digitallife

The digital disruption of our everyday life, in particular, our social relationships and interaction among each other is not really a spotlight topic. We talk about the future of jobs, autonomous driving, the Internet of Things and since the 2016 elections we at least talk about the impact of digitalizing and democratizing our media. This article takes a closer look at social media and what it can do and does to our life, especially to that of our kids and teenagers. We need to be more conscious of this, and make sure the social media industry gets regulated where there is a need for regulation. Read for yourself:

“I’ll admit I was a slow-follower when the iPhone launched ten years ago. I was suspicious of Apple’s intent — I was not fan of its closed, vertically integrated model — and the market’s infatuation with apps felt like a fad that would ultimately fade. When I finally did get an iPhone, I felt complicit in the what amounted to internet climate change: slowly but surely, our new addictions were bound to swamp all that we had worked so hard to build on the open web. As Tristan Harris and many others have pointed out, the economic incentives driving our mobile landscape (in short: advertising) are based fundamentally on the science of addiction, and addicted we certainly are…”

Source: Is Social Media The New Tobacco? – NewCo Shift

Extremely good Read on your Role in the Business Models of Social Networks: You Are the Product (John Lanchester)

“At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month. It is hard to grasp just how extraordinary that is. Bear in mind that thefacebook – its original name – was launched exclusively for Harvard students in 2004. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such as television or cinema or radio.

Also amazing: as Facebook has grown, its users’ reliance on it has also grown. The increase in numbers is not, as one might expect, accompanied by a lower level of engagement. More does not mean worse – or worse, at least, from Facebook’s point of view…”

Source: John Lanchester reviews ‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio García Martínez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ by Jonathan Taplin · LRB 17 August 2017

August 11, 2017 0

A very good long-read on an extremely important Topic for our Digital Future: A human-centric trust model for the Internet of Things (David Maher)

For IoT security to be successful, there needs to be an effective way to reason about how humanity can trust the security, safety, and privacy of this massive transformation of the world. Most importantly, “ordinary people,” whether they are consumers or workers, must be able to safely, reliably, and intuitively interact with vast, complex, interconnected systems of IoT devices. It can be overwhelming to think about all the ways individuals and society can be damaged by the haphazard engineering of systems that merge the physical and digital worlds. Technologists have done a terrible job with security technology so far, yet now we are about to impose those failures onto the physical world on a scale that only ubiquitous, pervasive, even invasive computing and connectivity can accomplish. Continuing the status quo is unsustainable…

via A human-centric trust model for the Internet of Things – O’Reilly Media

April 27, 2017 0

Beyond Pokemon Go: how AR will create a ‘deep reality’ we can’t escape from (Darran Anderson)

Augmented reality (AR) – at this fledgling stage at least – projects and amplifies that which already exists. At a basic level, it’s a series of glorified apps escaping a hand-held format for a pseudo-holographic one. It will also allow us to alter our surroundings. Yet this technology is about to take over our environments in a much deeper sense.

The effects of AR on our behaviour and identity will be substantial. Saturated with information, we will have more choice than ever, provided we can afford the options on show. Our lives will arguably become far more convoluted. The freeing up of time and energy from menial tasks may be offset by competing interests vying for our attention…

Source: Beyond Pokemon Go: how AR will create a ‘deep reality’ we can’t escape from

January 6, 2017 0

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet (Going Walden)

Technology has a lot to answer for: killing old businesses, destroying the middle class, Buzzfeed. Technology in the form of the internet is especially villainous, having been accused of everything from making us dumber (paywall) to aiding dictatorships. But Michael Harris, riffing on the observations of Melvin Kranzberg, argues that “technology is neither good nor evil. The most we can say about it is this: It has come.”

Harris is the author of “The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection,” a new book about how technology affects society…

Source: What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet — Quartz

December 27, 2016 0

Great Piece of Reading on a Future where myriads more Photos are being taken than ever before: “As We Become Cameras” (Matt Hacket)

Wearable cameras will be ubiquitous. We’ll barely notice.

By 2020, 80% of the world will be in possession of a physically unlimited camera attached (mostly) to an instantaneous global image distribution network. This will also be the screen that allows access the visual experience of the rest of the world.

Smartphones still require a complex series of time-consuming gestures to create and distribute an image. An exponentially increasing appetite for images, as a practical matter, requires exponentially increasing creation. Wearable cameras will take care of that.

But what happens when images are integrated as fully into our reality as time?

…

Source: As We Become Cameras — Medium

March 23, 2016 0

ANDRÉ CRAMER

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