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MoMA | Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language | Dial-a-Poem
moma culture poetry installation-art communication language telephone
2 days ago by danburzo

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[1204.2677] The Geographic Flow of Music
__toread music culture dissemination
5 weeks ago by danburzo

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Imperfect Sound Forever [Stylus Magazine]

"I’m pretty anal about sound, and I’m prepared to admit it. I’m not a super-duper audiophile (I can’t afford to be), but I have spent hundreds thousands of pounds over the years on stereos, headphones, hi-fi separates, portable audio systems, and even (in my more gullible moments) biwired speaker cables and limestone slabs to position my speaker stands on, all in pursuit of the “perfect” sound: slightly more sparkle and physical *ping* in the treble (hearing the stick hit the hi-hat, perhaps, rather than a vague *splash*); a more rounded and tighter bass sound that doesn’t bloom like ugly bathwater and overwhelm the song; more realistic vocals that put the singer right in front of you, spittle-filled lips and all. You know the kind of thing… It’s like when serious wine buffs talk about being able to smell diesel or orange peel in a bottle of Shiraz: it seems like nonsense until you immerse yourself in the sensations of the discipline and find that you too are scrabbling for ridiculous metaphors to describe how something tastes or sounds or smells when you suddenly realise there are more nuances than you ever imagined."

music sound technology audio compression aesthetics texture recording mp3 culture essay production
5 weeks ago by danburzo

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The Philosophy of Insomnia [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
culture history philosophy insomnia sleep emil-cioran plato friedrich-nietzsche
5 weeks ago by danburzo

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Sartre & Peanuts [Philosophy Now]

"While it is difficult to say what Sartre would have thought of Peanuts, we do know what Schulz thought of Sartre: “I read about him in the New York Times, where he said it was very difficult to be a human being, and the only way to fight against it is to lead an active life – that’s very true.” If any character has shown us the difficulties in existence, it is Charlie Brown."

philosophy existentialism comics culture pop-culture charles-schulz peanuts jean-paul-sartre religion
5 weeks ago by danburzo

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Books: Bits vs. Atoms [Coding Horror]

"How do books suck? Let me count the ways:
* They are heavy.
* They take up too much space.
* They have to be printed.
* They have to be carried in inventory.
* They have to be shipped in trucks and planes.
* They aren't always available at a library.
* They may have to be purchased at a bookstore.
* They are difficult to find.
* They are difficult to search within.
* They can go out of print entirely.
* They are too expensive.
* They are not interactive.
* They cannot be updated for errors and addendums.
* They are often copyrighted."

books ebooks publishing culture reading bibliophilia things information typography epub design design/editorial digital-humanities
5 weeks ago by danburzo

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A Sontag Sampler [NYTimes]

Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long- haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.

Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.

Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, wagon-lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, penknives, aphorisms, hands.

Things I dislike: television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.

susan-sontag quotes culture art writing thinking process things via:robertogreco
6 weeks ago by danburzo

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On bicycles, non-attachment, and living well [Budnitz Bicycles]
things culture craftmanship consumerism
7 weeks ago by danburzo

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How to reorganise your bookshelf using the honesty system [Guardian]

"some of these excesses are simply a by-product of that elastic thing that can happen to time when we are in a bookshop, where our sheer good intentions and excitement overrule everything we have previously learned about how many hours there are in a day. Just as I keep on subscribing to the New Yorker magazine in the expectation of a lengthy, debilitating illness that will allow me to catch up on 15 years' worth of issues I have hardly skimmed, I'm keeping The Golden Bough in preparation for the non-fatal heart attack that will ultimately enable me to read it. That's a lot of sickness in my future, but I'm embracing it. I suppose that's the joy of a proper, unexpurgated book reorganising session: it makes you look forward to the good times, and the bad."

books bibliophilia bookshelves guilt reading culture nostalgia things
7 weeks ago by danburzo

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Sasha Frere-Jones: Good Things About Twitter [The New Yorker]

"Two pernicious fallacies embedded in criticism of Twitter—and, by extension, blogs, tumblrs, and GIFs of catbots who kill with laser eyes—are that non-traditional forms of expression can wipe out existing ones, and that these forms are somehow impoverished. The variables unique to the Internet—hyperlinks, GIFs, chat, comments—have enabled new writing voices with their own distinct syntaxes. But we are not dealing with fungible goods—the new forms will never push out older ones because they’re insufficiently similar. You might overdose on unicorn GIFs and go to bed too tired to read “Freedom,” but unicorn GIFs will never replace “Freedom.”"

twitter literature reading writing culture media-studies alarmism
9 weeks ago by danburzo

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Timeless [Vimeo]

"The digital settles in as background. We remember less and query more. Our identity play would be considered schizophrenic in the last century. We have more friends than ever before yet know new frontiers of isolation. The quantification of our experience haunts us in the form of a persistent history. And we are distracted more than we ever knew possible. These circumstances are paradoxically a description of the near future and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. The truly timeless is redefined – it has transcended that which is classic; it has become that which is never finished."

design video essay design-fiction culture technology identity bruce-sterling consciousness human+ transhumanism augmented-self time post-digital
10 weeks ago by danburzo

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Sexts from Patricia Lockwood [Rhizome]

"Patricia Lockwood is an actual poet—published in the New Yorker, even!—who has inappropriately touched the imaginations of a thousand followers with her “sexts.” Born around the time of the Anthony Weiner scandal, the genre congeals gobs of glowing poetry from networked life’s greasy stew of blunt spam copy, collaged pop culture, and constant little spells of titillation. This is a selection of Lockwood’s hottest sexts."

patricia-lockwood poetry twitter culture literature
10 weeks ago by danburzo

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Fail Worse [The New Inquiry]

"There’s no demonstration of life’s futility or language’s emptiness that is so profound, it can’t one day be turned into a reassuring fridge magnet, and that thankfully helps put pessimism back in its place."

samuel-beckett quotes appropriation literature language platitude irony humor criticism culture interpretation misunderstanding
10 weeks ago by danburzo

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Banksy on Advertising

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."

banksy advertising manipulation privacy counter-culture quotes corporations public-space policy culture media media-studies type:quote
10 weeks ago by danburzo

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The disappearing virtual library - Opinion [Al Jazeera English]

"The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry."

internet culture books knowledge information community publishing monopoly intellectual-property copyright piracy education collaboration
10 weeks ago by danburzo

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“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.”: An Interview with Patricia Lockwood, Poet Laureate of Twitter [HTMLGIANT]

"I have no problem thinking of tweets as poetry, because the really great ones function in the same way that poetry does to me. They are clear and cubic thinking, and they repay obsessive thinking-about. 140 characters is just about the right length to get inside your head, so if I walk around all day chanting “apnews: an girl go back in time to shhot cow that start gret chicago fire . cow say “i expect you” shoot her an start fire with i’ts cigaret” to myself the same way I walk around chanting “The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight was less than moonlight,” I see no reason to make a distinction, because I’m not some sort of taxonomy psycho. Honestly, when I think of the question “what is poetry” I picture Linnaeus and David Lehman absolutely making out, hands up each other’s shirts, while everyone who participates in modern American poetry watches."

patricia-lockwood literature poetry twitter language interview type:interview art culture humor comedy aaliyah
10 weeks ago by danburzo

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The myth of the eight-hour sleep [BBC News]

"A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural."

health sleep history science mythbusting culture society research chronobiology physiology insomnia night
february 2012 by danburzo

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The Participatory Museum

"The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. It was written by me, Nina Simon. I’m an exhibit designer, museum consultant, and the author of the Museum 2.0 blog."

museum community culture curation participatory-museum nina-simon books
february 2012 by danburzo

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Against TED [The New Inquiry]

"When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? (...) What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch."

ted technology culture conferences events science knowledge marketing bias silicon-valley corporatism criticism elitism branding
february 2012 by danburzo

