Michael Stevenson

Web culture circa 1995 – some first thoughts on the history of HotWired and Suck.com

"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 -...

By Michael Stevenson on 08/31/10 Comments Off

Web Words: a Vocabulary of the Web Interface

The Web is 'Search' and 'More.' We already know this intuitively: online content, and our experience of it, is mediated by the range of views and actions made available by the interface and, increasingly, the engine. Web Words is...

By Michael Stevenson on 11/25/09 Comments Off

Patrick Lichty’s manifesto, The 50-Year Computer

The Slow Computer Movement is born:

I have a proposition to make – when I am ready for my first mind/body transplant in 2058, at age 95, I want to be using the same computer I am today.

By Michael Stevenson on 09/29/08 Comments Off

Intrade Being Scammed?

One of the more interesting developments in the 'Many Minds' area of Web 2.0 is the futures market, where people basically bet on an outcome of a particular event, such as an election or, recently, whether Hurricane Gustav would...

By Michael Stevenson on 09/24/08 Comments Off

Generation Geenstijl, or a Virtual Death Threat in Parliament

It's already old news (that's what I get for reading the Saturday paper on a Sunday) but I saw this article earlier: "Geenstijlgeneratie bedreigt erop los," which I'll embellish in translation as "Generation Geenstijl issues threats like there's...

By Michael Stevenson on 07/20/08 7

Updated Hyves Pulls Plug on Student Projects After Waag Society Event

((Looks like a possible false alarm, please see update below)) Online social network Hyves has blocked access to the profiles pages for unregistered users. Now one has to be registered and logged in to view a Hyver's full profile,...

By Michael Stevenson on 05/22/08 3

Mark Deuze on Media Work

Mark Deuze, professor of Journalism and New Media at Leiden University and assistant professor at Indiana University, was the latest speaker in the ongoing New Media Research Lecture Series...

By Michael Stevenson on 05/17/08 Comments Off

Uncontemporary Media Theory: a Course Outline Manifesto

Amsterdam, May 2008 By Michael Stevenson, Rosa Menkman, Jasper Moes, Erinc Salor and Esther Weltevrede (MA mediastudies, University of Amsterdam) with Geert Lovink Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project, now expired, was on to something. In the rush to discover and...

By Michael Stevenson on 05/05/08 Comments Off

Notes on Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema

This is a summary of Virilio's book, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. I read this for a class on German Media Theory - alongside Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, Klaus Theweleit's Male...

By Michael Stevenson on 03/10/08 5

URLs registered for the U.S. Elections

For those of us who thought domain name grabbing went out of style in the 1990s.. The Caucus blog at New York Times reports that the Republican National Committee has been parking domain names in preparation for the...

By Michael Stevenson on 03/07/08 2

Meta-humor at Daily Kos

This diary at Daily Kos confused me at first, because it was completely empty. No title, no text: there was nothing there. But looking at the various tags for the diary makes it clear why:
Justification for Iran War,...

By Michael Stevenson on 02/12/08 1

Del.icio.us and Procrastination

I've finished a short piece on tagging as a form of classification, called Getting Things Done?
Why do tomorrow what can be put off until the day after?
I've been reading some classic texts on categorization and how...

By Michael Stevenson on 02/11/08 Comments Off on Del.icio.us and Procrastination

Paranoia and Premediation – Richard Grusin’s 1/20/09

Richard Grusin has a video up called 1-20-09. Along with some others, Grusin has 'entertained' the fear that the Warner act of 2007 will keep George Bush in office next year (something Bush could do relatively easily...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/21/08 1

Video Vortex: Dan Oki, ‘Cinema as Research Database’

The final speaker for the session Cinema and Narrativity was visual artist Dan Oki. In contrast to Jan Simons and Thomas Elsaesser, who drew on 'old media' to analyze the Web, Oki's talk focused on how the database...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/20/08 Comments Off on Video Vortex: Dan Oki, ‘Cinema as Research Database’

Video Vortex: Thomas Elsaesser on ‘Constructive Instability’

'Constructive instability' is how Condoleeza Rice described the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in the summer of 2006. It's a term that brings to mind tropes of globalization - maybe a synonym of precarity, or the state that produces a desire for...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/19/08 4

It’s the definitions, bloggers.

Lately I've been taking a shovel to the Internet Archive, looking for material on the history of blogging. It used to be that a query for 'blog history' would return a number of would-be Spanish civil war buffs, but...

By Michael Stevenson on 12/16/07 3

Community Memory, or what Craig’s List looked like in 1974

Notions of 'virtual community' and 'virtual reality' have been put to rest by locative aspects of the Web in recent years - from flickr maps to Facebook, from questions of legal jurisdiction to problems of national censorship. As much...

By Michael Stevenson on 11/14/07 2

Debord as Programmer: Alexander Galloway on the Game of War

On Thursday night Alexander Galloway, NYU assistant professor and founding member of the Radical Software Group, gave us a peak at his latest project,...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/27/07 7

What’s wrong with Web-cynicism?

Whether you're the latest social networking site out of Silicon Valley, or a lowly blogpost fueled by coffee, plans don't always work out. I started writing this post with the title The Wasteland of Web 2.0, and was going...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/22/07 1

Dystopias after Google

Here at MofM we've done our share of Google criticism, but I think The Last Psychatrist has one up on us. What Hath Google Wrought is a giant-sized portion of skepticism about the 'accidental monopoly', which...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/20/07 2

blog.google.com: Internet finally subsumed by Blogs

It is well known that Google, which depends on every link it indexes to recommend search results, has a certain 'vulnerability' that blogs expose. Bloggers are professional-amateur-pointers. They publish frequently, they link a lot, and then they syndicate...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/18/07 3

Making the Spinplant Relevant: more from Friedrich Nietzsche

<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...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/09/07 24

Pingback Spam, Popularity and Protecting Investments

This blog is a real magnet for pingback spam lately. While I’d like to take it as a sign of our growing popularity, that would be like being flattered by calls from telemarketers. Also, it probably says more about...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/09/07 9

Repurposing the Wikiscanner: Comparing Dutch Universities’ edits on Wikipedia

<update>This project got quite a few positive responses, and many universities were interested in their own ‘profiles’. But the best was an endorsement by Virgil, who created the WikiScanner. He’s now made the Wikiscanner mashable, making this kind of...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/07/07 3