A Distinctive Taste

A Twitter analysis of political tweets - the networks and the cross over

Interesting

Original Story: Wall Street Journal

Shout out to:emergentfutures

Wallpaper* iPad Edition

If you have an iPad you can download the enhanced Wallpaper* iPad Edition - free for subscribers, or available to purchase from your local iTunes store

(Photo of Wallpaper* Composed is from the sampler gallery)

Done!

Shout out to:wallpapermag

emergentfutures:

How Negative Reviews Increase Sales Online

Panos Ipeirotis set out to study the dollar value of online reputation, and along the way he discovered the counter-intuitive ways that reviews inform it

Paul Higgins: this must be read carefully to look at a strategy that might work. 

Full Story: Technology Review

emergentfutures:

CHART OF THE DAY: Android’s Share Of New Smartphone Purchases Is Twice As Big As The iPhone

New smartphone buyers are overwhelmingly choosing Android phones in comparison to iPhones and BlackBerrys, new data from Nielsen reveals.

Full Story: Business Insider

emergentfutures:

You Love Your iPhone. Literally

Paul Higgins: Interesting article on the effects of technology including:

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone.

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia.

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member

Full Story: New York Times

So I cracked my iphone screen today.  Glass shards go into my thumb when I unlock the screen.  I headed up to Baltimore with the fam to visit my sister for lunch. The entire time going there and and coming back I had this feeling of anxiety that my phone was broken.  I also caught myself mentioning my phone being broke twice.  Not to my surprise, my sister who doesn’t have an iPhone could give less than a fuck about my screen being cracked.  I guess I am writing this to make fun of the fact that I felt like this today, and I should probably be ashamed of myself for feeling this way about an inanimate object.

White Walls, Consumerism: When my friend Joanne McNeil asked me about my thoughts on the origins of whiteness as signifier of high-tech. I ignored any associations to traditional cultural meanings (death, life, good, bad, purity, what-have-you) and biology (teeth, rice, ivory) and instead challenged myself to look at technology as an historical artifact of modern science. It did not occur to me until after the English riots were disparaged as “shopping riots,” and just as I experienced the heady consumer-high from my first new cell phone purchase in over five years - a white iPhone 4 - to look at it Whiteness an artifact of consumerism.

What Joanne was asking me about was the exterior whiteness of consumer electronics - this is very different from the interior whiteness of control rooms and linen undershirts - it is more akin to the exterior whiteness of the earliest experiments in Modernist architecture and the white dresses worn by nurses. The whiteness of my new iPhone is not an expression of my personal aspirations - there are millions of other people with the exact same phone. The whiteness is an expression of a public aspiration. To borrow a term from Jean-François Lyotard the “narrative knowledge” that girds consumerism is not too different from the metanarratives that gird “scientific knowledge.”

While Republican candidates are more than happy to pander to a crowd that cheers the death of someone who can’t afford health insurance, but most Americans to not want to believe that their gain comes at someone else’s expense. The American dream which is the “master narrative” of consumerism was never a simple promise of personal progress; of “I get MINE, and to hell with you.” What fun would a jetpack be if you had the only one? It would be almost as worthless as owning the world’s only fax machine. If you are king it might be cool to own the only one of something, but in a consumer society you would look like a bigger jerk than a Segway owner. I didn’t buy an iPhone because no one has one. I bought one because everyone I know has one. That means I have lots of people to tell me what the best apps are and to share the features of the phone.

Americans might dream of having a good job that enables them to own a nice car and a charming house in a pleasant place, but an element of that dream is that they are not alone in that pleasure. That along with millions of others, they are enjoying luxuries that once only a few kings might have hoped for. The dream was never to exclude that wealth from the rest of the world, it was explicit that billions more people would someday soon enjoy the justice, stability, mobility, and material pleasures of modern life. Millions of Americans fought and died for that dream in the twentieth century. In the 21st they were convinced to fight an enemy that “hated their freedom.” It is not clear to me that they would have fought to keep their big cars and cheap fuel prices if that had been the justification that had been given.

It was clear this summer that the super-rich consumer elite have abandoned the “we” aspect of the American Dream. It is not at all clear that consumer culture can survive without it. No matter what wonder scientific progress is able to deliver, it is meaningless if it is attached to a dream that no one buys. Whatever else high-tech whiteness is, it would be a truly tragic thing to be nostalgic for. 

Interesting concept.  Anyone who is a fan of this blog knows my thoughts on the “American Scheme”

Shout out to:youmightfindyourself

bankcee:

Polaroid Model 80B by splorp on Flickr.

Jr. designer Allan taking us through some wireframes for a big new feature… (Taken with instagram)

Can’t wait to see the new developments.  Svvply is continuing to do the damn thing regarding combining the aesthetics of branding merchandise and e-commerce.  Good for them, and I can’t wait to see the new developments. Follow us on Svpply when you get a chance.

Shout out to:svpply

stoweboyd:

emergentfutures:

China inches ahead of US in PC sales for the first time

We may be living in a “post PC” world according to some, but PCs are unquestionably still big business, and they’re now a bigger business in China than anywhere else. That’s according to the latest report from market research firm IDC, at least, which found that both PC sales and shipments in China inched ahead of those in the US for the second quarter 

Full Story: EndGadget

This is perhaps the bellwether of the Fall of the West. The Internet is the crowning achievement of western technology — the largest, most expensive, and most significant innovation of all time — but now China is growing its own branch of the web as fast as the US. A turning point.