Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically overvalue innovation. What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important. Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations.
Something is being built, a massive modern work, both intellectual and physical, and many people have many different kinds of stakes in it. No one is quite sure what it looks like, but there’s no question that the San Francisco Peninsula is once again the locus. “There were Deadheads everywhere,” says Gumby of Silicon Valley in the late 1980s.
Indeed, what becomes of brand and brand experience when content is atomised — people consume the track, not the album; the article, not the magazine — and, especially on mobile, rarely leave dominant technology platforms like Facebook?
Renaming multiple files can be a tedious process when doing so manually, but the Finder in OS X can make it easier to rename a batch of files at once on your Mac. Instead of relying on a third party app, use this handy tip to quickly rename a batch of files without breaking a sweat.
Julia Kelleher of Jewel Images is a family photographer who teaches mobile photography through CreativeLive. Here, she shares her top four tips for getting better pictures of your children with your camera’s phone.
After you install the app, it walks you through how to add Steve to your iPhone or iPad’s Notification Center, the menu of mini-apps that appears when you swipe from the top of the phone down. What that means in practical terms is that you can go from looking at a locked phone to playing the game in about two seconds.
Noguchi had stumbled on to the same thing that computer scientists were just discovering themselves. Sometimes mess isn’t just forgivable, it’s optimal. At Bell Laboratories, researchers Daniel Sleator and Robert Tarjan were studying the mathematical properties of “self-organising lists”, a data structure where, like a filing cabinet or a stack of paper, the information is arranged in a single row, from front to back. The closer something is to the front, the faster you can find it.
You need innovators, you need maintainers, and you need someone to set up and run the billing system.
~
Thanks for reading.