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Flaneurism shouldn’t be easy [Pete Ashton]

"One of the most surprising things about the Internet is how people think there’s a single monolithic culture. There used to be, back when access was difficult and determined by circumstance. But it’s not like that now. The Internet is for everything and everyone, which means it’s like everything else, prone to mediocrity and abuses of power. But unlike the physical world there’s no scarcity of space or time. While we should be aware of the machinations of the evil machine we don’t have to be slaves to it. Let those who can’t be bothered have their Facebooks and the Google Plus. But for those for whom that isn’t enough, don’t complain or give up in the face of these mountains of shit. Turn away and keep searching, building, exploring and blogging. There’s plenty to do and plenty of room to do it in."

culture internet communication serendipity filter-bubble flaneur evgeny-morozov
february 2012 by danburzo

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Modernist Journals Project

"The MJP is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1896 and 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published. With magazines at its core, the MJP also offers a range of genres that extends to the digital publication of books directly connected to modernist periodicals and other supporting materials for periodical study.

We end at 1922 for both intellectual and practical reasons: the practical reason is that copyright becomes an issue with publications from 1923 onward; the intellectual reason is that most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922, a date marked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We believe the materials on the MJP website will show how essential magazines were to modernism's rise."

art ephemera magazines design modernism history reference archive culture typography illustration
february 2012 by danburzo

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This Talking Is Only Bravado
psychology essay culture los-angeles urbanism community sociology cities nyc
february 2012 by danburzo

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Drinking Games [Malcolm Gladwell]

"One common "belief is that alcohol causes self-inflation." It makes us see ourselves through rose-tinted glasses. Oddly, though, it doesn't make us view everything about ourselves through rose-tinted glasses. When the psychologists Claude Steele and Mahzarin Banaji gave a group of people a personality questionnaire while they were sober and then again when they were drunk, they found that the only personality aspects that were inflated by drinking were those where there was a gap between real and ideal states. If you are good-looking and the world agrees that you are good-looking, drinking doesn't make you think you're even better-looking. Drinking only makes you feel you're better-looking if you think you're good-looking and the world doesn't agree.

Alcohol is also commonly believed to reduce anxiety. That's what a disinhibiting agent should do: relax us and make the world go away. Yet this effect also turns out to be selective. Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he'll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself, and he'll grow more anxious.

Steele and his colleague Robert Josephs's explanation is that we've misread the effects of alcohol on the brain. Its principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision. It causes, they write, "a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion."

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background disappear. (...) Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

Myopia theory changes how we understand drunkenness. Disinhibition suggests that the drinker is increasingly insensitive to his environment—that he is in the grip of an autonomous physiological process. Myopia theory, on the contrary, says that the drinker is, in some respects, increasingly sensitive to his environment: he is at the mercy of whatever is in front of him."

anthropology sociology culture drinking health alcoholism psychology customs alcohol
february 2012 by danburzo

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Is the Social Web Less Surprising? The Internet of People and Social Flâneurism
facebook flaneur serendipity twitter culture technology
february 2012 by danburzo

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Design Perfectionists at Home [NYTimes]
life home culture aesthetics obsession ocd perfectionism minimalism things architecture interior-design psychology hoarding _noteworthy
february 2012 by danburzo

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The Art of Fieldwork [Rhizome]

"When asked, in a 2009 interview, about the ways in which he adopts various identities in creating his works, borrowing from their tropes and methodologies, but never fully conforming to their professional standards, Fujiwara responded:

Who says I’m not a writer or an architect or anything? Who has the authority to decide these things? […] Honestly, I am a fraud, I’m an outsider in all these fields, but this gives me the liberty to work subjectively. Truth and accuracy are not my concerns. If an academic would work with fiction in this way, it would be dishonest, wrong even, whereas you’d be a fool to trust an artist in the first place.

