- I remember in middle school tech class, we learned the definition of 'technology,' -and I was surprised when I found that it included things we don't think about such as chairs and mechanical pencils. It really is a misused word, and people often say, Oh, the world would be better off without phones and technology, as if that would solve their woes. I interviewed someone the other day, and one of the questions was; if you could wave a magical wand and change anything about the VCU to build community, what would it be? He then answered that VCU would ban all phone usage on campus to force students to communicate with each other. A bit of me also has that wish, although in a less extreme way. It's a known fact that phones have caused us to be disconnected from other people, and therefore, we have all become anxious blobs of meat, avoiding eye contact with others on the street.
I used to have a very rigid view on what a website should be, and how it should look like. After having explored more niche websites, I have come to learn that it is okay to think outside of the box, to test the notions and constraints of what a website should look like or how users interact with it. I personally can relate to how websites are rocks thrown in the ocean - people start things in a sudden burst of inspiration, and then suddenly the site is abandoned, leaving people wondering at the things that the website could have turned into. - room - flexible, can shift the contents and links - shelf - small little things to store there - plants - can grow and build slowly - puddles - burst, and then evaporate.
- interesting to note that corporation heavy websites now have people yearning for old, hand-made sites - kind of like how people long for simple, cottagecore life - - Rothberg has since shared the source code on GitHub, so you too can create a website which self-destructs the moment Google indexes it. - I don't think I can do that - make a website by hand only to be destroyed by google's index. definitely a metaphor for something, in the way that .com corporate sites ate away the little handmade webs
- i love the sound of handmade computer, it seems so intricate and artisanal. - "the first computer is a human", reminds me of all those math classes where the teachers were saying that your brain was the calculator. also reminds me of a psych lecture i saw on youtube, where computer science is very similar to how modules in our brains function. - - I very much agree with the statement that art, architecture, and computation are very much interconnected. we watched a urban city documentary last semester in dialogues, and it really shows how the design of a city's layout can change how people interact with each other and the surroundings around them. a layout can seem aesthetic from the architecture's point of view, with buildings spaced evenly from each other, and with condos that reach the sky, but the reality is that those are not the best ways for the city's community. Condo's isolate people from one another, and the placement of certain types of buildings can cause people to feel unsafe when traveling. - - Humans are the running code in a city, running through various loops, walking around the city in a specific way because of how the city was specifically built. If
"the text of an instant message appears as a two dimensional object on a screen, yet its meaning is not static - it is intimately tied to the speed with which it was typed and the frequency with which the enter button has been hit. The dynamics of conversations vary, from rapid-fire single-word exchanges to scrolling prose broken up by long pauses, and in these contrasts we can see the difference between the blurting out of a rumour and the divulgence of a transgression."
ahhh i really love how this piece is written! everything we interact with is 2d flat screens that show us anything we want, connect us to anyone in the world, so many capabilities done through the screen. i do feel like texting isn't like writing - more like 'talking', because writing I feel is not really intended for real-time, immediate responses. It allows for the writer to thoroughly think through something, before sending it, waiting for a reply. Texting is more real-time, and can be immediate, and the way we express words can convey a certain emotion. Even how we type - do we choose lowercase, uppercase, punctuation, abbreviations - can reflect on who you are as a person. (i absolutely do not like uppercase 'U' or 'Ur', or 'wdym', 'hru,' even though i sometimes fall victim to the latter. but never U or Ur.)
"hereas a truly instant messenger would display each and every keystroke in real time, instead we have an exchange that sits halfway between speaking and writing."
i wonder if people say, "talk to you later", or "i'll text you later." and usually, in text conversation, when referring to someone's text, i would say, "x said this!" instead of "x texted this!" unless i was talking to someone in person, i would use the former.
there is an intimacy of seeing every keystroke - of seeing what people are writing, then pausing, deleting a word or two, writing again, deleting, writing, before sending. it's like seeing the layers of someone's photoshop file.
"The role of the throbbing ellipsis is to placate a user sufficiently to keep them in the chat, to remind them that they are not alone."
snapchat does this well - they notify the user every time someone is typing, and shows the person's bitmoji when they are still in the chat - it almost gives you a sense that they are there with you, waiting for you in the same room. i like that feature, of the virtual togetherness of being on the same page.
"Many users will not wait more than a few seconds for content to load online. Anything longer than this breeds great frustration."
because everything is going too fast, our attention span has been cut tremendously - and i can't help but keep thinking about the quote in fahrenheit 451, how the billboards are so big because the people drive so fast.
"social and news media seek to appeal to and produce a sense that something important is just about to happen. By exploiting anticipation and appealing to a sense of futurity, both intend to capture their audience for as long as possible"
ah, why must you make me wait in anticipation?
"The medium of online chat however allow for us to be present in numerous conversation simultaneously, flitting between personas."
i feel like we are wearing masks either way to different people. it just switches a lot faster in social media. we all wear different personas around certain people, and i am going to refer to 'one no one and one hundred thousand, where the main character drives himself mad obsessing over the fact that every person you meet, or sees you, will think of you as a different person or character. (your mother and your friend will see you differently)
"Story modes represent an interesting fusion of the urgency of live streaming with our desire for crafting narratives."
as always, we pick and choose what we post and say on social media, crafting that said narrative, and not knowing who have just scrolled past it, seen it, or stared at it for a long time. we tend to forget who is watching our said story, and sometimes we are careless in what we post when we are posting stories real time. (don't say you are away on a family vacation during said vacation, wait, in case people want the opportunity to break into your home)
"It goes some way to curb the intrusion of work into employees’ private lives and to counteract the emerging culture in which workers are obliged to feel ‘always on’."
me everyday when i see that gmail notifcation, and am tempted to click, read, and get distracted in whatever said email entails.
It's astonishing to see how Hockney has gone from taking pictures in a structured and linear way to exploring something that is more flexible and edges and moving beyond the box. As a graphic designer, I am always working withing a rectangle box, sketching out the borders first before assembling my design. (The content lookups do remind me of the matrix project done in Core I.) I think it would be an interesting approach to try - gathering the material before deciding the final medium.
I'm not quite sure if I can completely agree with his view on the apple website - there has been some complex websites with fancy animations to impress the audience, and it wows me. But I still favor the simpler and minimal designs more. They are a lot of relaxing to explore through for me.
I thought AR was a more recent thing - I didn't know it went back to the 1980s! I wonder what was going on behind the black screen and white silhouette - what was the process from the beginning to the end, and what were the major challenges?
The giver of names gives me reverse AI art - we type in whatever we want to create an image, meanwhile the video was doing the opposite. There was a Psych lecture I watched that also talked about how AI draws from a database of thousands of words and images to detect what a certain object was.
The library is what brought them together, and it asks for nothing back. Its purpose is fulfilled by all of us using it
What kind of thoughts are possible at the library versus the ones that are had in the current Penn Station? Then ask yourself this: if technology is a place where we live, a place that we carry around with us, shouldn’t we choose to be in lively and nourishing digital environments?
Even in places where no money changes hands, follows and likes act as representations of worth, just like money.