You Are Not A Gadget

It’s always two sides of a coin whenever people invent something. Human invented some tools to help them then those tools turned back to control them, sounds little like Sci-fi movie or Matrix. All the devices we made extended our ability as we, human are a lot weaker than animals. But I didn’t realize how my memory got extended when using Internet or Google, may be it’s like the mobile phone in the way that there’s no need to remember anyone’s phone number anymore. Something I little disagree with the writer is that we don’t have to break the rules all the time to create a new thing. Many electronic musicians these days still use midi to compose their music, but there are many ways to use it to form another structure for example, artist like Autechre used MaxMSP as algorithm and used MIDI to trigger sampler.

It’s humble and fun when the writer talked about computer problem comparing to the world crisis and good to know a little of developing history of information technology with the world.

This is the quote I like.

‘Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.’

Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural

I started to have a question coming across my mind when I saw this topic saying that it’s not natural.

Gesture interface is what I’m quite interested as I saw some of the instruments like Theremin in Youtube before.

Pamelia Kurstin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHOGW5MDsz8

And when the writer talked about gesture with different culture had different meanings invokes me to think of Latin people like Italian, they seem to have very interesting body language or even victory hand sign, with two fingers, if it turns backward in UK, it means f*** off. New gesture, that happened from new device eg. handsfrees headset, sometimes you might think they are talking to themselves or rehearsing a play, is also the interesting part for me.

Of course, as the writer mentioned, to use technology is somehow not natural but just the new way of gesture adopt to new device, since capturing natural human action is too complicated for computer. Still, I can’t wait to see what they would come up from NUI!

Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out.

As long as we are the users who happen to be in the bottom of pyramid. We somehow someway are victim of the system, which tends to influence us to get into new thing all the time. For me, it’s scary to imagine that these people, I’ve never even got to meet in real life, hold many of my important information.
Whatever they are trying to do, buying other company, would surely impact us as users. Our privacy free world would be intruded in the recent future.

I like how Zuckerberg is so rebellious and tough to stand for what he believed, especially when he compared information that he would have found from Wayne in Facebook and Google.
In my opinion, nobody can always stand at the top as we can see in this IT business, especially what happened to Myspace, Multiply, Hi5 and other popular pages. When Zuckerberg pointed out of Google issue, I totally agree and think that sometimes I spent too much time from Google just to find little information, since they informed too much.

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

In the beginning of using Internet in 90’s, I used to go to some chat page and there would be warning not to show your real photo and always come with the disguise name. I saw many friends of mine use Internet for their surrogates. Especially in Thai culture which people are quite shy to tell what they really think and try to avoid confrontation. Hence, Web board in that time was so useful to us. By the beginning of 21 century, I started to experience how visual reality blended with reality, when some of my friends could actually trade their money in the online game with real money. Everything became so clear to me after social network. There was no boundary between online and reality. For me, I like the fact that everything seems to be more crystal and more reliable than it was. Before Internet era, many Western people came to Bangkok and we couldn’t really perceive whether they are good or not, just knew that they were ‘international’. It might be bad that everything will be recorded, but once you know that, you would be more careful in what your action.

Things that make us smart

This is a very scientific article when a reader always got into the writer’s experimental, from his example. When I was an architecture student, I was taught that all data were mostly very complicated and hard to understand, hence we needed to visualize everything in graphic and tried to do mapping all data together to understand the requirement and criteria of the program. Data visualization plays important role in design. It has to be very clear and easy to understand. I’ve read that when we do data visualization, we should reduce ink ratio, ratio of ink used for essential information, to very low. Human mind is tricky, once we can discover new tools, we might come up with new perspective.