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*^/realtime****
There’s a new sense of Now emerging from the web
and it’s starting to become more present
than the here and now in front of us.
The events in our lives only seem to come into full existence as we post them online. A moment that can’t be digitized and shared in one form or another is in danger of never happening.Our parents took photos to try to hold on to the past. We take photos to create the present.
We point our mobile devices at the things and events in our lives not to remember them but to make them real. This concert, this forest, this meal with friends hasn’t really happened until it’s made its way online. The cutting edge of experience is shifting away from our senses, moving outside of our consciousness, and getting entangled in our electronic media.
Now has become the moment
when the fragments of our ‘real’ lives
are released into the cloud.
Now is the ephemeral membrane
between us and the network.
“Google organized our memory. Real-time search organizes our consciousness.” - Edo Segal
It’s this new endless Now that Twitter revealed
and everyone else is clamoring to try to control. -
spell
This photo feels like science fiction. Over the course of 2500 years we translated the sounds of vibrating vocal cords into a series of tiny robotic movements with our fingers. Hollywood never dreamt up anything so fantastic.
There are layers upon layers of abstraction at work when you’re typing.
The sounds of speech have been broken down into meaningless symbols
designed exclusively for the eye. The keyboard replaces those symbols with a set of identical buttons that can all be triggered with the exact same movement. The unique shape of each letter … writing’s last, tenuous link to the universe of body and sound … is seen but no longer felt.
It’s remarkable that the keyboard
… a child of the printing press …
is still the primary tool for writing in our electronic culture.
Even our latest touch screen mobile devices still rely
on virtual keyboards for much of their input.
But change is coming …
Touch screens are urging us to return to gesture
… not just for controlling the interface,
but for writing … for communicating.A new kind of written language could evolve on the iPhone,
a hybrid alphabet of pictograms and ideograms,
brought to life through fluid gesture.
A beautiful, animated, multi-touch calligraphy.
But the slick, glossy surface of a touch screen
reduces all of our interactions to a single sensation.
We touch but we don’t feel.
Haptic technologies promise to reawaken our sensuality
after hundreds of years of slumber.
Soon the pixels on our screens will begin to ripple and pulse …
A mosaic of braille-like data raining beneath our fingertips.
And all the while,
the fabled brain-machine interface is creeping up on us
ready to reunite physics and metaphysics into a single reality.
There is plenty of interest in typing directly with our minds,
but why would we continue to rely on the written word?
Our alphabet will disintegrate
in an environment in which speech and thought have become one.
In the very earliest time
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
… there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen-
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.
- Nalungiaq, Inuit woman. -
celebrity
Each of us has become our own full-time paparazzi,
harrassing ourselves with cameras and recorders, waiting for the next juicy moment that we can add to the tabloid of our life.Paris Hilton was famous for being famous. But you and I are the real celebrities of the 21st century: We’re famous because we watch ourselves.
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light saber
In less than one year, Wall Street has stolen more than $3 trillion from tax-payers. That’s the equivalent of 20 years worth of universal health care for all Americans.
Oh well. Did you see that photo of Obama on the Righthouse lawn holding a toy light saber? There is so much awesomeness in that photo, my head is about to explode. -
politik 2.0
Stop worrying about facts.
The real battle is for people’s emotions not their minds.
Let your opponents drown themselves in well-informed arguments
while you float safely on a vague, undefined image
that is neither right nor wrong
but feels good.
Hope. Change. Unity.
Name one person who doesn’t want all three.
… yet try to find three people that actually agree on what they mean. -
world wide web
A spider’s web is an extension of its nervous system,
a trembling network of silk strands cast out into the environment
picking up tiny vibrations far beyond the reach of the spider’s senses. -
Google does not have all the answers
-The church up the street posted this on their front lawn.
And lots of bloggers from all over the world are finding similar signs.
Actually Google does have all the answers.
What Google isn’t so good at is helping us find the right questions.
But then that’s never been the Church’s strength either.
Their power and authority came from a time when information was scarce
and they could hand out the Right Answer to every question.
In our electronic world of instant information there are no right answers
only a sea of perspectives clashing and colliding.
Truth is no longer carved in stone, or written in ink,
it flickers and flashes
revealing a mosaic of contradictions in constant motion. -
nervous system
whoever controls the shape of the network
controls the shape of our culture
the shape of our connected imagination.The Internet is the new kind of awareness. It’s not something that you look at. It is the way or means through which you look at things. - Eric McLuhan
When our internet service providers
cripple new technologies that threaten their narrow corporate goals,
they are preventing us from experimenting
with profound new ways of organizing and understanding our electronic culture.
censorship at the network level is indisputable.
it stops us from being able to redefine the boundaries of acceptable.
it is a form of cultural paralysis.
bandwidth caps put a lid on innovation
and guarantee that whoever controls the network
controls our high-definition future.
when universities are forced to
block all p2p file sharing activity, including sharing that is perfectly legal,
they are distorting the way that students relate to each other and to their world.
the network is our new civic infrastructure
the connective tissue of the global We.
If Coke and Pepsi controlled our water supply
there would be soda flowing through our pipes
and water would be more expensive than Diet Coke.
we should be nervous when someone owns our nervous system.
