Information & Culture just published (paywall; or free pre-print) an article I wrote about “night modes,” in which I try to untangle the history of light, screens, sleep loss, and circadian research. If we navigate our lives enmeshed with technologies and their attendant harms, I wanted to know how we make sense of our orientation …
Tag: design
Beyond bugs and features: A case for indeterminacy
In 1979, Harvard professors Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin identified what they saw as a shortcoming in American and English evolutionary biology. It was, they argued, dominated by an adaptationist program.[1] By this, they meant that it embraced a misguided atomization of an organism’s traits, which then “are explained as structures optimally designed by …
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Discourse Matters: Designing better digital futures
A very similar version of this blog post originally appeared in Culture Digitally on June 5, 2015. Words Matter. As I write this in June 2015, a United Nations committee in Bonn is occupied in the massive task of editing a document overviewing global climate change. The effort to reduce 90 pages into a short(er), …
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Turn This into That: a Remixing Experiment
Two sides of social production: crowdsourcing and remixing Networked technologies have facilitated two forms of social production: remixing and crowdsourcing. Remixing has been typically associated with creative, expressive, and unconstrained work such as the creation of video mashups or funny image macros that we often see on social media websites. Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, …
Can objects be evil? A review of “Addiction by Design”
Schüll, Natasha Dow. (2012) Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and …
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In Defense of Friction
There is no doubt that technology has made my life much easier. I rarely share the romantic view that things were better when human beings used to do the boring tasks that machines now do. For example, I do not think there is much to gain by bringing back the old telephone operators. However, there …
Do Anonymous Websites Work?
Some advocates of "real name" policies argue that pseudonymity is far too easy to abuse. They suggest that "real name" policies help reduce spamming and trolling. This might be true, however, you can still get a fair amount of troll-like behavior and hateful discourse in "real name" sites. Just sit on these Facebook searches for …
Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs)
In his seminal book "Code", Larry Lessig argued that social systems are regulated by four forces: 1) the market; 2) the law; 3) social norms; and 4) architecture or code. In thinking about social media systems, plenty of folks think about monetization. Likewise, as issues like privacy pop up, we regularly see legal regulation become …
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Social Media Collective 