Why do some new technologies cause ripples and reactionary backlash in society but others slip into our daily lives almost entirely uncontested? It turns out there’s a rather specific combination of things the new technology must do to upset the public.
At Wired they highlight the work of Genevieve Bell and her studies of how society reacts to new technology:
Genevieve Bell believes she’s cracked this puzzle. Bell, director of interaction and experience research at Intel, has long studied how everyday people incorporate new tech into their lives. In a 2011 interview with The Wall Street Journal‘s Tech Europe blog, she outlined an interesting argument: To provoke moral panic, a technology must satisfy three rules.
First, it has to change our relationship to time. Then it has to change our relationship to space. And, crucially, it has to change our relationship to one another. Individually, each of these transformations can be unsettling, but if you hit all three? Panic!
Why We Freak Out About Some Technologies but Not Others [Wired]
While many of the Halloween decorating tricks we’ve shared over the years involve lots of wire, LEDs, and electronic guts, this one is thoroughly analog (and easy to put together). A simple set of silhouettes can cheapl...
You’ve got a dozen windows open, your media player is buried underneath somewhere, and the phone rings. Do you reach for the speaker power button, dig through the windows, or simply wave your hand to pause the music? Wi...
LED matrix cubes are nothing new, but this 16x16x16 monster towers over the tiny 4x4x4 desktop variety. Check out the video to see it in action.
There are a wide variety of Linux distributions, but there are also a wide variety of distributions based on other Linux distributions. The official Ubuntu release with the Unity desktop is only one of many possible ways to use Ubuntu.
Windows 8 has a new feature that allows you to automatically run scheduled daily maintenance on your computer. These maintenance tasks run in the background and include security updating and scanning, Windows software updates, disk defragmentation, system diagnostics, among other tasks.
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Earlier this month we shared a clever 9-layer density column demonstration you’d most certainly not want to drink. This smaller demonstration, however, is a delicious column of fruit flavors.
Think you know the answer? Click through to see if you're right!
Think you know the answer? Click through to see if you're right!
Our latest edition of WIG is filled with news link coverage on topics such as 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 12.10, the FTC’s offer of a $50,000 cash bounty for technology to help eliminate robocalls, the new malware variant spreading across Skype, and more.