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wildcat2030: Tiny “solar panels” implanted into the eye could one day restore vision to the blind without the need for any ugly wires. Around 15 million people worldwide have some form of blindness. In people with these conditions the retina’s photoreceptors, which transform light hitting the eye into electrical impulses, are often damaged, preventing visual information from being sent to the brain. Several companies, such as Second Sight in Sylmar, California, have developed prosthetic retinas, some of which are currently in clinical trials. Such technologies generally use a camera to detect visual information that is then relayed through a wire to an implant inside the eye. The implant effectively replaces the damaged photoreceptors. However, these prostheses tend to require numerous wires to connect the implant to an external power source and to transmit information from the camera to the implant, says James Loudin of Stanford University in California. (via ‘Solar panel’ eye implant promises sight without wires - tech - 13 May 2012 - New Scientist)

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Katinka Matson Question 2010

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prostheticknowledge: Phone Story Game that looks at the dark side of telephone manufacturing (and recently banned by Apple) Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. Under the shiny surface of our electronic gadgets, behind its polished interface, hides the product of a troubling supply chain that stretches across the globe. Phone Story represents this process with four educational games that make the player symbolically complicit in coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labor in China, e-waste in Pakistan and gadget consumerism in the West. http://www.phonestory.org/

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"DESELFING — Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)"

— A Dictionary of the Near Future, Douglas Coupland (via faketv)

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thingsorganizedneatly: SUBMISSION: Deconstructed Alan Titchmarsh VHS. Done by Derbsign.

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kofke: EVERYTHING WILL BE OK 1999   •   chalk on slate   •   4’x24’   •   2010 Jason Scott Kofke

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Lost Formats Preservation Society by Experimental Jetset The society was founded in 2000 with the design of Emigre issue no. 57. Its sole purpose is to save formats from obscurity.

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"Show me a computer expert who gives a damn, and I’ll show you a librarian."

— Patricia Wilson Berger, former president, ALA. Epigraph from This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson (via epigraphic)

(via librarianista)

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sweetpeapath: by Ehren Elizabeth Reed (via fullbloom)

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"What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. … A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud."

— Adam Gopnik, “How the Internet Gets Inside Us”

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» What the Luddites Really Fought Against

  • By Richard Conniff
  • Smithsonian magazine, March 2011

Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values. If we don’t want to become, as Carlyle warned, “mechanical in head and in heart,” it may help, every now and then, to ask which of our modern machines General and Eliza Ludd would choose to break. And which they would use to break them.

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"I notice that, as the Net provides free or cheap versions of things, ‘the authentic experience’ — the singular experience enjoyed without mediation — becomes more valuable. I notice that more attention is given by creators to the aspects of their work that can’t be duplicated. The ‘authentic’ has replaced the reproducible."

— Brian Eno, “The Authentic Has Replaced the Reproducible”