What is a meme? How is it a part of our greater cultural dialogue? Jump on Twitter to #AskAMemeMaker today, and join in a dialogue on just how memes can be more than just internet noise.
Continue Reading →Internet
By now you may have heard of Vine. If you’re on Twitter at all, you’ve definitely heard of and/or seen it. You may not have actually used Vine, but you probably will soon — it’s the newest multimedia format to hit social networks, a more complicated version of a GIF or a simplified version of a home movie.
Continue Reading →
Today China’s biggest online food retailer, Yihaodian, announced one of the most amazingly weird plans I’ve ever heard: the company will roll out 1,000 virtual supermarkets around the country. The stores — spanning 1,200 square meters (roughly 12,900 square feet) in virtual space and stocking about 1,000 items each — will “exist” in blank city spaces, and shoppers can find and “enter” them using their smartphones and augmented reality.
Continue Reading →
BERKELEY, California — Whatever definition for art you hold dear, quality art often offers the viewer a chance to challenge that definition and a new means to look at the world. New perspectives are important: they disrupt our expectations, allowing for new ways of thinking, new dialogues, and new ideas. A particularly interesting genre of internet art offers the same possibility. Rather than the single URL-based work that links nowhere, works that embrace the internet’s networked structure allow us to engage and explore the internet in an entirely new way. These works give us new ways to browse.
Continue Reading →
BERKELEY, California — As more of us can afford the tools historically only available to publishing houses, we have increasingly adopted them to share our stories and thoughts online. The invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s cheapened and quickened the arduous process of writing texts by hand. The cheaper the publishing, the cheaper the books, making information more accessible and creating an economic environment where more people could become publishers, creating an increasingly diverse, cheap, and accessible flow of information to an increasingly wider audience. Before the printing press books were rare and expensive, few possessed them and few could read them. The internet has expanded what the printing press started at an unprecedented degree.
Continue Reading →
The internet was once heralded as an egalitarian space holding all of the world’s knowledge just a few clicks away. New identities could form and gain power and respect online in a way that wasn’t possible in our white-, Western-, and male-dominated physical world. Donna Haraway‘s “Cyborg Manifesto” claimed that an embracing of our cyborg [...]
Continue Reading →
Pandora doesn’t work here in Iceland. Nor does Netflix. The country doesn’t allow either, so my friends and I have all been swapping music and movies instead of streaming them. My friend who gave me the songs I am listening to right now got them through the Bittorrent hub Piratebay. I’m listening to London music from a Philly girl while living in a farmhouse in southern Iceland, all because the internet is slightly less global than I thought. It’s a strange world.
Continue Reading →
As more of our identities are placed online, what problems may potentially arise? Authorship and branding have never been harder to control.
Continue Reading →
Occupy.here uses a wifi router to create a network for discussion for only a locale audience. By bypassing the traditional internet, Phiffer is working to make a free, open, unregulated and community based platform for exchange.
Continue Reading →
I love the internet. It’s jumbled and weird and mind-numbingly vast. It’s also the source of my employment. (Thanks, internet!) But I’m also worried about the internet — specifically the internet and art.
Continue Reading →
