Saturday, November 29, 2014

2 + 1 dreams

Journal. June 26, 2013, 5:33pm. Daydreaming on the sofa, I recollect two dreams from the previous night.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Denkplatz D-503

This post was drafted practically at the dawn of time. April 27, 2013. Even then already it was belated. Not sure why I'm moved to hit Publish today. Perhaps a response to the new job. You know, the one I've had since September 2013. Which is to say, not a new job. So. Belated, ladies and gentlemen, belated through and through.

§


Theo A. Nusyg, untitled (1997), ink on bar napkin. Used by permission.

A year ago I was reading a post by Jeffrey Schnapp, (Icy) cold spots, with great interest:
Or might it [the library cold spot] instead be imagined as a portable ice-cube shaped, battery equipped, signal jamming device that an authorized patron or librarian could introduce into a given space to reprogram it, as it were, on the fly? Or might it assume the form of an enclosure structure or booth, a kind of phone booth in reverse?
I decided to tweet a question in response: "as libr's jamming cube would also interrupt surveillance, would it become a criminal space? or is contemplation already criminal?"

"Not sure why it would interrupt surveillance, since surveillance systems are usually running on a hard wire," came Professor Schnapp's reply, which suggested that, unsurprisingly, Twitter had not served me well in speaking clearly. (OTOH, the poor workman blames his tools, the poor abstractician blames his concrete.)

And then I forgot all about the exchange until the DPLA launch last week got me to thinking about libraries. Thus, a belated note, not so much of clarification as of dilation.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

SNS SOS

The following originally appeared on Google+, Oct 12, 2012.


It's worth carefully thinking through the question of natural monopoly in relation to the so-called social graph (is there really only one, i.e. the social graph?). What makes the question interesting, I think, is that the users of Facebook are not its customers in the sense that monopolizing the social graph is not monopolizing social networking -- but rather a certain kind of advertising. Unless I am mistaken, people don't open a Facebook account in order to be advertised to...