Showing posts with label futurology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label futurology. Show all posts

Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Cultural Memory in the Present) Review

Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Cultural Memory in the Present)
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Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Cultural Memory in the Present) ReviewJosé van Dijck raises interesting questions in this book: How are digital artifacts different from physical ones? What does the advent of zero-cost memorabilia mean for how we construct our identities? How will this technological transition affect our culture and our sense of history?
These are good questions to reflect on, but this book gives us few answers. There are some enjoyable (and potentially illuminating) stories in here; my favorite is of the radio station in The Netherlands plays "the two thousand most popular songs of all times" (the subject of Ch. 4). Unfortunately, these stories are interspersed with unparseable sentences such as "In conjunction to the technological script, we hence need to look at how social practices and cultural forms transpire through the concrete manifestations of diary writings and lifelogs" (p.67) and "The pair brain/mind is hierarchically off set from the pairs technology/materiality and cultural practices/forms; the latter two are mere conceptual aids in the neurobiological theory of movies-in-the-brain" (p. 125).
Clearly, van Dijck has done her homework. But can any amount of social theory shed light on such broad questions? After reading this book, I don't feel like I've gained any new insight beyond the traditional mantra of the humanities: It's complicated.Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Cultural Memory in the Present) OverviewMany people deploy photo media tools to document everyday events and rituals. For generations we have stored memories in albums, diaries, and shoeboxes to retrieve at a later moment in life. Autobiographical memory, its tools, and its objects are pressing concerns in most people's everyday lives, and recent digital transformation cause many to reflect on the value and meaning of their own "mediated memories." Digital photo cameras, camcorders, and multimedia computers are rapidly replacing analogue equipment, inevitably changing our everyday routines and conventional forms of recollection. How will digital photographs, lifelogs, photoblogs, webcams, or playlists change our personal remembrance of things past?And how will they affect our cultural memory? The main focus of this study is the ways in which (old and new) media technologies shape acts of memory and individual remembrances. This book spotlights familiar objects but addresses the larger issues of how technology penetrates our intimate routines and emotive processes, how it affects the relationship between private and public, memory and experience, self and others.

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Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication Review

Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication
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Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication ReviewThis book brings welcome attention to the neglected field of personal, general-purpose manufacturing. He argues that the technology is at roughly the stage that computing was when minicomputers were the leading edge, is good enough to tell us something about how full-fledged assemblers as envisioned by Drexler will be used, and that the main obstacle to people using it to build what they want is ignorance of what can be accomplished.
The book presents interesting examples of people building things that most would assume were beyond their ability. But he does not do a good job of explaining what can and can't be accomplished. Too much of the book sounds like a fund-raising appeal for a charity, describing a needy person who was helped rather than focusing on the technology or design process. He is rather thoughtless about choosing what technical details to provide, giving examples of assembly language (something widely known, and hard enough to use that most of his target users will be deterred from making designs which need it), but when he describes novel ideas such as "printing" a kit that can be assembled into a house he is too cryptic for me to guess whether that method would improve on standard methods.
I've tried thinking of things I might want to build, and I'm usually no closer to guessing whether it's feasible than before I read the book. For example, it would be nice if I could make a prototype of a seastead several feet in diameter, but none of the examples the book gives appear to involve methods which could make sturdy cylinders or hemispheres that large.
The index leaves much to be desired - minicomputers are indexed under computers, and open source is indexed under software, when I expected to find them under m and o.
And despite the lip service he pays to open source software, the CAM software he wrote comes with a vague license that doesn't meet the standard definition of open source.Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication Overview

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