12 insights on the internet as art — virginia heffernan
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This presentation consists of highlights from the interview with Moe Abdou,
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Virginia Heffernan writes regularly about digital culture for The New York Times Magazine.
Virginia Heffernan@page88
Author of Magic and Loss
The internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization; it favors speed, accuracy,
wit, prolificacy, and versatility, but, it also favors integrity, mindfulness, and wise action.
Insight #1
Insight #2
On Design
In the digital sphere, the optimal UX design doesn’t dictate mental space; it maps it.
The goal is to caress the subconscious and let the intuition guide the path.
Insight #3
On Artificial Intelligence
Outsourcing to machines the many idiosyncrasies of mortals - making interesting
mistakes, brooding on the verities, propitiating the gods by whittling and arranging flowers -
skews tragic. But letting machines do the thinking for us? This sounds like heaven.
Thinking is optional.
Insight #4
On Language
Hashtags are hard to explain partly because they are almost never transparent
or ideologically neutral - they’re meant to be code for you to figure out.
Insight #5
On Images
A new visual literacy is emerging.Instagram is gorgeous reminder that
life is beautiful, and it goes by fast. If used right, it will stealthily persuade you that
other humans, and nature, and food, and three-dimensional objects more generally are worth observing for the sheer joy of it.
Insight #6
On Video
More than any other form of moving or still picture, of language, of design, Internet video registers in the contemporary mind as reality
itself - the truth, history. The Record.
Insight #7
People contribute to YouTube because they want to tell stories, be heard, be seen, be
known and maybe get famous.
Insight #8
Ian Cleary on VR
The truth is, virtual reality just creates a deep hunger for real-world experiences.
Insight #9
On Music
The only act that’s impossible is consuming art the old way: Treating the Internet like a record collection that might be dipped into with a balance of equanimity and curiosity. We’re officially through the looking glass, everyone; we might as well stop to smell
the music and hear the new air.
Insight #10
Technology thrives not on empirical facts but on what neo-Marxists like Walter Benjamin used to call “aura.” - that quality that made
a work of art irreplaceable and precious and available only to the elite - undesirable.
Insight #11
In twenty-five years the Internet has doggedly modeled for us a strange but familiar truth: that our lives are both here - in our physical
beating hearts - and elsewhere, in a fathomless realm channeled through our phones and
laptops that we can but dimly intuit.
Insight #12
The internet suggests immortality - comes just shy of promising it - with its magic and
suggestion of universal connectedness. And then, just as suddenly, it stirs grief: the deep
feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound. That connectedness is illusory;
that we’re all more alone than ever.
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Presentation by Chase Jennings
Insights by Jenna Abdou
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