Archive for the 'English' Category

Stephan Packard DID NOT invite you to join Google+

Published by admin on 22/01/2012 in English and German. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

…so for some reason, some of my friends and colleagues have received ‘invitations’ from ‘me’ to join Google+. The mails don’t look like spam, but rather as if they do come from the Google+ system. But I didn’t send out any invitations on purpose, and at least one of the recipients shouldn’t even be known to my Google+ account at all, unless Google is using my android address book to get at contacts. However, many other friends did *not* receive these mails.

So: If you have received such an ‘invitation’, I’d like to:

(1) apologize for spamming you, albeit inadvertently;

(2) if you’d be so kind, ask you to drop me a line if you did get such a mail, which might help me to figure out what is going on.

Incidentally, yes I am aware of the irony of this happening to someone studying the control of communication in newest media. Oh dear.

 

 

Google’s Double-Plus Real Names

Published by packard on 10/08/2011 in English. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

So after spending a couple of weeks talking about why Google+ is so great, we are now in the second week of speaking about Google’s strange policy regarding user names for this new social network. And it really is very strange, perhaps even more so than it is controversial, oppressive, or socially obliging. For whatever you might have heard and whatever Google’s original intention might have been, the way the service and its rules work right now does not boil down to requiring real names. That would have made for a pertinent but simple story; it is a story well worth telling and debating, but it’s not this story. »»»»

What is Consciousness? Let’s decide by having a vote.

Published by packard on 22/03/2011 in English. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Information is Beautiful is undertaking a large poll, mapping beliefs about consciousness to age, gender, and rough location, worldwide.

Perhaps even more interesting than the possible outcome is the way they framed the question, offering subjects to choose 3 out of 12 statements about consciousness. While the table with possible choices is a 3 minute crash course in contemporary philosophy, speculation about possible combinations may yield hours of fun. If you’re that kind of person. Which, in my case, happens to be a “Functionalistic Identity Theorizing Behaviourist”, in the poll’s terms. Which are you?

When you find out, feel free to post your vote to the comments here. Perhaps we’ll see how Signifying Media considers consciousness. By strict majority vote, of course.

What happened to Virtuality Week?

Published by packard on 01/03/2011 in English. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Mid-February, I started a ‘virtuality week’, promising small pieces of a research project on virtuality every day. I started off well enough and continued through the second and third post, promised to continue on Saturday, and never did. So what happened?

Well, the short answer is you don’t really want to know, because it’s all tedious stuff about workflow coupled with a slight dysfunction in the interface I use for scheduling blog posts. Either way, I apologize, and I will be posting the two missing parts during the remainder of this week.

Now, instead of dwelling on what went wrong, let’s recap by considering what I would be doing if I declared virtuality week to be not broken but virtual, i.e. a virtual week that spans the first half of the real week beginning Feb 14th, and continuing during the second half of this week. I think this immediately creates an intelligible idea in our heads, right? But what is that idea about, and why would we accept the word ‘virtual’ to describe it, even as a rough metaphor?

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Kinect and World of Warcraft: Virtuality or Interface?

Published by packard on 16/02/2011 in English. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Here’s one of three cases in point to illustrate and refine what I have been saying about virtuality and interface. World of Warcraft is often explained as a virtual world, or more precisely, a game that presents or allows access to a virtual world. On the other hand, the Kinect is often described as a first popularization of VR hardware, as it relates body movements ‘directly’ to the controlling of an avatar in computer games.

But what really defines the construction of perceived virtuality in both cases, I think, becomes clear when the two are combined.  »»»»

Interface and Virtuality

Published by packard on 15/02/2011 in English. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

‘Virtuality’ is a word with an etymology so promiscuous as to be downright obscene. The rivalling explanations for the original reason for the word’s current usage with reference to new technology are plentiful and can be disorienting. What might be even more surprising, however, is that the historically defining introduction of the term into computer studies is rarely mentioned, much less examined in detail. »»»»

Questions on Virtuality

Published by packard on 14/02/2011 in English. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Welcome to virtuality week on Signifying Media. This is all about the second of the three larger projects I outlined at the beginning of the year. But as opposed to what I did with the topic of textual control, for which I wrote one big theory dump of a post and have just been following that up with short observations on current cases in point, I’ll break this up into smaller pieces, because that’s where this project currently stands: A few questions and several miscellaneous hints towards parts of answers. »»»»

Don’t Make Me Steal

Published by packard on 12/02/2011 in English. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

“Don’t make me steal” is a ‘Digital Media Consumption Manifesto’. It argues that many who download copyrighted material for free on the internet do so not because they want to steal, but because the access provided to the same content by other media is inferior. On this basis, it calls for legal alternatives. »»»»

Limits in Mechanical Communication

Published by packard on 05/02/2011 in English. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Dirk Baecker has just made an intriguing post extending Shannon/Weaver’s concept of communication (or if you like, pointing out that its scope always has been greater than many people think). Michael Seemann recently included a fascinating argument against Kittler’s denial of software in some posts on his concept of ‘queryology’. This post right here is basically what happened when I read the two directly after each other; it is intended to spell out what I think is an interesting connection between the two, and a launching point for a critique of a dualist concept of mechanics as limits and limits as mechanics in communication.

So in case you were wondering, yes, this is going to be one of those posts. The ones for which I made the ‘theory’ tag. Consider yourself warned. »»»»

The Habits of TV and the Independent Web

Published by packard on 02/02/2011 in English. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Last week, I began asking some questions about atavistic TV habits in our use of the web. On the same day, the always fascinating John Battelle revisited his concept of the dependent and the independent web in a post on web interdependency, which made me back up and reconsider some of the more specific observations I made earlier in a broader light. »»»»