This is Your Brain on Social Media
(image by Emilio Garcia under Creative Commons license.)
I’m pretty convinced that the consistent and pervasive use of social media subtly shifts the mental ground of human consciousness. But as Marshall McLuhan often noted, our present environment is usually invisible. So I devoted most of yesterday’s tweets to playing around with the medium through some tongue-in-cheek [...]
Are we not 1984 Sheep? We are Brave New World Rats!
Pervasive computing is like a giant Skinner Box.
I’ve been working all week on a post about the shift from mass-media-fueled propaganda to the operant conditioning environment of pervasive social computing. It’s taking a lot longer than expected, so for now, here’s one of the images I’ve been working with as I VizThink my way through.
The spark [...]
Google Buzz Overtakes Facebook in Race to Bottom of Privacy Barrel
Google Buzz launched this week with default privacy settings that publicly disclose a user’s most frequent chat and e-mail partners. If that wasn’t bad enough, they buried opt-out settings so deeply that it takes an 11 step tutorial to find your way through the counter-intuitive maze of links leading to the required pages. You’d think the company that [...]
Mercy Killing: Self-Assisted Facebookicide Watch
Is it just me, or does it seem a bit suspicious that a site devoted to getting Second Life avatars ejected from Facebook launched about the same time Linden Lab acquired a competing Social Network? No! Of course not. I just love to kid the Lindens when the opportunity arises.
But seriously, I was added to [...]
Social Networks, Fast Food and Evolution.
Humanity has been subject to the laws of physics and the dictates of Mother Nature since the birth of the species. Evolution shaped humankind over hundreds of thousands of years to operate within the natural world. Human psychology is still embedded within brain structures that were optimized for the pre-technological past. So it makes sense [...]
A Sneek Peak at a Music Video on The Migration of Identity
Back in May of last year, I created the image below to accompany a post on “Identity Surfing Within and Between Worlds“. I’m in the process of transforming the original concept into a 3D visualization that will be used in a music video for the fourworlds song, “Revolver.” The video below is just a [...]
I Won’t Play Your Sex Games or Fight Your Fashion Wars
Although I appreciate (my imagination’s version of) the sentiment behind the barrage of Facebook invitations pictured, I have to just say no.
I’ve been lovingly referred to as Spock-like, so I realize that it’s quite possible I’m just missing some human ability to enjoy such activities. If so, I’m grateful.
Modern existence offers an endless menu of [...]
