Technology
The Problem with Tweeting a Revolution
Andy Carvin tweeted the Arab Spring. He still missed something by not being there.
During the most heated days of the Tahrir Square protests, Andy Carvin sent more than 1,000 tweets per day. He kept at it for 18 hours at a time, aggregating and crowdsourcing information from activists, freedom fighters, and (citizen) journalists. He submitted to sleep only as a biological necessity. READ MORE >>
How Do You Stop Racism on Twitter?
Not by shaming or prosecuting users, for starters
Last week, France embarked on a new frontier of hate speech prosecution: Twitter. READ MORE >>
Atari Is Not an Anomaly
The pioneering video game company is dead. Its successors are making the same mistakes.
For those of us born in the 1970s, last week’s news of Atari’s demise came as a sentimental shockwave. Atari was our first video game console. It introduced us to Space Invaders and Missile Command and Pitfall. More importantly, it taught us how to play electronically, forming our habits and blistering our thumbs. READ MORE >>
Welcome to One Man Focus Group, where obsessive critic Paul Lukas evaluates tomorrow's cultural detritus today. The call to the bullpen is one of baseball's time-honored rituals, right up there with spitting tobacco juice and arguing with the ump. And for the past 80 years or so, that call has always been made on a traditional, hard-wired land line. READ MORE >>
The video-game industry, which has been in a fight with the gun lobby to deflect blame for the Sandy Hook massacre, could use some positive press in Washington these days. So Electronic Arts, which makes first-person shooter games like Medal of Honor and Battlefield, did what any company looking for an image boost would do: Get the eminently wholesome John Legend to headline an invite-only inauguration after party on the top floor of the W Hotel, and highlight a game that doesn’t revolve around shooting people.While Legend passed the time with supermodel co-host Malin Ackerman in a VIP section at the rear of the dark room, and the crowd noshed on gussied-up chicken and waffles while glancing surreptitiously at Grover Norquist (who seemed to enjoy the attention), I pursued the ostensible purpose of the event: promotion of the latest edition of “SimCity,” which EA is using as a bridge to D.C. wonks.In a corner of the room, as I peered at a computer displaying a virtual town, a woman asked if I'd had a chance to play it. She pulled over her husband, who'd designed it and flown out from San Francisco to show it off. He asked if I wanted to try it out.I could spend the night gawking at mayors-about-town Michael Nutter, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Cory Booker. Or I could pretend to be a mayor myself. READ MORE >>
Baudrillard and Babes at the Consumer Electronics Show
The surreal magic of the annual gadget extravaganza in Las Vegas
It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise that I’d meet a sales rep who referenced Jean Baudrillard.It was a couple of days into the Consumer Electronics Show, the gargantuan annual gathering of the gadget industry. I was idly taking notes as salesladies lured men onto a set of vibrating exercise machines, their fat jiggling, while an Asian man in a fedora and round sunglasses danced on one of them to “Gangnam Style.” A shaggy-haired off-duty software sales rep named Will Ryan asked what I was writing. READ MORE >>
There's a War in Cyberspace over Icons vs. Text
In the physical world, icons are always telling us what to do. No smoking on the airplane. Beware of the road crew ahead. Crap here if you’re a man, and there if you’re a woman. There’s even an icon that says, essentially, “Yes, when I die in a car wreck, you may take my organs and put them in another human body.” And these icons, for the most part, tell us these things without so much as a word. They’re feats of human efficiency: Why force someone to read tedious text when the image of a crossed-out cigarette will do?The digital world, however, is a different story. On the Internet, warnings and directions are often much more complex. How can an icon summarize, for instance, whether to allow Facebook to share your user history or to allow your iPhone to know where you are at all times? You’ll probably understand a website’s terms of service better if you sit down to read them, but you probably don’t have the time or patience for that, instead signing away vast swaths of your personal information without a second thought.The White House thinks this is a problem. Last February, it promulgated a Privacy Bill of Rights decreeing that consumers shall get a clearer idea of what, exactly, a mobile app does with your data (California, meanwhile, has already made its own rules). The app industry, desperate to avoid clunky regulations from Congress, promised to work with privacy advocates to come up with their own standard practice for privacy notifications. Get all the players in a room, the thinking went, and they should be able to hash out an approach that works for everybody. READ MORE >>
Eric Schmidt: Silicon Valley's Only Grownup Wants to Have Fun Too
How soul-crushing it must be to be constantly referred to as the “adult in the room” when you are, in fact, always in a room full of actual adults. Though ostensibly a compliment, it’s not entirely flattering. It is the equivalent, more or less, of being the guy you can count on to turn on the lights and turn down the music just when the party is getting fun. READ MORE >>
