July 25, 2010
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer’s glue in secret alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares, because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy, incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality, through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens."

—

Oyl Miller, Tweet

It’s the glare from the reflection
Making patterns in your eyes
It’s the looking back in anger
With every second slipping by

Undertow has come to take me
Guided by the blazing sun
Look at everything around us
Look at everything we’ve done.

Please anyone
I don’t think I can, save myself
I’m drowning here please, anyone
I don’t think I can, save myself
I’m drowning here please anyone
I don’t think I can, save myself
I’m drowning here please, anyone
I don’t think I can, save myself

quote via @buzz

9:27am  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/856091494
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: literature lyrics music media technology culture network 
July 22, 2010
Social web: The great tipping point test

“EVERY move you make, every twitter feed you update, somebody is watching you. You may not think twice about it, but if you use a social networking site, a cellphone or the internet regularly, you are leaving behind a clear digital trail that describes your behaviour, travel patterns, likes and dislikes, divulges who your friends are and reveals your mood and your opinions. In short, it tells the world an awful lot about you.”

12:10pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/844767785
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: data network internet twitter sociology 
July 19, 2010
Dare to Quote! On Zizek and Wikipedia

“Reading Slavoj Zizek’s 2010 Living in the End Times book, I noticed the author quoting Wikipedia a number of times. No big deal, you would say but it is significant in the light of the ongoing controversy around Wikipedia as a reliable (academic) source. Zizek is considered a leading intellectual, and arguably Europe’s most famous baby boom philosopher  (b. 1949). This postwar generation entered their professional lives in the age of the (electronic) type writer, well before the introduction of the personal computer. As authors they are the ones that profit from the copyright regimes and are known to have a firm grip on the print media. Even though computer literate (read: they can type) their cultural attitude towards the WWW is ambivalent—if not absent. If a critic like Zizek includes Wikipedia in his verbal stream of consciousness it is a sign of the times that Wikipedia has become an integral part of our media environment.

So far, in the case of Zizek, referenced media have been books, followed by feature films. Forget newspapers, television and radio, or hearsay conversations and correspondences. If Zizek starts telling stories it is based on contemporary myths and current affairs that are supposed to be known to all of us, written down without detailed references. If Zizek starts to theorize he talks aloud, like in a bar, and it is this oral, narrative element that constitutes his philosophy. To include Wikipedia in these rants is part of a significant cultural shift and it is odd that Zizek himself is unaware of this Event.” via @networkpolitics

4:36pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/832341033
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: academica book culture internet knowledge text network philosophy 
May 30, 2010
via mthing + touba

via mthing + touba

5:02am  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/645608937
(Notes: 118)
  
Filed under: religion philosophy identity materialism ethics network 
May 29, 2010
Facebook suicide manifesto: Suicide on social network should introduce noise into system

“Unlike the old days, when we could invent online identities daily, our social networks today require fidelity between our physical self and our online self. The situation is unbearable. […]

Invisibility comes in many forms, and on social networks it is the form of a radical overload of information – a maximum participation. No more thought, because every considered click adds to the collaborative filtering algorithms that makes sure everyone continues to like what they like, but in slightly modified form. Click   everywhere, click often, and don’t stop until you have disappeared beneath a flood of meaninglessness.” /via @hautepop + @andrelemos

3:04pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/643763382
Filed under: data facebook identity internet network 
May 26, 2010
"

By “biopolitics” I mean the ways in which, in modernity, various powers, such as—but not only—the state, have progressively made the human body, its well-being, and its very life, the subject of their attention. Clearly, technology and science, as well as culture, have played a huge role in the advance of a politics of “bios.”

In other words, it is not enough that those in power influence what we think; there is even more at stake in controlling our bodies, and in controlling life itself. Our sense of our own bodies, the variations of our affective lives as well as our emotional states and moods, even our reflexes, are more intertwined in power networks, and networks of production and consumption, than ever.

In this enmeshing, the moment in the 20th century when human speed thrills were vastly enhanced by technology marks a striking new development. Seduced by speed and the joys of adrenaline, the modernist subject, as she accelerated to the unprecedented personal speeds of forty- five miles per hour, learned how to gauge her alertness and intensity in cohabitation with the machine. The state, with its speed limits and traffic laws, was on hand to monitor this new techno-enabled freedom.

Human energy, as biopolitical resource, was being recalibrated in relation to machine power. Movement—at any speed—was enshrined as the basic sign of nothing less than life. And we all had access to a new pleasure, a thrill not known to our ancestors, and a certain freedom to use it, a characteristic thrill of the modernist era which can still teach us lots about what it means to be modern.

