parker higgins

I’m really intrigued by the idea of sonic tourism — going to places to experience the acoustic landscape there. There have been a few efforts to document sound destinations, including the wonderful Sound Tourism, but nothing that feels comprehensive.

If you fall into the intersection of people who have looked at this website before yesterday and people who are looking at it after today, you may notice that I’ve given it a bit of a spitshine.

Every once in a while, my Iron Blogger group decides to take on a common topic. At our meet-up this week, a handful of us agreed to take on last week’s Sherry Turkle op-ed in the New York Times. It’s called “The Flight from Conversation,” and it seems to cover some of the same territory as her book “Alone Together”: namely, that we’re allowing gadgets to get in the way of interpersonal communication, favoring “sips” of online contact over a “big gulp of real conversation.”

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.

My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.

I’ve been following the discussion about Creative Commons BY-NC-SA v4.0d1. This release is an important one for many reasons; one is the sense that v4.0 is expected to remain in place even longer than the 5+ years v3.0 has been final.

I spent some time this weekend reading the Reynoso Task Force Report [pdf], the findings from a group of UC Davis professors, students and administrators, which assigns responsibility for the November 18 pepper spraying incident and delivers recommendations to the administration.

Last weekend, Trevor and Maira and I took the balloon mapping kit I received as a reward for backing the Public Laboratory Kickstarter project out for a spin. The kit is simple and inexpensive by design. It contains a 5.5 foot balloon, a very long string and winder, rubber bands, and assorted clips, rings and carabiners. You provide a camera, a soda bottle camera rig, and helium.

It’s no surprise that the major traditional publishers are afraid of e-books. Like record labels and movie studios before them, publishers have seen the spectre of disruptive technology on the horizon and have dug in their heels. Where they’ve accepted e-books they’ve done so half-heartedly, neutralizing the benefits of the new medium with opaque DRM schemes that emulate the limitations of print books as closely as possible. As Clay Shirky puts it:

I wrote much of the April Fool’s Day edition of EFF’s EFFector newsletter, which we sent out to our subscribers yesterday. (Some of the stories there were submitted by my colleagues, and the brilliant lead story in particular is nearly entirely Maira‘s creation.) As far as I can recall, it’s the first intentionally funny writing I’ve done since Buckley’s Student Voice backpage in 2005-2006.