Nicholas Carah
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Platforms like Google and Facebook are increasingly an infrastructural underlay for public culture.
The great hope attached to networked forms of digital media was that they would make for better democratic participation, and with that bring more freedom. The past two decades seem historically significant because of the opening up of technolo
A brand is a device for coding lived experience and living bodies into market processes. A couple of important coordinates to lay out about how to think about brands. The first is to say that the relationship between brands and media platforms
To invoke the cyborg is to critically consider the dreams and nightmares of a world where the human body cannot be disentangled from the machines it has created.The term cyborg was coined by the cybernetic researchers Manfred Clynes and Nathan
This process is at the heart of technocultural capitalism.If we look carefully we can discern in many Silicon Valley investments the effort to engineer away the friction between living bodies and the capacity of platforms to translate life int
I like this Tweet a lot. Fr Bob makes an incisive observation about the logic and politics of augmented reality – at least as its imagined by the major media platforms.Platforms like Facebook and Google are investing in virtual, augmented and
The constant flood of views, opinions, theories and images amounts to a kind of disinformation. It becomes harder for us to mediate a shared reality that corresponds with lived experience, that coheres with history or that is jointly understo
everyday infrastructure. This gets called the ‘internet of things’. Watches, Televisions, Cars, Fridges, Kettles, Air Conditioners, Home Stereos are just some of the everyday objects that are getting ‘connected to the internet’.
That’s not a hypothetical story. Facebook actually did that in 2014, to 689000 users. They changed the ‘mood’ of their News Feeds. Some people got happier feeds, some got sadder feeds. They wanted to see if they ‘tweaked’ your feed sad, if you
This is Jose van Dijck’s definition of a platform. ‘The providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code social activities into a computational architecture; they process (meta)data through algorithms and formatted pro
I type ‘platform’ into Google. Ask a platform what a platform is. Google suggests a nearby bar, a train station, a Wikipedia entry.
This is Carl Schmitt writing in 1918 about a fictional civilisation, the Buribunks. Every person has a personal typewriter.Every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life. These diaries are han
On the night of October 15, 1940, the German air force sent 236 bombers to London. ‘British defences were dismal’. They ‘managed to destroy only two planes’. London, the heart of the British Empire, was under siege.In Rise of the Machines Thoma
Media are technologies that organise human life and experience. They symbolically represent reality and they also collect information about reality.How did they come to do this? First up, we often think of digital media as ‘new’. We register th
Coupling an aircraft with a camera enabled armies to view territory from the sky, to disclose invisible soldiers, camouflaged artillery positions, and unnoticed rearward connections to the enemy.
In 2017, Harvard scientists encoded a moving image gif of Muybridge’s horse experiment into the DNA of a living cell. Where, as The New York Times explains, ‘it can be retrieved at will and multiplied indefinitely as the host divides and grows.
I have no idea how many times I’ve already bounced the Twitter feed this morning. Wandering around the house, the garden, making coffee, putting the washing on. How many tweets have I seen today already? Twitter would know. My guess is several
At the Splendour in the Grass music festival in 2013 the festival wristbands had RFID tags in them. You could link your tag to your Facebook. Then, as you wandered about the festival going to see bands play, you could ‘swipe’ your wrist at the
The advertising model shows us how the audience do two kinds of labour.First, by allowing the platform to monitor them they do the work of being watched, of providing the data that enables advertisers to target them. Second, by using the plat
The ‘shows’ you see are on the TV screen are not really the product. He says the real answer to the question ‘what do media make?’ is ‘audiences’.
Branding and advertising are a fundamental part of our media culture.
Facebook launched as a public company in 2012, immediately after its launch the stock price sunk.Facebook had a big problem and the market weren’t convinced Facebook could solve it.Users were starting to ‘go mobile’. To access Facebook predomin
The launch of the first Apple iPhone will stand the test of time as a significant historical event. It marks the transition from the television to the smartphone as the organising device of the media system. During the product launch Apple and
In the past decade our public culture and media system has been dramatically disrupted by the emergence of major media platforms.
It was like breaking up with a machine.
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