Today’s great information technology goes out onto the streets with us on our smartphones. It does not only convey information from top to bottom, but also from bottom to top and side to side. It continues to convey information, however, from top to bottom. A lot of information. In the internet age, those at the apex of politics, business or civil society still have enormously more leverage to convey information to the world at large than the average person. Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign is living proof of that, and his 2012 campaign might still underscore it.
The internet can still be used for top-down purposes, and some time soon somebody is going to use that to maximum effect, for good or ill. We lose sight of that at our peril. (tags: politicsinternet )
Perhaps this all sounds fantastical, absurd, and more than a little nuts. We couldn’t agree more. That’s one of the reasons we love conspiracy theories — the more awesomely insane, the better. (tags: uspolitics )
Don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes “to see how it feels.” Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run. (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality )
"...it's OK for a serious journalist to like Doctor Who and interview Matt Smith, because this is safely different from all that horrid sci-fi stuff: 'Surely there are parallels with Douglas Adams – one of the early Who writers – who later, in Hitchhiker's, created a universe to explore not science fiction but the human condition.' " (tags: )
"the most interesting thing in my office is a little grey box, which contains the only copy we have of Stephen's hardware voice synthesiser. The card inside dates back to the 1980s and this particular one contains Stephen's voice. There's a processor on it which has a unique program that turns text into speech that sounds like Stephen's, and we have only two of these cards. The company that made them went bankrupt and nobody knows how it works any more." (tags: disabilityscience )
