tom moody

The magical religious phrase of the dotcom era (1996-2001) was "media convergence." Somewhat like the New Age movement's harmonic convergence, with a side of Singularity: the sublime moment when TV, music, and homepages would all be united in a single monetizable particle-plus-waveform. The dotcommers famously crashed and burned, mercifully taking their dreams and jargon with them, but like all fanatics, they waited and bided their time in dank cellars (supported by their parents) until suddenly...they were back.

While these, um, curators work on integrating the home video picks of Joe and Jane Sixpack with the youth audience lusts of their children in a family convergence special, the art world has its equivalent of media Satori in high-minded talk of "new productive systems." At institutions such as Rhode Island School of Design, future-minded administrators are seeking to engineer a convergence of the convergences by collapsing the art, architecture, design, and media vizier departments into one uber-department that will guide our audio/visual/textual discourse into the next century (or until the fuel runs out).

Socraft: Essential Names For Common Social Media Practices, by Adam Humphreys & Erik Stinson

My favorite of these:

Needledicking: Making direct contact with a person of higher online social standing within a given community with no fixed intentions or propositions – mainly (merely) to say what’s up or indicate approval of “what they are doing” – under the impression that said action may result in unforeseen future benefit. E.g.: “Biches are needledicking my fake Bill Gates account…”

Paddy Johnson has a commenter who is constantly stopping by to say "haven't read yet - looks interesting - keep up the good work." Now I have a name for it.

I'm guilty of dogpiling Paddy Johnson's blog but that's because I only read one blog.

Am told that an unsympathetic reader reduced an earlier post about crappy Netflix viewing suggestions to a bullet point about not liking so-called recommendation engines. That's very true, way to simplify an argument. Let's reiterate it: people interested in some idea of "art on the net" at some point are going to have to agree with industry's premise that a machine-aided Daily Me is possible (this reader obviously does) or will cling to the idea that while a human mind can lose at chess or Jeopardy it will always be more subtle and perverse than an "engine." This doesn't rule out the idea of a synthetic person, down the road, with thought patterns based on human ones; it's only to say that from what we've seen of humor from this species so far, it's been mostly unintentional. The AI, when it comes, will likely build consciousness from the inside out rather than springing into existence as an aggregation of influences. It will also likely be very different from us (but still won't like Bad Company with Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock).