July 2012
21 posts
“Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever—the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check their email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or…) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It’s not abnormal, and it’s not just for business. It’s just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it’s just life.”
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Ian Bogost, “The Cigarette of This Century”. Via Shawn Blanc. (via tonylucero)
Those cigarettes, they’ll kill you.
(via s-m-i)
Peter Cawdron - Coconut Headphones
If you haven’t heard of Cargo Cults, you’ve missed out on one of the most intriguing insights into human nature, first made popular by noted physicist Richard Feynman in his 1974 commencement speech at CalTech. (Note: Christopher Moore’s wonderful novel “Island of the Sequined Love Nun” is all about Cargo Cults and it’s very, very funny.)
Although the cults themselves did not originate in the second world war, it was this war that transformed them. During the war, the people of Melanesia (a group of islands NE of Australia) found their normal daily routine overwhelmed by the Japanese and then the American war machines. Overnight, air bases would spring up. Forrest were cut down, runways built, and large steel birds flew in from the sky full of cargo, the likes of which the islanders had never seen before. The Melanesian people were fascinated by this radical transformation of their island and struggled to comprehend the world at large beyond the seas.
When the war ended and the air force abandoned them, they began mimicking the actions of the soldiers. They would clear bushland to form a runway, march with sticks instead of rifles, hoist American flags, build control towers complete with pseudo radios made from coconuts and straw, all in an effort to bring back the planes with their precious cargo.
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Geek's are not the mainstream →
tmblr.ttms.us
“Geeks are lamenting that they don’t dominate and control this network, and expressing it in the only way we know how: Through technological triumphalism. If the culture of a giant network doesn’t resemble the culture we prefer, then it must be a problem that can be solved by making the network more technically complicated.”
There are certain insights you can only have when your firmly rooted in the tech sphere (aka, programming, reading tech news, studying start-ups, early adopting new services, using every app known to man, and being a power user of technology, etc.) You may be able to envision new technical possibilities that ‘mainstreamers’ could never even consider.
At the same time, this deep level of technical insight can also disconnect you from mainstream sensibilities, and it’s important to find ways to root yourself in how the masses experience and interact with technology.
The iPhone and Disruption: Five Years In →
daringfireball.net
What’s happened over the last five years shows not that Apple disrupted the phone handset industry, but rather that Apple destroyed the handset industry — by disrupting the computer industry.
