The document summarizes key ideas from a presentation on technology and its impact on society. It touches on how technology controls our lives through metaphors and by organizing our world. It also discusses how new technologies are seen as revolutionary by younger generations but unnatural by older generations. The presentation questions whether constant connectivity through always-online devices is infantilizing our brains and reducing attention spans. It explores themes of control through convenience, habits locking us in, and the ethical issues around individuals being the products that corporations sell to advertisers.

1. Mathias Klang
Control, Cloud & @klang67
Social Media

2. Beware the metaphor

4. This is not a shopping cart

6. Computer resources over a
network

7. Cloudwashing

8. End user services: social media

10. OMG
wtf???

12. unpack

13. technology we use to organize our lives controls us

15. Only technology
(spot the ethical dilemma?)

16. Douglas Adams
Anything that is in the world when you’re
born is normal and ordinary and is just a
natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when
you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and
exciting and revolutionary and you can
probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five
is against the natural order of things.

17. …you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they
will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will
appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be
tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Plato –
The Phaedrus (ca 370 bc)

19. How did we
end up here?

20. "If we don't teach our children to be alone all they
will be is lonely" Sherry Turkle

21. Living the
cyborg dream

22. Man & Machine

23. Portrait of Hugh de Provence (1352)

24. Swedish telephone
c:a 1896

25. Writing as external memories

26. Ludicrously brief history of
computers

27. Generation 3 (1964-72)

29. The digital is the original
& everything is copy

30. Everything is miscellaneous

31. 91 % Access to the Internet at home
83 % Access to broadband at home
7% Never used a computer
Source: Sweden Statistics 2011 (*Individuals aged 16-74)

32. Blogger 1999
Google 1999
End of communications monopoly

33. Normalizing the abnormal

40. What, who, how
much?  Why?

41. This is not a phone

42. Always online

43. “My fear is that these
technologies are
infantilising the brain into
the state of small children
who are attracted by
buzzing noises and bright
lights, who have a small
attention span and who
live for the moment.”
Prof. Susan Greenfield

44. Performance lifestyle

45. Monotask queuing

46. Not knowing

47. The end of boredom

48. Waiting by THE phone

49. Only 30 kg

50. Limitless
303 grams

51. Social responsibility

52. digital liberates us, habits lock us in.

53. The state

54. Only technology
(spot the ethical dilemma?)

55. The corporation

56. if you're not
paying for
something,
you're not the
customer;
you're the
product being
sold

57. The individual

58. Controlled by convenience

59. Are those of
us who
remember
the analogue
age fortunate
or
unfortunate?

60. THANKS!

61. Mathias Klang
klang@ituniv.se or @klang67
www.digital-rights.net
Image & licensing info in the notes
section of slides.
Images at www.flickr.com (or
specifically stated).
This ppt licensed: Creative
Commons BY-NC-SA
Download presentation
www.slideshare.net/klang