Daniel Rourke /stream

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What will the digital world look like in ten years?  The trends are already clear. Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path.  The explosion in the volume…

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n this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like to…

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"The everyday experience of liberal capitalism rests upon the violent defence of the boundaries against the other that the system itself produces. That banal and pacifying phrase ‘social exclusion’ allows us…

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Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume any…

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Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From 1956…

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In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use,…

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While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on the…

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Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend to…

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A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since World…

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The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the…

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Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations…

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That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication…

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We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner…

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Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through a…

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Professor of New Media Art at the University of California, both artist and graphic designer, Lev Manovich does not need further presentation. His first book “The language of New Media” (it…

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Video games are worth loving, but loving them comes with shame. Not passing regret or social embarrassment, but a sharp-edged physical guilt: the hunch-backed, raw-fingered, burning-eyed pain that comes at the…

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In this in-depth analysis, Daniel Johnson discusses games, language and sociology with regard to Valve's Portal - please note that the article contains story spoilers for the game. In 1959 Erving…

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For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could…

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In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for…

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How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends,…

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What will the digital world look like in ten years?  The trends are already clear. Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path.  The explosion in the volume…

Bookmark

n this essay, I want to explore some dimensions of what the term “humanism” means—what it meant in the past and what it means today. In particular, I would like to…

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These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers. Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas filled with…

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"The everyday experience of liberal capitalism rests upon the violent defence of the boundaries against the other that the system itself produces. That banal and pacifying phrase ‘social exclusion’ allows us…

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Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From 1956…

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Twitter art bums me out. Fine, it’s a new medium that we don’t know what to do with yet, but it's receiving a growing amount of attention and most of it…

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While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on the…

Bookmark

Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend to…

Bookmark

A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since World…

Bookmark

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the…

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Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…

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That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication…

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Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through a…

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It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived. An international group of scientists is aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth -…

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Video games are worth loving, but loving them comes with shame. Not passing regret or social embarrassment, but a sharp-edged physical guilt: the hunch-backed, raw-fingered, burning-eyed pain that comes at the…

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In this in-depth analysis, Daniel Johnson discusses games, language and sociology with regard to Valve's Portal - please note that the article contains story spoilers for the game. In 1959 Erving…

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“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with…

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How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends,…

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[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those…