“You know what your trouble is? You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.”
~William Gibson “The Winter Market”
The ability to communicate. This ability is one of the features of the Internet that draws us as a society in, allows us to create communities and maintains our relationship across long distances of space and time. For the Internet to continue to grow as the central backbone of communication & society in the world, …
Since the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri is now “requiring” iPhones or iTouches for the incoming freshmen class, it seems like a good time as any to talk about the influence of technology in higher education. The argument presented by Brian Brooks, the associate dean of the Journalism School believed that putting the device …
I was made first aware of the WolframAlpha project by a couple of colleagues who were looking into artificial intelligence and were impressed with this new search engine that could understand questions and respond with natural responses. As of right now, all search engines have a tough time with translating natural language questions into data from analysis. …
The first barrier that any nanocelebrity must cross in order to expose themselves to the larger online community is to self-publish. If we are to believe that academics must “publish or perish,” then a person seeking to be a nanocelebrity must publish or never exist. This may be the most obvious place to start, but …
According to Ellen Nakashima, the Pentagon is looking at the creation of a “Cyber Command Center” designed to be the central resource on the war on cyber-terror. The U.S. Military is discussing how they could best protect the national military cyber-assets, national security online resources, and the civilian government in the chance that there would be …
I admit, for being a student of cyberstudies and a strong supporter for open source, that I was late in the whole Linux party. I finally have a Linux computer in my office, and it has been working great. It seems that most of the barriers to entry with regards to Linux have been worked …
It seems that the issues that I get requested to speak on most during the last couple of months have been the issues of cyberbullying and sexting. Most of the time it comes in the form of an educator who has heard of me and wanted me to talk to other teachers about these technological issues. There was a rare occurrence that I had …
A reaction to Dan Patterson’s comment regarding the development of tools and technology online.
Rex Sorgatz wrote last year about the concept of the nanocelebrity when he wrote “[t]he point is that renown is no longer the exclusive province of a select few. Nano-celebrity is there for the taking, if you really want it.” I believe that he was talking about celebrity at the micro level and was getting …
A simple little article describe the past of the web and how the web may develop based on sociology and technological development. The question is “will the web morph into other forms or will the web keep it current structure?”