Fujiwara’s quote might arguably best sum up this tendency: if art can be anything, then the artist can also be anyone. Though their work is strikingly different in process and final form, Ga, Jordenö, and Fujiwara, to consider only a few of the artists working in this vein, explore the possibilities offered by different disciplines, choosing to be as rigorous—or as lax—as they see fit. Yet, rather than resulting in watered-down versions of social science, in which the methods of a more supposedly “serious” field are employed to confer a veneer of relevance or gravity on an artistic project, the work of these artists is enlivened by the marrying of the subjective and idiosyncratic with the academic and research-intensive."

art anthropology ethnography culture research documentary process methodology
february 2012 by danburzo

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The Death of the Cyberflâneur [NYTimes]

"Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago."

"(...) if you took an open poll of his friends, or any large enough group of people, “Satantango” would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like “War Horse.” It might not be everyone’s top choice, but it won’t offend, either — that’s the tyranny of the social for you."

"It's this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. (...) Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable."

evgeny-morozov internet culture serendipity social-media google facebook advertising filter-bubble flaneur privacy
february 2012 by danburzo

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Gluttony Goes Viral [Chronicle of Higher Education]

"And there's the key to understanding the often anesthetic effect of the Internet. Decadence doesn't demand great wealth: Decadence is a useful way to understand any situation in which an existing pleasure becomes cheap, and it takes the ingenuity of a Petronius to fight off the boredom. That is now the case with information—the small burst of satisfaction that comes from a refilled inbox or a new text, from connecting with friends, or sharing the meme of the day. Millions of us are now richer in these pleasures than our parents' generation could ever imagine. But our capacity for enjoyment is still finite: We've built up a tolerance to the pleasures of information, just as Trimalchio built up a tolerance to the pleasures of food. Those who experience our constant connectivity as dulling should be able to identify closely with his guests.

In the midst of this excess, a very few of us can be "accomplished voluptuaries." They are the ones most at home online, who experience no disquiet in blogging about life and talking about the Internet interchangeably. I also suspect that they are disproportionate among our own "arbiters of taste," the ones who ensure that the Internet can give us something new and enjoyable and forgettable every day: hungover owls, outrageous hipsters, creative Auto-Tuning, endlessly looping GIF's of Oprah unleashing bees on her studio audience, and on and on. But the talent of taking pleasure in excess, and inventing new pleasures out of excess, is still a rare one: For every Petronius, there are many more Trimalchios who end up bloated, exhausted, wearing a false face of enjoyment."

internet information information-overload information-overconsumption information-diet technology culture gluttony history decadence rome hedonism pleasure addiction media petronius satyricon abundance
february 2012 by danburzo

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Two decades of the web: a utopia no longer [Prospect Magazine]

"The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square."

technology culture internet history evgeny-morozov business public-space net-neutrality politics policy community utopia privacy filter-bubble social-media
february 2012 by danburzo

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How the Internet Gets Inside Us [The New Yorker]

"The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful. When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you’d just bought."

"Blair’s and Pettegree’s work on the relation between minds and machines, and the combination of delight and despair we find in their collisions, leads you to a broader thought: at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind."

internet technology culture information attention history innovation books digital-humanities nicholas-carr sherry-turkle clay-shirky adam-gopnik media information-overload information-diet alarmism solitude _noteworthy
february 2012 by danburzo

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The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality [NYTimes]
digital-humanities education scholarship academia mortality religion technology culture internet authorship social-media publishing
february 2012 by danburzo

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The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg [NYTimes]

"This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data."

digital-humanities life-logging cyborgs augmented-self memory forgetting technology culture
january 2012 by danburzo

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Writer's craft is now a ghost in the machine

"His notebooks are fascinating items in themselves. There might be a sketch for his screenplay of The Proposition followed by a reminder that one of his children needs to be vaccinated with the address of where he has to take her. The creative and the personal is intertwined."

digital-humanities memory archival library process notebooks recording ephemera technology culture writing paper creativity
january 2012 by danburzo

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Household Archaeology [Wikipedia]

