How old are you? (In Internet Years)

Then again, the Internet is a new kind of barometer for keeping track of exactly how old you feel: how many things you don’t get, how many mini-Internet worlds you can’t find the door to; exactly how many crickets in the world you can no longer hear chirping. Unlike in generations past, when (I imagine) you just kept doing what you and your same-aged friends did, and aged into obscurity in comfort on a cloud of your own tastes and generational inclinations, until you died either thinking you all were still the coolest or not caring anymore about being cool, these days the Internet exists in part to introduce you to all these things you didn’t know about, but in part to remind you how much there is out there that you’ll never know about. The Internet is basically like being at a house party and trying to find the bathroom and opening up a door to a room where a bunch of kids are playing a game or doing a drug or having an orgy (metaphorically) or something and you get all flustered and say, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!” and they all look at you like, “You pervert,” and you quickly slam the door shut. Everywhere you go on the Internet there are rooms you don’t understand, people playing games you don’t know the rules to, teenagers doing drugs you’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce. And you just walk through the halls of this house party, aging in fast forward, until you open the one last door at the end of the hallway and it’s Death. Ha, ha.

via Dealing With Your Own Cultural Irrelevance (at Age 28) by Edith Zimmerman

Thomas Suarez, App Developer, 12 years old

Thomas Suarez is a 6th grade student at a middle school in the South Bay of Los Angeles. When Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK), he began to create and sell his own applications. "My parents, my friends and even the people at the Apple store all supported me," he says, "and Steve Jobs inspired me".

via youtube.com

Thomas Suarez is a 6th grade student at a middle school in the South Bay of Los Angeles. When Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK), he began to create and sell his own applications. As if that wasn't enough, he has already done a TED Talk.

Beyond all that he shares during the talk, he is the perfect example of a new generation of "nerds" that are socially savvy, eloquent and entrepreneurial.

What were you doing when you were 12?

We always think we invented the future

Two Stanford scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries say the earlier era prefigured the "information overload," with its own equivalents of Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Social networks have been key to almost all revolutions -- from 1789 to the Arab Spring.

Two Stanford scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries say the earlier era prefigured the "information overload," with its own equivalents of Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Social networks have been key to almost all revolutions -- from 1789 to the Arab Spring.

(HT Open Culture) 

MIT Media Lab's Leah Buechley on falling in love with technology

via youtube.com

Leah Buechley talks about her High-Low Tech research group at the MIT Media Lab and explains a love for technology based on construction, not consumption. She also explores a kind of digital and analog work, making paper-based interactive pieces. She also touches on themes brought up by yesterday's post, the importance of hand-made technology. 

Introducing Boxie The Robot

Boxie is a mobile interactive robotic camera built with the goal of actively capturing stories about its environment and the people within it.

via labcast.media.mit.edu