Categories
Event

[EVENT] #LovingMachines with @ScadHu at @ManCathedral

Last night, I was tired, but decided I still wanted to head to Manchester Cathedral to see this event – glad I did – made me think a lot about the subject itself, but also how to present work in a ‘publicly engaging’ way:

Categories
Reviewer

#Emptyshelf17 #23 The Circle by Dave Eggers

The CircleThe Circle by Dave Eggers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I watched the film first – I don’t know if that was a good move or not, as there’s some definite oddities in the film. The book’s much better, and is a real challenge as to who has the power over our knowledge (very Foucauldian), although it came to a rather abrupt end which I found a little less satisfying than the film – although overall a much more believable end! As I’m currently putting together a piece on peer/self-surveillance, I screenshot quite a few pages about the nature of being ‘fully transparent’ and – essentially – the affordances and constraints it places about us, and the price ‘we’ may be prepared to pay for that.

View all my reviews

Categories
Media & Press Media - Audio

[INTERVIEWED] Women and Technology in the Church

I was interviewed by Oladokun Damilola, an MMU student who was pulling together material for her Masters dissertation in multimedia journalism. Great to share online space with @digitalnun again. My segment starts:

excerpt

You can listen, and read more insights on Oladokun’s website.

Categories
Digital

Stop saying technology is causing social isolation

Love this article that came through my feed this morning – see this early extract:

People like to criticize current society. Not necessarily the current society relative to us, but the contemporary society of the time they live in. It’s just so cool to romanticize the past even if it makes us feel bad about the present. Past times were always better. And in this age of information and technology, in which the smartphone is so ubiquitous, it’s only obvious to blame them for some of society’s problems. Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable to stop and reflect on the use we give to technology and to criticize the bad behaviors associated. But I believe that accusing technology (and, again, especially smartphones) of ruining social interaction and even all kinds of experiences is, to say the least, quite wrong and misguided. Some people would even qualify that as pretentious, but I’ll refrain from that.

The article covers a great number of things that I have covered in various workshops, encouraging people to think about the fact that ultimately in using most digital/social technology we are dealing with human beings – just happens to be mediated by technology … but that culturally we prioritise face-to-face (which yes, are valuable – I love catching up with people) …. this sentence totally captured it:

… I’m just not able to comprehend why should we be forced to interact with those physically close to us instead of with the people that we really want to interact with.

I often use the photo featured in this blog post to encourage conversation … we have a rosy, nostalgic view of the past in which we think we all chatted away with those random strangers .. but no – we just buried ourselves in a different technology.

One of my favourite bits from my own book (described by the Financial Times as sensible) is:

Although in practice most children are continuing conversations with friends from their local area, it’s fascinating to see how often “online” communication is viewed as second-rate, as we see from Professor Livingstone’s comment:

“Even though … face-to-face communication can… be angry, negligent, resistant, deceitful and inflexible, somehow it remains the ideal against which mediated communication is judged as flawed.”

Yes, we need to look at our habits, but not dismiss technology out of hand.

Read full article.

Categories
Life(style)

#TDC15: 7679 Total Tweets (So Far)

epilogger

I quite enjoyed finding epilogger a couple of years ago, neat (free) way to collect tweets into one place (sure the paid version has all kinds of exciting features!) … so here’s the tweets from Thinking Digital: a conference for those curious about how technology is shaping our future (so far 8 years Newcastle based, but with an event coming in Manchester in November).