by Gareth Rogers
•
3 November 2019
Sam Harris is always worth listening to, but the podcasts are perhaps most engaging when his cool rationality is in contrast with a more spontaneous, over-the-top character (the Ricky Gervais ones are also great). Brand is all that and more, but has clearly thought deeply about the topics under discussion - the nature of mind, the nature of the self, among others - and might actually have a point in suggesting that for all Sam's enlightenment, he spends a lot of time criticising...
by Gareth Rogers
•
22 June 2019
Caught onto this book a bit late as it was published around 2010, but the ideas are if anything even more relevant now than then. It is full of brilliant insights concerning the development of the internet, which he expresses in the book better than I would paraphrase, so I strongly recommend you read it for yourself.
Still this is my web page, and inspired by the author's own attitude to self-expression, here are my thoughts...
One of the things that really resonated with me was the criticism of what he calls Web 2.0 designs - but let's just call if facebook - from the perspective of bad software design. As someone who grew up with the development of the internet, and was working in IT for a lot of that time, there is something disappointing about applications such as facebook becoming almost synonymous with the internet. It reminds me of my father's words, written in the 90's, about the possibilities of communication in the approaching internet age - and you can't help thinking there are more interesting possibilities out there.
More specifically it is the representation of people according to some reductive set of searchable profile attributes (i'm single/in a relationship/it's complicated) and design of throwaway fragments of communication to achieve one-click responses. As a software application it was probably fine for looking at women at his ivy league college, but as the software is scaled up into a global communication platform that design becomes locked in and ends up becoming restrictive to the way people communicate with each other.
In many ways it's a requirements problem: how do you model people for the purposes of meaningful communication? Would need to think about that one, but pretty sure the solution is not a facebook profile.
The inspiration I've taken from this book, though, is that we shouldn't allow our personalities to be represented by bad software and manipulative business models: it's time to take our online presence into our own hands! So just as soon as this website's finished, it's bye-bye fb, I promise...
Feel free to leave your comments using the facebook plugin feature below...
Still this is my web page, and inspired by the author's own attitude to self-expression, here are my thoughts...
One of the things that really resonated with me was the criticism of what he calls Web 2.0 designs - but let's just call if facebook - from the perspective of bad software design. As someone who grew up with the development of the internet, and was working in IT for a lot of that time, there is something disappointing about applications such as facebook becoming almost synonymous with the internet. It reminds me of my father's words, written in the 90's, about the possibilities of communication in the approaching internet age - and you can't help thinking there are more interesting possibilities out there.
More specifically it is the representation of people according to some reductive set of searchable profile attributes (i'm single/in a relationship/it's complicated) and design of throwaway fragments of communication to achieve one-click responses. As a software application it was probably fine for looking at women at his ivy league college, but as the software is scaled up into a global communication platform that design becomes locked in and ends up becoming restrictive to the way people communicate with each other.
In many ways it's a requirements problem: how do you model people for the purposes of meaningful communication? Would need to think about that one, but pretty sure the solution is not a facebook profile.
The inspiration I've taken from this book, though, is that we shouldn't allow our personalities to be represented by bad software and manipulative business models: it's time to take our online presence into our own hands! So just as soon as this website's finished, it's bye-bye fb, I promise...
Feel free to leave your comments using the facebook plugin feature below...