Next Nature: Nature Changes Along With Us is positioned at the intersection of technology, design and nature. It is a 472-page compendium of the most thought-provoking observations from the awarded website nextnature.net, supplemented by lots of visuals, infographics, maps and guest essays from renowned authors, commentators, academics and artists.
In the current literary landscape of mobile phones and mobile culture it’s rare to find a title that’s both playful and insightful. In fact, most titles concerning mobile-mediated communication are text tomes: although interesting, also dense. Occasionally you’ll come across a paper or article describing an art project using mobile phones that is usually delightful and sadly almost always on the periphery of major journal literature. That’s why Dis Connecting Media elbows its way into a unique position.
In a fresh testament to how deep our affective relationships are with mobile phones, last week’s Blackberry out(r)age revealed users “breaking up” with their beloved Blackberrys on Twitter. Amongst all the (by now stale) joke tweets about the Blackberry server crash (What did one Blackberry user say user say to the other? Nothing…) Blackberry users started posting their Dear Johns…
Natalie Dixon
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26 September 2011, 4:31 pm
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tags: affect and mobile technology, affective computing, Amparo Lasen, Gerard Goggin, Jane Vincent, Leopoldina Fortunati, mobile phones, mobiles as affective computers, Natalie Dixon masters thesis, Rich Ling
For anyone interested in affect, mobile phones or both, my masters thesis (completed this year) is available for download.
In my last blog post I explored the notion that information visualization is not merely a tool, or art, or an agent of clarity but also has the capacity to generate emotion in users and arguably, become a player in our emotional processing. However, as our information visualization project develops I realize the bigger challenge is not just how to inspire emotion but how to effectively visualize it. Food (one of the variables in our project) is a highly charged, emotive and textured subject and it deserves to be visualized in all its layers and complexity. This lead me to wonder if visualizing emotional content or emotional intensity is perhaps one of the biggest challenges information visualization faces? And have any projects successfully done this?
Emotion has long since been a fraught with subjectivity and complex interpretations for as long as scholars have sought to understand it. When scientists became interested in emotion in the late 19th century it suffered under labels like “feminine”, “spiritual” and “out of control”. As an object of study it was at odds with the scientific laboratory that was a “masculine”, “physically grounded” and “highly controlled” space. The notion of science as a rational activity therefore clashed with the study of difficult-to-grasp, fuzzy, uncontrolled emotions. After all, scientific principles involved rational thought, logical arguments, testable hypotheses, and repeatable experiments. The only leeway allowed was for “non-interfering emotions” like curiosity, frustration and the pleasure in new discoveries.
Plenty has been written about our loss of social cohesion due to the Internet (see James Katz) and how mobile phone technology has contributed to blunting our social competencies (see Hans Geser). Like it or not we are often rendered limp at the DVD rental shop or supermarket isle calling our husbands or girlfriends asking: “So what did you say you felt like eating for dinner? Or “Have you seen the latest Woody Allen?”
According to Wikipedia’s edit history, on 23 September 2010 shortly before midnight, the entry for Julian Assange was edited by a user whose IP address belongs to the Australian Government’s Justice Department. The user attempted to make a seemingly innocuous change to the page by adding: “Assange is a supporter of the North Melbourne Football Club” under the Early Life section of the entry.
Although media censorship in Iran is a widely publicized fact, this research report seeks to establish a clearer picture of which women’s online consumer lifestyle titles Iranian web users are currently forbidden to view. This report was conducted using the University of Amsterdam Media Studies Department’s tool called Censorship Explorer. This tool allows users to input URLs and test them against known proxy servers around the world. For this research all available Iranian proxy servers listed in this tool were used although the number varied over the three days of testing in November 2010. The list of nineteen women’s consumer magazine URLs was compiled using Google.com as well as lists from international publishing houses and the researcher’s existing knowledge of the consumer lifestyle magazine market.
The New Museum of Art in New York City is currently hosting an exhibition carrying work from 23 artists titled “Free”. The show explores: “how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space.” Perhaps with a firm tongue-in-cheek approach the only other exhibition running at the museum right now is called “The Last Newspaper”.
