We shouldn’t be talking about the rise of the social media and new media any more. It’s here, in everyone’s lives on a daily basis. And it’s doing things to us. It’s changing the way we communicate, learn, socialise – to name a few. But what is it really doing to our cognitive (and perhaps social) skills?
The question arose…
In fact, magazines were pioneers in niche content before cable TV and the Internet came along and usurped them with the flashy video of the former and the interactive communities of the latter. (Glaser, 2005)
It is no longer obvious that magazine content is delivered in the format of a paper journal. Although everyone still reads paper magazines, most people…
Offline: The Magazine
I am and always have been a big fan of Wired. I like their “Californian Ideology”, their almost child-like enthusiasm and optimistic view on life and I like how they think technology can change the world in a techno-deterministic way. And because I am a…
Chris Anderson headlined his latest feature in Wired magazine: The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet. He maintains that with the ubiquitous iPhone comes app addiction; so while most of us spend the whole day on the internet (using applications like Spotify and Google Maps) we’re no longer browsing the web as much as we used to. The browser is THEN and the app is NOW. In Africa the opposite is true.
“Early histories of ‘the digital content revolution’ will center around one area, San Francisco’s South Park.” (Justin Hall talking about San Francisco’s multimedia gulch)
I’m in the bay area researching HotWired – Wired’s ambitious website created in 1994 – feeling like I’ve stumbled on a fairly pivotal event in the transition from cyberpunk-and-VR-driven cyberculture to something recognizable as today’s web culture. Here are a couple of observations from the field:
It’s a fact that people more and more gather information from the internet and other digital sources instead of learning -to master- that information. What will be the long term effects of this development? Does the posibility to search and read about almost everything that exists increases our knowledge and understanding of the world or will it lead to people…