“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”
As discussed earlier in this blog, it is important to publish thoughts and ideas in order to exist on the social network. However, it is equally as important to know what to communicate and what not to communicate within these channels. If one writes simply to let others know they exist, it will...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Dan Patterson from ABC News was on This WEEK in TECH discussing how companies need to think about web development now and the future and I think he hit on a key point: Our tools and our gadgets and gizmos, they are all well and good. But really this is not about our tools and gadgets, it about...
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...
