'I don’t think in terms of technological determinism. I think in terms of human vulnerabilities: technological affordances and human vulnerabilities. The technologies of mobile connection make us some offers we can’t refuse. Connectivity technology pushes every button. There’s this new research that shows that our iPhones light up our brains in the same places that love lights up our brains. We’re wanted. Somebody wants us, somebody needs us, somebody’s calling to us, somebody remembered us. -- We’ve cornered ourselves into a communications culture, where I think we’re spending less and less time reflecting. The issue for me is reflection and spaces for reflection. Social media satisfy some needs. People feel connected. In some online places, people do feel responsibility and belonging. But in fact, people can just leave when they wish; the friended is not a friend. What I’m finding in my work is that online life can create a sense of disorientation. The speed of online friendship is so fast: you get this sense of intimacy so fast and the sense of close connection; you feel that you’re getting right to the heart of things really quickly. You’re not going through all the hard things that come with a shared life and a shared community; you have the sense of cutting to the chase. That goes on for awhile, and then somehow you don’t know what you have. You don’t know what your responsibilities are. You don’t know what you can ask for. So then people wonder, “Do I have everything; do I have nothing? What do I have?” It’s fine if you have a couple of those ambiguous relationships; everyone does. But when ambiguous relationships become more and more of your life, people become very disoriented. I have tremendous respect for the support and the connection and the fun that people have online. But I think when we decided to call these online connections “communities” and “relationships,” we chose the words we had available to us, and we confused ourselves. -- ...the point is, when we’re with people we feel as though we’re getting some kind of authenticity, and we experience ourselves as authentic. Which is why we go see people in person—we know, no matter how much they’re made up or fluffed up or prepared, we’re going to see the real something. And that’s what these kids are trying to avoid, when they only want to text, when they don’t want to have a conversation, and that’s what they’ve become exhausted by. They’ve put themselves in a world where they are performing all the time. They have organized a world where they’re always at their screen. That’s when they just kind of crack and find some way to drop out for awhile. -- I’ve studied kids and dolls – whenever I do a robot study, I do a parallel study with a doll. And everything is different with a doll. With a doll you have the psychology of projection. A child will act out with a doll what is on her mind: a little girl with a Barbie who feels guilty because she broke her mother’s china will put the Barbie in detention. Because of its passivity, because it’s inert, the doll is a projective screen for the child’s imagination, fantasies, sense of wonder, anxieties. Everything’s projected onto the doll. But a relational artifact, a sociable robot, is in a position to initiate a conversation. The robot is in a position to voice an opinion. With a robot, one is not free to project what is on one’s mind. The psychology of projection gives way to the psychology of engagement. The robot is presented as active, in place to be a new kind of best friend. Why do we need robots to do that? With every technology we need to ask if it’s serving our human purposes. What is the human need? What human purpose does it serve to have imitation people, who really aren’t people, pretending to be people? -- it’s only a collective fantasy that a robot, a machine that does not recognize your existence, can address your loneliness. In my view, this is a fantasy. We need to understand its roots. My research suggests that its roots lie in people having a sense that no one is there to listen to them. We have to acknowledge this. So many of us are lonely. But it does not follow that something that will never experience anything about human life can understand the things we want to talk about, about our lives. -- A common reaction to my book has been: “What are you complaining about? The people in your book, the elderly people who are happy with their robots, can’t tell the difference. My grandmother wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Why not give them this thing? If the machines will be so good we can’t tell the difference, what does it matter?” I think it matters very much. I think our humanity is at stake. -- It’s as though we don’t even have the word “solitude” anymore where solitude is a good thing. I have heard this formulation, how we need to “solve the problem of solitude,” not just on this one occasion. So, for example, people think of always having a device at hand as a way to solve the problem of solitude. We have a very hard time thinking of a life that does not include reaching for a device when one is alone. And I think we have an increasingly hard time even imagining that, imagining anything but loneliness. And of course, our connectivity devices give us the fantasy that we will never have to be alone. The capacity for solitude is crucial to our ability to reach out to people, not in anxiety but with a genuine ability to forge relationships. ...where we expect more from technology and less from each other; we’re treating each other as less human.'

'As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication – and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.' -- "...people can't get enough of each other, if, and only if, they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control." -- "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding – and we clean them up with technology." -- "We use conversation with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. And our flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for reflection." -- "...people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they become almost willing to dispense with people altogether." -- "Being alone feels like a problem to be solved, and so people try to solve it by 'connecting'." -- "...if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves – so we 'connect' more and more, but in the process we set ourselves up to be isolated." -- "Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious, in order to feel alive. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self."

