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luís soares

Blog do escritor Luís Soares

TGIF

What's it all about? Surf the "Net" Chat on-line

Join "The Jamisons" As They Learn How Computers Make Learning Fun!

 

Learn About:
-Web Pages
-Browers
-E-Mail
-Search Engines
-Security Issues
-Equipment Requirements
-Other "Net" Technology

 

Getting on-line! Access free information from the Net: kids will love all the magazines, TV reviews and learning sites. They will be entertained for hours while learning! Also: games, family travel tips, etc. You'll make new friends with similar interests, work on homework together, play games, and let your imagination soar! Find a special interest from among the thousands of Internet newsgroups.

 

Licensed, Designed, Distributed and Manufactured by
Diamond Entertainment Corporation
Cerritos, CA 90703
Copyright 1997

Project X

Field of Vision - Project X from Field Of Vision on Vimeo.

A top-secret handbook takes viewers on an undercover journey to Titanpointe, the site of a hidden partnership. Narrated by Rami Malek and Michelle Williams, and based on classified NSA documents, Project X reveals the inner workings of a windowless skyscraper in downtown Manhattan.

This film is the product of a joint reporting project between Field of Vision and The Intercept.

Directed by Laura Poitras and Henrik Moltke

Read an interview with the director here: fieldofvision.org/interview-with-henrik-moltke-and-laura-poitras

See more from Field of Vision here: www.fieldofvision.org

A realidade ainda existe?

Ontem, por acaso, revi "The Matrix", o filme de 1999 dos irmãos (agora irmãs) Wachowski. O filme alterna entre sequências de ação visualmente inovadoras, uma interessante mistura de várias ideias que o cinema, a banda desenhada e a televisão andavam a trabalhar há anos e discursos pomposos de filosofia pop sobre a natureza da realidade. É esta última parte que parece ter envelhecido pior e me parece, contudo, mais necessária que nunca.

Há uns dias, tinha lido um texto ("I'm With The Banned" de Laurie Penny) sobre Milo Yiannopoulos, o troll de extrema direita suspenso pelo Twitter. Tinha-me assustado e deprimido.

Hoje, por acaso também, cruzei-me com dois textos que partindo do momento informativo e político atual (Trump, Brexit, Putin, terrorismos vários e crise dos media tradicionais), tentam uma análise de uma realidade pós-facto e pós-verdade em que vivemos, um mundo dominado pela irrelevância da aderência do discurso à realidade.

O primeiro está no site da Granta, toma um caminho mais filosófico e aponta o momento presente como consequência natural e inevitável do pós-modernismo. Fala ainda da importância da nostalgia no presente, um tema que me é particularmente caro. O título é "Why We're Post-Fact" e o autor é Peter Pomarentsev.

O segundo é do The Guardian, tem como título "How technology disrupted the truth" e a autora é Katharine Viner. Aqui o discurso é mais colado à atualidade e à realidade dos media. Acaba assim:

We are privileged to live in an era when we can use many new technologies – and the help of our audience – to do that. But we must also grapple with the issues underpinning digital culture, and realise that the shift from print to digital media was never just about technology. We must also address the new power dynamics that these changes have created. Technology and media do not exist in isolation – they help shape society, just as they are shaped by it in turn. That means engaging with people as civic actors, citizens, equals. It is about holding power to account, fighting for a public space, and taking responsibility for creating the kind of world we want to live in.

O que me preocupa é perceber que textos longos, informados, documentados, responsáveis como estes podem facilmente ser ignorados, arrumados como mais uma diatribe de intelectuais queixinhas que estão a ver o seu mundo acabar e só se sabem lamentar. Até porque um dos links abaixo do artigo do The Guardian é de um artigo sobre novas descobertas relacionadas com "o mistério do orgasmo feminino". Muito melhor.

Eu sei, são textos longos, dão trabalho a ler e perceber e nem sequer nos deixam a sentir bem no fim da leitura.

Tenho cada vez mais a sensação de viver numa ficção entre os clássicos distópicos de Orwell, Huxley e Atwood (et alia) e episódios de Mr Robot ou Black Mirror. Se a realidade vai deixar de interessar, o mundo vai implodir sob o peso da sua própria mentira. E eu ainda devo estar vivo.

A ilustração abaixo vem do artigo do The Guardian e é de Sébastien Thibault.

truth.jpg

MTV explica a Internet nos anos noventa

From The Next Web:

Way back in the mid-90s, MTV was breaking their head about this weird new technology that was taking the world by storm — the Internet.

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when people were still writing about the internet with a capital I, while using terms like ‘cybervoyagers’.

In 1995, they decided it was time to let their audience in on this hidden secret — and what better way to do it than by opening a can of celebrities?

Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Sandra Bullock, Ozzy Osbourne, Moby and — yes — Coolio, they’re all here for this amazing piece of nostalgia.

Zero Days

Alex Gibney’s ZERO DAYS is a documentary thriller about warfare in a world without rules— the world of cyberwar. The film tells the story of Stuxnet, self-replicating computer malware (known as a “worm” for its ability to burrow from computer to computer on its own) that the U.S. and Israel unleashed to destroy a key part of an Iranian nuclear facility, and which ultimately spread beyond its intended target. It’s the most comprehensive accounting to date of how a clandestine mission hatched by two allies with clashing agendas opened forever the Pandora’s Box of cyberwarfare.

Hypertext

Hypertext: an Educational Experiment in English and Computer Science at Brown University is a documentary film from 1976 made by Brown University computer scientist Andries "Andy" van Dam. 

 

The film was funded by a 1974 grant provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities to support "an experimental program to teach a college-level English poetry course, utilizing a new form of computer based 'manuscript,' called a hypertext." More information about the grant is available on the NEH website. To read the story behind how this film was re-discovered in 2016,see this article on the NEH website. To read more about Andy van Dam's classroom experiment with hypertext, check out van Dam's final grant report, as well as this journal article "Poetry and Computers: Experimenting with the Communal Text" written by James Catano, one of the graduate students who worked in the class (note -- article behind a paywall).

 

The Hypertext system used in the film is called FRESS and was developed by Andy van Dam, Carol Chomsky, Richard Harrington, and others based on the hypertext idea developed by Theodor Nelson.

 

The Hypertext poetry class described in the film was conducted by Jim Catano, Carol Chomsky, Nancy Comley, and Robert Scholes.

 

Film production was done by Michael Silverman, Bill Gallery, and Peter O'Neill.

 

From Archive.Org

Welcome to 1984.

China has gamified being an obedient citizen with the creation of Sesame Credit. The game links to your social network and gives you a score for doing things that the government approves of, but it also reduces that score for doing things the government disapproves of. Even your friends' scores affect your own, and being friends with people who have a low score will drag your score down as well. This insidious system applies social pressure on people to ostracize their friends with lower scores, either forcing those friends to change their ways or effectively quarantining their rebellious ideas. While many sci-fi visions of a dystopian future have centered around a bleak government that controls through fear, Sesame Credit shows us that a government can use gamification and positive reinforcement to be just as controlling. And it's real. While currently the system is opt-in, the government plans to make it mandatory in 2020. Once mandatory, it may give rewards for good scores or penalties for bad ones. And in the meantime, making it opt-in has already set the tone for the game: people participate willingly, so they find it fun, and they set a very high standard for what the "average" score should be. Already people have begun sharing their scores on social media.