“This latest installation involves a forest of 150 interactive rods installed in an empty factory space that when touched trigger both light and audio cues, effectively creating a large interactive instrument.”
An Interactive Forest of Musical Lasers by Marshmallow Laser Feast | Colossal.
What Facebook doesn’t seem to get is that people generally do not love Facebook. They love their families and friends, who all happen to be on Facebook (which was mostly due to fortunate timing on Facebook’s part). But Facebook itself, they mostly just tolerate, when they don’t outright hate it for its ridiculously confusing, constant changes to its interface and navigation, and its intrusive and bewildering privacy policies.
These ads, and Facebook Home itself, reveal that the company actually believe that people love IT, Facebook, and not the connections to other people that Facebook happens (for the time being) to provide. If the company keeps thinking that way, the inevitable withdrawal of users (already happening among teenagers) will only happen faster. Nobody is ever going to be convinced that Facebook is actually better than real life.
via Facebook Is Helping Us Disconnect From the World – San Francisco – News – The Snitch.
When we are angry though, why are we angry? Certainly, sometimes our friends’ rudeness hurts our feelings; we don’t like being made to feel as though we are not important to the people we care about. But there’s something about control going on here, too. We want our friends to be able to control the urge to look at the phone. We want our friends themselves to be bound by our expectations of what listening and paying attention look like. More strikingly, those who have employees or kids want to exercise dominance over their underlings at the office, and over their children at home. When employees or kids fail to perform deference by seeming to listen quietly, it is insubordination; they reject not just their attentional obligations, but also the authority of their supervisors and parents. It may look like thumbs on a screen, but in truth it’s a middle finger raised straight in the face of power. These are recalcitrant workers, and recalcitrant daughters, engaged in micro-sociological acts of rebellion.
Perhaps sometimes people who ignore physically co-present conversation are just being rude, but—as demonstrated in two out of the three Facebook Home ads—sometimes rudeness is also resistance. When we view smartphone users as present and taking action instead of merely absent, these acts of resistance become more apparent. The bored developer rejects Mark Zuckerberg’s demands that he perform emotional labor at work and appear to be interested and engaged when he is not; he thwarts Zuckerberg’s power that keeps him sitting in that chair. The bored daughter rejects gendered expectations that she perform emotional labor at home by appearing to be a caring “good listener” when she is not; she thwarts the parental power that keeps her sitting at the table. And when I spend my drink-wait staring determinedly at my phone rather than re-acknowledge the guy who keeps touching my arm and laying artless pickup lines on me, I am rejecting his masculine entitlement to my body, my attention, and my time. In my own small way, in a way less violent than the imaginary bar fight in my head, I am thwarting the power of patriarchy. I’m not absent but present, and pissed off on top of it; my friends who are present with me through digital conversation are providing welcome support and diversion.
Here’s the other thing: We were attention-shifting before there were smartphones, and we attention-shift even when our smartphones are still in our pockets. I’ll own the fact that sometimes I don’t pay full attention when people talk to me: sometimes I accidentally space out, sometimes I have a lot on my mind, sometimes I’m too sleep-deprived to focus on much of anything, and sometimes—yes—I’m making the choice to deliberately tune out and wait for someone to please just stop talking. A smartphone in my hand may make it more glaringly (glowingly?) apparent to the person speaking that I’m not giving them my full attention, but I don’t need the smartphone in my hand to create the possibility of inattention. If we view smartphone use as “absence,” it’s too easy to see non-use automatically as presence; yet, we all know the frustration of talking to someone who’s distracted, even without a smartphone in their hand. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that we have someone’s attention just because the thumbs are still and the eyes are pointed in our general direction.
via Rudeness as Resistance: Presence, Power, and Those Facebook Home Ads » Cyborgology.
[These are just begging to be tattoos, huh? -egg]
[Interesting snippets of the secret histories of drag in African-American performance traditions. -egg]
How much deeper it goes depends on how many hours you have. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff’s 2007 study Ragged but Right: Black Travelling Shows, “Coon Songs” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz documents female impersonators in African-American tent shows back into the late 19th century. In New York meanwhile there was Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, the Harlem drag balls, the “mannish acting women” among the early blues queens (Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, also minstrel and tent-show veterans) and all the gender nonconformists of the jazz age and Harlem Renaissance.
…
That ambivalence hints at the multitudinous duplicities of crossdressing in African-American history. It’s difficult to separate it, for example, from the legacy of minstrelsy: Blackfaced white minstrel troupes were as a rule all-male, and so would include performers who specialized in female characters, mostly degrading archetypes such as the Mammy and the Wench (plantation madonnas and whores). When black-run minstrel tent shows and their female impersonators took over, they sometimes perpetuated those characters, though they also added more dignified ones, just as they sang some of the “coon” songs and re-enacted jokes and scenarios from that ugly past. Scholar J.T. Lhamon reads Little Richard’s act as a “Sambo” figure mutated, made a “trickster,” by its acceleration through rapidfire postwar social modes—sum that up as “woo!” or “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-boom!” (those last couple of syllables were originally “goddamn!”).
Minstrelsy might be reclaimed and reconfigured, but its uneasy inheritance is everywhere, in American black and white.
[Some good info here. -egg]
There are a ton of browser extensions that promise to protect your privacy, which leads to some natural questions: Which is the best? Do they all do the same thing? What should I really download? In this guide, we’re going to look at the most popular browser extensions that promise to protect your privacy online, and give you our recommendations.
We’ve talked about why you should care about your privacy several times here, so whether you choose to do something to protect yourself is up to you—we’re not going to rehash it. Instead, we’re going to dive into the tools available to keep your data safe. Most of them fall into three groups: add-ons that prevent third parties from tracking your movements, add-ons that block ads and scripts, and passive security tools that enforce good habits. Don’t worry, though. You don’t need to download a ton of apps to keep yourself safe and your data close to pocket. Here are the best in each group.
Volcano Dust is a brand of powdered bhut jolokia chili peppers. Also known as ghost chills, bhut jolokias are mind-bendingly hot. For example, an average jalapeño pepper measures about 5,000 on the Scoville heat scale; a bhut jolokia measures 1,000,000 Scovilles.
The manufacturer of Volcano Dust sent me a box of samples, and I carefully tried them out. They are certainly the hottest powdered chili peppers I’ve ever tasted, but I like them. A slight dusting of theHot Italian Blend on my easy-over eggs or chicken soup turns them into an exciting culinary experience. Here’s to blown-out capsaicin receptors!
[Some interesting thoughts from grinding.be. Worth a read. -egg]
I’m increasingly resistant to the notion of Sustainability… because what are we sustaining but the slow motion death of the life on Earth that has supported us? WE NEED TO ACCELERATE FORWARDS INTO THE FUTURE, DRAGGING ALL OF HISTORY AND ITS LESSONS WITH US.
Okay, that’s a tad hyperbolic… but there are a lot of legacy civilizational myths that need to be exploded. For starters, the crux of the Environmental Mythology, that the Amazon is some untouched Gaian Paradise, when the evidence points to it being a pre-Columbian garden that’s since ReWilded:
grinding.be » Blog Archive » Conservation ain’t what it used to be (WE NEED TO BE BIGGER).
