Archive: The Gnovis Blog
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Why We Blog (Revisited) & Our Holiday Hiatus
Our editorial team will be wrapping up our Fall issue next week, but for our bloggers the holiday break starts today. We’ll be back in early January. Before I retreat to the editor’s corner, though, I thought I’d wrap up our semester in a pretty little bow. I swear I didn’t plan this.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Weekly Roundup: Hermann Hesse, Tim O'Reilly, and Barack Obama walk into a bar…
Maybe I’m still feeling the Tryptophan , but my favorite posts this week appear to be lacking a coherent theme, so I’m going to revert to simple bullet points. Just because they’re random, though, don’t assume they aren’t utterly fascinating.
Here at gnovis
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Digital Killed the Television Star
Is TV soon going to become another nostalgic relic of our technological past like radio stars or record players?Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Book Review – "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind"
If you’re familiar with the work of Lawrence Lessig, you’ll recognize the formula James Boyle follows in his latest book, "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind". It goes something like this:
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Censor them with Content
Imagine the following scenario: You are a policy maker for a country with questionable leadership, and an even more questionable economy. A new technology called the Internet has emerged which might answer some of your economic concerns, but you are concerned about the unintended consequences of adopting a technology that might undermine your county’s sense of morality, not to mention nationalism.This problem is not new, you saw the same threats emerged out of other media sources once they were able to syndicate content from across the world. But with newspaper, television and radio, the number of broadcasters was small enough that the appropriateness of content could be regulated. With the Internet, however, every media consumer is also a producer.
With a population of less than 5 million, these were the concerns of the Singaporean government when it implemented a complicated array of Internet censorship practices, but these concerns could equally be applied to the United States as well. The anxiety of nation-states about the border/culture/economically-agnostic nature of information on the Internet, and the desire to control information must always compete with the thick ideological armor with which we protect our digital free speech. The design of our Internet infrastructure is so imbued with the ideology of free speech that unrestricted access to information seems preordained for anyone who chooses to plug-in.
So how do you censor the individual? You launch MySpace.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog wrap-up: Giving thanks for moments passed and speculating on what's to come
In the spirit of holiday decompression, here are a few tidbits to mull over as you recover from turkey food coma and awkward moments with extended family.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Obama's appointees: Lessons learned from science?
Over the last week, we’ve learned that the Obama administration will be largely comprised of superstar members of Washington’s elite sphere. Could Obama’s choice of seasoned insiders be the perfect complement to his outside the beltway form of strength?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Blog Wrap Up: Death, Post-Election, and Conceptual Art
On Gnovis: Halloween arrives three weeks late
The CSCW conference inspired Jed to write about user death (both voluntary and involuntary, physical and digital) and the implications this has for Social Networking Sites (SNS). Jess Vitak responds with her own take on why users don’t delete their profiles: "the costs are too high and the incentives are too low." What do you think?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Productive Monsters: the up-side of Hollywood's most destructive characters
With finals coming and PhD applications looming for many of us, it is no
wonder WIRED’s retrospective “The Creatures that Ate Hollywood” delighted me.
King Kong Vs. Godzilla, 1962
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Death of a User: The Overlooked Use-Case
For all the time we spend detailing use cases for ever imaginable "happy path", when was the last time we stopped to create a use case that accounts for the "death" of a user? Are we good/humble enough developers to handle the potential that our users might want to, well… leave?
"User death" was a topic that I kept running into at CSCW this year . Not in any papers or presentations, instead the topic was relegated to quiet conversations where people dared challenge the impenetrable user/technology dyad. During one of the first nights at CSCW, I spent a good deal of time speaking with Mike Massimi, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. He was kind enough to share some recent theoretical work he submitted to SIGCHI about what he calls "thanatosensitive design." Quoting one his professors, “It’s an odd feeling seeing a recent e-mail in your inbox from someone who is no longer here to receive the reply.” Massimi suggests that we need to reconsider user-centered design to account for our inevitable deaths.
Category: The Gnovis Blog