"

— Enda Duffy on his book The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism /via curate

5:58pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/634880616
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: capitalism consumption emotion history knowledge modernism network philosophy politics technology 
May 25, 2010

David Weinberger: How information became the “dominant metaphor” of contemporary intellectual life

“The Cluetrain Manifesto author and Internet philosopher discusses information — as a paradigm, as an irony, as a way of comprehending ourselves and the world. Given the fact that we don’t understand, in any meaningful way, what information actually is, Weinberger says, it’s worth considering how it became the “dominant metaphor” of our intellectual life — and how the metaphor is changing as we enter the digital age.”

via wildcat2030 + infoneer-pulse + Nieman Journalism Lab

12:03pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/630996960
(Notes: 19)
  
Filed under: data knowledge media rhetoric technology history philosophy video capitalism network 
May 24, 2010
Science 2.0 Pioneers > SEED

“From open-access journals to research-review blogs, networked knowledge has made science more accessible to more people around the globe than we could have imagined 20 years ago.” /via @endlesscities

3:48pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/628343063
Filed under: network science academia knowledge blogging 
May 24, 2010
Re-Link: The Physcial Network of Data

“With an estimated 1,733,993,741 users and a global growth rate of 380% since 2000 , it is easy to think of the internet as a free-flowing cloud of information accessible by all. However, unlike popular belief, our connection to the internet is not mediated by an uber high-tech network of satellites (or any of the other usual suspects). In fact, satellite links account for only 1% of all internet connections. Automatically, and incorrectly, thought of as a complex metaphysical network of information, the Internet consists of a highly physical network of lines and nodes; a simple system with inherent complexities. […]

The lines and nodes of the internet, much like any other physical infrastructure, are prone to an array of politico-economic issues. Closely related to the politico-economic reading of the hierarchical structure of the world, much of this understanding of internet has to do with its very physical backbone. Areas with the least number of users get the best connections and others, like most of Africa, get nothing. We can clearly make out the users from producers. The redundancies of the submarine lines to North America and Europe have caused internet prices to plummet, which in turn has encouraged not only higher usage of internet but an active participation in the information world. Meanwhile, you can count the number of lines feeding Africa on one hand. As a result, prices are so high that even the lines that are already in place become meaningless, because of lack of use.” /via @endlesscities

3:42pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/628333922
Filed under: network data materialism history internet communication media technology visualization economics africa europe 
May 10, 2010
from ‘Knowing Capitalism’ by N. J. Thrift, p. 48

from ‘Knowing Capitalism’ by N. J. Thrift, p. 48

11:29am  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/586504890
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: academia capitalism culture history knowledge network theory discourse ideology 
May 3, 2010
Facebook admits its colonial project.

Facebook admits its colonial project.

8:19pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/568789590
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: facebook graphics philosophy network 
January 12, 2010
CfP: 2nd Global Conference: Digital Memories (March 2010: Salzburg, Austria)

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with the issues and implications created by massive exploitation of digital technologies for inter-human communication and examine how online users form, archive and de-/code their memories in cybermedia environment, and how the systems used for production influence the way the users perceive and work with the memory. In particular the conference will encourage equally theoretical and practical debates which surround the cultural contexts of memory co-/production, re-/mediation, en-/decoding, dissemination, personal/mass interpretation and preservation.

Papers, presentations, workshops and reports are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Digital Personal and Community Memory
Theories and Concepts of Memory. The Digitisation of Individual and Community Memory. Identifying Key Features and Issues.

2. Externalization and Mediation of Memories
Memory Metaphors in the Digital Age. Web 2.0 Services as a Medium for Production/Dissemination of Memory. Representational Principles for Memory Recording.

3. Memories and Cybercultures
Social Networking and Fan Cultures. New Media Arts and Memory.

4. Memory and Inter-Culturalism
Expatriate, Dissent and Emigrant Cultures and Communities Online.

5. Memory and Technology
The Memory of Digital Media and Systems. The Memory Infrastructures and the User Response.

6. Emergent Technologies for Memory Capturing
The Spatialization of Memories in Virtual Worlds. Prototyping Tools for Digital Autobiographic and Biographic Productions. Experimental Interfaces.

7. Archiving and Dissemination of Memory Data
Digital Data Recording. Memory Restoring and Preservation Strategies. Digital Libraries and Archives as a Community Memory. Database Structuring, Data Retrieval and Usage. User Response and Modelling.

8. Uses of New Media for Production of Historical Knowledge
National Identity and Memory in the Digital Age. Political Uses of Cybermedia for Historical Revisionism.

9. Specific Research on Community Memory
Social Issues Research. Online Ethnographic Research. Privacy and Legal Issues in Community Informatics.

6:43pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/330886913
Filed under: memory network media technology internet 
January 4, 2010
"A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island […] [E]ven before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent of a story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course."

—

Jean-François Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi)

via fuckyeahphilosophy + guerrillamamamedicine

7:24pm  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/316683452
(Notes: 41)
  
Filed under: psychology philosophy culture identity network ideology 
January 4, 2010
"Perhaps I’m strange, but I never understood the Marxian desire to liberate the productive forces. I don’t like productivity, production, any of it. I want unproduction, cessation, silence. I don’t want to be a machine anymore. I want to be dissolved into strains and strings […] Heads in talking machines, talking machines near listening machines. Your dystopian epithet is no longer “Citizen”, you are merely “Node”."

— IlllllllllllllI @ 4:04 PM Dec 24th, 2009 & 3:59 AM Jan 3rd 2010

9:11am  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/316074031
Filed under: economics politics culture marxism network 
December 15, 2009
"Definitions of the intellectual are many and diverse. They have, however, one trait in common, which makes them also different from all other definitions: they are all self-definitions. Indeed, their authors are the members of the same rare species they attempt to define… . The specifically intellectual form of the operation—self-definition—masks its universal content which is the reproduction and reinforcement of a given social configuration, and—with it—a given (or claimed) status for the group."

— Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (via fuckyeahtheorists)

11:50am  |   URL: http://micro.maximalis.me/post/284575001
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: network academia philosophy politics