'Lana del Rey, in other words, is a pop musician who has been manufactured as a pop musician. In that, she is no different from Beyoncé or Gaga or Madonna or any other musical act that has ever existed ever. Music is manufacturing. Music is performance. Music is spectacle. It lives and dies on its ability to combine sincerity and falsity in approximately appropriate ratios. And so, inevitably, it has introduced many an artist to the business end of the hype cycle. Lana, however, is different from her counterparts in one particular way: She found her current fame, such as it is, on YouTube. She is not a celebrity so much as she is an Internet celebrity. And, as an Internet celebrity, Lana-née-Lizzie is not just a product; she is a possession. She is, in a very real sense, ours. We, the Internet – we buzzing democracy of views and virality – created her. We have made her both what she is and more than what she is, aura and reproduction in one, a celebrity forged in the fire of 26 million YouTube views. We have, link by link, converted Lana del Rey, the person, into Lana del Rey, the meme. Which would be terrific for all involved – the singer gets her audience, the audience gets its singer – were it not for the fact that Lana del Rey is also, inconveniently, a person.'

'And so the Lana Del Rey-bashing economy moves faster than the actual Lana Del Rey economy...'

'Speedtest.net, which had 165 million unique users in 2010, is now offering a way for users to sign up, save their results, share them with friends, create shared tests, and even win badges. “People like to show off,” Suttles said, pointing to a recently popular Reddit thread where a visitor to a Korea showed off a wickedly fast connection.'

'Sherry Turkle discusses Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other' -- "People start asking simpler questions so they can get immediate answers."

'The goal of this series (other than to simply entertain) is to raise awareness about the abundance of various tangled messes in the world and to establish the humanitarian fund dedicated to eradicating this blight from the face of the Earth entirely.'

'...people are influential because they are connected to many influential people. But influence doesn’t seem directly linked to how many people you are connected to. It’s a function of being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to. So, it’s not who you know it’s where you know. It’s where you are situated in the network, and not just in the limited sense of how many immediate contacts you have. It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.'

'We scramble to keep up with the never-ending inflow of demands and commands, under the false premise that moving faster will allow us to get out from under the endless stream of pings for our attention. For answering email and responding to texts or tweets only exacerbates the problem by leading to more responses to our responses, and so on. Every answered email spawns more. The quicker we respond, the more of an expectation we create that we will respond that rapidly again. We mistake the rapid-fire stimulus of our networks for immediacy, and the moment we are actually living in for the thing that needs to catch up. -- The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discrete, yes-or-no, symbolic language. We are making choices not because we want to, but because our programs demand them. ...the more we learn to conform to the available choices, the more predictable and machinelike we become ourselves.'

'The realtime internet has turned me into an information shark. Either I keep swimming through this stream of information or I die. In a recent New York Times article, young journalists are described as frantic, fatigued, intense, pressured, strained, exhausted, burnt out and shackled to their computers. This might be an apt description of many online journalists, but it also sounds a lot like everyone I know. While journalists have to obsessively keep up with news related to their beats, my beat is the entire web. I’m frantic and fatigued by lunch. I am just another member of the web’s global newsroom.'

'Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. 100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!' -- Passive crowdsourced 'heads-up' on traffic problems. Active updates in return for reputation. (Great solution for the 'who will build the roads?' question: evidence of route demand and usage.)

'To Skype or not to Skype, that is the question. But answering it invokes a larger conundrum: how to perform triage on the communication technologies that seem to multiply like Tribbles — instant messaging, texting, cellphones, softphones, iChat, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter; how to distinguish among those that will truly enhance intimacy, and those that, though pitching greater connectedness, in fact further disconnect us from the people we love. The very technology with which we choose to communicate in a relationship has become a barometer of our willingness to reveal ourselves within it. -- Short silences that seem natural on the phone become terribly awkward on video. Suddenly I understood why slumber-party confessions always came after lights were out, why children tend to admit the juicy stuff to the back of your head while you’re driving, why psychoanalysts stay out of a patient’s sightline. There is something exquisitely intimate about the disembodied voice.'

'[Turkle] told me people are not only uninterested in Skype, we're also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. "Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that," she said. "But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control."

'In the contemporary entertainment business (and also, increasingly, in sports and in politics), it’s the business that’s the entertainment and the art of the deal that’s the art that draws most notice. We have become a society that is fixated on process and absorbed by the slippery, complex machinations of the middlemen, brokers and executives who conspire offstage to determine what takes place onstage. Call this outlook “procedural voyeurism” — a redirection of mass attention from the spectacle of the game itself to the circus of the game behind the game... the era of surplus sophistication, of ceaseless and largely needless background information about the figures surrounding the facts. Perhaps as a way of filling the infinite spaces created by the advent of cable TV and the metastasizing Internet... Procedural voyeurism grants us an illusion of control over realities that we secretly fear we have no power over...'

'...three modes of sharing and why they're different: #Sharing Goods: the hardest to do, because if you give a physical good you no longer have it, you're deprived of it. #Sharing Services: like giving helping someone across the road - you don't lose out on physical stuff but it's an inconvenience. #Sharing Information: like giving someone directions - you don't lose stuff, it doesn't take much time, no inconvenience. -- The music industry is not battling against a generation of digital criminals, it's fighting a bunch of kids doing what their parents have been telling them since they were two – sharing nicely. -- A mixtape is more valuable gift than a spotify playlist because of that embedded value, because everyone knows how much work they are, of the care you have to take, because there is only one.'

