May. 2nd, 2016

jazzy_dave: (Default)
Once again , after falling asleep too early i am wide awake again.So it got me thinking (no sniggering in the back please) do you or have you ever suffered from insomnia or unusual sleep patterns?

What is your best method in getting off to sleep?


Have you ever sleep walked?
jazzy_dave: (Default)
So as i am awake and finding it difficult ot nod off again here is a selection of grooves for that twilight zone.

Iron & Wine - Cinder and Smoke



More music here )
jazzy_dave: (Default)
Old Age Gets Up

by Ted Hughes
Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks

An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again
Ponders
Ideas that collapse
At the first touch of attention

The light at the window, so square and so same
So full-strong as ever, the window frame
A scaffold in space, for eyes to lean on

Supporting the body, shaped to its old work
Making small movements in gray air
Numbed from the blurred accident
Of having lived, the fatal, real injury
Under the amnesia

Something tries to save itself-searches
For defenses-but words evade
Like flies with their own notions

Old age slowly gets dressed
Heavily dosed with death's night
Sits on the bed's edge

Pulls its pieces together
Loosely tucks in its shirt
To Sylvia Plath

by Yahia Lababidi
Sleepwalking she prepared breakfast
for her still dreaming children, before
breaking fast, to satisfy her appetite

no fire needed, she all-consuming flame
bravely cowered on the kitchen floor
and slaked an antique thirst on vapor

laying her dream-tormented head to rest
she took premature or belated leave, set
out to sea, having found no harbor here.
jazzy_dave: (Default)
Well, after being awoke again early in the morning, i listened to some music , specifically some by Ian Car's Nucleus, and drifted back to wake up around nine this morning. As it is a bank holiday i had no plans today.

Best to recharge the batteries so to speak as i will be very busy tomorrow or at least cram in as much work as i can.

As i look out, the weather does not seem as nice as it was the last two days. Evenings are still very cold though. Plus the fact that cousin wants me to sign a solicitors letter about moving out of the property seems to clod the future. No wonder i go for dark brooding clouds in my photo shoots.

Music still plays a large part in my make-up. I still listen to four hours daily on average, which [livejournal.com profile] spikesgirl58 thought was a bit low and was under the impression that i listened more. I use at one time but that was due to having music radio on all the time, or driving a car with the radio on, but now i seem to confine myself to Radio 4 and the occasional internet radio podcast, and of course You Tube, and that i never listen to music whilst i am out and about.

Oh well, at least i have a birthday to look forward to on the 15th and it is the big 6-0 ye gads!
jazzy_dave: (Default)
Sherry Turkle "Life On The Screen : Identity in the Age of the Internet" (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)






An interesting study on the first effects of personal computers and Internet on the way we think our personal and our collective identities.

Turkle first introduces the notions of simulation, taking the computer one step further from the 'big calculator' and toward a more 'friendly machine' and 'helpful machine' popular view. She spends a lot of time discussing artificial intelligence and its possibilities, which is the weak point of the book, in my opinion. Many of the interventions she collects for this part of the book seem to bring nothing to the point she is trying to expose.

The last part of the study is definitively the most interesting, focusing on how Internet changed our lives and discussing the experience value that a 'multiple life on the web' can or can not really have.

This book was published in 1995 ; of course the author had no way of knowing how much the Internet would change again and what kind of new possibilities it would offer. I think that it what makes the interest of this book : you can really have a clear idea of the expectations people had of future technologies and compare with what actually happened.
jazzy_dave: (Default)
Aleks Krotoski "Untangling The Web" (Faber & Guardian Books)





Untangling the Web is a timely and detailed account of how the internet is changing us, and what we can do about it.

The book makes very good points about the different identities we have online, and also about the way things are changing as the anonymity of the early days of the web gets eroded, and past identities become harder to erase. It’s great on the privacy implications of the web, how much people share online and how much other information can easily be discovered. And there’s also a good discussion of the way the internet filters what you see based on the information that companies are building up based on your past usage:

"The commercial services that dominate the digital world – the Googles and the Facebooks – are trying to keep us brand-loyal by delivering services that meet our needs, so they confirm our biases by telling us things that we already want to hear."

If you and I both Google “climate change”, we’ll get different results, and the results we see will likely reinforce our existing opinions. While it makes sense for the search companies to try to make our results more relevant, you can see the dangers of such an approach. As Krotoski puts it, “The vast ocean of information online is increasingly navigated by packs of like-minded people who really only see a little slice of what is available on the web.” I’m not sure what a slice of an ocean looks like, but you get the point.

Krotoski returns to the point in a later chapter looking at extremism. The effect of what she calls “cyberbalkanization” is often pluralistic ignorance – the belief that everyone else thinks as we do. This is reinforced by the tribes of self-reinforcing believers that spring up, and can lead to more extreme views, as you are influenced by those around you.

The main strength of Untangling the Web is that it presents very serious, sometimes terrifying information, but never becomes hysterical or deliberately ratchets up the fear. Instead, she usually presents us with something we can do about it, or a reason why it doesn’t matter so much. Krotoski wants to show us the effects of the internet, not to scare us with a doomsday scenario, but to enable us to take control of it and make it better.

For example, she tells us about “cyberchondria”, the tendency for people to self-diagnose on the internet and make a headache into a brain tumour. Then she gives the more disturbing example of online support communities normalising self-destructive behaviour, such as the pro-ana community which “exacerbates the eating disorder anorexia nervosa by giving its members a place to share anything from tips and tricks for hiding weight loss from loved ones or doctors to ‘thinspiration’ photos of emaciated women.” But then she balances this out with an account of some of the positive effects of providing more trusted health information on the internet.

For a book that professes to untangle the web, the organisation is not always very easy to follow. The overall four-section structure makes sense: “Untangling Me” is about our own minds and bodies, “Untangling Us” looks at family and friendship, “Untangling Society” examines the larger social implications, and “Untangling the Future” is about future directions. But the trouble is that there’s a lot of overlap in these categories – it’s hard to separate out . The result is that things sometimes get a bit tangled. I should confess, though, that it might be me – I read this book on Kindle, and have noticed that I’ve had similar trouble with a few non-fiction e-books lately. No idea why, but it seems harder to keep track of the structure than it is with paper books.

The other problem I had with the book was the occasional use of the “straw man” technique, presenting breathless newspaper headlines as the representative of criticisms or fears over the web’s influence, and then arguing that things are not that bad. For example:

"A headline you read on the front page screaming “Internet ‘terror breeding ground’” is actually terrifying. It implies that the web eradicates morality. But how real is this threat? Or is it just tapping into a public fear in order to sell copies?"

To me, this misses the point. Yes, of course tabloid headlines are sensationalist and over-hyped, but what about more intelligent critiques? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to engage with them?

A similar thing happens sometimes with books, for example Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, in which apparently “he says we’re using our minds less than ever before because it’s so easy to find information”. That wasn’t the book I remember reading at all – I thought he was saying that the way we use our minds on the internet is different, and leads to different patterns of thought – more attuned to finding information quickly, and less attuned to deep reading and contemplation. Things like that chipped away at my trust of the author’s judgement, and made me question whether the representations of other books or arguments were accurate.

Despite these reservations, though, I’d definitely recommend reading Untangling the Web. It’s a lively and interesting introduction to the huge range of changes that are happening as we shift from a predominantly private to an increasingly public way of life. Despite the way the cover shouts “What the internet is doing to YOU”, the author presents a balanced view and never subscribes to hyperbole or fear-mongering. Her ultimate philosophy is that we shouldn’t be scared of the internet, but should be aware of what is going on and take control of it ourselves:

"The problem we’re grappling with is that we are too tangled up in the web, experiencing the social and psychological evolutions as they happen. We’re so fearful of what it will do to us and our institutions, that we forget that we have the power to shape it ourselves."

Wayfinding

May. 2nd, 2016 02:31 pm
jazzy_dave: (Default)
Aleks Krotoski does a fascinating series on BBC Radio 4 as well -

Digital Human

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0785rmt#play

http://thedigitalhuman.tumblr.com/

Aleks Krotoski compares our intuitive way-finding skills to those of the digital world and finds out why describing the best way from A to B still poses problems for tech.

Simon Wheatcroft is adventurer who's run all over the world and at distances that would make marathon runners shudder, he's also blind, he explains how he combined the sensations he gets underfoot with notifications from his fitness to learn to run solo.

Combining cues from the world around you to find your way is Tristan Gooley's passion. As the Natural Navigator he uses anything natural or man made not only to find out where he is but where he's going. He eschews all navigational tools; maps compasses as well as digital devices in the belief that the head down follow the dot mentality they foster impoverishes our experience of the journey itself.

Thora Tenbrink from Bangor University explains why the directions we receive from our devices often feel so alien that we really have to focus to make sense of them. While tech can use street names and exact distances, humans are vague navigators heading in the general direction and using landmarks. The two approaches aren't always that compatible.

Our natural way-finding abilities can let us down though when we're under stress. Professor David Canter has been studying behaviour in emergency evacuations for much of his career, he explains the sometimes odd and contradictory things we resort to when trying to escape a disaster. So should we look to technology to come to the rescue? We hear from researchers at Georgia tech who explored how far participants would trust a robot to save them from a burning building - apparently quite a lot!

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