Last week we read Vannevar Bush’s essay “As we may think” and one aspect I truly found fascinating was the purpose for what he came up with the idea of the memex: an effort to arrange a mechanism to automate the actions of saving, indexing and retrieving the human knowledge.
“The investigator is staggered by the findings and…
A good chance that while browsing through the endless database of Twitter one could come across a line like this: “I have forgotten my umbrella”…in fact you will. The expression of mundane or day to day activities and thoughts like these is where Twitter was specifically designed for. No “accidental” constraints of characters like SMS, no abbreviated snippets like Google Search or RSS feeds, but the intentional constraining of character input and direct publishing of brief statements, thoughts, morals or otherwise short articulations of textual brainfarts into a grand network of other publications, in other words, the post-modern version of the aphorism…the microblog.
By Lievnath Faber, Tim van der Heijden and Rosa Menkman.
IN-BETWEEN MANIFESTO
We are the Interdividuals
We are the people that celebrate the in-between. Our manifesto is meant for everyone. One who is ‘in-between’ is neither an isolated individual nor part of a collective; one is in-between. Someone who is in-between is called an ‘interdividual’.…
Nietzsche was known for his fondness of aforisme. Using the fewest words for the finest thoughts. This distinctive style of using aphorisms intrigued me. Nietzsche uses rhetorical violence to overthrow and seduce the readers of his work. Within Web 2.0 it’s important to ‘seduce’ people into reading your content. Could Nietzsche’s aphorisms serve as a tool to attract attention?
Calling Google “evil” might just be the fashion of the day. We could also argue it to be a perfect example of Nietzsche’s slave morality.
Nietzsche on Wikipedia:
Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.
It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
In an attempt to grasp and theorize all that is happening in the new media landscape, one method can be to project a philosophers’ philosophy onto a new media phenomenon and see what happens.
Amongst the many theories and quotes Nietzsche got famous for, the interesting thing is to look at the context of these quotes in comparison to the…
Nietzsche’s criticism of the mass culture emerged along with the rise of popular literature, journalism, and the modern press. With the explosive rise of weblogs, mobile devices, and online video, traditional journalism has been contested and challenged by a new model of journalism called citizen journalism. With Nietzsche’s critique of mass society in mind, can we actually consider citizen journalism…
<update> See bottom of the post and the comments </ update>
About a week ago there was a small-scale furor on this blog and a Nettime-NL thread surrounding the spinplant. Laura (one of the very creative members of this blog) wrote a Wikipedia entry on the fictional plant, complete with a taxonomic category and a high-resolution photo. The…