Kids boycott classroom with CCTV cameras. People call them brats. Kids respond with an op-ed that every adult should read. Many users suggested that cameras were a good idea because they could be used to keep an eye on bullying and student behaviour, we were accused of been “narcissistic megalomaniacs” angry at “being nabbed for [...]
My pal Chris wrote a moving post about an experience he had growing up in South Africa, a white boy who went with his church to talk about Jesus in the “coloured” townships. Which made me think about traveling and the relationship we rich, “white,”[*] educated people have with the rest of the world. I [...]
I went to see The Examined Life last night, a really, really good film about … philosophy. Wonderfully done. Interviews with eight philosophers (Zizek, Cornell West, Judith Butler and more) about their thoughts and work. It’s no easy feat making an entertaining feature-length talking-head documentary, especially about philosophy, but Astra Taylor succeeds in this one. [...]
The Cult of Done Manifesto There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. There is no editing stage. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know [...]
I have to think about this little bit more. Kevin Kelly has a compelling argument that access is better than ownership (because it comes with fewer responsibilities), for social goods such as movies, books, music. But one thing that strikes me is that while “consuming” might work in this model, the true test is what [...]
I was just in London for BookCamp (fantastic, see my comments here). When I fly, I usually download a number of TED Talks to watch on the plane. Loved this one, about the moral decision-making of liberals and conservatives.
David Simon is a former journalist who quit his job because he could no longer do it the way he wanted to do it: the companies that run papers these days don’t want their journalists to ask the most important question out of the famous five Ws + H (who what where when why how) [...]
I gave a semi-impromptu presentation/discussion yesterday at Podcamp Montreal* on “The Intimacy of Audio.” I’ve always felt that audio is the most intimate communication medium, and in the session yesterday I wanted to explore the idea of intimacy further. In particular, I wonder how we can build and use technology to help people become more [...]
Martin Heidegger’s 1954 piece, The Question Concerning Technology transformed the way I look at technology (it’s really dense, and the translation is heavy-handed). I read it in 1995, a decade before I got implicated in the web, and 40 years after it was published. When I first started writing on the web in 2004, I [...]