Sixian

The Relationship Between Viral Effects and Network Effects

Just as the goal of desire is to extinguish itself, audiophilia’s object is a kind of intimacy and immediacy that can be achieved only when one purchases a technology sophisticated enough to disappear itself, allowing creators and listeners to comingle in its transparency. 

If social change is a push-pull process “in which a society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind by its realized past,” without a magnetic pull from the front, how are we to move out from the stagnation? The mass phenomenon of the burnout directly reflects the troubles of our cultural... See more

We often think making things for the web is a process of simplifying—the hub, the dashboard, the control panel are all dreams of technology that coalesces, but things have a tendency to diverge into a multiplicity of options. We pile on more tools and technology, each one increasingly nuanced and minor in its critical differences. Clearly,... See more

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless,... See more

One risk was over the last five years, you saw technology players, tech forward, skinny labels as they call themselves, emerge to try to disrupt the major labels, whether that was a Distrokid at the low end or an Orchard or Grooves in the mid segment or Believe Digital. They were trying to say, hey, we can use technology to do like 80%, 70%, 50% of... See more

The conflict between old and new media is in many ways a dispute over who gets to control the “clocks” we live by; who gets to set the pace; who gets access to the technologies that make it easy to synchronize (or de-synchronize) large groups people.Clocks may seem innocuous, but they’re never ideologically neutral. Timekeeping doesn’t just happen.

Unlike the clocks of Old Media, the subjective time zones of internet subcultures are a de-centralized creative expression that reflect the idiosyncrasies of many different reality tunnels. Whereas geographic time zones sit next to each other in a very orderly fashion, internet time zones are kaleidoscopic and multi-layered — they allow you to look... See more

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that caring involves an “ethico-political commitment” to the neglected and oppressed and a concern with the affective dimensions of our material world. We care for things not because they produce value, but because they already have value.