Everybody is very enamored by Google’s self-driving cars, you know, Google making glasses. That’s all jazz hands. It’s a big, huge distraction. They’re an advertising network. They’re putting a 25 to 50 percent advertising tax on everything created in the world. That’s all their doing. It’s a huge ad network. They’re going to subsume all …
On death and online culture
As Facebook knows, a digital world raises new problems. To be sure, Facebook made a mistake not considering enough the mortality of those who would use their product. But to be fair, when have inventors or designers ever had to before? Think of other classic American brands—Ford or Coca-Cola, for example—whose products are not so …
Digital world and humanity
It is not enough to be passersby on the digital highways, simply “connected”; connections need to grow into true encounters. We cannot live apart, closed in on ourselves. … Media strategies do not ensure beauty, goodness and truth in communication. The world of media also has to be concerned with humanity, it too is called …
Coming to terms with tech proliferation
The virtuality of the debate has made it difficult for us to grapple with the consequences of the proliferation of the world outside of this bubble …Now that the effects of the tech world invade the physical environment, we have to figure out the necessary philosophical and intellectual framework to deal with it. — Evgeny …
Digital afterlife data policy
Beyond the variability among states and companies, it’s worth asking if access to data post-mortem should extend beyond family members and enter some kind of publicly accessible data repository, which data scientists and presumably anyone else could explore. In presenting this concept, Brubaker used the word “donate,” not unlike a person permitting organ donations after …
Digital afterlife
Who gets the photographs and the e-mail stored online, the contents of a Facebook account, or that digital sword won in an online game?…“There can be painful legal and emotional issues for relatives unless you decide how to handle your electronic possessions in your estate planning.” — Anne Eisenberg in yet another useful piece on …
Boston Marathon, and the value of social
Please keep checking in. People often complain about social media. Facebook is time-consuming and pointless and self-aggrandizing and there’s no real connection — yes, all right. Twitter is a constant, exhausting, too-cool-for-school barrage. And both of them leave you feeling a little more distant from everyone, at the price of keeping a line open …
How to navigate child consent in the digital era
With college students, obviously, we assume that they are young adults–even there, we still need to do a lot more to educate them as they, too, struggle deal with the ramifications of privacy in a networked world where exposure can get out of control much quicker and in hard-to-anticipate manner. — Your Children are not Your …
Pick your collaborators wisely
I have learned that when it comes to successful idea translation, whether in labs, ateliers, or startups, it is not only the breakthrough eureka ideas, but the chemistry of the team, that determines success or failure. Venture and academia are not polar opposites, as some might have you believe. After all, serial entrepreneurs and productive labs are …
Raju Narisetti in a Q&A with Nieman Labs
I think Twitter — unlike all the fears people had that it’s going to turn us into short attention-span people because we were so focused on the character limit — Twitter actually brought serendipity back into my life in a major way. I now encounter and experience so much more interesting content from around the …