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  • Philip Man
  • Url: http://www.philipman.net
  • Posts: 14
  • About the user: Technology should be centered around a meaningful experience: understand behaviour not technology, think people instead of device and. Don’t make products, make experiences. Like Huxley said, “to give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means.” Technology changes fast, but people do not. The fun part does not happen in the device, but on the road from the screen towards the mind. The challenge is to understand the user’s motivations; what drives him or her, culturally and psychologically? People often don’t know what they want until you show it to them. My main ideas involve developments in new media technology and I am particularly interested in how new media is inherent to new ways of communicating, to what extent that requires and generates new kinds of data and how this can be used to improve relations between people. I like the challenge of difficult problems and to act as an idea catalyst /

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“The customers of this product also bought this, would you like it too?” [x] Not interested

When signing up for a service or installing software, have you ever read privacy policies that you had ‘to agree’ with in order to continue? You surely agreed, but what you have agreed with is probably a mystery. The fact that consumers deliberately do not pay attention or put effort in understanding privacy policies is a common idea as Stevenson (2005) shows in his ‘Whatever Button’ project. When the privacy policies show up ready to be check by the consumer, one simply scrolls down without looking, or clicks through the ‘I agree’, ‘I confirm’, ‘I accept’ button in order to receive the product as soon as possible: throughout the interactions in between, one would say; whatever. Companies deliberately make privacy policies not a Shakespearean-like poet to read, but rather a humongous text filled with jargon that even a law professional thinks is a horrible grind to understand. In this way, data about the body is increasingly flowing away from the individual it belongs to, resulting in some interesting developments such as new ways of perceiving identity.

Picnic Virtueel Platform Hot100 Day

I was pleasantly surprised when a few weeks ago I received an invitation for the Virtueel Platform Hot 100. Present at this event are 100 alumni from different media and art institutions with the goal to get in touch with each other. The invitation was quite flattering and inspiring:

“The HOT100 are the creme de la creme of the Dutch art academies, universities and universities of applied sciences in the fields of art, design, theory, communication or development skills related to e-culture

Book Review: ‘You Are Not a Gadget’ by Jaron Lanier

The preface of this book is the most pessimistic and exaggerated one of probably all times.

“It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as a individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. “

Google Instant: instantly distracted

A few days ago Google launched its new way of search that promised to be ‘faster than the speed of type’. Instant Search, the new way name, is sort of similar to the earlier search predictions, but this one is on steroids. It is designed to cut off a lot of time users spend on searching, allowing them…