"I would argue that we're in Darwinian struggle with narrow AI, and that nature is currently selecting for bots and against humans and one reason efficiency. Rather than rising to some great complex golden age, I am concerned that human civilization might head towards a boolean age that's a constant bombardment of categorical questions that you must answer. You can't post any questions that aren't asked directly of you. When awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide almost without noticing back into superstitions and darkness." -- Suggests an encrypted, reputation-based, darknet economy.

'Another outcome of the social nervous system is that we see the shift away from privacy as an inalienable right to an individual responsibility. In a social nervous system there will be increasing pressure to be connected 24/7 to the hive mind that is Facebook, Twitter and so on. Those who do not connect, share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life.' -- ORLY? Loose lips sink ships.

'...socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting. The lesson? There’s value in obscurity. -- Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity — that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.'

'NO ONE IS IMMUNE TO THE STORMS THAT SHAKE THE WORLD -- The Internet expands the horizon of every utterance or expressive act to a potentially planetary level. This makes it impossible to imagine a purely local context or public for anything that anyone creates today. No one can be immune to the storms that shake the world today. What happens down our streets becomes as present in our lives as what happens down our modems. This makes us present in vital and existential ways to what might be happening at great distance, but it also brings with it the possibility of a disconnect with what is happening around us, or near us, if they happen not to be online. The fact that we do not know something that exists in the extant expansive commons of human knowledge can no longer intimidate us into reticence. If we do not know something, someone else does, and there are enough ways around the commons of the Internet that enable us to get to sources of the known.'

'THE POWER OF CONVERSATION -- Arguing is a basic ingredient of thinking: our way of structuring our thought would have been very different without the powerful tool of verbal exchange. So, let's acknowledge that the Internet allows us to think and write in a much more natural way than the one imposed by the written culture tradition: the dialogical dimension of our thinking is now enhanced by continuous, liquid exchanges with others. The way out of the guilty feeling of wasting our time is to commit ourselves to interesting and well articulated conversations... If it happens that what we will leave to the next generation are threads of useful and learned conversations, then [so] be it: I see this as an improvement in our way of externalizing our thinking, a much more natural way of being intelligent in a social world.'

'Reluctant to risk their lives by visiting a bank, many subscribers transferred money to each other by passing on the serial numbers of scratch cards charged with credit, like gift vouchers. Recipients simply add the credit to their account or sell it on to shops that sell the numbers at a slight discount from the original. This impromptu market has turned mobile-phone credit into a quasi-currency, undermining the traditional informal hawala banking system. -- Criminal rings are among the parallel currency’s busiest users. Kidnap gangs ask for ransom to be paid by text messages listing a hundred or more numbers of high-value phone cards. Prostitutes get regular customers to send monthly retainers to their phones, earning them the nickname “scratch-card concubines”, while corrupt government officials ask citizens for $50 in phone credit to perform minor tasks.'

'Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false. It’s my own version of “slow news”. ...the advent of 1,440 minute news cycle (should we call it the 86,400 second news cycle?), which brings with it an insatiable appetite for something new to talk about, should literally give us pause. Again and again, we’ve seen that initial assumptions can be grossly untrustworthy. ...Clay Shirky (also a friend) observed recently — in a Tweet, no less — that “fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way WAY up.”'

'The power of all things ‘NOW’ can be traced back to the eternal lure of instant gratification ...many ‘fixed’ items run the risk of becoming synonymous with boredom, hassle (Maintenance! Theft! Going out of style! Repairs!), eco-unfriendliness, and sinking a large part of one’s budget into one object (which impedes spending on multiple experiences). ...'digital' has become synonymous with 'instant'. -- Zygmunt Bauman: "...fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability." -- Raw experiences: ...‘live’ cannot be edited, controlled or censored and therefore offers the possibility of boredom-beating surprises. And surprises, excitement, controversy, scandal, realness, and rawness is exactly what many consumers are openly or secretly craving.' -- Have fists, will travel.

'At the lowest level, there is #Disconnectivity Anxiety, which I define as a persistent and unpleasant condition characterized by worry and unease caused by periods of technological disconnection from others. Some Tweeters may have devolved to the next level related to our overly connected world, #Disconnectivity Panic, which involves a frenzied and unfocused effort to get reconnected. Others may have sunk even lower to #Disconnectivity Catatonia, psychological and physical paralysis due to loss of technological connection. Though a truly scary thought, the endpoint of this continuum may be Disconnectivity Suicide, where life is just not worth living without technological connection. Though I have never heard of it happening, I will predict (sadly) that it will occur in the near future if it hasn't already.'

