Episode Notes

Kio Stark stops into Tummelvision to discuss – you guessed it – how people relate with & to technology!  Kio teaches about human social dynamics at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Topics include Kio’s ITP syllabus, “bro-gramming”, Zuck’s hoodie, instruments for triangulation, systems of acknowledgement and the tower of Babel that comes from an outward-focussed web.

The group makes a very important distinction that what draws most people online is connectivity – not just information – and that we are in the “nursery school” stage of development as far as building social spaces that work online.

Chat Transcript & Storify Recap

Episode Notes

“You can’t have art without resistance in the materials”

Quoting William Morris, Paul Ford explains that when he wants to learn something he goes out and finds the appropriate software. In the limits of the software you might find a community.

Twelve year olds are now saying Facebook is for old people and Heather makes a 12-year-old’s face at the thought of Facebook buying Instagram. The group discusses Instagram’s future within the walls of Facebook. Will it get dragged into the Menlo Park swamp or will it go the way of Youtube?  An almost purely mobile photo app with few features, Instagram is applauded as a less judgmental environment for people who don’t know how to shoot real photographs.

Spontaneity ensues as Andy Baio stops by.  He is the founder of Upcoming.org, a former CTO of Kickstarter.com, and author of the Waxy.org blog. Andy is a less hopeful and thinks Instagram could very well get sawed into pieces. The conversation turns to “The New Aesthetics” – a phenomenon that Andy says smells like machine vision. Paul Ford weighs in on the topic by way of Aaron Cope and Heather by way of Bruce Sterlings’ closing talk at SXSW.

Here is a link to the entire chat transcript and a highlight reel of the show via Storify!

Show links:

Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out | Paul Ford | New York Magazine

Adobe Photoshop File Formats Specification | Adobe

What The Tech Pundits Don’t Get About Facebook’s $1B Instagram Deal | Cliff Kuang | FastCoDesign

Heather’s Instagram reaction to Facebook’s acquisition

Grab Instagrams with GramGrab

Reaction Pictures & Emoticons | MyFaceWhen

Wikipedia list of Acquisitions by Facebook

Facebook is for Old People | Patrick Moorehead | Techpinions

Instagram’s Buyout: How Does It Measure Up? | Andy Baio | Waxy.org (Wired)

An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Bruce Sterling | Wired

Why the New Aesthetic isn’t about 8bit retro, the Robot Readable World, computer vision and pirates | Rev Dan Cat

The New Aesthetic | James Bridle

the new aesthetic | Aaron Straup Cope SXSW 2012

Bruce Sterlings closing talk of SXSW 2012

Episode Notes

Heather Gold and Kevin Marks on Tummeling, Bubbles, and how media representations affect how people believe.

Full chat transcript available here.

Episode Notes

From SxSW in Austin, Heather Gold and Kevin Marks talk with Howard Rheingold, who has been studying and writing inspiringly about virtual communities since the 1990s, and has been online continually since the mid-1980s. His The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online is the original Tummler how-to guide.

Enjoy this conversation with the godfather of online tummlers!

All of the TummelVision hosts, and many of the guests, will be spending the next week or so in Austin, Texas for South by South West (SXSW).

For me, the point of 20,000 web geeks squishing into a few blocks of downtown Austin for a week is to hugely increase the chances of having interesting conversations with old friends, and making new ones.

It’s the Peer Group and a Stiff Drink principle made manifest. If you want to understand it, read Laura Fitton‘s excellent introduction post.

If you want to find us, here are our speaking sessions (and those of our guests), and the one’s they’re attending or tracking.

As Laura says, keep your eyes open as we’ll be around plenty of other places too.