"Household archaeology has a long history of anthropological inquiry. Archaeological investigations of the household serve as a microcosm for the greater social universe. The household serves as a space for socialization processes. Household archaeology focuses on the household as a social unit, and involves research on the household's dwelling and other related architecture, material culture, features, and larger sociopolitical organizations that are associated with a specific culture. Household social relationships have been associated as serving as an "atom" for society.[1] Therefore, household studied effectively convey information pertaining to flexible economic and ecological conditions[1] Household activity encompasses spheres of activity related to function and how people act. Household archaeology redefines the notion of the household and the domestic by challenging notions of what households are, how they operate and the social implications of such analysis. The material culture provides information about such activities. Households are families, domestic groups, and co-habitations. Households function in a variety of fashions."

wikipedia archaeology anthropology sociology research culture material-culture type:article
january 2012 by danburzo

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Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic [The Wirecutter]

"I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It's a tool, but it's not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn't seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it's evil, but because it's too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%."

technology culture happiness life work balance psychology addiction information-overload information-diet nature thoreau inspiration _inspiration
january 2012 by danburzo

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Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight [danah boyd]

"When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling."

communication culture internet facebook privacy steganography social-media
january 2012 by danburzo

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Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures [Ribbonfarm]

Mining Subcultural Attention / Impersonal Secret Handshakes / Patterns of Social Organization / The Taming of Subcultures / The Fabrication of Subcultures / The Fortune at the Bottom of the Attention Pyramid

internet culture language communication business marketing subculture illegibility social-media dystopia globalization consumerism surveillance attention facebook google social-graph interest-graph manipulation
january 2012 by danburzo

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The Business of Publishing (Renaissance Edition) - Brainiac

"It was only slowly, Pettegree writes, that a workable, profitable book world took shape. The press founded by Johannes Gutenberg, like many of its competitors, kept the ship afloat by printing advertisements, "ephemeral" books for students and ordinary readers, and even indulgences -- they were a booming business in pre-Reformation Europe, and the demand for them was limitless. Eventually, the printing industry as a whole figured out how to create new books written for a popular audience. And it was this 'trade' market which, by supplementing the anemic 'academic' one, ensured that the printed book was here to stay. The age of printing, Pettegree writes, was "an age of experimentation and rapid technical advance," in which "publishers and booksellers had embraced the printed book, but without fully comprehending how much had changed." It took a lot of struggle, creativity, and, most of all, business savvy to get to the other side of the divide, and to unleash the real potential of printing."

books business culture history renaissance gutenberg movable-type knowledge printing
january 2012 by danburzo

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Techno Tuesday
comics humor illustration satire consumerism technology culture best-web-comics-ever andy-rementer _defunct-blogs
january 2012 by danburzo

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Pink Tentacle
japan blog culture design illustration _defunct-blogs
january 2012 by danburzo

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Reading the Web - Idea of the Day Blog [NYTimes]
ideas culture news _defunct-blogs
january 2012 by danburzo

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The Case For A 21-Hour Work Week [Co.Exist]
work life balance economics culture consumerism
january 2012 by danburzo

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This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business [Fast Company]
business culture future trends change chaos disruption
january 2012 by danburzo

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How are white people stereotyped in predominantly non-white cultures? [AskReddit]
culture stereotypes white-people reddit
january 2012 by danburzo

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The Dangerous Effects of Reading [David Tate]

"I think we should all agree that getting faster at judging things is bad, but I think the real danger in having a super-efficient-filter is that your default mode is exclusion – you reject long enough and you lose the ability to create things that pass your own filter. You stagnate at work for fear of everything you do being judged like every news article or viral video that you view.

