This week Sara and I talk to writer Amy Donahue about the way that social media shapes our relationships.
Download and Show Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: High Fidelity Connections and Social Media with Amy Donahue
Tagsocial media
Writer and programmer Paul Ford joins us again to talk about Buzzfeed, biking as contemplation and future-proofing his kids.
Download and Show Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: Meme Culture, Writing, Contemplation, and Parenting with Paul Ford, Part 2
Kevin Roose reports:
Lazin-Ryder is one of a number of Twitter users who are using homegrown methods to make their tweets self-destruct. He says that having his tweets disappear automatically makes Twitter feel more conversational and casual, and less like a professional pressure-cooker.
“Tweets are passing things,” he said. “I don’t laminate and frame my note-pad doodles, why would I preserve my tweets for all time?”
Full Story: Fusion: Meet the tweet-deleters: people who are making their Twitter histories self-destruct
I’ve been thinking about doing this, but I also really like using Timehop to explore old tweets. Split between Ephemera and atemporality.
(via Ellis)
See also:
This week Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill*, talks with us about the implications of algorithmically filtering social media feeds.
Download and Show Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: Algorithmic Reverberations on the Feed
For more on the topic, check out Zeynep’s article on Facebook’s algorithms and Ferguson.
*This was recorded a few weeks ago, well before the recent tragedy in Chapel Hill, so we didn’t discuss that.
This week we talk with Willow Brugh of the MIT Media Lab about what happens to all your digital “stuff” when you die. How will your co-workers get the last of your uncompleted work? What will happen to your Facebook page? Who will delete your porn folder? Willow talks about all that and more.
Download and Show Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: Color Coding for Sex and Death
This week on Chris Dancy and I talk about my e-waste in the Internet of Things article, “organic reach” on Facebook and how today’s social web is different from the social software of the early days of the net, such as IRC and Usenet.
Download and Show Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: From IRC to E-Waste Rapid Communion begets Complexity
The Atlantic reports:
Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, two researchers at Michigan Technological University, thought they might. In a study released online last week, the two scoured Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and a few other websites to find “prescient information”—that is, tweets and statuses about current events posted before the events became current. The only way someone could write such a post, they reasoned, is if they were visiting… from the future. […]
The study, alas, turned up no time travelers. But that doesn’t quite mean anything. The authors admit that the study might have failed for many reasons: Time travelers might not have the ability to physically adjust the past; they might not have posted about the events the authors were looking for; they might have posted about the events but not turned up in a search. Time travelers might have also read the study or this news story about it, and been sure to making avoid any careless mistakes.
Full Story: The Atlantic: Can Physicists Find Time Travelers on Facebook?
You can also read the full paper, which hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, on Arxiv
(Thanks Skry!)
For more on the difficulties in using social media for academic research see my recent Wired piece on the lack of peer review of social data.
In the latest Mindful Cyborgs Chris Dancy comes out of the Buddhist closet, we talk about the Dark Night of the Soul, the Abyss, and more. Here’s a taste:
CD: Yes, outcome attachment is probably my number one suffering point. The scariest things that I found at the conference was that over the 3, almost 4, years that I’ve been practicing awareness or contemplative practices or being in a beginners mind or meditation, impermanence, love and kindness. All these things, I’ve had periods where I’ve just felt really disconnected from the people around me and these are highly intelligent people or very, very tense people, much like myself. You kind of hang around people you are. So much so that at times I’ve felt profoundly sad, just profoundly depressed.
It comes during after periods of great meditation or just prolonged periods of awareness and I found that there’s something called dark night of the soul, which is a state and there’s actual terminology for this, which is a meditative psychosis. But it’s where people actually become unhinged or removed from the world that they perceive because they get so in touch with being aware that they physically feel disconnected to actually have a soul collapsing experience. Which I thought I was really along but when you get in a roomful of Buddhists and they start talking about their journey you’re just like, wow, I just thought it was me and I never would have admitted so loudly and now it’s actually pretty common.
KF: Yes, I had a similar experience when I was much younger, around 20, and I didn’t know what was going on with me for about a couple of years. I ended up hearing about a similar concept called the abyss. It’s part of cabalistic and part of western occult, a tradition as of western esotericism. But it’s a very similar idea of just becoming- I think they describe it as knowledge without understanding.
The situation where you start to understand and kind of go back to sort of Buddhist terminology, like you start to not to understand but to be aware of impermanence and to be aware of the malleability of certain aspects of reality but you haven’t really come to terms with it yet. You haven’t truly grasped the wisdom of that yet and it leaves you fairly unhinged. At least that’s my understanding of it and there’s probably a lot of people out there that would tell me that I’m completely wrong or that I’m equating things from two very different religious or spiritual practices and everything, but I don’t know. I see them as related, very similar and related aspects.
As always, you can find it on Soundcloud, iTunes or Stitcher, or download it directly.
Show notes and transcript are here.
New article from me at Wired:
In one episode of Black Mirror — the British television series that explores the near future of technology with an edginess reminiscent of The Twilight Zone — a woman’s husband dies, and she replaces him with a robot.
This walking automaton looks like him and talks like him, and it even acts like him, after plugging into his Twitter account and analyzing every tweet he ever sent.
Yes, that’s a far cry from reality, but it’s not as far as you might think. With an online service called Lifenaut, an operation called the Terasem Movement Foundation offers a means of digitally cloning yourself through a series of personality tests and data from your social media profiles. The idea is to create an online version of you that can live forever, a digital avatar that even future generations can talk to and interact with. Eventually, Terasem wants to transform these avatars into walking, talking robots — just like on Black Mirror. And today, it provides a more primitive version, for free. […]
But Dale Carrico, a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, is skeptical. To say the least. He says that the folks at Terasem and other “transhumanists” — those who believe the human body can be radically enhanced or even transcended entirely through technology — are pursing pipe dreams. He doesn’t even give them create for trying. “The trying is evidence only of the depth of their misunderstanding, not of their worthy diligence,” he says. Simply put, an avatar isn’t a person — in any meaningful sense.
Full Story: Wired Enterprise: If You Plug Twitter Into a Digital Avatar, Can You Live Forever?
My avatar is embedded in the story so you can chat with it.
This week Chris Dancy and I interview Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul. We talked about contemplative computing, the history of meditation and more. Here’s a taste:
KF: One other thing I wanted to ask you about, Alex, it was one of the more surprising things in the book to me was that you pointed out that contemplative practices seem to have started somewhere between 800 and 200 BC as a response to colonialism, global trade and urbanization. That actually does kind of bring us back to that idea of the technologies that causes this sort of problem aren’t hammers and bows and arrows but they’re network technologies like social media comes back to that comparison of urbanization and economics and so forth. I would have thought those practices would still have developed much, much earlier in history so I was wondering if you’d talk a little bit about the research you did in that area of the history of contemplation.
ASP: There’s not a huge literature on this yet, I mean people definitely are working on it but I think that what’s distinctive about that period which historians of religion refer to as the Axial Age is that it’s the first time that contemplative practices stopped being a secret. They stopped doing things that are for initiates that are part of … It’s the first time that we begin to see people like Buddha arguing that these are and should be accessible to everyone. That they’re open, they’re public sort of in a sense that they go from or they continue to the network metaphor they go from being proprietary to being open source. Anyone can do them. Anyone can improve upon and add to them.
You can find the episode on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher, or download it directly.
Oh, and see also my article on Pang’s book.
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