archive

What technology can now achieve

Daniel Peter Hourigan (Griffith): Zizek and the Ontological Emergence of Technology. Peter Otto (UCSD): Romanticism, Modernity, and Virtual Reality: An Overview and Reconceptualisation of the Field. From The Economist, a special report on managing information: Information has gone from scarce to superabundant — that brings huge new benefits, but also big headaches. Tim Berners-Lee on the year open data went worldwide. Triple Canopy goes Inside the Mundaneum: Snail-mail Google and a card-catalog Web — a fin-de-siecle Belgian information scientist’s proto-Internet. A review of Simulation and Its Discontents. From Popular Science, what the future of America's infrastructure might look like: 25 new technologies that will transform America's systems. Given what technology can now achieve, the enduring crapness of airplanes must serve some psychological purpose, mustn’t it? Steampunk's turn toward the past is more than merely aesthetic — technology is viewed with a turn-of-the-century sense of wonder that opposes our contemporary tendency to take it for granted. An interview with Tom Chatfield on books on computer games. That whole Internet thing's not going to work out: Farhad Manjoo on how to suss out bad tech predictions. An interview with Aleks Krotoski on books on virtual living. Geert Lovink examines the colonization of real-time; comment culture and the rise of extreme opinions; and the emergence of "national webs". A review of Fun Inc.: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield. We now face a new threat to our control over our computing: Software as a service — for our freedom’s sake, we have to reject that. Jane McGonigal on how gaming can make a better world. A look at how the Internet will change the world — even more.