When the stream of media forming our consciousness is indistinguishable from the stream of consciousness forming our most enlightened media we will have arrived at a distinctly new place in human evolution. […]
Sandwiched between Social Media Week Chicago and the Chicago Humanities Festival is a brand new meme-maker. Not simply a day of ideas – but an entire week devoted to sharing, inspiring and networking. This new spectacular undertaking – Chicago Ideas Week – comes complete with its own TEDx Festival. Hundreds of formal face-to-face talks – thousands of informal […]
Viewser has been published for one year now. The celebration was a bit subdued on my anniversary day. I was hacked. I know this could, and does happen to everyone. Even to those in super secure installations. Today it was reported that the US military’s fleet of top secret drone aircraft has been compromised and […]
If my son plays games on a big screen these days – they are multiplayer, graphically realistic, highly submersive role-plays. His favorite is COD – Call of Duty, a military shoot ‘em up mission oriented game. I shudder to think at how many people he has off’ed via this game and how many times he […]
I have an idea for a 9/11 essay, but will wait until after the event to write it. In the media ramp-up to the anniversary, I am on 9/11 overload. Perhaps not as much as my NYC brothers and sisters, or the survivors, or the families of the victims or other WTC alumni. The mixture of […]
He killed the audio CD but resurrected the music industry. Forever changed the way we look at pictures and videos of your summer vacation or watch summer blockbusters. Turned your hand-held into a portal to the world wide web. Historians will long debate the role Steve Jobs and his company played shifting paradigms in all […]
Search engines are not encyclopedias. They are not reference desks at libraries. They don’t give you the right answer. They give you an answer. And the answer they give you is not the same answer they give me. The same query produces different results for different people, intentionally. Companies from Google to Facebook to AOL […]
There’s a big, new peep show open in Chicago that has a lot of cameras pointing up. Not toward our iconic architecture – but to underwear in the sky. It’s a 26 foot Marilyn – right there on Michigan Avenue – and it has given the tottlin’ town’s legendary sportscaster and neighboring statue, Jack Brickhouse, a […]
In southern Illinois, just East of St. Louis, you can walk on and among the remains of a great prehistoric civilization. Built a thousand years ago, it was once the largest city in North America – as big or bigger than Paris or London at the time. Between 15,000 and 40,000 lived here. Too big […]