In his book Speaking into the Air (University of Chicago Press, 1999), John Durham Peters points out that if telepathy — presumably the only communication context more immediate than face-to-face interaction — were to occur, how would one know who sent the message? How would one authenticate or clarify the source? Planting an idea undetected into another’s mind, subconsciously in this case, is the central concept of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. [Warning: I will do my best to spoil it below.]

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams …

Every once in a while our reliance on technology initiates a corrective or at least a thorough reassessment. In a sort of Moore’s Law of agentic worry, the intervals seem to be shortening as fast as the technology is advancing, and the latest wave is upon us.
Sometimes these assessments are stiflingly negative and sometimes they are uselessly celebratory. Jaron Lanier’s recent book flirts with the former, while other current thinkers lean toward the latter. For instance, where Clay Shirky sees the book as an inconvenience borne by an era characterized …

It’s that time again… For those who don’t know, every year around this time,  I ask a bunch of my friends and colleagues what they’re reading and then I compile it and post it here. This year, new participants Nancy Baym, Ian Bogost, Andy Jenkins, Kenyatta Cheese, and Michael Schandorf, and join regular contributors Steven Shaviro, DJ Spooky, David Silver, Dave Allen, Patrick Barber, Ashley Crawford, Howard Bloom, Alex Burns, Peter Lunenfeld, Cynthia Connolly, and Erik Davis. Thanks to everyone who contributed and to those who didn’t but considered …

Are computers and devices taking over our lives? Will our technology eventually out grow and enslave us? How would we know? Walk into a coffee shop in any major metropolitan area and you’re likely to see what looks like humans enslaves by machines. Hell, look at any crowded freeway and you’ll see the same thing. As Jaron Lanier puts it in You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), “The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living” (p. 26). …

Now that Spring semester is over, I can get back to the real work. One of my classes (Dr. Nick Lasorsa’s Theory Building in the Social Sciences class) inspired me to rediscover visual modeling (see Shoemaker, Tankard & Lasorsa, 2004 and Britt, 1997). I’ve always been a big fan of playing with ideas visually, but it had been a while since I’d tried to model any of the things I’ve been working through in my head. Below, I’d like to float three models in various stages of development.

I’ve been playing …