Alan Jacobs asks us to consider the influence of the first-person shooter video game genre on the minds of young men, in particular the young men adorned in combat gear in Ferguson, Missouri: What is it like to have your spatial, visual orientation to the world shaped by thousands of hours in shooter mode? I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces … Note how... Read more
“Weird Al” Yankovic was the first “popular music” I ever liked. Well, him and the Monkees, because I was a kid. From a young age I felt alienated from what I knew of pop music: Rock was aggressive and threatening (to me), and Top 40 pop was dopey. At the age of 8 or 9 or so, I really didn’t know much else (save for the Beatles, which were more like a cultural force of good than a “rock band,”... Read more
If you’re in public relations, journalism, entertainment, or other similar fields, you already know that Facebook wields enormous power, probably far too much, in that its algorithms are what chiefly decide to what degree any content you post will be seen by users. Only the people who work at Facebook can know precisely how every factor is weighed, but we do know that there are elements of the content itself that determine its delivery, as well as how its received... Read more
I have no idea why he did it. I have no special insight into whatever darkness weighed on the heart of Robin Williams. I haven’t even seen a Robin Williams movie since Man of the Year, which was terrible. But he’s someone I absolutely idolized as a young comedic performer, someone whose career I would have done anything to emulate. He was an early example for me of a performer who was utterly beloved entirely for his performances, for his talent... Read more
Microsoft has a new ad campaign for their tablet-laptop hybrid the Surface Pro 3, which compares the device directly to the 13″ MacBook Air. Here’s one of the ads. Now, of course I get that it wants to show that the Surface is comparable to the MacBook in tech specs so that folks don’t presume it’s an underpowered netbook piece of crap, fine. I won’t get into all of the device’s now well-documented problems and shortcomings. You gotta compare your product... Read more
I’ve moments ago finished The Bone Season, a novel by Samantha Shannon that I quite enjoyed, about a near-future world in which “clairvoyants,” those born with an ability to interact with the spirit world, are considered riffraff at best and plague-carrying criminals at worst. The layers of the world are rather quickly shown to be numerous, with a number of possible answers to the question of who is really in control (and it does get complicated). For this post, I’m primarily... Read more
Speaking of whether social media can subsume one’s identity, I’m reminded of a piece from last year by Sara Scribner on “breaking up” with Facebook, and for so many of us even contemplating such a thing is fraught with anxiety and percieved peril. (I also wrote about this piece around the time it came out.) Toward the end, she queries some young adults as to their dependence on Facebook, and is surprised to hear that many of them are not happy about life... Read more
Are we losing ourselves in social media? A lot of people feel that way, that we’re all just absorbing ourselves into some kind of swirl of ones and zeroes, and that our identities and individualities are being lost to “Big Data.” One way I’ve heard it put is that we’re all turning into the passengers on the Axiom. Rob Horning at The New Inquiry addresses this, by way of his reading of Jean Baudrillard, a social critic from the previous... Read more
In May, the European Union’s top court made the controversial ruling that search engines were responsible for upholding a so-called “right to be forgotten,” compelling Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others to cease indexing and displaying links to web pages that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” to a person making a complaint. This is not globally enforceable, of course, and applies only to the EU court’s jurisdiction. Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, of which Wikipedia is a part, reported that its... Read more
Did Andy Ihnatko know I was starting this tech-and-humanism blog? Almost certainly not, but look, he’s gone and given me some great blog fodder. Ihnatko is a brilliant, funny, and insightful technology pundit and commentator on geek culture that I’ve been a fan of for years. Occasionally he’ll use his personal blog to wade into other areas that spark his intellectual curiosity, and it’s almost always worth one’s time to read. (Recommendations: His mauling of Family Guy and praising of Bob’s... Read more
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