'...twitter is an instant window into the lives’ of people. A chance to track the distractions that are filling up people’s lives’, momentarily taking over their brains. An impact significant enough to process a lil thought/meme about it. Whether it is a human, a product, a political scandal ... or a celeb death, the twitter’s portal into a generalized human psyche is priceless. We must embrace the power of this tool. We must embrace all tools that allow us to reflect/share/digitally mourn. We are growing up, learning how to use social networks to experience life together. We are learning how to mourn, celebrate, and crucify miscellaneous celebrities. We are learning that death memes are the memes that unite us. The internet/internet meme is a coping mechanism/opportunity. While events happen in ‘reality’ our opportunity to reflect upon them in a ’sillie lil online world’ helps us to cope with how deeply rattled we are by the underlying themes of highly bloggable events.''

'"What we have designed would allow them to control a computer with their thoughts. If they imagine their muscles moving, that could flick a light switch for example. It's an area that is being heavily researched in America but so far all the tests have involved wired sensors. This prototype uses wireless technology to remove the risk of infection and that's the real drive of our work. The eventual aim would be to see these systems fully working so they are available to help patients communicate. That's the future.'''

'Technology is that which is produced by a mind — any mind: animal, machine or alien. When we created the technology of writing, we gladly extended our memory onto paper, making ourselves smarter. But in turn the alphabets we invented changed how our minds worked. Because our inventions can reach back into our brains, and essentially transform our minds into another one of our inventions, our inventions are more powerful than our minds. In this way technology can circle back into its origins, becoming its own child. Whatever progress there is in the world, is passed down generationally via the mechanism of our culture. Whatever changes that literacies ignite in the human brain must be carried forward not in our genes, but in the continuum of technium. This gives the technium incredible power. We don't quite appreciate it yet, but our child, technology, is more powerful than we its parents are.'

'...how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest? At the most abstract level, history and computation are the same thing: the evolution of systems over time. Twitter has several remarkable properties that allow us to finally leverage this correspondence in tangible ways. The simplicity of its data, the openness of its system, and its extreme time resolution make it possible for us to detect atoms of history, those moments when something is triggered and society is reconfigured ever so slightly. Simply tracking the volume of various phrases gives us a sense of what is happening on the street, literally and figuratively. But that signal is but a shadow of a far more complex and intricate reality, an interwoven web of individuals and actions. -- Disruptive events lead to information elites.'

“As soon as I saw his iPhone on the table, I felt resentful,” she says. '“He’s on Twitter, for work he says.” They’d barely got beyond their aperitif when a row started. “I refuse to have a three-way conversation. If you talk to me, I expect eye contact. Meanwhile, you are typing some meaningless observation into the ether.” -- “People feel they’re not being shown enough consideration, that they’re being excluded if their partner is spending a lot of time using phones for socialising, playing games or working. It’s the fact that these devices are so mobile that makes the problem more widespread.” -- “Sometimes it’s an almost tragic scene. The couple are on holiday with their children and dad’s eyes are are glued to a bit of electronic gadgetry. He’s present but he’s absent at the same time. The very technology that is meant to bring people together is increasingly separating us from those we need to attend to most.”'

'Today's Mail: "I won't date him if he doesn't get unlimited texting."'

'#Media Level: Media like video, music, games or pictures now create their own data trail into the real time web. For example, inside games you can retweet your score. Picture tagging and real time music tracking are other examples of media creating a real time data source. #Filtering Level: We now have a huge amount of data to process. There are many ways to filter the data. Including but not limited to rating based, location based, time based and socially based. -- ... the reactions from syndication go out to cause new data being created resulting in phenomena like hashtags, RTs and news hype - this is a type of real time feeback effect.'

'In the twittersphere, if you just take the tweetstream and put it on Fox News, people are going to be tweeting and looking at their own tweets and making assumptions on their own tweets in this divine narcissistic loop of ego destruction and id aggrandizement to the point where all information to do with self-preservation beyond the next 5 minutes is discounted as having no meaning; so all science, all religion, all philosophy, all the body of knowledge accumulated is meaningless in the twittersphere which is merely an open nerve that's being poked at by the aberant nature of individuals whose illnesses are being carried on the mainstream networks as "news".'

'Perhaps I’m too old to appreciate how “showing off” has now become “sharing.” If I made an effort to let people know what I was listening to, I would only be able to see what I was doing as trying to score points, trying to beat out whoever was paying attention by one-upping them with something cooler than what they were listening to. Maybe that kind of competition is a contemporary potlatch, but to me it just seems weird. It seems to supplant the pleasures of me in my apartment listening to the music, which should theoretically be enough, with a different and more uncertain pleasure of showing others up—I mean, sharing with them my superlative tastes. But pop culture consumption ultimately has little to do with sensual qualities and more to do with signaling, with participating in a zeitgeist, with nailing down one’s social identity for a particular moment in time. -- Poseurdom is too seductive and useful an opportunity; it lets us deploy cultural capital without risk.'

