January 2011
12 posts
4.01: The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool →
10 Digital Trends and Questions for 2011 →
Latest blog post for Bookbrunch a bit late but outlines the following trends:
- The year of Android
- Apps coming of age
- Interesting start ups
- The normalisation of ebooks
As well as a bunch of questions that we should see answered, primarily because of the data we collect over the coming year.
Gaming and Narrative Part II
A further observation on gaming. Techradar’s analysis of the technology behind team Bondi and Rockstar’s new game, LA Noire, makes the point that sophisticated new facial scanning techniques can bridge the “uncanny valley” that makes quasi-realistic computer characters a lot more unsettling then straight forward cartoons. Allied to this is a whole new invisible interface, a...
Fractured Partial Attention
Tom Armitage’s excellent piece on the iPad and the Kindle has provoked a general positive response, and for good reason. His point is similar, although more developed, nuanced and paying closer attention to the materiality and objectivity of the devices, to that I made in a review of devices for the Frankfurt Bookfair. My point was that while the iPad is unquestionably the superior device...
Henry Jenkins: Introduction to Communications... →
Brief Thoughts On That Website Everyone Keeps...
Yes, that one. You can’t look at Twitter, or one’s RSS feeds without seeing it plastered everywhere. Quora. There are two things I think worth mentioning. 1.) what the discussion around Quora reveals about digital culture, and 2.) more prosaically the potential of the site.
1.) Digital culture is built on an economy of backlash. As soon as Quora became remotely popular, the start up...
Narrative and Gaming
People often seem to say that while computer games’ narratives have greatly improved in recent years, they still haven’t reached the level of mature narrative forms like novels, films or perhaps the signature form of our age, the high end TV serial. For me it’s been a long hiatus from serious gaming stretching back to when I started university and in truth before them. The last...
Literary Lists
Over the holidays I visited Italy and as is my want read books around the country, one of which was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A great book on so many levels its pointless to discuss here. Reading about the novel I cam across this list of the top 100 twentieth century novels - as voted for my the readers of Le Monde, which immediately put in mind of various English language versions...
Google Ngram Viewer in Science →
