the desire to work
I see warnings online that say “these seem to take longer than usual,” which doesn’t allow us to work continuously.
We are losing a lot of time in class because of the delay.Strengths:
Free access to the internet
We can write, take pictures, record audio, film, paint, and edit images.
The text and images from the web can copied and pasted in some cases
Easy to carry.
We can work collaboratively.
Megatrends author John Naisbitt updates his thinking. It’s more surprising than you might imagine. Hint: Internet is not technological but social.
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Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.
I just spent 35 minutes watching Bruce Sterling sum up the ideas of his design manifesto, Shaping Things. Thank the Great Whatever, because Shaping Things has been sitting on my bookshelf for two years and I’ve been dying to know what it’s about. I don’t want to spoil a great talk, but suffice to say that Sterling debunks many sci-fi technological conventions (such as androids and cyberspace) as impractical, pointing out that they are better literary devices than real design solutions. Sterling calls for the creation of “spime,” a kind of sustainable hybrid object that is embedded within networks (within networks (within networks)).
(Via BoingBoing)
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Oxford University Professor Jonathan Zittrain, who wrote The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, says closed systems are destroying innovation.
How the iPhone Is Killing the Net | Free Press:
Zittrain records the same phenomenon with networks, as the open Internet surpassed proprietary networks like the telephone system, AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. For example, it took the break-up of the AT&T monopoly for third parties to create new devices such as answering machines, fax machines and dial-up modems. The Internet, on the other hand, had an open design and a philosophy of sharing and trust that fostered development from outsiders.
Zittrain argues that today’s era of generative PCs combined with a generative Internet is coming to an end. By generative, he means systems that can be leveraged to many tasks, are adaptable to a range of uses, easy to master, accessible to many and allow for changes to be easily transferred.
“The status quo is drawing to a close, confronting us — policymakers, entrepreneurs, technology providers and, most importantly, Internet and PC users — with choices we can no longer ignore,” he writes.
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If you study the history of media, you see very quickly that they always go to war against each other. Accompanying each new media technology’s adaption curve is a decline for another. So as magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and now the Internet vie for attention, each borrows and steals from each other until, as is the case with convergence media, they start to blend together. Obviously each has its strength and weakness, and in the current battlefield, the Internet seems to be outpacing newspapers very rapidly. If you are a media manager or company owner, your motto should be adapt or die.
So what will the future of magazines be? The New York Observer ponders the question and you may be surprised by the results. I’m still pretty old school, so I happen to like holding a thing– a magazine, paper or book– and not to worry about whether or not I lose or damage it. I like rolling up a magazine and sticking it in my pocket or making coffee stained rings on the paper. At the same time, I hate paying thousands of dollars to ship my library across the ocean. If only books could pay rent!
Kindle? Well, the DRM is an issue, and honestly, I cannot think of a different way of browsing a book than running my thumb down its trimmed edge to catch a page by surprise. I also have a mania of buying my own books (as opposed to borrowing or checking them out) because I am lost if I cannot underline or scribble notes in the margin. I know Kindle allows you to highlight text and to write notes, but it looks too slow for me. However, if there is a way to copy and past the highlighted text from a Kindle book into a word processor, then that would make its features more interesting (maybe it can do that– I don’t know for sure). Then there’s the cost. Geez, I really don’t want to spend a large stash of money for something that will be outdated in a year. I’m already smarting from how rapidly my iPod has become obsolete.
Anyhow, read on. If you are a media watcher, I think you’ll like the piece.
Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now? | The New York Observer:
In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.
“You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,” Mr. Carter said. “That is what I see as the future. … That I know is coming.”
“Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!” said Peter Meirs, the vice president of production technology at Time Inc.
“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”
One of Greenpeace’s most important campaigns is to push electronics companies to go green. Here is the latest report.
Samsung and Toshiba new leaders in greener electronics ranking | Greenpeace USA:
The Greener Electronics Guide is our way of getting the electronics industry to face up to the problem of e-waste. We want manufacturers to get rid of harmful chemicals in their products. We want to see an end to the stories of unprotected child laborers scavenging mountains of cast-off gadgets created by society’s gizmo-loving ways.