'The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break. ...on FriendFeed all the comments are aggregated on one page, and everyone participating sees it all. It’s much more likely to break out into a mob. ...it might be a good idea to slow the mob down a little until actual facts can be introduced into the conversation.' -- This slowing down is a valid point regarding realtime sentiment racing ahead of facts and wider context. #iranelection is a perfect case study. Isn't all this just a 'tragedy of the commons (attentional bandwidth)' problem?

'SurveillanceShaker brings more than 1000 CCTV cameras on the iPhone. It becomes an addictive live soap opera when watching places around the earth in real time and guessing what will happen next. You’ll see live images of streets and buildings but also surprising images of russian internet cafes, hotel lobbies, server rooms, barns with little pigs and many more. Just shake or double-tap your iPhone to switch to the next camera.' -- Awesome. Camwhores too?

'#Free 1: Simple cross-subsidy #Free 2: Ad-supported #Free 3: Freemium #Free 4: Gift economy -- #Reversible business models: In China, some doctors are paid monthly when their patients are healthy. If you are sick, it’s their fault, so you don’t have to pay that month. It’s their goal to get you healthy and keep you healthy so they can get paid. -- In Denmark, a gym offers a membership program where you pay nothing as long as you show up at least once a week. But miss a week and you have to pay full price for the month. The psychology is brilliant. When you go every week, you feel great about yourself and the gym. But eventually you’ll get busy and miss a week. You’ll pay, but you’ll blame yourself alone. Unlike the usual situation where you pay for a gym you’re not going to, your instinct is not to cancel your membership; instead it’s to redouble your commitment.' -- On the fallacy of consistent price elasticity: 'The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.'

"The value of Tweets right now is less the information they contain than the solidarity they promote. Twitterers are bearing witness to what's happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I'm here. You're here, too. We are present. Twitter, for all its faults, and the Internet, for all its insubstantiality, nonetheless serve as the strands of an existential telegraph. By resisting those who would censor history in real time, those flinging messages into the ether are demonstrating their freedom of speech—or, rather, their freedom to speak in spite of all efforts to the contrary. This mere gesture of freedom—the ability to connect to others and confirm one's experience of the world—is what social networking is all about. While this may or may not be enough right now to topple an unjust government, the opposition, in demonstrating that this freedom is now a permanent right, has already claimed victory." -- The network is flowing.

"...the human brain evolved to very quickly recognize and empathize with physical pain and fear in others, but is much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain, or to acknowledge and celebrate virtue or skill. What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration. This is especially problematic with regards to compassion, as we may find ourselves building insufficient bonds of empathy, critical to communities undergoing stress (and we're seeing a lot of stressed-out communities right now!). ...rapid-fire messaging overwhelms the brain's capacity to see consequences. ...there's a point where an insufficient amount of attention given to a potentially moving encounter means that little or no empathy--compassion or admiration--will result. And while paying attention to another person is important, offering empathy is much more critical."

'Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you. ...scenius is nurtured by several factors: #Mutual appreciation: Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure. #Rapid exchange of tools and techniques: As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility. #Network effects of success: When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success. #Local tolerance for the novelties: The local "outside" does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.' -- Group flow

"What if the reason no one's figured out why Twitter matters is that it's bigger, in fact, than anyone's imagining? ...by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation. It's not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven't always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It's just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life. And that may be all the point that Twitter needs."

"As the commodification of values make things generalized and more substitutable for each other, the complex web of social relations that at one point measured meaning and value are substituted by a system that while complex in its own way, undeniably simplifies the meaning of many exchanges... In this context -- an important one for understanding the experience of modernity that's linked to efforts to promote literacy, analytic reasoning, and progressive eye exercises, I cannot help thinking about what is traded for the ability to generalize bears. What sorts of metaphors of understanding are embedded in our preconcieved senses of space? When we seek the ability to 'to look back and see patterns of space construction from a newly alienated vantage-point,' or to seek 'a deeper understanding of the subject space by clearing away mental debris, or to understand better how that debris is constructed in the first place,' what does this cost us?" -- An eye for an ear (McLuhan)

"In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired." -- What hath God wrought!

"Electricity isn’t an energy source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so. ...information does not exist without a physical substrate, and if the physical substrate goes, so does the information. ...that substrate is the global network of communications links and server farms, and the even vaster economic and technical infrastructure that keeps them funded, powered, and supplied with the trained personnel and spare parts that keep them running. It’s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy... The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end... The waning of the internet will pose an additional challenge to the future, because – like other new technologies – it is in the process of displacing older technologies that provided the same services on a more sustainable basis."

"Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so."

Deep Science: Simulation : Measurement : Hypothesis

'The scene takes a new direction as the parties move from inner city clubs and warehouses to the countryside. The location of these events was a closelly guarded secret up untill an hour or so before the start. Meeting points would be made available through flyers and pirate radio stations. Mobile phones were still widley regarded as Yuppy toys but thanks to BT's messaging service they became an ideal way to co-ordinate people to different meeting points (Motorway service stations usually) and eventually the venue itself. It generally turned into a game of "follow the car in front" untill you find a party. By keeping the venue secret like this they could get everyone on the move heading for the party or in the wrong direction if needed. The Police have no option but to follow. So the end effect is that 1000's of people can decend on one location in a matter of minutes. Once a party goes past a certain size there is, in reality, very little the Police can do."