So how do you break the power of consumption? By creating your own things."

technology culture creativity creating process inspiration productivity attention reading writing filter-bubble curation making quiet taste happiness personal-development
january 2012 by danburzo

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The Joy of Quiet [NYTimes]
downshifting simplicity sabbatical silence meditation attention distraction technology culture hermitage ascetism quiet
january 2012 by danburzo

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Belgian beer: Brewed force [The Economist]

"How a small, unremarkable country came to dominate the world of beermaking."

beer craftmanship tradition belgium history culture politics drinks lager ale stella-artois
december 2011 by danburzo

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The Book Collection That Devoured My Life [WSJ]

Luc Sante loves books.

books passion collecting bibliophilia library luc-sante literature reading culture history home
september 2011 by danburzo

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Teenage Brains [National Geographic]

"Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults."

psychology neuroscience adolescence childhood coming-of-age brain adulthood risk-taking thrill-seeking decision-making evolution david-dobbs culture sociology research creativity
september 2011 by danburzo

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My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling [NYTimes]

"An Education: Three American siblings attend an experimental school in Moscow where instruction is only in Russian and classes are videotaped to improve teaching."

education russia language childhood resistance culture learning critical-thinking resilience teaching moscow
september 2011 by danburzo

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blackoystercatcher: Taking history back from the "storytellers"

"Some of the most interesting documentary films take their structures from organic phenomena like the hours of the day, or the trajectory of a river from source to mouth. Others are essays that follow a structured thought process. Still others divide into sequences or parts that need to be understood and compared as discrete units for the film to generate meaning in the viewer. In fact, there are nearly infinite possible documentary structures, of which I think we've only seen a small fraction. By contrast, the mainstream documentary focuses on what's now called "storytelling," a highly traditional representational strategy that in recent years has come to imply the omnipresence of characters (good and evil), a narrative arc and a conventional act-based structure in which seemingly insurmountable problems are frequently solved."

culture history documentary movies storytelling filmmaking via:robertogreco archive footage rick-prelinger criticism has:via
september 2011 by danburzo

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Computer-Generated Articles Are Gaining Traction [NYTimes]

Depressing (I think).

technology culture humanism writing artificial-intelligence journalism data singularity turing-test via:camilstoenescu has:via
september 2011 by danburzo

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Twenty Years Fore & Aft [Frieze Magazine]

"Derivative cut-and-paste, shareware, mash-up, appropriation, détournement, post-disciplinary network-culture infrastructures; this favela of the intellect no longer has to be valorized. It’s just another way to get results; it’s the way that falls apart fastest."

design-fiction futurism technology culture bruce-sterling future nostalgia cities community science-fiction art atemporality
september 2011 by danburzo

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The Never-Ending Story [design mind]

"I define storytelling as the untangling of, and bringing order to, the chaos of actual experience and packaging it in a way that is usable for yourself and other people going forward."

"I think creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact. When you design a space that encourages short, reactionary verse, people are going to give you short, reactionary verse. Maybe when you design a space that’s not encouraging that, people will use more depth in their self-expression."

jonathan-harris storytelling art social-media platforms apps technology culture downshifting quiet community narratives
august 2011 by danburzo

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Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? [NYTimes]

"As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success — a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist — to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. (...) It may be true, in other words, that “nobody knows anything,” as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know."

music marketing science network-effect duncan-watts hits psychology influence aesthetics popularity taste economics culture sociology behavior decision-making cumulative-advantage
august 2011 by danburzo

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The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter [NYTimes]

Rob Walker covers Kickstarter for the New York Times.

rob-walker kickstarter creativity art entrepreneurship culture technology
august 2011 by danburzo

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We Will Get Better [More Intelligent Life]

"What does it mean to be human? Julian Baggini meets with scientists who aspire to take evolution into their own hands ..."

transhumanism nick-bostrom singularity culture posthumanism technology life immortality hacks genetics prosthetics neuroscience drugs dystopia biology
july 2011 by danburzo

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Every Day Carry

"Everyday Carry, or EDC, generally refers to small items or gadgets worn, carried, or made available in pockets, holsters, or bags on a daily basis to manage common tasks or for use in unexpected situations or emergencies. In a broader sense, it is a lifestyle, discipline, or philosophy of preparedness."

things culture technology gadgets lifehacks design tools blog fashion identity cataloguing survival organizing
july 2011 by danburzo

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A Point of View: What's in a marriage? [BBC]

