Wendy Chun – Programmed Visions, (book, pp. 1-2, and optionally pp. 3-10)
Software is this intangible but concrete thing. A metaphor that I likened that to, is perhaps how our words are an ephemeral, intangible thing, yet this invisible thing generates incredibly visceral effects. I think about this in how leaders, CEO’s, and teachers are literally able to change the projection of a persons life, sometimes simply through a powerful phrase. I think about how people copyright expressions and phrases, and how even a thing as concrete as language but as fleeting as the moment, can be commodified. I also think about the many people who have perhaps said similar words of similar effects a long time ago, and how that spread of information was naturally spread through conversation, until it got to the hands of someone who could write it down or archive it, or speak it in front of some mass audience that would remember and pass it down to the next generation.
Matthew Fuller – How to be a Geek (book, pp. 12-14, and optionally pp. 63-71)
This article talks about bringing in the conversation of software culture in a way that is accessible to everyone, by using language and forms of expression in ways that relate this “concept” away from just technical experts, and into ways that can be turned into discernible questions and realizations of the problems within. I love the way the Geek is described, and I totally agree with the notion that geeks are in fact running the world. Every company wants an employee that is over-accommodating and zealous in their chase for information, because that chase usually brings new revelations and inventions from within the Geek themselves. This is something rare, because concepts can now be commodified, and it is sad to think about someones life idea or revelation being turned against them in a for-profit if their only way of thinking was to push that idea to the max, simply because of how their brain (and influencing environmental conditions) decided to function around certain ideas. But it is hopeful that there are geeks who geek out to the ideas of problematics, perhaps going beyond their individual scope of understanding their own relation to the issue, to find the relation between us all.
Geert Lovink – Sad by Design (podcast w/ Douglas Rushkoff, 60m)
I believe that the corporations are really trying to separate us, in terms of dividing and conquering our individualities through our more than willing use of social media and metainterfaces. It is easier to take down individuals rather than a whole group of people standing as one, yet even this concept is frightening. Even if we did stand together as one against the elites who perhaps “no longer need us”, and decide to use all the data ever to target individuals. An army is only as strong as its “weakest link”, but by those means, almost everyone is a weak link, because we do not even know what we don’t know. It was really interesting to hear Geert Lovink talk about a metaphor of open-face and honest technology as free-range chickens, as someone is always getting victimized, there is no such thing as open-face in private or public software interaction. It is a “compromise that rubs the wrong way(…) the companies are not in it for the humans (…)”. So it is, in fact, creating a “demilitarized” zone between humans and these companies who still enable conflict on both sides, is just a scapegoat.
Soren Pold – New ways of hiding: towards metainterface realism (article)
The metainterface paradigm is a really scary thing to think about, because it has so many lines of communication as a concept that is limitless, and then it is connected to the industry as a product, while being an entire art/design practice of its own. These core facets of how the meta interface is interacted with today makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint its effects on just one think. It’s a new form of the actual expansion of globalization itself, but one that will continue to surpass itself and become more abstract and complicated, whilst having connections to real tangible forms of mass communication devices. It has already forever changed how globalization has evolved and has planted a seed in peoples minds about how the surface convenience of such meta interfaces are a normal progression of technology. But how can anyone think of this as a normal progression of technology when there is a concept, which can be turned tangible, and then again turned back into a influenceable concept, as just another effect of the progression of computer and software engineering? Something that is able to give influence back is no longer a simple two-to-two interaction, it is a form that is a medium, it has an effect to influence and deceive, not just receive.