"Cat owners are primarily confined to their homes. There’s no cat park. The Internet is the cat park."
- Scott Stulen, Internet Cat Video Festival (via Wired.com)
#Tech #sxsw #cats #cat #gif #gifs #internet #digital culture #funny #lol #animals #animal #culture #meme #memes
"At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?"
- Om Malik | Uber, Data Darwinism and the future of work
#Tech #data #social media #uber #taskrabbit #culture #cultural #digital culture #collaborative consumption #collaborative economy #share economy #sharing economy
newsweek:
Filing this under Things We’re Desperately Looking Forward To.
#tech #social media #communication #friends #society #culture #charts
"Look around your living space. Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd? Listen to your own speech. Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly? In other words, is your style an anti-style? The most important question: How would it feel to change yourself quietly, offline, without public display, from within?"
- How to Live Without Irony (via NYT, peterfeld)
#culture #history #fashion #opinion #hipsters #irony
"As anyone who reads the news knows, there’s often a side effect to new technologies: moral panic. Facebook causes narcissism! Texting is making us illiterate! But the funny thing is, other technologies don’t provoke such alarm. Take Square, a tool that lets everyday folks accept credit card payments. It’s tipping into mainstream usage, changing how small businesses operate and how friends split a bar bill, but it hasn’t provoked any doomsaying.
What’s the difference? Why do we freak out at some technologies and shrug at others? …To provoke moral panic, a technology must satisfy three rules.
First, it has to change our relationship to time. Then it has to change our relationship to space. And, crucially, it has to change our relationship to one another. Individually, each of these transformations can be unsettling, but if you hit all three? Panic!"
- Why We Freak Out About Some Technologies but Not Others
#tech #new technology #innovation #culture
"We have begun to pollute and desecrate and cheapen all of our experiences. We are creating neat little life-boxes for everything, all tied up with a geo-tag, a photo, a check-in; our daily existence transformed into database entries in some NoSQL database on some spinning disk in some rack in suburban Virginia.
The end-game is this. Slowly, gradually, without realizing: we stop participating in our own lives. We become spectators, checking off life achievements for reasons we do not know. At some point, everything we do is done soley to broadcast these things to casual friends, stalkers, and sycophants."
- Ted Nyman | The Horrible Future of Social
#tech #social media #culture
"Amazon Prime gives you the joy of consumption without the pain of acquisition."
- The Cult of Amazon Prime
#tech #amazon #shopping #news #culture
"[Techies are] driven by writing their blog post and voicing their opinions or by staying ahead of the curve… Normal people don’t have those artificial needs which fuel a drive to discover something new for the purpose of discovering something new. They have actual problems to solve."
- Keeping Up With The Normals
#tech #news #culture #innovation
