Benjamin N Jacobsen’s article in New Media and Society, When is the right time to remember?: Social media memories, temporality and the kairologic, explores the concerns of memory in socio-technical systems like Twitter and Facebook. The one thing that strikes me is the idea that the window that is used. Maybe it is a result […]
Category Archives: algorithms
Strava, segments, and tracking
A few years ago, Strava visualised the GPS co-ordinates in their data and displayed the locations of secret bases. A change of privacy settings later and, apparently, all was secret again. The Guardian has just run a story on using segments and GPS locations to show individuals within the bases through re-purposing the segment function. […]
Notes on recent blogs
A post on Slashdot pointed me towards the post, High-Performance Mobile System-on-Chip Clusters, on the ACM blog. Posting here as a sticky note for a potential project. However I am also aware that this might become part of the notes graveyard, Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/259098-high-performance-mobile-system-on-chip-clusters/fulltext https://reproof.app/blog/notes-apps-help-us-forget.
A City of Things
More of a short note but Richard Coyne touched on cities a few days ago in his post, Cities as media, and Shannon Mattern’s earlier book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. I have the new one somewhere but the idea of smart cities existing since classical and earlier […]
Media literacy as failure?
Will Partin has written a post on the QAnon media literacy, What if modern conspiracy theorists are altogether too media literate?. A long-ish read that is well worth it, it reminded me of Whitney Phillips’s talk at the Digital Methods Initiative Winter school in 2019 and her contentions about media literacy. It raises challenging questions […]
Technological literacy and critical thinking
Going through some older newsletters, I came across this brief interview with Tim O’Reilly, The unwavering optimism of Tim O’Reilly, on Infoworld. Whilst his optimism that “[h]aving technical literacy is on the same level as being good at reading, writing, and speaking”, there seems to be a question of how and what is taught and […]
Facial Recognition and Make up
One of the Saturday talks at Transmediale discussed CV Dazzle through make up to defeat, if temporarily, facial recognition. The Guardian had a small piece, Hiding in Plain Sight, on Dazzle Club’s work using make-up and other techniques to work against it.
Reality, imitation and reasoning with generated artefacts
A short post this time but I have been reminded me of something. A few months ago, news came through of the recreation of John F Kennedy’s lost speech (BBC news link) using voice synthesis. Small sections of voice with different pronunciations are algorithmically stitched together to present the whole voice as if it was […]
Thoughts on May’s border models
I’ve been thinking a little about Theresa May’s latest clarification of what her Government wants from Brexit and borders. I come at this merely as curious about some of the underlying models. A line in Dan Roberts’ analysis sums up part of what is bothering me: May’s convoluted proposals for avoiding a customs union would […]
Welcoming the Videocracy
I’m currently reading Videocracy (Allocca, 2018). As the Head of Culture and Trends, there is a clear bias but the breathlessness of the writing is intriguing. Has YouTube style become writing style? Allocca highlights some interesting videos and extrapolates these into trends and themes. Some are long lasting such as the power and use of […]