What are the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of Silicon Valley? I’m trying to find out, reading and watching thinkers, historians, sci-fi literature, visiting virtual environments. I’m trying to put some structure in my work using a mindmap, partially based on the book From Counterculture to Cyberculture (by Fred Turner): In… Continue reading
I posted on PBS MediaShift about my experiences writing “Finding reality while looking through code” – about my asking around on various networks and my posting a ‘making of’ while I was preparing the post. So the piece on MediaShift is Uber Meta: it’s” the making of” of ” the… Continue reading
Our newspaper site www.tijd.be exists 15 years now. In May 1996 someone who had a 128 kbit connection was a rather fortunate citizen, while nowadays we consider 100 megabit normal (in Belgium anyway). In May 2026 speed will no longer be an issue. Access to networks, information streams, databases will be… Continue reading
This blogpost is an experiment. I’ve been writing an opinion editorial about the future of news media, which you can find here (in Dutch, in the next few days I’ll publish it in English), and it will also be available in our print newspaper De Tijd on Saturday, May 28…. Continue reading
Fluid. Liquid. Streaming. It are words often used to describe the new reality the more affluent part of humanity lives in. We are always on now, social, webbed, mobile, connected. As Om Malik says in Will We Define or Limit the Future: Mobile phones of today might have innards of… Continue reading
One of the things which seem to interest web-savvy journalists and students is curation: selecting, contextualizing social media and web streams. I use Storify to report and curate events such as the Arab uprisings and the disasters in Japan, and now I’m experimenting with Scoop.it! creating a page about curation…. Continue reading
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to meet journalism students interested in social media (at a Journalism Night in Brussels, Belgium, organized by publishers, journalism departments & organizations). I presented some tools I use on a daily basis, a workflow for articles and bigger news projects. That same workflow could be… Continue reading
Are we sure this is a time of major, disruptive, history-changing technological innovation? Professor Tyler Cowen in his book The Great Stagnation remembers his readers how the period from 1880 to 1940 brought us electricity, electric lights, powerful motors, automobiles, airplanes, household appliances, the telephone, indoor plumbing, pharmaceuticals, mass production,… Continue reading
How does our near future look like, as computing and fast internet access become ubiquitous, ever more digital data become available in easy to use formats? Well, it seems our world is being transformed by algorithms, and at the LIFT11 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Kevin Slavin presented some fascinating insights… Continue reading
How can one combine longer posts with short posts, often just mentioning something interesting on other blogs without being inclined to add something substantial? I’ve been embedding Twitter in the right column of this blog, as I do at my Bear&Bull blog (Dutch language). However, often I’d like to include… Continue reading