Culture is technology-driven William Gibson once said, and, with the proliferation of digital media, the aphorism is less and less debatable (if it ever was). If technology is indeed the engine and infrastructure of our culture, then understanding it is tantamount to understanding ourselves.
The books written on the topic could fill a library, and two recent ones caught my eye. The first attempts a broad-reaching macro-view. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press, 2009) promises not only to get to the bottom …

In honor of the release of Slayer‘s new record, World Painted Blood, I interpolated the old Sherwin-Williams “Cover the Earth” logo. I was always reminded of this design by the title “World Painted Blood,” so here it is:

I entered the design into their World Painted Blood photo contest. You can see it on the Slayer site here.
Slayer’s World Painted Blood comes out on November 3rd.

I just returned to Austin from San Diego, where I was head-deep in the world of five-gallon buckets, toolbelts, aluminum ladders, and drooling paint cans. Yes, construction. You see, my friend Josh Beagle and his partners Ray and Albert are starting a meat-curing business, and I spent the last several days helping them build out their new warehouse facility.

The staff over at O’Reilly Media‘s magazines, Make and Craft, asked around to see what features The Ultimate Notebook would include. The result is their newly published Maker’s Notebook. “Clearly, lots of DIYers dream of designing their own project notebooks. We incorporated as many ideas from this Notebook Braintrust as possible,” explains Gareth Branwyn, friend and contributing editor to Make. Well, being the journaling, notebook geek that I am, I got my hands on a copy as soon as I could.

The scariest moment of Bowling for Columbine (2002) was watching the security camera footage of the shootings. Something about seeing that black and white representation of Eric Harris’ and Dylan Klebold’s grainy forms stalking the cafeteria that morning was just plain eerie.

In a 2005 Daniel Robert Epstein interview, Pi director Darren Aronofsky likened writing to making a tapestry: “I’ll take different threads from different ideas and weave a carpet of cool ideas together.” In the same interview, he described the way those ideas hang together in his films, saying, “every story has its own film grammar so you have to sort of figure out what the story is about and then figure out what each scene is about and then that tells you where to put the camera.”

The much-discussed, much-explored interface between humans and machines is seemingly our final frontier. Comparing the interface to the Victorian novel and the 1950s television show (both of which shaped society’s understanding at the time), Steven Johnson wrote, “There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.” The graphical user interface has come to represent all of the many processes going on inside the computer — and the way we interact with each other through them.

My good friends Patrick Barber and Holly McGuire (of McGuire-Barber Design — the fine folks who designed my book, Follow for Now) run their own egg cooperative. Well, edible Portland ran a story on them this week — featuring a video clip of just what goes down with the chickens and the eggs. Check it out.

I ventured to Atlanta again this year for Georgia Tech’s Digital Media department‘s Winter Demo Day, and it definitely re-greased the mental wheels. When you’re stuck while thinking about technology and media, an event like this is sure to shake things loose.
The Digital Media program at Georgia Tech spans the spectrum that runs from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to film production. Students and faculty come from all points on the spectrum as well, thereby making the input and the output of the department is as diverse as its people. Their semiannual …

About a year ago, I had a discussion with my friend Ryan Lane about a “Trillian for social networks.” Having no idea how such a thing would work (and realizing that I probably wasn’t the only one thinking about it), I was trying bouncing aspects of it around with someone who might have an idea how it would work. Skip ahead to last summer, my friend Justin Kistner and I had a similar conversation. Well, in the meantime, Justin has gone several more steps toward making this a reality.