Spent a little time playing with PFlow yesterday.
Why Facebook and other Social Networks are unhealthy (part II)
In a previous post, I mentioned the bricoleur concept by Claude Lévi-Strauss and how our culture became less open to abstract ideas (and therefore started to embrace narrow concepts).
Now, to give you an example of this principle applied to Social Networks, let’s consider this simple case.
Let’s say I post an image on Facebook. It’s an image depicting something important, with a smart caption that makes the picture stand out even more. It gets a lot of likes. People don’t even need to comment on the picture. I get a sense of inexplicable satisfaction from all the likes the post is receiving. It is not that those likes are directly related to me, but since we’re confused about the tools we use, as we consider them a sort of extension of ourselves, hence the extemporaneous joy.
Anyway, there’s no real need for the people who like my post to actually consider the picture and the story behind it. Therefore, more posts go on, other pictures are uploaded, and more likes.
Replies to posts are not really required (the system still works) and if somebody does, it can be anything: a few words, another picture, a link, and so forth. The complex richness of the human capacity to conceptualize, and engage in dialogues, it’s reduced to simple bits that yield a strict output: true or false, 0 or 1.
This little example seems a stretch. The thing is this is just the tip of a long process our culture has gone through.
Read more“Why Facebook and other Social Networks are unhealthy (part II)”
Why Facebook and other Social Networks are unhealthy (part I)
Facebook is an extension, not a tool (it could be a tool, but people usually don’t use it that way). A tool is an instrument we use to make things. An extension is how we project ourselves into things that surround us (cars, television, phones, gadgets, and so forth.)
As an extension, people just get lost in it. Facebook makes you waste your time. 99% of the content on Facebook is useless and if you’re looking for something useful you’ve got to go through that 99% of garbage, which makes you waste even more time. If you’re not looking for any interesting stuff, then you’re wasting your time in the first place.
Read more“Why Facebook and other Social Networks are unhealthy (part I)”
Zbrush doodling
Long time since the last post.
Being busy, not been much posting lately.
Anyway, I try to keep experimenting.
Below is my first doodle with Zbrush. Rendered with 3ds Max / Vray.
