If you don't laugh at this Lotus Flower video remix, you're completely dead.
Year: 2011
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➟ The Weight of a Good Notebook
Wishlisted book: Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
Amazon.com recommended this book to me, and they were right, it's exactly the book I'd like to be reading now. Completionist instincts are especially activated in Japanese consumer culture, the one place I can think of where releasing a $300+ electronic device in multiple colors prompts repeat purchases from a significant number — with limited edition rereleases prompting early-morning lineups. Serendipitously, this lines up with a lot of articles and posts I'm reading lately (therein lies the problem, "high rate, low downtime" information consumption) about hyperconnectedness and how it's ruining our ability to analyze. The last line of the book description below summarizes this idea, and explains the book's title, so I've set it in bold for your convenience.Book description from Amazon:
Otaku: Japan's Database Animals (USD$16.17) [BookDepository.co.uk, free shipping worldwide]In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otaku’s ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in Japan by the country’s phenomenal postwar modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War, and America’s subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a database of plots and characters and its consumers mere “database animals.” A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese popular culture.Reading: Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown
Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown | Magazine
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_att_fail/all/1They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’
(via Instapaper)
Digging through my Instapaper queue to read this article from eight months ago. Not sure “We’ll escalate this to Tim and see who wins” has quite the same ring to it.➟ The Modern Concert
I've had a few conversations over the last few weeks about our modern state of connectedness, and right now my Facebook feed is filling up with photos from several vacations happening in near-real-time. This Gizmodo article looks at the impact of Instagram sharing on the concert experience, which both takes away and adds to what we traditionally define as being present at a concert, and absorbing – really feeling – what it's like. There are drawbacks to every instance of this now, as long as our interactions are still device-oriented. Every photo you post or update you send on holiday takes precious seconds away from the view, or breaks conversation once sacred and uninterrupted with one's travel companions. Looking at a screen breaks gaze, and advances in technology to change that are far off.Most people reject this behavior, and I can understand why, but it's of interest to me that we push this envelope against the grain of comfort, make the sacrifices inherent with any pioneering generation, and see what this connectedness can serendipitously bring us. The immediate countable benefits are obvious: live restaurant recommendations from friends who've been in the same part of Tokyo before, location-aware mapping and transport data, photos and video from a concert you couldn't attend, a greater sense of involvement with a friend's life, and so on. It's what else might come silently with these that I care about. More highly developed neural pathways for social interaction, greater pattern recognition in relationships, augmented emotion, the end of the long-distance relationship. There's so much to be excited about.http://gizmodo.com/#!5764994/the-modern-concertGetting goosebumps to music = creativity, openness to experiences
Science Daily:Most people feel chills and shivers in response to music that thrills them, but some people feel these chills often and others feel them hardly at all. People who are particularly open to new experiences are most likely to have chills in response to music, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science.I never knew that some people don’t get goosebumps or chills listening to music they like, whether from some sublime melodic passage or brilliant lyric. Talking about it last night reminded me of this article, which I wanted to find and share.
➟ Life Below 600px
If your clients are always going on about the fold, find some way to have them read this page by Paddy Donnelly. Makes a good draw-’em-in case for scrolling as modern behavior.➟ Solve Any Problem [Brainstorming]
Will Myddelton:
Chances are you’ve already used the KJ Method or one of its many subtle variations. It’s a group activity that works like this:
Brainstorm lots of ideas for your problem (individually)Sort these ideas into groups and label them (collectively)Rank them in any way that makes senseMake a decision based on what you’ve doneClearly articulate what you’re going to do next.If that doesn’t sound familiar, imagine writing ideas on post-its, grouping them, naming them and then prioritising. That’s the KJ Method as most of us know it.Solve Any Problem – Hidden Gems (via @iA, who called the post “How (to use Information Architecture) to solve any problem”.
sangsara.net 