More miscellaneous details

Tag: society

  • ‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement – The Guardian

    Williams first had the idea to bring VR into prisons five years ago. After founding Creative Acts in 2018, she said she “got real tired of hearing people come home after life sentences, having done multiple decades inside, and literally landing on a different planet”. She felt there was an urgent need for her organization to visually puncture the concrete barriers separating incarcerated people from the outside world. “As the world was changing out here, we missed it,” said Star Van Pool, Creative Acts’ program facilitator, who was incarcerated for 17 years.

    So when Williams heard about a rudimentary VR program led by correctional officers in another state, she began to workshop how her organization could safely and humanely adapt this work. “I was looking for something that would bring the outside world inside. I heard that VR works on your brain as if you’ve had the experience,” Williams said. “It seemed like an ideal tool.”

    , ,

  • If Jeff Bezos doesn’t eat the Mona Lisa, who else will? – Diggit Magazine

    What would it mean if Jeff Bezos would buy and eat the Mona Lisa? This article demonstrates how a seemingly meaningless petition on change.org conjures various connections between contemporary manifestations of technologically driven nihilism and an upcoming battle between technocapitalism and intangible sociocultural values.

    , , , ,

  • Who can save us from social media? At this point, perhaps just us – The Harvard Gazette

    The boldest and most creative of social media’s would-be reformers, a small group of legal scholars and other academics, joined by a handful of rebel programmers, have a more radical plan. They call it frictional design. They believe the existing technological system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt in a more humanistic form. Pursuing an approach reminiscent of the machine-breaking strategy of the 19th-century British Luddites, if without the violence, they seek, in effect, to sabotage existing social media platforms by reintroducing friction into their operations — throwing virtual sand into the virtual works.

    , , , ,

  • The Tyranny of Now – The New Atlantis

    Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new — to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.

    , , ,

  • Turns out the zombie apocalypse isn’t as fun as they said it would be – Rebecca Solnit on our dangerously disconnected world – The Guardian

    The pandemic emptied out the streets, but this is another kind of emptiness – it often seems as though fewer people are out and about, but also the people still present are a lot less present. Had this happened overnight it would be a sci-fi horror movie scenario – people seeming numbed, dazed, their attention captured and manipulated by the contents of tiny devices controlled by powerful corporations, a billion Manchurian candidates in a wifi-equipped Metropolis. A Night of the Living Dead to You. But it’s happened so incrementally it’s become normal for us all to be in that limbo, that bardo.

    , ,

  • The world of tomorrow – Works in Progress

    As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century. By the time I was a teenager, however, the spell had broken. The once-enticing future morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness. Limits replaced expansiveness. Glamour became horror. Progress seemed like a lie.

    Much has been written about how and why culture and policy repudiated the visions of material progress that animated the first half of the twentieth-century, including a special issue of this magazine inspired by J Storrs Hall’s book Where Is My Flying Car? The subtitle of James Pethokoukis’s recent book The Conservative Futurist is ‘How to create the sci-fi world we were promised’. Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.

    , ,

Tags

AI Amazon Apple archives art book reviews books chatbots children China classical commerce computing copyright culture data design Donald Trump economics education Elon Musk environment ethics fakes future gadgets galleries Google health history history of technology humour illustration internet jobs journalism Leeds LLM mental health metaverse mobile phones movies music NASA painting photography politics productivity psychology robots satire schools science sculpture search Second Life social media society software space standards technology television time truth video video games VR watches writing

Archives