Friday, March 16 2012
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
This reprint of the cult classic memoir, based on Ellen Ullman’s early years as a computer programmer, reaffirms the reach and relevance of her thoughts on technology and creativity. Her insight is also foresight, and her story remains immediate, critical – and very entertaining.
Monday, March 5 2012
20 Questions: Ellen Ullman
Technophile, humanist and storyteller Ellen Ullman is touring for her latest, By Blood. The cult classic Close to the Machine and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, The Bug, are enjoying a resurgence, as well. From the sterile environs of an airport terminal, Ullman recalls a glorious range of artists and intellectuals (and the work they have produced) that have shaped her.
Tuesday, January 31 2012
Get Off of My Cloud!: ‘Collecting’ Music in the Digital Age
I have the greatest record collection imaginable. But it's almost exactly the same as all of Rhapsody’s other customers.
Wednesday, August 10 2011
Making Robots Human
From childcare provider to chef, roboticists have big plans for their human-like machines, which raises the question: How human is too human?
Thursday, November 11 2010
Why the Caged Bird Sings
TED Fellow Juliana Machado Ferreira's work focuses on bringing the latest advances in forensic science to bear against “crimes against nature. Her bete noir—and the driving factor behind her research—is the illegal wildlife trade that removes hundreds of thousands of animals, primarily birds, from Brazil’s ecosystem every year.
Monday, March 22 2010
Loneliness Is a Cool iPod… Happiness Is a Warm Album Cover
The communal nature of MP3 filesharing is often idealized to the point where the discourse surrounding it masks what are ultimately fractured connections between musicians and their listeners.
Monday, March 15 2010
Bone Flutes, Pianos, and iPods: Notes on Music, Technology, and Embodiment
From Paleolithic flutes, to pianos, to iPods, a central point emerges: just as the mind isn't free from the body, music isn't free from its material base.
Wednesday, March 10 2010
“Lots of Tight Jean Moments”: An Interview with BT
Having just released a new double-disc album, BT sits down to talk about writing songs in code, Avatar, his 400-pound chrome pony, and -- yes -- those many "tight jean moments" he's prone to.
Monday, February 1 2010
The Cult of Kindle and the Myth of Digital Utopia
If I could read more with a Kindle, it stood to reason that I wasn’t reading enough without one. Getting and consuming increasingly MORE information is an end in of itself these days.
Friday, July 24 2009
Scratching the Surface: Your Brain on the Internet
What does the ubiquitous availability of digital text mean for the human brain as it processes ever-increasing amounts of information?
The Cultural Logic of Computation
Far from being the great liberator, computers, Golumbia insists, actually serve to fix us in the grid of global capitalism while concentrating power and shifting it upward to those who control the networks we are enmeshed in.
Friday, July 10 2009
Google and the End of Wisdom
What today’s students do not realize is that what Google provides is sometimes fact and oftentimes opinion – but never answers.
The Public Display of the Private Individual
As a professor of mine once opined, it is the shift from Rockwell's paranoid "I always feel like somebody's watching me" to the insistence that someone need be watching to validate private feelings.
We Are United in Our Digital Isolation
The paradox of the new media is that for each face-to-face interaction we sacrifice, we open up the possibility of connecting with thousands of like-minded people.
Tuesday, June 16 2009
The Power of Story in the Digital Age
In an age where Twitter and Google seem to be taking over the world, how do people communicate information in a meaningful and memorable manner? They tell a story.
Screaming In Digital: The New Media Generation’s Inner War
Both Twitter and Facebook are attempts to inject organic humanity into the cold, artificial realm of networking technologies -- our humanity cannot survive the conversion process.
Monday, June 8 2009
YouTube’s Budget Travel Through Space & Time – Yours & Mine
I was momentarily freaked out that I was stuck in the afterglow of The Summer of Love for so long, but I trusted it, went with the synaptic flow, and discovered YouTube’s true power.
24 Tweets
Having to bop back & forth between Facebook & MySpace & Plaxo & Blogger & Skype & Twitter is just too fucking much & I’m wading thru all thi[0!]
Monday, May 18 2009
The Death of the Second Folk Revival
If the Second Folk Revival put the power of recording into the hands of the artists, what’s been happening these past five years or so has put that power into the hands of everyone: cell phones that record video, ProTools and Cakewalk, Movie Maker and MySpace.
Monday, March 23 2009
The (Un)lonely Crowd
A festival pass no longer guarantees a communal experience for music lovers. Instead, appreciating events like SXSW is now about social networking and utilizing new technologies. So what does this say about the future of "the concert"?
