National Day of Unplugging: March 1-2, 2013

Happening all over the place, the National Day of Unplugging is:

... a 24 hour period – running from sunset to sunset – and starts on the first Friday in March. The project is an outgrowth of The Sabbath Manifesto, an adaption of our ancestors’ ritual of carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and connect with loved ones.

Download your own I UNPLUG TO poster, fill it in, take a photo of you and your poster, and upload it to the National Day of Unplugging website. When sunset arrives on March 1, experience what it's like to get seriously turned off.


Looking for ideas about how to unplug? The Ten Principles of unplugging is available for download at the Sabbath Manifesto. Folks looking to take more frequent technology breaks might also enjoy subscribing to the UNDO List, sent every Friday.

Philosophy, contrast, and monetisation

I just caught the trailer for the film, Being in the World: A Celebration of Being Human in a Technological Age

... and was delighted and amused that before I could watch this video about relating to people and objects and all that fascinating philosophical stuff, first there was an ad, an increasing-common way for free services to remain, well, free-of-charge. And not just any ad, but an ad for a new Die Hard film, A Good Day to Die Hard:

Best quoted conversation from A Good Day to Die Hard to contrast the Being in the World video?

"Need a hug?"
"We're not a hugging family."
"Damn straight."

Meditation on mediation

All this talk on mediation of late has me thinking about, well, mediation. Beyond media ecology, mediation has meaning in the world of negotiation. But is media-mediation so different than negotiation-mediation?

Sherry Turkle's TED talk Alone Together includes a brief mention of the problem of communication technology addiction: that the metaphor of addiction is inappropriate because the only way to deal with addiction is to stop using that 'substance' and that's something no one is seriously going to do with our modern communications networks such as the Internet, social networks, or smartphones.

"These technologies are our current partners in the human adventure. The notion of addiction with its one solution that we know we won't take makes us feel hopeless and passive," Turkle says.

While our smartphones might be packed jam-full of gee-whiz apps and capabilities, they aren't actually smart in the way a sentient being is smart. Yet I wonder whether using negotiation tools such as BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Settlement) and ZOPA (Zone Of Possible Agreement) might be useful in assessing and negotiating the type of relationship we want to have with our technologies?

We're a long way from our technologies being 'smart' in the sense of having a personal say in this negotiation yet these technologies do mediate our interaction with others across all spheres, including professional and personal. Is navigating technology enough, or do we need to be active negotiators?

Mediated life: digital afterlife

An entertaining and surprisingly (disturbingly?) familiar look at what the future might entail:

Who upgrades the upgraders?

Quote: to be human

Via Carl Hiassen's 1995 novel, Stormy Weather:

"Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity--I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples."
-- from Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller