SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children

Illustration Paul Rogers via The New York Times.

"If kids are allowed to play 'Candy Crush' on the way to school, the car ride will be quiet, but that’s not what kids need. They need time to daydream, deal with anxieties, process their thoughts and share them with parents, who can provide reassurance." Technology, remind us Jane Brody, is a poor substitute for personal interaction. Read full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 4'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: How Cats Took Over the Internet... and the museum!

Image courtesy of The Infinite Cat Project via The Creators Project.

"When the Queens-based Museum of the Moving Image exhibits How Cats Took Over the Internet, based on our previous interests (cats, cats, and more cats), you better believe there's a palpable excitement in our office air. Having literally taken over the web over the last few years, the internet-based cat phenomenon has become more than a passing fad or a time-killer at work: now, it's a real social and creative fact, to be deeply and critically discussed in a museum, starting Friday, August 7.

“The Internet’s collective obsession with cats offers a window into the way we understand ourselves," Jason Eppink, the Associate Curator of Digital Media who organized the exhibition, states. "This exhibition examines the many reasons for this deceptively frivolous phenomenon and highlights the new ways we’re creating, consuming, and sharing culture," he adds." Read full article by Benoit Palop in The Creators Project. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image via Wired.

Marcus Wohlsen's Wired article explicitly called "How Facebook Could End Up Controlling Everything You Watch and Read Online" would have been quoted so many times in a second part of my dissertation about information on the move... but since that imaginary second part is not happening (anytime soon, at least), at least I get to share it here. Anyone interested in the future of news, journalism, publishing, content creation and marketing, and well, the Internet in general, should have a look. Here's a fragment of the article: "Given that links appear to be more clickable when shared on Facebook, online publishers have scrambled to become savvy gamers of Facebook’s News Feed, seeking to divine the secret rules that push some stories higher than others. But all this genuflection at the altar of Facebook’s algorithms may be but a prelude to a more fundamental shift in how content is produced, shared, and consumed online. Instead of going to all this trouble to get people to click a link on Facebook that takes them somewhere else, the future of Internet content may be a world in which no video, article, or cat GIF gallery lives outside of Facebook at all." Read full article in Wired. E.T.P. 5'

Image via The Economist.

And obviously related to the previous article, Alexandra Suich writes for The Economist print edition a nice piece about how technology is profoundly changing the advertising business. This is fragment of Little Brother: "In 1963 David Ogilvy . . . wrote: 'An advertisement is like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.' Half a century later advertisers are at last taking him at his word. Behavioural profiling has gone viral across the internet, enabling firms to reach users with specific messages based on their location, interests, browsing history and demographic group. Ads can now follow users from site to site: a customer who looks online for flights to Frankfurt will be inundated with German holiday offers. Conversant, a digital-marketing firm, uses an algorithm to deliver around 800,000 variations of an ad to its big clients’ prospective customers to make it as irresistible as possible. . . Extreme personalisation in advertising has been slow to come, except in search advertising, where Google, Yahoo and other engines have been serving up ads tailored to users’ interests for years. But now it has arrived in earnest. According to one poll by Adobe, a software company, most marketers say they have seen more change in the past two years than in the previous 50." Read full article in The Economist. E.T.P. 6'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo via TIME Magazine.

Tony Haile writes in TIME: "If you’re an average reader, I’ve got your attention for 15 seconds, so here goes: We are getting a lot wrong about the web these days. We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race towards new trends like native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ones and make the same mistakes all over again." Not an average reader? Read full article in TIME. E.T.P. 12'

Photo via Fast Company.

The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind The Secretive Lab's Closed Doors: Space elevators, teleportation, hoverboards, and driverless cars: The top-secret Google X innovation lab opens up about what it does--and how it thinks. Read the full article by Jon Gertner in Fast Company. E.T.P. 10'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Image via Dazed Digital.

As with most technology news this is as interesting as disturbing: "Google might be cracking down on drug sellers, but don't worry: the darknet has you covered for all your illicit search needs. A new search engine called Grams has popped up, and it promises to make it easier for you to find black market goods including drugs, guns, stolen credit card numbers and even fake £100 Tesco vouchers." Read full article in Dazed Digital. E.T.P. 5'

Image via Fast Company.

The jokesters at Someecards have created a series of brutally honest job titles to restore order to a world gone mad with euphemism. Each entry stares deep into the soul of a modern job title and reduces it down to the main task for which its bearer is responsible. "Head of IT," for instance, is now transformed into "Director of Turning Things Off and Back On," a tactic that even the least computer-savvy individuals have learned works most frequently. Read more brutally honest versions of job titles in Fast Company. E.T.P. 3'

DESIGN, BUSINESS & INNOVATION

Photo: David Byrne via The Guardian.

This week David Byrne stated in a provocative article in The Guardian that "the Internet will suck all creative content out of the world". In his guess, as with most web-based businesses, only one will be left standing in the end. "There aren't two Facebooks or Amazons. Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace". It sounds about right, right? Want to read the full article, check The Guardian website. Estimated Time of Procrastination: 4'.

Age on Internet Empires. And speaking of the Internet, Fast Company published a map of the most visited websites by country. Guess which two are the most popular ones and who happens to be big in Japan? Click here to see the maps in Fast Company. Estimated Time of Procrastination: 1'46''.