Tanuj

Anyone trying to apply science via technology must reason through contingencies, constraints, and behavior in specific circumstances. Questions like What is most appropriate and desired in this context? arise. Science focuses on necessity and universality; technology focuses on contingencies and specificities. Thus, technology does not just follow... See more

In the words of MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle: computers empowered their users, making them feel smart[er], “in control”, and “more fully participant in the future”.

ITEs go quite a bit further than a conventional text editor. That is, ITEs are:

• Navigable. The apps provide methods for quickly and intuitively navigating, reviewing, and collating collected thinking.

I’ve come to think of the networks and infrastructures connected to the phone as active parties in the photographic process. I take pictures of the non-computational world and I give them to the phone so it can understand my world better. The phone’s understanding is extractive, not empathic, but it’s the tradeoff I accept in order to store and... See more

I believe the common prevailing metaphor—the internet as cloud—is problematic. The internet is not one all-encompassing, mysterious, and untouchable thing. (In early patent drawings depicting the internet, it appears as related shapes: a blob, brain, or explosion.) These metaphors obfuscate the reality that the internet is made up of individual... See more

Bootstrapping a multiplayer experience on the web is as easy as sharing a link.

You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead.