The result is a vacancy of purpose, a world full of ‘designer jetsam and flotsam’ that is swilling around or embedded into or above our planet; poorly designed products, unwanted solutions, unfriendly materials, and a mutlichoice of artefacts that are discarded as fast as they were adopted.
The iPhone is an identity. People spoke about their phone as if it were part of their body, and even more a part of their mind, with a weird entanglement of Big Brother anxieties over security — "If someone stole my phone, they could just get in everywhere and retrace my steps everywhere" — and an emotional sense that their phone was who they were. Some people said that without their phone they felt disconnected from the world around them, fuzzy-headed, helpless and incompetent ("I would feel lost without it").
A startling thought! The trickle-down effect of what was popular in entertainment culture, and what was popular in international politics, had pooled in the imagination of children. Not for this generation of kids, the lure of the stars, or the wonders of limitless human invention. Rather, they were destined to be pessimists by default: ready to accept the decline of civilisation, or the death of the Earth, as just the prevailing narrative. They parsed the mass of sci-fi images produced by our culture, interpolated them with terrorism and eco-doom, and decided that the funny bald author guy at the front of the class wanted to see transmissions from a future dark.
No technology has advanced at such a pace in the history of mankind; until the internet existed, if you bought something amazing you could at least rest assured that it wouldn't tell you that it needed an overhaul when you were using it. In the very writing of this article my laptop froze for 30 seconds before presenting me with a list of programs that its integrated AutoUpdate service thought needed a fresh lick of paint.
The lack of honesty and clarity from [Facebook] and its representatives ... and the continued trend of taking established language - such as "open technology" or "data portability" - and corrupting it for its own marketing purposes, is far more disconcerting than the boundaries it's pushing with its technology choices.
Scholars surely understand that on a deep level, yet many persist in the valuing venue and medium over the content itself. This is especially true at crucial moments, such as promotion and tenure. Surely we can reorient ourselves to our true core value—to honor creativity and quality—which will still guide us to many traditionally published works but will also allow us to consider works in some nontraditional venues such as new open access journals, blogs or articles written and posted on a personal website or institutional repository, or non-narrative digital projects.
Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.
Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed.
Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.
In this case, the fact that the brain - just like the internet - is a network with “small world properties” helps. Every pixel in the brain and every Internet page can be seen as a hub in this network. The hubs can be directly connected to each other just as two Internet pages can be linked.
With eigenvector centrality, the hubs are assessed based on the type and quality of their connections to other hubs. On the one hand, it is important how many connections a particular node has, and on the other, the connections of the neighbouring nodes are also significant. Search engines like Google use this principle, meaning that Internet sites linked to frequently visited sites, like Wikipedia, for example, appear higher in results than web pages which don’t have good connections.
They have covered the Crystals' He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss), American teen star JoJo's R&B ballad, Too Little Too Late, and the old English sea shanty Deep Blue Sea. On the Veckatimest tour, they have performed under huge bulbs in massive glass jars, which have blinked and sparkled in time to the music. They have also played with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the LSO, for which their songs were arranged by composer Nico Muhly (who also worked with them on Veckatimest).
Accusations of pretentiousness came with the move into orchestral performance, which rankled with Droste. "It bums me out! That playing with an orchestra is perceived as a very grand thing to do, when I wish it was just perceived as like a fun, one-night thing. I thought it would introduce younger fans to different music, and perhaps bridge a gap between the generations."