• Tech

“The age of the public sphere as face-to-face talk is clearly over; the question of democracy must henceforth take into account new forms of electronically mediated discourse. [...] For Habermas, the public sphere is a homogeneous space of embodied subjects in symmetrical relations, pursuing consensus through the critique of arguments and the presentation of validity [...]

Alright, maybe that’s a little dramatic. After all, the panopticon was an idea born from thoughts on discipline and the prison system: Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance [...]

Those in new media studies tend to have a great distrust of Facebook, and for good reason. Facebook recently rolled out a new ad structure where companies like Starbucks may pay Facebook to find posts mentioning that company, then turn those posts into an ad for said company including that user’s endorsement of the company. [...]

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas traces the history of the concept of the “public sphere” – its rise and its decline. He argues that the “literary public sphere” (which arose thanks to a newly well-read bourgeois) eventually brought the rise of the “political public sphere” (a true public opinion sprouted from [...]

The day has come that we can sit in class and watch tweets of the punchlines from the State of the Union address from the President. The president is in our streams – and about time. The infiltration of the “democratic” online “public” by both government and special interests has happened (even if it still [...]

Lately, the pervasiveness of location-based gaming (or clever marketing aimed at getting you to broadcast your locations and habits for the monetary gain of both the platform creators and business, whichever you want to call it) has been really bugging me. Really, it’s the fact that these developers allow ignorance of their product within their [...]

A key topic in Blown to Bits is privacy; what it was (and what it has become), why it’s a concern, how we lost – or “abandoned”(21) it. Abandoning your privacy is an interesting concept; one that was unheard of just two decades ago. If someone in 1979 was waiving around information like their name, [...]

Throughout my time on Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, a few things have become apparent. These tools (which is simply what they are) take up an immense amount of time and require real effort to make them valuable. So what is value and how does one obtain their version of it from these digital conglomerates? It [...]

Beginning March 13 at 8:30 a.m., I will be following 13 fixed-gear cyclists from Dallas to Austin documenting their trip from a not-so-cyclist-friendly city (ahem-Dallas-ahem) to one of the most cyclist-friendly cities in the U.S. during SXSW. Oh, wait… did I say fixed? Like, one gear, no coasting, FIXED?! Yes. 240+ miles. On fixed-gear bikes. [...]

This was awesome enough to share. Hammer-and-Nail art. I cant’ seem to find this artist’s name, as every search inevitably ended with fingernail art and I gave up, disgruntled. Enjoy! *UPDATE: Artist is Saimir Strati.  Thanks to @ECDryere for finding it! Beautiful!