danah boyd tweeted an unedited version of her talk given at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference (#pdf09) entitled “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online” and I must say, it’s absolutely fabulous.  Though her ideas might be controversial, she touches on an important reality I think many tech evangelists are scared to recognize; that class divisions [...]

Um, cool.  Maybe we won’t be jacking in anytime soon, but we’re definitely seeing a blending of human and machine.  These are most certainly post-human times.  A neural interface system called BrainGate has moved to phase II of clinical testing.  What is BrainGate? A baby aspirin-size brain sensor containing 100 electrodes, each thinner than a [...]

Great article brought to my attention by @zephoria.  Ethan Zuckerman over at the Berkman Center talks about the over emphasis of the impact of social media on the protests in Iran.  Much of the recent hype has suggested social tools like Twitter and Facebook have more or less caused the protests rather than merely serving [...]

As the penetration of mobile technologies continues to grow, with an estimated 4 billion subscriptions world wide, Indians are rapidly adopting and incorporating such technologies into their lives.  A recent article in The New York Times, which was brought to my attention via Smart Mobs, describes how users from all levels of Indian society are [...]

I feel compelled, in light of recent events, to attempt to say something constructive about Twitter.  After being recently Oprah-ed, Twitter has been thrust into the purview of public knee-jerk criticism—and everyone’s got an opinion.  I won’t deny my own skepticism when I signed up over a year ago.  It smacked of narcissism, and in [...]

Since I’ve started at Sun I’ve been thinking a lot about how to best apply my education in anthropology to the projects we’re working on. It’s early, but so far I’ve been exploring the different ways humans interface with technology with the hope of designing effective educational content. The process of settling in has been [...]

According to Mark Bauerlein, yes.  This morning an article from the LA Times was brought to my attention that briefly summarizes Bauerlein’s thoughts regarding the effects of the changing media environment on young folks, thoughts which he published in his book with the catchy, market-ready title The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young [...]