The Taming of Tech Criticism • ©[thebaffler.com]
What does it mean to be a technology critic in today’s America? And what can technology criticism accomplish? The first question seems easy: to be a technology critic in America now is to oppose that bastion of vulgar disruption, Silicon Valley. By itself, however, this opposition says nothing about the critic’s politics—an omission that makes it all the more difficult to answer the second question.
Why all the political diffidence? A critical or oppositional attitude toward Silicon Valley is no guarantee of the critic’s progressive agenda; modern technology criticism, going back to its roots in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, has often embraced conservative causes. It also doesn’t help that technology critics, for the most part, make a point of shunning political categories. Instead of the usual left/right distinction, they are more comfortable with the humanist/anti-humanist one. “What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?”—a clever rhetorical question posed by the technology author George Dyson a few years ago—nicely captures these sorts of concerns. The “machines” in question are typically reduced to mere embodiments of absurd, dehumanizing ideas that hijack the minds of poorly educated technologists; the “humans,” in turn, are treated as abstract, ahistorical émigrés to the global village, rather than citizen-subjects of the neoliberal empire.
On the importance and implications of studying technology non-use • ©[interactions.acm.org]
What actually constitutes technology non-use can become a deceptively complex question. Non-use could be understood as the absence of action and, as such, may not be amenable to study through methods traditionally used to study participants’ actions. For example, drawing on ideas from ethnomethodology, Jeffrey Treem [3] argues that technology non-use is not observable-reportable in the same way that use is. As a result, he suggests, we need novel, fundamentally different approaches to study non-use.
In contrast, Jonathan Lukens’s study of visual artists who avoid using tools such as Photoshop for specific portions of their work demonstrates how non-use can require as much, if not more, conscious, deliberate, effortful action as technology use does. In this way, while non-use is often understood as the absence of a phenomenon or practice, something else likely exists in place of use, and it is that something we should be studying.
In practice, though, non-use is often not as absolute as the term may suggest.
via On the importance and implications of studying technology non-use | ACM Interactions.
Tech journalism needs to grow up – ©[theweek.com]
We are all familiar with what passes for technology criticism. The internet is stuffed with digital publications dedicated to reviewing the hardware and software issuing from Silicon Valley. There are the fetish-style videos in which gleaming machines are unboxed, the gadget reviews that aspire to be long-form think pieces.
We need a better class of tech criticism. Even though these publications talk a big game about the disruptive nature of the industry they cover, their coverage remains decidedly less than revolutionary. Just as literary criticism looks beyond the cover design to the moral and literary merit of a work, so should the tech press refuse to judge a phone by its chamfered edge.
Stop Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi—It’s Making Us All Fear Technology – ©[wired.com]
The news is bleak. With Ebola on U.S. soil, we are one infected monkey away from the plot of Outbreak. Russia is threatening to invade the Ukraine. We are blowing things up in Iraq again, where starving children are being massacred. There is overpopulation, and climate change; there is peak oil; there is a truly alarming spike in the diagnosis of autism. We are a society faced with many problems. Things, to put it mildly, could be better. Technology, for its natural inclination toward radical change, is perhaps the only thing that can make them better in a major, scalable way. But in the 21st Century, the average American is overwhelmingly afraid of artificial intelligence, NASA has abandoned its shuttle program, and the tech industry is the new darling villain of journalists across the nation. While innovation has improved our lives in almost every way imaginable, people are more frightened of the future than they have ever been. And after Battlestar Galactica, can you really blame them?
via Stop Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi—It’s Making Us All Fear Technology | WIRED.
Why the internet of things could destroy the welfare state [theguardian.com]
On 24 August 1965 Gloria Placente, a 34-year-old resident of Queens, New York, was driving to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. Clad in shorts and sunglasses, the housewife was looking forward to quiet time at the beach. But the moment she crossed the Willis Avenue bridge in her Chevrolet Corvair, Placente was surrounded by a dozen patrolmen. There were also 125 reporters, eager to witness the launch of New York police department’s Operation Corral – an acronym for Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists.
