Context: Social media users more likely to believe misinformation The adoption of a “social” communications technology walks hand in hand with the suspension of disbelief as to the veracity of curated information broadcast on that channel; a wilful or semi-unconscious cognitive entrapment as progressive desensitisation to serial falsehoods. This may have taken a particular shape […]
Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
Some truths of inner self dawn upon us all a little later than they should. It was just a couple of years ago now that I found myself sitting in a meeting of technical professionals discussing some lofty software vision or planned improvement for the forever leaking bucket of logical or administrative and bureaucratic extensibility; […]
We are seduced by a language that endlessly recreates itself through us. These are all languages; all of these online platforms, communities and commercial engagements superficially appear to only be that through which we enunciate, articulate, align ourselves to ideological or emotive positions and communicate as an existential necessity but it is precisely in our […]
Context: Visualising Facebook I find it interesting that, beyond regional or other associated differences, a philosophical observation to be made is that the underlying and universal property here is that of recursive information system self-replication. So, we observe persons, cultures, national identities visually and linguistically self-replicating through a rapidly-evolving language and grammar of idiom, meme, […]
The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]
A recent quick dip and paddle into one of the big social media platforms revealed what is probably quite starkly and bleedingly obvious to other observers: attempts (by pretty much anyone) to say anything that is not entirely trivial and inconsequential, regardless of perceived or actual bias or partisan agenda, creates an enormous flurry of […]
Observing some of the unfolding confrontations and adversarial self-definitions across these social media spaces we all now inhabit, even if indirectly bearing the burden of their consequences, I really have to wonder sometimes, not if the world can still be saved from its own erstwhile immaturity and wilful ignorance but if it is even worth […]
Context: Facebook: Recommended Principles for Regulation or Legislation to Combat Influence Operations It is a fascinating issue. I suggest that the complexity of the problem far outstrips these assertions of interdiction and oversight. We have seen pretty much the same thing happen in cyber security. Where a property or quality, if not the actual content, […]
Disinformation is a mirrored labyrinth that no one can escape, but escaping – like truth – was never really the most important thing. A point worth noting is: these technologically-mediated information systems possess characteristics of what is known as “emergent complexity”. The form and flow of information and energy across (and as) these systems leverage […]
What I find unrelentingly entertaining about the technologically-mediated collective and aspirationally-individuated self-definitions of our historical moment is not that we (all, and each in our own ways) seek to create and sustain these distributed and functionally differential or dissociative Others of self-representation that we endlessly cultivate. What is more interesting is that we rarely notice, […]
Technology is always and already the cognitive hyper-extension of our minds and the many ways in which we may choose (or be chosen) to see ourselves through the diverse manifestations of this technology constitute the complex forms of introspective life that we (perhaps inadvertently) inhabit. The material extension and concrete presence of technology masks it’s […]
Daedelus Kite 