As I’m guessing you know, Facebook has changed its name to “Meta” and headed out to colonize/discover/create a “metaverse.” It is a vision that at least in part has been propelled by the company’s acquisition of Oculus. What you may or may not know is that the term metaverse was coined by sci-fi author Neal […]
Author: Alex Reid
Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo
Following up on Ted Underwood’s recent post on the recent article “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” So yes my post title is a joke, but in my defense, they started it. Very briefly put, this is a conversation about natural language processing. NLP is about the nonhuman-computational processing […]
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posthuman computer vision
As I have been writing (albeit infrequently) here, my current interest is with the concept of “posthuman computer vision.” It is apparently a term that is not in wide use. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad news for me from a rhetorical perspective. Obviously computer vision has been a field of research for […]
Media archeology is a familiar term even though its history is not so easily traced. Certainly it has to do with philosophical lineages passing through Foucault and Kittler, but that’s only a start. When I started this blog, more than 15 years ago, I subtitled it “an archeology of the future,” in part because the […]
Computer vision is a massive field in computer science. I guess you could say it’s a subfield of AI. If it’s unfamiliar to you (wikipedia), it’s basically about how computers see things. There are many applications for computer vision. How many? Hmmm. Think of the many ways you use your eyes and then multiply that […]
There are some broad implications that arise from the assertion of a material-historical (and thus non-essentialist) ontology. For one, humans are not necessary beings but are products of the unfolding of the history of matter, and for another, as a result, none of the qualities that describe humans are necessary either. Nothing about us is. […]
I’m reviewing the copyedited version of my book manuscript (still well on pace for a Jan 2022 publication), and I’m thinking of adding a paragraph like the one below, either to the preface or introduction. Probably the preface since that bit has a more personal register. Basically it’s about the fact that the book was […]
I’ve been working on this article, off and on, since January I guess, which is longer than usual for me. As this post title suggests, it’s an article with two focal points–one conceptual/theoretical and the other technological. With the latter I am looking primarily at contemporary smartphone screens with their combination of ceramic glass (for […]
There are no categorical imperatives requiring the use of social media in any way. I.e., we are not under any universal obligation to use social media. We should probably start there. At the other end of the spectrum, I don’t believe it is controversial to assert that social media platforms (and their corporate owners) seek […]
I admit this is a weird, esoteric thing. You could call this “inside baseball,” but at least that term makes reference to a sport most people have heard of. So I apologize up front for those who have no idea what I’m talking about (though I’d be fascinated to know what made you click on […]
Alex Reid 