‘Hey everybody – this is barack’, wrote US President Barack Obama on the social networking space Reddit. ‘Just finished a great rally in Charlottesville, and am looking forward to your questions’. Social media has hit the headlines again – this time as a means of facilitating democratic participation. In August Barack Obama signed up […]
Author Archives: Perri Campbell
With the click of button we can now fight poverty, condemn dictators, and occupy… (insert your home town here). Online activist organisation Getup! offers us the chance to support gay marriage and refugees and asylum seekers. CommunityRun even lets us devise our own campaigns. YouTube offers the perfect place for ideas to begin their viral […]
‘The most fertile ground for experimentation is where the real and the virtual blend together… Artists tend to push on the questions that we’ll all be asking years later. And in the process, they often grapple with emerging technologies in unpredicted ways’ (Cacophony). During the last century ‘net art’ and virtual installations […]
‘We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible…We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society’ (‘Facebook Is Making Us […]
‘The digital and physical are increasingly meshed [they] dialectically co-construct each other…This is opposed to the notion that the Internet is like the Matrix, where there is a “real” (Zion) that you leave when you enter the virtual space (the Matrix) – an outdated perspective as Facebook is increasingly real and our physical world […]
‘I remember well the mix of anxiety and excitement as a little group of Australians huddled around a strange looking box in the press area of the cavernous Chamsil Stadium in Seoul, venue for the closing ceremony of the 1988 Olympic Games. It was the first time that a picture was going to be transferred […]
‘Sharing is the new religion. And some of that sharing may well be not very nice. While we under-share in the real world, online we over-share like crazy. And call it freedom’ (Suzanne Moore). Does social media have no concept of privacy? Do online spaces offer us too much freedom? If we […]
‘Heaven knows, I’m not comparing the internet to a hurtling death trap. But the internet has its destructive side just as the automobile does … As with the car, criticism of the internet’s shortcomings, risks, and perils has been silenced, or ignored’ (Lee Siegel) . The cyborg-ish figure of the terminator (the T-800) blurred […]
Do you find yourself reaching out to friends over an update or tweet rather than a cup of coffee? Do you find a 140 character comment more gratifying than a deep-and-meaningful face to face (real time) conversation? If your answer is yes, you may be a victim of ‘Technology Overload’ according to well-known social […]
‘Amidst the swirling maelstrom of technological progress so often heralded as the imminent salvation to all our ills, it can be necessary to remind ourselves that humanity sits at the centre, not technology… It’s difficult to separate us from our creations but it’s imperative that we examine this odd relationship’ (Chris Arkenburg). It’s been […]