Where Art Meets Social Networking Sites

The New York Times published an article on July 2, 2009 called "Where Art Meets Social Networking Sites" about the current art show, "Status Update" at the Gallery@Haskins at Haskins Laboratories, curated by Debbie Hesse of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and Donna Ruff. The article included comments by Debbie and Philip Rubin, CEO of Haskins, and coverage of the work by many of the artists, including Cat Balco, Matt Held, Keith Johnson, Jeremiah Teipen, Lee Walton, Rachel Perry Welty, and An Xiao. The show, which focuses on the intersection of art and emerging technologies, runs through August 1, 2009.
(photo by Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times)

Trivial + Banal + Lame = Important

Clay Shirky gave a fascinating presentation today (Oct. 3, 2007) at a meeting of the Yale Information Society Project at the Yale Law School. A lot of what he talked about will be covered in his book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" that is due to appear in February 2008. Clay teaches at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he works on the overlap of social and communications networks. The title of Clay's presentation was "Social Tools In Political Contexts." From his abstract:

"One of the challenges to the innovationist view of technology (tool designers pour 'innovation' into tools, which is then extracted by the users) are the way tools are adapted to local contexts. The current explosion in social tools offers an alternate view that might be called diffusionist, where local context helps determine not just the utility of social tools, but actually alters their political context. We ... look at three case studies of such diffusionism -- the use of 'flash mobs' by Belarusian protesters, the use of Twitter by Egyptian activists, and the use of flower delivery services as a protest movement against US immigration policy."

Clay touched on many topics, including: LOL cats, Google Maps, EFF, Tunisian Prison Maps, PledgeBank, information cascades, David Isenberg ("The Rise of the Stupid Network"), collective action, ICQ, GlobalVoices, Genevieve Bell (Intel anthropologist), Burmese bloggers, etc. See his Wikipedia page for more information.

Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies

Lifeboat Foundation
has a special report on the
Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies.