Talks by subject
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Incantations for Muggles: The Ro ...
Doctoral Candidate, School of Information, University of California-Berkeley. Over the last few years, the tech sector has been abuzz with talk of social media and Web 2.0 and journalists have been hyping the peculiar things that the MySpace generation is doing. While the "radical" practices of young people and the organizational fetishes of technologists are certainly a curiosity to be examined, the real shift is happening in the lives of everyday people without an ounce of reflexivity. Google has become the go-to person for questions about health symptoms. Yahoo! Local has replaced the Yellow Pages for providing insight about local restaurants. People have connected around all sorts of common ground to share everything from recipes to confessions of secrets that have been long held. Elderly citizens are jumping online to do their genealogy research and diaspora communities are conversing across geographical boundaries. With the vast majority of Americans online, the content of Web 1.0 has been ubiquitously integrated with the social technologies of Web 2.0 to provide a seamless experience for all sorts of people. Our society has become fundamentally networked. People are sharing content and creating culture along the way. So what does this mean? Are practices evolving or is it simply the underlying architecture that is shifting? Why have common adult practices been invisible as they go digital while teen practices continue to provoke moral panics as new technologies are incorporated into them? In this talk, Boyd will seek to step out of our techno-centric worldview and dive into the everyday practices that are affected by the rise of Web 2.0 technologies. By unpacking the magic, Boyd will try to shed new light on the implications of the systems that we develop and analyze the ways in which architectural shifts are affecting the way we live.
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The Coming Age of Magic
The desktop metaphor is dead. Increasingly, as computers become embedded in everyday objects, those objects exhibit behaviors that we do not, and cannot, fully control, based on layers of difficult technologies. Interaction design is significantly trailing the capabilities of the technology because of how difficult it is to explain what all this new stuff does. One side treats everything like a laptop, even if it's a phone. Another is obsessed with making simulations of people. Increasingly, however, the devices in our lives fall in between. How can we explain new technologies in a useful way when how they actually work is highly complex and interrelated? The desktop metaphor was useful for twenty years as a way to structure and explain information-processing technology. I propose "magic" as a metaphor for structuring interactions with embedded information processing technology. It is behavioral, embedded, widespread, and it's easy to explain it as a metaphor (i.e., that it's not true, but a useful model). The manuals for magical items have been written for hundreds of years, now it's possible to make the objects themselves.
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Place Matters: Social Encounters ...
Over 15 years ago, Mark Weiser presented a vision of ubiquitous computing, of computers that would disappear into walls (and everywhere else). In this talk Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! Research describes research that is concerned with punching holes in the walls between online and offline social encounters. I pose the questions: How can the two be more effectively merged? What technologies will emerge in the next ten years to help us do that?
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The city is here for you to use ...
Talk given in The Web and Beyond 2008: Mobility Conference in Amsterdam, 2008.