Filed "marriage" under "things you took for granted only to realize they have had to be invented by someone".

bbc alain-de-botton marriage history love relationships culture tradition bourgeois sex society happiness balance
july 2011 by danburzo

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Triple Canopy

"Triple Canopy is an online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them."

design art essays philosophy ideas internet technology culture commentary criticism photography writing inspiration visual magazine publishing _noteworthy
july 2011 by danburzo

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Drone Ethnography [Rhizome]
technology culture art surveillance drones ethnography gis military design-fiction speculation new-aesthetic
july 2011 by danburzo

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Google+ is the social backbone [O'Reilly Radar]

"The launch of Google+ is the beginning of a fundamental change on the web. A change that will tear down silos, empower users and create opportunities to take software and collaboration to new levels.

Social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web is today."

oreilly edd-dumbill google+ facebook social-media communication culture technology social-networking openness
july 2011 by danburzo

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Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings? [NYMag]

"There should be a word for that feeling you get when an older person — and not much older, so quickly are things changing — shames him or herself by telling young people how to live. I'd vote for Bedeutungslosigkeitschmach, or "irrelevance shame," (made up with the help of Google translate) or perhaps Rünschmerz, the horrifying gut pain one experiences watching Andy Rooney. Whatever it's called, Franzen brought it in buckets."

"The phonograph killed the player piano; radio, newspapers, and TV happily co-existed for generations. When did you last think fondly on the DuMont television network, or smile in recall of Friendster? This moment of anxiety and fear will pass; future generations (there's now one every three or four years) will have no idea what they missed, and yet they will go on, marry, divorce, and own pets."

nymag writing journalism facebook social-media media publishing paul-ford jonathan-franzen bill-keller stewart-brand whole-earth-catalog internet culture technology future storytelling narrative
july 2011 by danburzo

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The Indicator: 101 Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School [ArchDaily]

"57. To save time, assume your wife is right."

architecture lists advice practice culture work life balance humor
july 2011 by danburzo

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Shadow's starting the New Year off with a bang, check out his latest journal entry here! | DJ Shadow

"As distasteful as it may sound, the fact is that so many of our heroes: Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, The Beatles, whoever you care to name; generated much of their best art in return for financial compensation. If you take away the compensation, guess what…the art stops."

music culture technology internet business industry art dj-shadow
july 2011 by danburzo

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DJ Shadow: On futile ground? [The Guardian]

"I don't like the fact that rappers I worked with five years ago no longer rap because they're not gonna make any money, so what's the point? Not everybody who made great music got into it for the love of art: some of 'em got into it as a means of making a living, and some of the music that they made along the way changed people's lives."

"The artist whose debut, the oft-praised 1996 album Endtroducing…, bore the footnote "this album reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture" has often struggled to navigate a coherent path through the digital world. This is why he is undertaking an almost stubbornly obscure negative image of a conventional marketing campaign – wandering into a handful of charity shops in the West End of London to covertly plant his new music on their shelves, leaving it to be uncovered by fellow musical archaeologists and vinyl obsessives."

music dj-shadow the-guardian marketing business distribution internet culture technology industry sharing
july 2011 by danburzo

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The Song Decoders at Pandora [NYTimes]

"Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?"

"Maybe because music is so ubiquitous, we respond to it almost like food: sometimes we want to try the new restaurant, sometimes the comfort of a familiar favorite dish."

rob-walker pandora music discovery categorization taxonomy web2.0 technology collaborative-filtering recommendation musicology music-genome culture aesthetics snobbery taste
july 2011 by danburzo

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Portishead: 'We get really scared of trying to make music' [The Observer]

"I feel, 'Hang on, I don't understand why we're doing this yet,'" says Utley later, sipping coffee in a pub garden just up the hill. "We've come from our kitchens with our kids, and suddenly we're walking on stage and playing at a festival in front of 30,000 people. How does that relate to our lives now? I'm finding it hard to come to terms with."

