The rationalists have been gaining ground rapidly over the past couple of decades. Atheism is, increasingly, equated with intellectualism*. At the same time (and probably not unrelated) we are surrounded by and immersed in technology more than ever, and more every day. We are urged and encouraged to believe in the progress of science and technology as the route to …
FOR SALE: Me. Good condition. Convenience ONO. [post 42/100]
[This article was written for Prophecy and is cross-posted here with permission.] We are addicted to technology. Literally. Cognitive scientists have found the same kind of dopamine response in smartphone users checking Facebook as in gamblers pulling the handle on a slot machine, or junkies getting high. And we know it. We now have resorts where you can pay to …
Statistics: the why behind the what [post 41/100]
It’s all about the numbers, right? This is how we are supposed to make decisions or justify them, how we evaluate our success, how we understand the world around us. Everywhere you look these days, there’s sexy new infographics showing, e.g., which percentage of us are jealous of our parents’ lifestyles, or prefer 70s retro to 80s retro, or open …
False adversaries and other obstacles [post 40/100]
“The problem is, everybody’s trying to be viewer-centric. And that’s just not going to work.” Last night at a MIPTV, someone said this to me. I managed (I think) to disguise my shock and hear him out. He’s not a bad guy, and he certainly doesn’t think that audiences are unimportant. But this statement comes from what I have discovered …
You can’t always get what you want [post 39/100]
Since I’m at MIPTV this week, I’ve got media on my mind. Thus, the next couple of posts are going to be focussed on the television world… I’m pretty sure most of the people reading this watch movies or TV series online, right? You’ve probably got Amazon/LoveFilm/Netflix/something else and you stream the content. They’re really catching on, these OTT services. …
The Internet of Why [post 38/100]
I was thinking some more on my way down to MIPTV this morning about last week’s post on the (possible) commoditisation of our selves through the wholesale adoption of “helpful” technologies (thanks very much for the comments, by the way, both here and on the backchannels. You know who you are). I don’t want to sound too much like Cassandra …
The Internet of No [post 37/100]
I enjoyed Nick Sweeney’s post from last month about motion and rest and how much of the technology we’ve been inventing recently, including the Apple Watch, is focussed on keeping us in perpetual motion. He muses about its technological antithesis, the ‘Internet of Rest.’ While I concur with his point – a life of perpetual motion is no kind of …
Grandma’s internet refrigerator [post 36/100]
Since it’s International IoT Day today, I thought I’d write something about… IoT. The other day, Alex Deschamps-Sonsino tweeted something that’s been tugging at the corner of my mind since I read it: As usual, I agree wholeheartedly (with all 5 of her points), but this one resonates for a reason that might or might not be what she intended …
Getting it together (the important business of cross-platform design) [post 35/100]
Remember the old days of design for mobile? I mean before the iPhone, when all we had were dumbphones and WAP? That was a gigantic pain in the arse. Screens were tiny, data connections were slow, touch screens were nonexistent. We had to very carefully select which portions of a web site we’d offer in the WAP version – if …