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 [...]
Thoughts on How The Avatar Film Relates to Avatars in Virtual Worlds
The role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. Marshall McLuhan
We cannot escape subjectivity. Our perception is inherently bound by limited points of view. We are fundamentally most blind to the pervasive psychological and cultural environment in which we swim like [...]
The Danger of One Story
This great talk by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie describes how our perception of the world can be warped by the domination of stories from a single point of view. Although the ill-effects are certainly much more consequential within the physical world, the message also has great relevance for virtual world communities.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Botgirl’s Bookshelf: The Second Self – Computers and the Human Spirit
Written over 20 years ago, The Second Self by Sherry Turkle is dead-on relevant for those of us interested in exploring the social and psychological dimensions of today’s virtual worlds. It brings to life the intimate interbeing of person, society and technology. It exemplifies a research methodology that integrates immersion and inter-subjective analysis. [...]