'Robert Bornstein talks about "dual dependency": the desire to have portable technologies nearby all the time and the desire to have other people always reachable at a moment's notice. Several people told me that they felt naked without their cell phones on them at all times and that they sleep with their computers or cell phones in their beds with them! Many more keep the devices not too far away at night and feel uncomfortable and agitated when physically separated from them or when they must be turned off.' -- 'Kate Fox says that portable technologies help us restore the kind of continuous communication with our 'tribes' that was common in pre-industrial days. It is alienating to be physically separated from our friends and family, she argues. Cell phones reduce that alienation by restoring a kind of pre-modern sense of community in which people were in frequent, almost constant, contact. They return us, she says, to "the more natural and humane patterns of pre-industrial society."'

In a "networked, participation based economy: #Network value would describe the access that an individual or organization has to new ideas and opportunities. #Brand value would describe reputation. #Social value would measure influence. #Knowledge would be measured through the number and quality of ideas and, finally, #Meaning measured through engagement. -- The measurable units of currency for networks might be #connections... For brand, reputation would be measured through #ratings... The influence generated through social value might be measured by tracking #conversations... identifying a universal measure for meaning might well be the most difficult... Somehow the stickiness of our experiences ought to be measurable and be an indication of how important to us any given experience might be [#engagement] -- Are these the right things to measure in an economy based on participation--and could their measurement result in some kind of sustainable system of growth and wealth creation?"

"Sure, the two services overlap. Groups of friends do share on Twitter, but the service makes even more sense as a tool for reaching people you do not actually know. There is a reason why celebrities like Twitter. It allows them to reach fans with little expectation they will actually interact with them. Facebook, meanwhile, demands interaction. Twitter's length restriction, doubtless part of its genius, also makes it better suited for announcements than conversation. Facebook, by comparison, is a two-way street. I have had long discussions on Facebook that eventually involved perhaps a dozen people, each of whom could easily read all the others' sometimes lengthy comments. Maybe there is a way to do this on Twitter, but I have not found it." -- Like chance encounters in the street, exchanging 'catch-ups', then moving on to the pub for a proper 'conversation'. Shifting into different 'performance' space-places is half the fun.

'.. the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation – they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are ...their reality arrives without a filter. -- "Adults can follow directions and focus, and that's great," says John Colombo, a psychologist at the University of Kansas. "But children, it turns out, are much better at picking up on all the extraneous stuff that's going on. And this makes sense: If you don't know how the world works, then how do you know what to focus on? You should try to take everything in."' -- On purposefully reducing activity in the brain's prefrontal cortex: 'Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."' -- Life in widescreen with fat pipes

'"BBS: The Documentary" by Jason Scott, a mini-series of 8 episodes about the history of the BBS'

"What makes Twitter a revolutionary communications tool is how it combines seemingly elemental aspects of digital conversation: #Place: Mobile & Web Based, #Time: Real-time & Archived, #Access: Public & Private, #Network: Open & Invite-only" -- Twitter as protocol

"Twitlonger is a way to let you post to Twitter when 140 characters just isn't enough. With Twitlonger, you can write what you need and a link to what you said will automatically be posted to your Twitter account. It's like twitpic for text."

"The manipulation, storage, and processing of information is a central theme of life. Learning erupts over and over again in the history of evolution, as if it were a force waiting to be released.Up and down the six kingdoms of life, minds have evolved many times. So many times, in fact, that minds seem inevitable. Yet, as inordinately fond as nature is of minds, the technium, or the seventh kingdom of life, is even more so. The technium is biased to birth minds. All the inventions we have constructed to assist our own minds – our many storage devices, signal processing, flows of information, and distributed communication networks, – all these are also the essential ingredients for producing new minds. And so new minds spawn in the technium in inordinate degrees. Technology is anything a mind makes. Built by minds, the technium is primed to make more minds. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too."

"Viewer Voices: The Onion News Network's Brandon Armstrong responds to viewers' emails, texts, and chats--no matter how inane."

'“Poor folk love their cellphones!” [Bruce Sterling] said. “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.' -- “I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an­other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”'

'Twitter, it has become clear, was "never about what you’re doing for breakfast," as Steve Gillmor writes. It was about creating "the realtime universal message bus." It was, in other words, about building an electronic conduit, a "bus," through which the people on the network - the human nodes - can efficiently exchange what have come to be called "status updates." The use of engineering terms to describe social relations is both apt and necessary. The social network is a computer network, a platform for programming in which man and machine enter a symbiotic, or cybernetic, relationship.'

