Learning Aesthetics

Welcome to 2012

It’s tempting to forget that what you see is indeed what you ask for, but the asking is always already filtered. Here’s a complicated reminder from the Microsoft Research Social Media Collective Blog.

I’m not sure whether language or culture is more at work here:

Checking with an old friend, who is checking in with an older one: If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park [...]

Perhaps part of the difficulty is that what I’m struggling toward isn’t really implementation, but rather evolution. Someone recently pointed out that you don’t change societies by changing laws. Instead the most effective way to produce social change was to introduce a new technology into the culture. Of course it’s hard to predict exactly what [...]

Privacy means not having to explain. I’m going to be going to one of those HR how-to-be-a-better-(fill in the blank) things next week; this one titled “Crucial Conversations”, which I assume has something to do with honest-communication or unafraid-plain-talk. Remember those? Put me in the re-mind that all these sorts of things are about: Affective [...]

Can’t let a month go by.  This from mpesce: The mobile telephone spreads connectivity directly to the person.  The mobile creates the phenomenon of direct human addressability.  The mobile is an inherently personal device; each mobile and SIM is associated with a single person.  With this single innovation, the gap is spanned between tribal and [...]

I find myself reading The Best Music 2009 which leads to Michael Pisaro Perhaps as Giles Deleuze says about philosophy, Art is not communication.  It’s always trying to subtract its relation to communication in the service of a remainder: something we hear or see or experience that “says” nothing so that it can “do” something [...]

I’ve been thinking about short, really short, Twitter short fiction for a while now, and as usual if you wait a bit it will present itself.  Note to self: The key may well be context, again. Eleven very short stories about SXSW Here’s my pick: I was out of his room by eight o’clock, just [...]

After the last couple you probably need this (you’ll probably want the full-screen button):