Alright first,
The Digital Medium
pretty cool blog, but more cool is its 'three principles'
http://inventingthemedium.wordpress.com/three-principles/
Inventing the Medium is based on three foundational principles:
All things made with electronic bits and computer code belong to a single new medium, the digital medium, with its own unique affordances.
Designing any single artifact within this new medium is part of the broader collective effort of making meaning through the invention and refinement of digital media conventions.
When we expand the meaning-making conventions that make up human culture, we expand our ability to understand the world and to connect with one another.
- The Next Facebook/Google+
Given this digital medium, we can ask two questions
(1) what makes an internet medium popular?
(2) what makes an internet medium cool?
Clearly facebook encapsulates the answer to 1). But we can note some severe shortcomings to facebook, and why it's not 2) yet:
exhibit a) the social graph
"The funny thing is, no one's really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what's basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.
Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook.
Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.
But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.
My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It's just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online."
exhibit b) m00t on facebook and identity constraint
http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/chris-poole-4chan-web-2/?utm_campaign=Feed:%20Mashable%20(Mashable)&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&WT.mc_id=obinsite00000
google+ came out and it was basically the same as facebook in terms of identity and most of us were unimpressed. that's why everyone's still waiting. the new facebook will have to change not just the way we share content (re: google+'s circles), but "who we share it as."
- Future of Interactive Design
In addition to the new popular digital medium, what does the future of the electronic medium--those devices that access the digital medium--have in store for us?
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/
It better NOT be the ipad.
Next up,
Broomsticks revealed
Just that way of framing the practice: rather than aesthetics, they focused on potent plants that had powers, functional plants, plants that cast spells. that's such a cool way of viewing it. just a different mindset back then. i'm not even going to say the difference back then was a lack of knowledge. just a different mindset.
Neo-Heidegger focused on space
"The book ends, symmetrically, with a meditation on Mary's giving birth to Christ, as an image of the mother-child dyad that brings the reader up to the edge of the Renaissance, when the major spheric disintegration took place once Copernicus et. al. started to question the notion of being encased inside whirling cosmic macrospheres. When those spheres were shattered, all hell, did indeed, break loose, and humanity was set on the path toward Nietzsche's annunciation of the death of God as a disguised cry that the human being now, for the first time ever, faced a gigantic cosmos alone and unprotected by any metaphysical immune system. Hence, the anxieties of the 20th century, its chaos of wars and its profusion of sages, each of whom desperately attempts to offer a pharmaceutical balm to soothe the anxiety of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger put it.
Sloterdijk, indeed, picks up from where Heidegger left off, for it was Heidegger's primary task to situate the lonely philosophical Ego into a specific and very concrete world, where he is always already engaged in doing something, thus putting an end to the subject-object dichotomy that had haunted philosophy since Descartes. Sloterdijk picks up the tradition of embedding the individual in a context by saying that not only is the human already in the world doing something, but he is specifically inside a container of some sort that functions as an extension of the mother womb. He or she is always involved with someone -- even when no one appears to be present -- inside an invisible environment of one ontological sort or another. Ontology, then, is applied immunology."
http://www.amazon.com/Bubbles-Spheres-Microspherology-Semiotext-Foreign/dp/1584351047/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320753177&sr=8-1