'.... a popular form of complimentary currency has grown up around cell-phone minutes. Today Kenyans use a service called M-PESA that helps people swap mobile-phone minutes as cash— you can literally pay for something at the store by transferring mobile minutes to the clerk's phone. Today the M-PESA is used for $10 million worth of trades a day, a figure that translates out to $3.6 billion a year, or about 10 percent of the Kenyan GDP.' -- Damn that's smart. Communications-backed currency.

'According to Dr. Hallowell, there are many overlapping reasons we all fall into the trap of being overly busy. A few are: #It is so easy with cellphones and BlackBerrys a touch away. #It is a kind of high. #It is a status symbol. #We’re afraid we’ll be left out if we slow down. #We avoid dealing with life’s really big issues — death, global warming, AIDS, terrorism — by running from task to task. #We do not know how not to be busy. -- Not only are we constantly occupied, but we, as Americans, are also famous for not knowing how to be unoccupied. “You can feel like a tin can surrounded by a circle of a hundred powerful magnets,” he writes. “Many people are excessively busy because they allow themselves to respond to every magnet: tracking too much data, processing too much information, answering to too many people, taking on too many tasks — all in the sense that this is the way they must live in order to keep up and stay in control. But it’s the magnets that have the control.”'

'PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms — or at least a modicum of their privacy. But Facebook at almost 200 million members is a force that reinvents and tears at such boundaries. Teachers are yoked together with students, parents with their children, employers with their employees. Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” — the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity. Facebook is trying to teach members to use privacy settings to manage their network so they can speak discreetly only to certain friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. But most Facebook users haven’t taken advantage of the privacy settings; the company estimates that only 20 percent of its members use them.'

Quotes Baudrillard's The Vital Illusion: "#Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social. #Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true. #Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present. #Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real. #Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex … Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event." -- Carr: "What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them."

Adam Greenfield: 'It will be "live feeds from massively distributed embedded sensor networks, extraordinarily complex real-time data visualizations, fully social augmented-reality overlays...” We all will be "minutely and intimately aware of every Indian woman maimed by a spurned suitor in an acid attack, every Iranian kid stoned to death for having the temerity to be born gay, every destroyed textbook in the trashed cafeteria of an abandoned Detroit high school." Unfortunately for us, quoting the Buddha, "awareness is suffering."' -- Jamais Cascio calls the unlimited-bandwidth future the "participatory panopticon," and describes a world where many will broadcast every move of their lives. Everything will be its own broadcast station, its own TV channel: Each subway train, each building, every lamp will be linked in, updating status reports and even live video to the net. The world will be defined by a cacophony of narrow-cast information, all of it begging for attention and analysis.'

'There are different abstraction layers at which you can experience the world and one of them is through the instrumentation of it. It is in some ways the inverse of the surveillance society. Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world. And it allows you have more agency. When people know a lot about you it takes away your agency.' -- 'Being able to understand what is going on the world – How much RFI is there right now where I am standing? What frequencies is it running on? What are the aggregate histograms? Tell me about it. Are people looking at the web around here, or talking on their phones, or sending SMS? Am I in a spot where the thermal signature of lots of people is high or low? What was it like ten minutes ago? Is this typical or atypical of the characteristic histogram of thermal and electromagnetic energy in this space for this time, year on year, day on day, and hour on hour?'

'... the improving raw numbers of cultural consumption matter mainly to entrepreneurs in the culture industries. Consumers care more about what their cultural consumption signifies. The new emphasis on the quantity of culture consumed and the signals it can be deployed to send has led to the development of a widespread collector’s mentality toward culture: Quote: George Balgobin: 'Facebook is devoted to cataloguing this cultural rebirth. Here people curate their personas and project them at the world. Characteristic of the younger generations, the mood strains for the eclectic while feigning nonchalance. The alchemist arranges lists in search of gold... Status updates remind you that a friend has just returned from an “HD Mozart Opera” while another is “getting into Herzog films”. This is an achievement panopticon; the participants are its prisoners.' -- The key question ends up being whether we believe that performing our appreciation of something means we don’t really appreciate it.'

On services that... 'attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. ...a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can “unite” us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services [that] meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. ...nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value.'

"Is email a distraction? SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web. Once started, it can not be undone by the application or by restarting the computer – you must wait for the timer to run out." -- From the maker of Freedom

Where did the wonder go?

"Only when huge digital throngs of people spontaneously arrived to crack open that information loop and add themselves as nodes on online social networks was Wiener's cybernetic vision fully realised. As armies of human nodes queued up to send and receive a constant stream of messages from their electronic ties, they unknowingly become the infrastructure and the backbone of a new kind of network or continuous information loop. Where this constant cycle of messaging and feedback has left us, I argue, is a place called Cyburbia. Cybernetics has brought us a long way, but now that its global information loop is fully built, it is in danger of leaving us lost and directionless. Now we need to spend some time thinking about the message - what it does to us to have the new communication technologies around, and how artists, culture-makers and everyone else might harness that new sensibility and turn it to their own advantage." -- (h8 cheap McLuhan derivatives ><)

'Just glad that in 2k9 ‘pix of urself’ are gonna be on the outsies, and ‘pix of urself lost in a large group of people’ will represent a sort of self-awareness of ur place in the world. U want ppl 2 know where u r, and that ur a part of something bigger than urself. Showcasing urself is for a lookbooker/myspacer, and u just need 2 kind of grow up if ur avatar/userpic has less than 10 ppl in ur photo.'

