Advice on Television
When I came to write up my Ph.D thesis about TV in India, mid 90s, I soon realised that the moral nervousness about the medium in India was the playing […]
Squeaky Dolphin
From an article about the anxieties of big data by Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford. 2014 is the year we learned about Squeaky Dolphin. That’s the Pynchon-worthy code name for a […]
This whole information business
One of the many revelations from reading Jon Gertner’s magisterial history of Bell Labs, is learning more about the story of Claude Shannon. He was one of any visionaries at […]
Incommunicado
As J.B. Priestley noted – “The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.” – a thought captured elegantly in this series of photos documenting our obsession […]
Anatomy of Distraction
Anyone who has a Smartphone or who lives with or mixes with people who own Smartphone – which is basically everyone in the Western world – will be able to […]
The Universal Machine
“It can be anything you want it to be. This is the nearest we have got to seeing what I would call a universal machine.” David Hockney, in a 2010 […]
Avatars of the political process
“Drones are avatars of the the political process: they are instantiations of a set of ideologies and beliefs, made visible by their reification in electromechanical systems. When we talk about […]
Possessive companies
Typically sharp and incisive piece by Benedict Evans on the tendency for companies to think, and talk, about owning their customers. He relates this specifically to Google Glass but the […]
Orwell vs. Huxley
Since NSA surveillance became apparent with the leaks by Edward Snowden, sales of Orwell’s 1984 have leapt. Orwell’s view of the future was one in which power deprives us of […]
Social serfs?
From a thought-provoking Paul Ford article in the New York Magazine on the $1bn Facebook Instagram deal: “When people write critically about Facebook, they often say that “you are the […]
Selling fridges to Eskimos
I gave a talk yesterday to the Local Government Group / The Young Foundation’s Ageing Well Learning Lab at the Design Council. I was asked to talk about Realising Technology’s […]
Visions of the Future
“In the future, using the internet will be as common as using the telephone services we have today” Two ‘vision videos’ – one from Microsoft in 2011 and the other […]
Devices vs. Things
“The stereo as a device contrasts with the instrument as a thing. A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible […]
7 things about technology that an ageing charity might need to know
Last week I gave a talk to the board of Helpage International, a large, very global ageing charity. I had a ‘simple’ brief. Talk to a very varied board – […]
Facebook Demographics Infographic
via Given my interest in Facebook, maybe I should be on it?
Nudging Older Drivers
ILC-UK, a London based think tank that focus exclusively on ageing related matters, launched a report today on older drivers. Specifically, it addresses how ideas from the ‘nudge’ agenda […]
Facebook: No country for old men?
I’ve been banging on for ages about the massive rise in the use of Facebook by older people. I’ve been posing as an advertisier and tracking the audience reach Facebook […]