There’s a thin strip of land in the Jersey City Heights wedged between the street and the edge of the baseball field near the reservoir. A few times a year, a carnival, of sorts, will encamp in that one-block-long urban landscape, transforming the area into the saddest little carnival in the world — filled with emptiness and longing and no joy to be had anywhere for any ticket price. Even the Fire Ball circle roller coaster has no flame.
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
The journalist Pete Warren noted in an article for The Guardian (UK) earlier this month that Google have duly noted, anticipated and are working toward solving the major problem that exists in attempting to link mobile Internet technology, social networking and online advertising. Google have developed their Orkut social networking application specifically for mobile phones – and so hope to dominate the most powerful form of advertising yet commercially developed – and in future, perhaps the most invasive as well as the most lucrative.
Continue reading → Panopticonic Consumerism or Mad Marketing?
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
Police in the UK increasingly use new monitoring and tracking technology to capture burglars and ‘home invaders,’ as well as car thieves. Suburban houses in high-crime hotspots are turned into Panopticonic dens with enough camera equipment inside them to identify an offender wherever they move within a building.
We owe the idea of Carceral Nation to the genius mind of Michel Foucault and his argument for a growing carceral culture:
No Panopticonic discussion can be had without the full disclosure of SuperGenius Michel Foucault influence on this site:
With gasoline peaking at $4.00USD a gallon — more than twice as much as a year ago — it makes one wonder if that devastating blow to the commoner’s pocket is a governmental feint to hide the insidious loss of more valuable and basic liberties.
In the early lives of cities, having “eyes on the street” was the prime way neighborhood crime was policed and thwarted. The classic, semiotic, image of that early neighborhood watch was the old woman leaning out the window, delicately balancing her elbows in a feather pillow on the windowsill as she watched the activity on the street below.
Continue reading → Eyes on the Street in the Early Lives of Cities
We’ve turned a horrible new page in the War on Terror as the FDNY — The Fire Department of the City of New York — have joined with the Department of Homeland Security to spy on residents.
We are living in the Golden Age of Text. We most effectively communicate on blogs, in email and via instant messages where The Word is King. However, in the next five years or so we will toss away our text — along with our newly enhanced ability to cogently write to persuade others — in favor of video: Semiotics Shall Rule the Word. There are active rumors that the next iPhone will have a touch screen that is a camera so you can do live video conferencing via iChat right on your phone. There is one proof-of-concept using the current iPhone that persuasively argues for video communication over text right now.
Continue reading → Naked Blogging as Semiotics Shall Rule the Word
We are fast moving into the world of quick curing so we may better kill and that is a strange disconnect in a society where we are required to claim our care for each other.
Like Salome in antiquity — who was rewarded for her dance with the granting of any wish from King Herod — chose a false cure for a certain death and a killing from her own curse. John the Baptist never saw his beheading coming until he appeared on a silver platter.
Continue reading → Salome in Antiquity: To Cure To Kill Today
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