http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/will-work-fun/ Revolutions are often thought of in terms of conflict and disorder, but they just as often come on waves of peaceful obsolescence. The old way of doing things is allowed to linger as long as it likes while everyone else gets on with the future. In the last few years the "free-to-play" model— where games are given away on mobile phones or online while the developer makes money through advertisements or the sale of in-game items—has encircled the videogame industry. At first it seemed like a curiosity, a unique idea that made sense in China and Korea, where loot-hoarding games… ]]> Thu, 17 May 2012 03:32:16 -0700 http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/will-work-fun/ http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577,00.html/spiegel-interview-with-umberto-eco-we-like-lists-because-we-dont-want-to-die-spiegel-online-news-international Umberto Eco - "The list is the origin of culture... What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible" : http://t.co/daRqmUvj ]]> Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:35:40 -0700 http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577,00.html/spiegel-interview-with-umberto-eco-we-like-lists-because-we-dont-want-to-die-spiegel-online-news-international http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4142 "The everyday experience of liberal capitalism rests upon the violent defence of the boundaries against the other that the system itself produces. That banal and pacifying phrase ‘social exclusion’ allows us to forget the material experience of exclusion and the subjectivities that it tends to generate." ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:39:01 -0700 http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4142 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled amazement before returning to contemplation of their most recent acquisition, or dreaming of the next one. These are people who thrive on making classifications, pondering the arrangements of their trophies and annotating them with informative labels. Often their obsession seems to derive from a need to impose order on a chaotic world, from the fear of death and oblivion. The collection will ward off mortality, carrying the illusion of eternity.… ]]> Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:54:06 -0700 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed,… ]]> Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:09:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical... ]]> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:09:39 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical organization characteristic of human societies, a real ant colony operates without direction or management. New research is showing us how ant colonies get things done without anyone being in charge. Ants, it turns out, have much to teach us about the decentralized networks that operate in many biological systems, in which local interactions produce global behavior, without the… ]]> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:09:00 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/23960/Analysis_Portal_and_the_Deconstruction_of_the_Institution.php In this in-depth analysis, Daniel Johnson discusses games, language and sociology with regard to Valve's Portal - please note that the article contains story spoilers for the game.

In 1959 Erving Goffman released The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; a book that went on to heavily influence future understanding of social interactions within the sociology discipline. In it, he discusses social intercourse under the metaphor of actors performing on a stage. Specifically, in the second chapter he shares the idea of a front and backstage to social interaction.

As with the theater, we… ]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 07:33:00 -0700 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/23960/Analysis_Portal_and_the_Deconstruction_of_the_Institution.php http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/91 In all the traditional approaches to pedagogy, both in art and in literacy, the possibility of perceiving the transitional nature of the space produced by text or image—the common space for author and receptor—is completely lost. The emphasis is on producing communication vessels that are static and consumable objects, for which the sign has to be well executed. In this kind of art, execution has to reach the point of desirability, which in turn defines success. Teaching and instruction are generally used as synonyms, something that reflects an implicit pedagogical ideology. The word instruction is a homonym: it refers to… ]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:51:00 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/91