Old texts make us dream and build the future

I just finished the first session of Howard Rheingold’s online Think-Know course. It seems the participants are an amazing group of people dispersed over several continents. The next weeks we’ll dive into both the theoretical-historical background of intellect augmentation and the practical skills of personal knowledge management. We’ve been reading… Continue reading

Liveblogging going full circle: Circa News

Cir.ca is an interesting mobile news app. As Online Journalism Blog says: It’s a simple idea: look at the latest news, pick stories you want to follow, and get a notification when something new happens on that story. The key difference is that updates are not delivered as traditional articles,… Continue reading

‘We live in a culture of real virtuality’

The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  “With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are… Continue reading

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong – The Atlantic

Alexis C. Madrigal explains:  “For one, I spent most of the 90s as a teenager in rural Washington and my web was highly, highly social. We had instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email. ” It’s important to have the history of the web right…. Continue reading

The Global Arbitrage of Online Work – NYTimes.com

“Not all those young companies will survive, but the habit of hiring online seems baked in; 64 percent of respondents said at least half of their work force would be online by 2015, and 94 percent predicted that in 10 years most businesses would consist of online temps and physical… Continue reading

Do you believe in the Exodus Recession?

” Since 1800, technological advance has been associated with economic growth. The new stuff being built saved labor input, which was then put into the construction of other things. However, the most recent technological advances may not be growth-inducing. As Samuelson puts it, “Gordon sees the Internet, smartphones and tablets… Continue reading

MRUniversity: it’s not a massive open online course, but it could be used to create one

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two economics professors at George Mason University, launch Marginal Revolution University. They’ll deliver free, interactive courses in the economics space, so I read on Open Culture. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok run the blog Marginal Revolution. Some years ago, Cowen also was a guest at… Continue reading

How the truth unfolds itself – Hermida about new media

So, is new media a revolution, changing society in a fundamental way, or is it a slow, very gradual process? That’s one of the many questions I have after having attended the neo-journalism conference in Brussels, Belgium. Yesterday professor Alfred Hermida (University of British Columbia) gave his vision on The… Continue reading

Journalists would be more cheerful being DJs

Mark Deuze is a charming person, but his message to journalists is not exactly ego-boosting: don’t take yourself too seriously, he told us during the neo-journalism conference in Brussels, Belgium. Deuze has been an Associate Professor at the Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications in Bloomington (United States) since 2006. Until… Continue reading

The many meanings of neo-journalism

I just learned a new concept, ‘neo-journalism’. There’s a conference about the theme in Brussels, Belgium, organized by the University of Louvain (UCL) and the University of Namur (FUNDP). So what is neo-journalism (there is also neo-television. Well, it’s about time – we could talk already about neo-online journalism and… Continue reading