I received a spam mail trying to get me to click on a presumably malicious link. When I looked at the link I saw it was not to a previously corrupted site somewhere but to an IPFS resource. Hadn’t seen that before.
Category: Day to Day
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Quickly Reaching The End of My Twitter Use
Twitter’s new management seems to want to limit the use of Tweetdeck to paying users only.
For many years, at least since the algorithm decided the timeline, I’ve used Tweetdeck as circumvention and as my interface to Twitter. It’s how I search for specific topics, follow some accounts, lists, tags etc. I had until recently some 70 columns in my Tweetdeck. Last year Tweetdeck became web only, and I suspected it wouldn’t be a net positive for my Twitter usage. It wasn’t. Mostly because it split up my different Twitter accounts over multiple tweetdeck set-ups where there used to be 1, and then made it harder to easily switch between accounts for posting and interacting. This last week it became mostly impossible to see any tweets when not logged in (which I never do on mobile).
All in all it looks like it’s time to discard Twitter fully. I haven’t posted in my accounts the last months, but kept the accounts if for nothing else than place holders. If even accessing Twitter is hobbled, then it’s finally time to let it go. One more platform that lives shorter than my own site.
Back in 2008 in presentations I used to share this list of what I shared online in which channel. Almost all of that is gone or disfunctional, where it used to be an integral part of my online interactions with my network.
A 2008 overview of social tools I used at that time. Slide from my 2008 talk at Politcamp Graz on networked life and work. Most of those tools no longer exist or I no longer use. Except for this blog.
I see lots of potential for social software still, and even again, just not social media.
[Update 2023/07/05: I have deleted all my topic oriented Twitter accounts and a few legacy ones, as well as my public main account (ton_zylstra). My private one (tonzylstra), I may keep for a while longer, unused though it is.]
Bookmarked Mechanisms of Techno-Moral Change: A Taxonomy and Overview (by John Danaher and Henrik Skaug Sætra)
Via Stephen Downes. Overview of how, through what mechanisms, technology changes work moral changes. At first glance seems to me a sort of detailing of Smits’ 2002 PhD thesis Monster theory, looking at how tech changes can challenge cultural categories, and diving into the specific part where cultural categories are adapted to fit new tech in. The citations don’t mention Smits or the anthropological work of Mary Douglas it is connected to. It does cite references by Peter-Paul Verbeek and Marianne Boenink (all three from the PSTS department I studied at), so no wonder I sense a parallel here.
The first example mentioned in the table explaining the six identified mechanisms points in this direction of a parallel too: the 70s redefinition of death as brain death was a redefinition of cultural concepts to assimilate tech change was also used as example in Smits’ work. The third example is a direct parallel to my 2008 post on empathy as shifting cultural category because of digital infrastructure, and how I talked about hyperconnected individuals and the impact on empathy in 2010 when talking about the changes bringing forth MakerHouseholds.
Where Monster theory was meant as a tool to understand and diagnose discussions of new tech, wherein the assmilation part (both cultural categories and technology get adapted) is the pragmatic route (the mediation theory of Peter Paul Verbeek is located there too), it doesn’t as such provide ways to act / intervene. Does this taxonomy provide options to act?
Or is this another descriptive way to locate where moral effects might take place, and the various types of responses to Monsters still determine the potential moral effect?
The paper is directly available, added it to my Zotero library for further exploration.
Many people study the phenomenon of techno-moral change but, to some extent, the existing literature is fragmented and heterogeneous – lots of case studies and examples but not enough theoretical unity. The goal of this paper is to bring some order to existing discussions by proposing a taxonomy of mechanisms of techno-moral change. We argue that there are six primary mechanisms..
John Danaher
In reply to Welcome to the Communuty by Clark MacLeod
Fines for not cutting your grass? Why have lawns anyway, they’re a 19th century relic of showing off you have so much land you can just turn it into a useless and mostly dead monoculture that requires excessive amounts of water? And then we all started mimicking it as if it’s the only sensible thing to do with a garden. If it’s about the bees, replacing the lawn with something else is perhaps a useful path? Or does the local regs specify it must be a lawn out front?
After the grass turned to dandelions, we got our neighbourly welcome note in the form of a letter from the town stating that our grass was too high and must be dealt with or we will be fined.
Vision Pro Launching in a Shrinking Market
In reply to AR/VR Headsets Continue Decline as VR Sets Plummet commented on by Stephen Downes
Seems to me one issue is right in the quote at the end. If you say that in 18 months my now new $3500 device will be obsolete, how do you expect mainstream audiences to fork that kind of money over? Even with compelling use cases, should they exist, that is an unconvincing position. It’s nice that compelling AR/VR is right around the corner for the mainstream, but it’s been a proximate future corner for two decades already, a corner that keeps moving away from you as much as you move towards it.
Even the AR/VR headsets arriving as early as 2025 will make today’s headsets look quaint.
Ramon T. Llamas, research director for Mobile Devices and AR/VR at IDC
‘Career Day’
Yesterday I visited the Design Lab at the University Twente for a ‘Career Day’ of the faculty for philosophy of science, technology and society (PSTS). I took part in the 2 year Master programme 20 years ago next to my then job, and was invited with 4 others to talk about what my work after studying there looked like and what role PSTS had in that. It was fun to be back at my old university and walk around campus and it was great to talk with current students, a much more international group than when I was there. Titles like ‘Career Day’ make me shudder, and just the morning before the event I had a brief interaction with Jack Yan how his and my (very different) work over the decades has actually made us unemployable, which I used as a contrast in my talk in the afternoon. My talk’s title was ‘What is it you do, again?‘ and instead of talking about a career, I presented my twisting path.
A session at PSTS Career Day at the University of Twente
My talk was reflective, and thus an opportunity for myself too, so perhaps I’ll reword it a bit and post it here as well.