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Scoop.it!
Excerpted from Evgeny Morozov: 
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Scoop.it!
Cities that cosy up to Uber, however, risk becoming too dependent on its data streams. Why accept Uber’s role as a data intermediary? Instead of letting the company hoover up extensive details about who is going where and when, cities should find a way to get this data on their own. Only then should the likes of Uber be allowed to step in and build a service on top of them.
Scoop.it!
Oral-B, a Procter & Gamble company, this year launched its SmartSeries Bluetooth toothbrush — an essential appliance for what the firm calls “the well-connected bathroom”. It connects to your smartphone, where its app tracks brushing tasks (have you flossed? cleaned the tongue? rinsed?) and highlights areas of the mouth (visualised on the phone screen) that deserve more attention. More importantly, as the toothbrush’s website proudly announces, it also “records brushing activity as data that you can chart on your own and share with dental professionals.” What happens to that data — whether it goes to these dental professionals, or your insurance company, stays with you or is appended to your data already owned by Facebook and Google — is a controversial question.
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Scoop.it!
“Nicholas Carr, one of America’s foremost technology critics, is far from acknowledging defeat of any sort—in fact, he betrays no doubts whatsoever about the relevance and utility of his trade. In his latest book, The Glass Cage, Carr argues that we have failed to consider the hidden costs of automation, that our penchant for delegating mundane tasks to technology is misguided, and that we must redesign our favorite technologies in such a way that humans take on more responsibility—both of the moral and perceptual varieties—for operating in the world.
Scoop.it!
I’m lucky enough to occasionally contribute to the New Yorker, where I’ve published three essays so far – all in their “A Critic at Large” section. It’s an interesting and challenging slot. I suspect, though, most people don’t know what writing such a piece entails.
Scoop.it!
Some technology critics, with their laments of cultural decline enabled by Twitter and e-books, are partly to blame. Instead of engaging with attention and distraction socio-economically — as was done with earlier media by Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Kracauer — we get Nicholas Carr, with his embrace of neuroscience, or Douglas Rushkoff, with his biophysiological critique of acceleration (8). Whatever the salience of such interventions, they end up decoupling the technological from the economic, so that we end up debating how the screens of our iPads condition the cognition of our brains — instead of debating how the information gathered by our iPhones conditions the austerity measures of our governments. To be critical of technology today should mean questioning how it and its boosters let the current system buy more time, and stave off an even more existential crisis.
Scoop.it!
Oral-B, a Procter & Gamble company, this year launched its SmartSeries Bluetooth toothbrush — an essential appliance for what the firm calls “the well-connected bathroom”. It connects to your smartphone, where its app tracks brushing tasks (have you flossed? cleaned the tongue? rinsed?) and highlights areas of the mouth (visualised on the phone screen) that deserve more attention. More importantly, as the toothbrush’s website proudly announces, it also “records brushing activity as data that you can chart on your own and share with dental professionals.” What happens to that data — whether it goes to these dental professionals, or your insurance company, stays with you or is appended to your data already owned by Facebook and Google — is a controversial question.
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