Posts tagged net

In spite of the political, economic, and ecological crisis of the last few years, the new social forms and categories that have emerged have failed to constitute themselves politically, and it’s hard to fathom what form change could take. In the absence of a collective horizon, the new (second) Industrial Revolution might not lead to the future but to the past, to a Victorian phantasmagoria of sorts, supplemented by consumer gadgetry and semiotic fetishism. A place akin to the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a sentient environment able to materialize all your dreams—but with a twist.

http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/tuned-to-a-dead-channel/

Our empirical and theoretical findings have cautionary implications for the future of social search, and crowdsourcing in general. Social search is surprisingly efficient, cheap, easy to implement, and multi-functional across aplications. But there are also surprises in the amount of evildoing that the social searchers will stumble upon while recruiting.

http://socialphysics.media.mit.edu/2014/02/02/a-letter-from-the-social-search-frontier-good-news-bad-news/