'Josh’s experiments in 2000, during which he and his cohorts became obsessed with their view counts, parallels today’s blogging, social media and YouTube “arms race.” In his experiment, the technology robbed the subjects–and their audience–of every last ounce of empathy. Digital communications is a wonderful thing–at least at the start. Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. But that’s only part of the breakdown. Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person. Harris’ Law took effect last year when Abraham Biggs killed himself in front of a live webcam audience on life-streaming service JustinTV. The audience’s role? They encouraged him to do it.'

"Solitude has been transformed into loneliness by the prevalence of tools that make it possible for us always to be connected. The tools assume an always-on status, so we do too, whether or not we need to. Because you can text your whereabouts at all times to your friends, you should do so. Because people can be contact you always, when they aren’t, it can begin to feel like a slight. Something about knowing people out there on line could be paying attention to what we are doing can bring out the borderline personality in all of us. The immediacy of the new medium for friendship sets friendship up on a customer service model, on which we are encouraged to expect immediate satisfaction on our own terms, since we are paying with that newly scarce currency, our attention. This commercial reciprocity threatens to preclude the possibility of the gratuitous reciprocity of friendship. The customer is always right, but the customer is always alone."

"...it’s difficult for a media consumer to care enough about any one thing to stick with it—and for a network trying to build allegiance to a brand, convincing anyone that what you’re showing matters becomes almost impossible. The only thing network television can uniquely offer us non-digitally-optimized saps and dipshits is the promise of immediacy. Leno’s content—like that of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the breakout stars of the past few years—is news-driven, hypertimely, and ultimately disposable, insofar as it loses almost all its value within 24 hours. ...viewers will (I think, and hope) happily continue to pay for quality. Those who don’t will get what they don’t pay for." -- The book was better.

'Bad late 80s early 90s CBC video about the growning phenomina of "Internet"' -- Never gonna happen

'... it's imperative that brands and their agencies do two things: #1. They become remarkably adept at understanding the cultural conversation in real-time #2. They change their process so they can respond to appropriately to the conversation. This means shrinking the planning process from weeks down to hours.' -- Hark, the future of the agency is 4chan.

"I have now spent two days with Twitter, and I have decided that it is basically guild chat in Internet-the-MMO. It’s a form of /grouptell, and we’re all out slaying bookmarks instead of orcs. Perhaps a recipe for the next big viral technologies on the Internet is go through the various basic things that were present in muds, and figure out the HTTP-based versions of them that people would want in the sidebars of their browsers.

Maggie Jackson: "We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli. Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals. This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. When you're scattered and diffuse, you're less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking. ...stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering." -- *gulps*

"Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all... (Newspeak Dictionary)" -- "You can't say anything complicated or nuanced in 140 characters. ...try explaining Plato's cave in those confines. Can't be done. You might allude to it, but you could not present it to someone who didn't know about it already. And Twitter encourages people to accept a medium that severely constrains communication, and calls a defect a virtue. Twitter feeds [the multi-tasking] addiction, that false sense of urgency. Most things can wait. Indeed, a lot of things are better off waiting. But we are encouraged to be plugged in, overstimulated all the time, at the expense of higher quality human relations."

"Twitter, which emulates some of the salient features of Newspeak, is of course perfect for advertising—if you have to stop to think about what’s being said, the persuasion has probably failed. But the most insidious aspect of it is how it encourages us to speak in slogans and catchphrases, to eschew logical exposition of our thoughts for a quick, allusive declaration. Twitter is supposed to facilitate our relationships by providing “ambient awareness” of the lives of others, but it seems more a way of persuading us to provide a constant stream of information about ourselves to those sureveilling us. In a sense, it ceases to be communication in any conventional sense; instead it reduces communication to the bleeps of a homing beacon. Twitter is a way to become one’s own voluntary RFID tag." -- Information vs Communication. Message vs Massage.

"... you can't have insiders unless you have outsiders. All tribes have outsiders. That's what makes them a tribe. If everyone is a member, it's not a tribe anymore..." -- "... leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they're the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. It's not for you to somehow beam your message to strangers and convert them, because you can't convert strangers anymore."

"Despite their differences, psychoanalysis and AI have always shared theoretical affinities –among these, the challenge to the idea of the autonomous, intentional actor, the need for self-reference in theory building, and the need for objects such as censors to deal with internal conflict. The strength and the weakness of object theories are the same in both psychoanalysis and AI: the strength is a conceptual framework that offers rich possibilities for models of interactive process; the weakness is that the framework may be too rich. The postulated object may be too powerful: they explain the mind by postulating many minds within it."