Fifteen months earlier, Placente had driven through a red light and neglected to answer the summons, an offence that Corral was going to punish with a heavy dose of techno-Kafkaesque. It worked as follows: a police car stationed at one end of the bridge radioed the licence plates of oncoming cars to a teletypist miles away, who fed them to a Univac 490 computer, an expensive $500,000 toy $3.5m in today’s dollars on loan from the Sperry Rand Corporation. The computer checked the numbers against a database of 110,000 cars that were either stolen or belonged to known offenders. In case of a match the teletypist would alert a second patrol car at the bridge’s other exit. It took, on average, just seven seconds.
via Why the internet of things could destroy the welfare state | Technology | The Observer.
Everything’s Amazing And Nobody’s Happy [npr.org]
So, what is our problem? We fly through the air and complain about the food. We project our thoughts around the globe almost instantaneously and then complain about a one-second lag. We live in age of miracles. We live with machines that can look painlessly inside us if we get sick and medicines that can heal us from things that were deadly a century ago. We should be amazed ALL THE TIME! We should be freaking out in wonder, marveling at the view from 30,000 feet and the wirelessly connected supercomputers we’re carrying in our pockets. (Apologies to Louis CK; see the video at the end of this post.)
But we’re not.
via Everything’s Amazing And Nobody’s Happy : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR.
As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse [newyorker.com]
Assuming that we really are evolving as we wear or inhabit more technological prosthetics—like ever-smarter phones, helpful glasses, and brainy cars—here’s the big question: Will that type of evolution take us in desirable directions, as we usually assume biological evolution does?
Some, like the Wired founder Kevin Kelly, believe that the answer is a resounding “yes.” In his book “What Technology Wants,” Kelly writes: “Technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency; Increasing opportunity; Increasing emergence; Increasing complexity; Increasing diversity; Increasing specialization; Increasing ubiquity; Increasing freedom; Increasing mutualism; Increasing beauty; Increasing sentience; Increasing structure; Increasing evolvability.”
via As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse : The New Yorker.
The Faster a New Technology Takes Off, the Harder It Falls [@larrydowneS for Wired.com]
That familiar model for technology adoption (first popularized by the noted sociologist Everett Rogers) — with clearly defined market segments adopting new technologies in predictable groupings — no longer applies. Following this work, Geoffrey Moore wrote in 1991’s Crossing the Chasm that successful new product introductions followed Rogers’s five discrete stages, moving from early adopters to mainstream users only after crossing a sales “chasm” in which the marketing message changes from the new and exciting to the familiar and incremental.
But today, new products and services enter the market better and cheaper right from the start. So producers can’t rely on a class of early adopters and high margins to build up a war chest to spend on marketing to larger and later markets. For better and for worse, thanks to near-perfect market information, consumers are too savvy for that. Everyone knows right away when some new offering gets it right — or, conversely, gets it wrong.
The bell curve, once useful as a model of product adoption, has lost its value as a planning tool. This kind of disruption has its own unique life cycle, and with it its own best practices for marketing and sales, product enhancement, and eventual product replacement.
via The Faster a New Technology Takes Off, the Harder It Falls | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.
Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time [io9.com]
X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.
In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device – researcher Derek J. de Solla Price laid the groundwork by establishing initial tooth counts and suggesting that the device followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world.
via Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time.
When Can Technology Bridge The Educational Divide | EdSurge News
The ed-tech landscape plays out similar to our socio economic landscape: those with the most resources seem to know where to find the best tools and have continuous access to them. Taking a random sampling of connected educators, for instance, one can see that the majority of us either have the time, space, or funding to attend the best conferences, meet the representatives from the latest tech fad, and share their latest concepts in the Twitter chats, Google+ groups, or enclosed virtual communities. Even with the professed missions of openness in our connected educator communities, the lack of diversity in culture, gender, and background often perpetuates the containment from the inside and the outside.
via When Can Technology Bridge The Educational Divide | EdSurge News.
Things I grab, motley collection 