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A Los Angeles Times article on “Why text messages are limited to 160 characters” reveals an interesting connection between old and new media: Friedhelm Hillebrand, the man more or less responsible for this figure, consulted postcards in his search for an ideal length for short messages. Initially, Hillebrand’s team could fit only 128 characters into that [...]
Isn’t this a whole lot more practical, and ethical, than inspiring vague fears in teens and jobseekers — that everything they do and write will come back to haunt them, that they’re constantly being watched, that their future depends on keeping-up appearances (a problem I go over here)? You won’t find Amegy Bank of Texas [...]
I love the idea that, as Ulla remarks in the comments, “we are really not that much more advanced than the 1700′s …” Perhaps we do, on the whole, tend to overestimate the degree to which new forms of social ties are historically novel. Maybe Facebook is merely the next phase, or version, of a much more [...]
In a post on Robert Fisk’s recent talk on Obama, Palestine, and the Middle East, Maximilian Forte picks-up on the widening gap between the neo-luddite old guard left and the emerging tech-savvy leftist blogger-journalist. I’ve always been a fan of Fisk — he’s one of only a few able to describe the Palestine-Israel conflict accurately [...]
A passage from Walter Benjamin, though from a different time, could just as well be said today of those who snicker at the ‘obscenity’ of social media. “(In Moscow I lived in a hotel in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan lamas who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist [...]
Location: The Change You Want To See, Brooklyn, NY Address: 84 Havemeyer Street, Storefront, Brooklyn, NY Date: 17 December 2008 @ 7.30 PM – 10.30 PM Over the past two years, Web 2.0 technologies have matured and so have the methods activist use to employ them. In 2008, activists from around the world used Web [...]
In a post on “Anthropology as connoisseurship”, Rex of Savage Minds observes: Obsession with the details also does not fly well in an age when what we are supposed to be doing is creating generalizing social science. So perhaps connoisseurship as a model of anthropology has drawbacks both for the politically engaged and the scientifically [...]
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