September 2010
23 posts
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August 2010
24 posts
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“Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy,...”
– Strunk & White had the Internet’s number, didn’t they?
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The End of Shame: or, Getting Over Oversharing →
Ms. Melissa Gira Grant of Glass Houses—get it?—has upped the ante, I think, on the conversation about oversharing (because yes, we’re apparently still having that conversation). From the SXSW panel picker:
“Oversharing is over. Now we’re told opening up online is the most valuable currency there is. What’s the real value in relating the most painful, awkward, potentially...
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Civil Inattention
“Privacy is not in opposition to speaking in public. We speak privately in public all the time. Sitting in a restaurant, we have intimate conversations knowing that the waitress may overhear. We count on what Erving Goffman called “civil inattention”: people will politely ignore us, and even if they listen they won’t join in, because doing so violates social norms. Of...
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WatchOne of the most valuable graduate seminars I took at CCA (though I realized it in retrospect, of course, as I was in the final, burned-out throes of thesis work at the time) was a visual anthropology seminar team taught by an IDEO designer and social anthropologist. The course reader was heavy on Geertz, Mitchell, and the like. Our fieldwork methodology was based on IDEO’s, obviously, which...
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Casual Access
“You wouldn’t just pick up someone’s telephone and start fiddling with it—just as you wouldn’t pick up a wallet or handbag and start rifling through the compartments or click around somebody’s desktop without their permission. Presumably the same technology etiquette applies to the iPad, creating another layer of difference between the device and the media it is starting to supplant....
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R & R
I spend some—not all!—of my last day of my summer staycation researching a piece I’m currently writing on The Future of Publishing (or Something Equally Grave). Enter Kickstarter, the crowd-sourced microfinancing site I’ve considered before as a harbinger of good will (and resources!) for writers and creatives. Obviously, I’m interested in why some projects succeed more wildly...
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Edit Wars: Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars →
From so best! data vis blog Information is Beautiful, this charticle functions as telling visualization of the obsessiveness that can begin to characterize user behavior in wiki-based publishing environments. (Par example, an entry for Nintendo Wii: “‘Wii,’ ‘Nintendo Wii,’ or ‘the Wii’? Should ‘wee’ link here, or to the article on...
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