"While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see."Dorothea Lange (via liquidnight)
With all of the Yahoo-Tumblr reporting still going on right now it surprises me how many writers still mistake Tumblr for a “blogging platform.”
Anyone who has spent significant time on Tumblr knows that this whole “blog” thing is a front.
Literally.
70% of a given blog’s post traffic actually happens in the Dashboard. For some blogs, that percentage is even higher.
This makes things like ranking a Tumblr blog’s popularity through site traffic fairly dubious.
It also means that the value of Tumblr isn’t just in the original posts but the amplification of ideas through reblogs and the like.
This becomes apparent when you dive into Union Metrics for Tumblr and break down any given post’s reblog tree:
There’s probably an iceberg.gif of some sort that would work really well here.
(btw, the numbers in that image are from an “official” blog that I run, not my personal blog.)
Well, here is your chance to digitally experience history, by zooming in on a Google satellite or terrain map, rather than just reading about it. (via MyReadingMapped™)
Distort, New Web Series Reveals Things Not Normally Visible By Using Photographic Techniques
Provost Lecture - Jeffery Olick: What is Memory Studies? (by sbcomm)
"Inside Business: Online anonymity to be confined to virtual history - FT.com, via @welovebold (via new-aesthetic)Full verification is the next step. Airbnb’s attempt to push all 4m of its users to show hard evidence of who they are, like a passport or driver’s licence, is designed to give it a leg-up over less-trusted sites where ordinary people transact with strangers.
If Airbnb is right and people crave reassurance about real-world identity, a race to the top will follow. One of the early hopes of the internet visionaries – that the virtual world could exist separate from and in parallel to the real one – will have been disproved.
There are drawbacks to the pursuit of verification. One is that it stands to make the costs of online identity theft much greater. When verified accounts are hacked, the higher level of trust invested in them can make the costs all the greater – as when the officially sanctioned Twitter account of news service AP was taken over by a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army.
Another potential drawback is the impact that the increase in verified traffic will have on the shrinking amount of truly anonymous communication. The ranks of the unknown will be made up largely of political dissidents, criminals and anyone paranoid about online surveillance. Particularly in politically repressive parts of the world, freedom of expression could get squeezed out along with other forms of illicit activity.
"
(via National Geographic Traveler Magazine: 2013 Photo Contest - The Big Picture - Boston.com)
“When you yell at someone, who hears it more: you or them? You’re only hurting yourself by getting angry. I want to live to be 100. I haven’t raised my voice in 40 years.”
Living in a community with a high level of social violence is a strange thing. It enters your emotional and physical space in unique and sometimes unexpected ways. Because I care about what’s happening in my community and in the larger South Side, I have chosen to photograph the impact of social and structural violence within the neighborhoods where I reside. I seek out places where violence has occurred. This puts me in harm’s way, but I believe I need to do it to show what’s going on in our city. (via Jon Lowenstein on the South Side: Shots Fired — BagNews)
It’s difficult to articulate exactly how Maisel’s photographs make me feel; but I can say that I don’t feel complacence. Perhaps because most of the landscapes paradoxically appear beautiful while revealing signs of trauma, or a kind of pain, they allow us to consider both sensations in our minds at once. Maisel’s photographs poignantly capture the dignity and beauty of the Earth even when it’s under duress. And what could be more pathetic than that? (via David Maisel and Beautiful Disasters | viz.)