The Guide ranks top market leaders of the mobile phone, computer, TV and games console markets according to their policies and practices on toxic chemicals and takeback. Samsung and Toshiba share top spot with 7.7/10 closely followed by Nokia, Sony, Dell and Lenovo all on 7.3. Apple continues its steady rise due to new products like the MacBook Air with less toxic chemicals helping boost Apple to 6.7.
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Graphic via textually.org
I’ve noticed an increasing pop culture awareness that we are addicted to our networked technology gadgets– a no, duh kinda revelation– but I was quite surprised (well, not really, it was inevitable) to see it pathologized with a new term, “Disconnection Anxiety.” I think the term sums up our entire planetary situation, actually, and it began long before the Internet. You could say that a system predicated on objectifying nature and reifying existence produces the ultimate disconnect anxiety, and that’s why you see so many drug ads on TV these days. Social Distress Disorder, Disconnect Anxiety… these are just other names for alienation, or the pain we feel from becoming aliens on our own planet.
I just hope a good dose of mindfulness is in the offing instead of a handful of pills.
textually.org: 68% of Americans feel “disconnect anxiety”:
According to a recent study from Solutions Research Group, 27% of Americans feel “acute” anxiety when disconnected from the Internet or their mobiles; 68% feel some level of anxiety.
“This goes for both mobile and computer connections. More than 80% of those surveyed reported that their mobiles are always with them and always on. Nearly 40% report logging on to the Internet via their computers while in bed and more than 60% admitted to using their Blackberry’s in the washroom.
American’s are logging on for safety, work and social life and for navigation according to the report. Many users report that they feel safer when connected via mobile or computer and many say they need constant connections because of a hectic work or social life.
Photo of dead cellphones by Chris Jordan
(BTW, you must see Chris Jordan’s site for his incredible series of information photo graphics)
In interesting article about the psychology of the cellphone market. Personally, all I want it to do is make phone calls and send text messages, so I settle for the cheapest, dullest clamshell on the market and use it until it dies. LIttle did I know that there are folks out there who change phones every nine months, and teenagers are supposed to be even more finicky. Who could imagine that phones would become so fetishized.
Making next popular cellphone can be study in psychology - International Herald Tribune:
At stake are millions of dollars in profits and the fortunes of entire companies. Like fashion or entertainment, the cellphone industry is increasingly hit-driven, and new models that do not fly off the shelves within weeks of their debut are considered duds. The most gadget-conscious shoppers buy new phones every nine months, twice as fast as they did a few years ago. And teenagers, one of the fastest-growing markets, are especially quick to dump a brand if it loses popular appeal.
In the Information Age, the flow of IP (Internet Protocol) data between locations is nearly ubiquitous. Globe Encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow.
A beautiful hyperreal depiction of telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world, visualized by the art project, New York Talk Exchange (produced by MIT’s Sensible City Lab). The project wants to know: “How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?”
Truth is, like a robin attracted to shiny objects, I was magnetized by the stunning imagery. But as I look at the project’s goals, it’s not clear to me what the benefit of this visualization is other than to reinforce the notion that NYC is the communications hub of the world and that people, ho-hum, make long distance calls. But there is this little tidbit:
As Columbia University Professor Saskia Sassen, author of the book “Global Cities,” details in the NYTE project catalog, “The striking piece of evidence coming out of this project is that global talk happens both at the top of the economy and at its lower end. The vast middle layers of our society are far less global; the middle talks mostly nationally and locally.”
PS Note the sponsor (AT&T). Hmmm, makes all that spying seem like an innocent mistake.
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A robot does interpretative dance of dreaming. No kidding. Thanks Scud!
Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind — Balter 2008 (128): 2 — ScienceNOW:
Don’t take that hammer for granted. Using tools may seem like second nature, but only a few animals can master the coordination and mental sophistication required. So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain’s trick is to treat tools as just another body part.
Today must be science day. Here is some evidence to suggest that in order for us to use a tool, our mind has to map it as an extension of our body, verifying McLuhan’s maxim that media are extensions of our nervous system.
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The real reason the Powerbook is shedding pounds. (via WillVideoforFood)
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