My husband is easily moved by objects such as the blue translucent Motorola pager he used to stay connected back when he first moved to Brooklyn in the early 90s. He saves it, along with Walkmen, Diskmen and other paperweights, in a clear plastic crate … Read More →
Author Archives: Freyja Gallagher
Last Minute Picks for #smwnyc
We’re psyched for SMWNY here at Zeitgeist, even if the term “social media” is beginning to make everyone break out in hives… For one thing, I’ll be helping to facilitate a sort of gigantic ideation session sponsored by my friends at Luminary Labs on … Read More →
Zeitgeist Panel — Human/Machine Interaction
Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our second event last Tuesday evening! Big ups to our panelists, Irwin Chen (@irwin), Ian Spalter (@ianspalter), Jill Nussbaum, and Dan Paluska (@thesixmill), for some fascinating presentations and scintillating discussion, and a huge thank you to … Read More →
From Ben Franklin to Jetpacks: Highlights from All Day Buffet’s Feast On Good
To quote Eric Zimmerman, “If the last era was summed up by cinema, the next one will be summed up by gaming because it’s participatory.” We can extend that — if the 20th century was about creating and selling more consumer goods, the 21st century is about unlocking human potential and solving social problems, and in order to understand this, we need a new kind of economics that can create value from human flourishing.
Interviews with Smart People: Frank Speiser, Co-Founder of Social Flow
“Technological evolution will make it easier to listen and harder to hide, and will make it possible to isolate people based on what they believe. If we allow ourselves to be broken down into factions and played off one another, then that’s what we’ll get.
On the flip side, technology makes it easier to distribute your thoughts and ideas. It’s a lot harder to stop you from reaching 1,000 people now than it was just 15 years ago. The cost of acquiring an audience of hundreds of thousands of people is pretty much the opportunity cost of your time. We can find ways to co-operate now that have not been possible in the course of human history until now. Hopefully the more capable of us choose to go that route.
I predict that eventually we’ll have a P2P barter system, a competing set of social currencies, and new derivatives based on social receptivity. It might take a while, but that’s coming. We’ll probably also pick up a whole new set of jerks that attempt to abuse all of the above. That’s just life.”
Innovation Gaps: Healthcare and the No-Fly List
Earlier this week, Sanofi-Aventis announced the impending arrival of the IBGStar, a nifty little device that plugs in to an iPhone and will allow diabetics to upload information from their blood glucose tests (a pinprick blood test that many diabetics must perform daily) to an … Read More →
The Death of the Author (Long Live the Commenter!)
The barriers to authorship are lower than ever — anyone can expound at length for free on any number of public platforms, and if you’re not the long-winded sort, microblogging pushes word-count pressure in the opposite direction. What I am finding very interesting at the … Read More →
Agile Comedy, Momofuku Ko, and Making Amazing Things Happen
A recent New Yorker piece on the actor Steve Carell (subscription required) is actually a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the process of creating funny movies has shifted from sequential and scripted to highly improvisational and highly iterative. The old way — writing a movie, casting it, … Read More →
Monday Maps: On The Move
This week on Monday Maps, we’re looking at an intriguing interactive representation of where Americans are moving within the US. Click a location to see the black lines, representing an inbound move, and the red lines, representing an outbound one. Heavier lines represent more moves. … Read More →