Computers can do anything or almost anything. They can even read books with the help of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Images from printed pages are converted into searchable and editable digital text. OCR has become better, that is: more accurate, over the years. Text collections like Google Books (over 25 million book titles), Project Gutenberg (57.000 free eBooks) and Delpher (in the…
In my last two posts, I talked about Hatsune Miku, Vocaloid and utaite (see “Hatsune Miku, the idol who doesn’t exist” and “Mere cover artists performing in Tokyo Dome?”). I wrote about how many lines are blurry within this community: copyrights, what is popular and how everyone can be both a fan and a creator. While utaite often are only one part…
As I’m sure we all know, digital media has led to a rise in hate culture that has been on all sorts of digital platforms, be it email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, haters have been around even before the advent of the Internet. But, with digital media and the interactivity it brings about, it has led to a sharp…
This week I am going to predict something. When I wrote about Tamagotchis a few weeks back I talked about how companies utilize people’s feelings of nostalgia by re-releasing old toys, retro clothing and more. One such trend that is happening right now is the production of “classic consoles”. Those consoles are new consoles, built to look like the ones you would…
I have prepared two claims. First regarding gender roles: gender should not choose roles, and second regarding working conditions: women must work hard to reach equality in work force. For the first message, I am asserting that gender should not be the key factor in assigning roles. I believe that it is time to break the old stereotype of gender roles. And…
“While a mosaic respects the diversity of the elements of which it is made up, it brings them together in an organic unity greater than the sum of its parts.” As in a mosaic, the world is represented by the diversity of its numerous habitants who somehow interact with each others and tend to create the unity of spaces where to promote similar passions and curiosities.…
During the process of writing blogs I realized that there is so much that we take for granted nowadays. Several pieces of digital structure have been normalized, people don’t think about them anymore. Additional to the fact that we don’t think about them anymore, we can also no longer imagine our lives without them. This is what I thought when I was…
Fragmentation and risk taking Maffessoli observes that the idea of the ‘individual’ is in retreat and is suffering fragmentation; and that the individual Self seeks a more profound way of being and is returning to the support of larger groups – this Maffessoli describes as tribalism (italics my emphasis): “The heir of the culture of reason, of a history we can control…