The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.
Michel Foucault - Of Other Spaces
James Bridle:
We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, “enhanced” books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of advertising, publishers’ reactions to new technologies betray a profound lack of confidence in the text itself. We are being distracted by shiny things.
via Craig Mod
(via hekj)
Algorithms shape our news cycle. For example, despite being “the most commonly used hashtag” since Sept 16th, #OccupyWallStreet has yet to trend on Twitter.
Gilad Lotan of SocialFlow speculates that OWS’s consistent growth over time prevented Twitter’s systems from taking notice. Since Twitter isn’t designed to capture news movements that live beyond a day, readers are left wondering if OWS is less significant than thought. In this way, Twitter’s algorithm colors the news.
It will be a long time before responsible news sources fully divorce humans from editorial duties. If ever. (Via Nieman Journalism Lab)
(via hekj)
Learning and mediating and the willingness to see through other people’s eyes are core competencies for the successful governance of a city.Living in the Endless City, Foreword by Wolfgang Nowak (via synthesizedigest)