""What, you thought that she was the dark lady who arrives in the dark car and gets wheeled out?" Utley chuckles. "That's interesting… Beth's a day-to-day person: we can talk about bread or how crap it is when you can't park; how awful it is when your relationship ends or one of your parents dies, as well as what washing-up gloves to get. There's a darkness within everyone and she's in touch with that stuff. And that's more interesting to her than singing 'Get up, get on up', which is fantastic when James Brown does it, but I can't imagine her doing that."

portishead music interview the-guardian the-observer fame concerts trip-hop life culture art process creativity inspiration
july 2011 by danburzo

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The Stylus Decade

"A few months ago, while Pitchfork were unveiling their expansive set of fin-de-siècle articles and lists, I spotted someone on the I Love Music forum say that they wished there could be a Stylus list. Despite my hatred of lists, this seemed like a good idea, and reasonably accomplishable too; most of us who used to write for Stylus are still in regular contact, and it wasn’t as if we’d never made a list before."

music writing criticism lists reference recommended culture stylus magazine 00s noughties albums
july 2011 by danburzo

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Animated GIFs Triumphant [Anil Dash]

Anil Dash's brief history of the animated GIF.

"GIF is the most popular animation and short film format that's ever existed. It works on smartphones in millions of people's pockets, on giant displays in museums, in web browsers on a newspaper website. It finds liberation in constraints, in the same way that fewer characters in our tweets and texts freed us to communicate more liberally with one another. And it invites participation, in a medium that's both fun and accessible, as the pop music of moving images, giving us animations that are totally disposable and completely timeless."

anil-dash gif animation cinemagraph history movies art culture internet folklore digital
july 2011 by danburzo

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Prelinger Archives [Internet Archive]

"Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 4,000 titles on videotape and a smaller collection of film materials acquired subsequent to the Library of Congress transaction. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions."

archive reference movies public-domain free footage stock video culture internet-archive vintage resources
july 2011 by danburzo

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Poemas del río Wang: Black people in the zoo

"Seventy-five years ago, in 1936 closed down the last of the zoo houses in Europe – notably in Turin, and one year before that the penultimate one in Basel – where black people were presented to visitors."

history africa europe racism zoo exotic culture
july 2011 by danburzo

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Mobility Shifts :: Conference

Links to various projects around the themes of "DIY U: Learning Without a School" and "Digital Learning Projects Globally".

education diy university learning digital culture mobility
july 2011 by danburzo

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A Short History of the Shadow: An Interview with Victor I. Stoichita [Cabinet Magazine]
type:interview victor-stoichita art culture history philosophy shadow visual-culture
july 2011 by danburzo

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10 More Great Cross-Disciplinary Conferences [Brain Pickings]

10 more conferences (none of which I've heard of!): 1. PopTech 2. BIF Summit 3. DLD 4. BIL 5. PICNIC 6. Conference on World Affairs 7. Aspen Ideas Festival 8. New Yorker Festival 9. Big Omaha 10. Portland Creative Conference.

brain-pickings conferences inspiration creativity culture technology education video lists
july 2011 by danburzo

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Top 10 Contemporary Cross-Disciplinary Conferences [Brain Pickings]

Good roundup of cross-disciplinary conferences by Kirstin Butler on Brain Pickings: 1. 99% Conference 2. BarCamp 3. DO Lectures 4. The Feast 5. GEL 6. Ignite 7. Palomar 8. PechaKucha 9. PINC 10. TEDx

Other suggestions from readers in the comments section.

conferences inspiration video culture technology innovation design creativity productivity doing ideas lists education brain-pickings
july 2011 by danburzo

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Alan Jacobs discusses 'The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction' [Vimeo]

"In this event, hosted by The New Atlantis (TheNewAtlantis.com), Alan Jacobs discusses his new book 'The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction' (Oxford, 2011). Jacobs is a contributing editor to The New Atlantis and a professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com"

vimeo video alan-jacobs reading media technology culture attention distraction anxiety snobbery shame guilty-pleasures
july 2011 by danburzo

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