Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Digital media panic as breeder reactor

Computer gaming fears as moral panic: a recent paper argues for this interpretation.  Psychologist Christopher Ferguson's argument is clever and historical, arguing that the growing track record of digital media anxieties feeds more of the same.

violent games have entered a cycle where the media's reporting triggers research, the mere existence of which induces further reporting of the potential for a link. Meanwhile, the fact that a significant portion of the research produces negative or ambiguous results gets ignored.

Does anyone have access to the paper itself?

Blueful: storytelling across tons of Web 2.0 platforms

Blueful is a fascinating Web 2.0 story, written across a series of Web 2.0 services, and maybe the most ambitious of all time. 

Here's how it works: pieces of the story, often text, appear on a site.  Then a link to the next one appears, usually as unlinked text, somewhere on the page.

It all starts with a basic web page, http://www.blueful.com/, then advances to Flickr, LastFM, Twitter, a WordPress blog, a LiveJournal blog, Google Calendar, Google Groups, Google Docs, Google Maps, a Wikipedia user tab, a MySpace page, a del.icio.us account, a Craigslist listing, an Imageshack image, YouTube subtitles, a Zoho slidehow, a Ta-da list, Ning, Sharemusic, a Polldaddy poll (!), Cafepress items, an OKCupid entry, and more.  If you get stuck, check the last site you found for a keyword in quotes, head back to the original Blueful page, and enter that word there to get a URL.

Sometimes the story is written into images:

It would make a fun intro survey to the Web 2.0 world.









(via MetaFilter)

War's memory seeping into photographic streets

This series of images is astonishing work.  The creator takes historical photos from Leningrad during the Nazi siege, then finds photos from the same locations and perspectives today, and mashes them together.  The seam is memory, the return of history's agony:

On a personal note, I experienced something similar in the late 1990s, after returning from Bosnia.  Not with identical locations, but feeling the utterly convincing sensation of double vision, war's violence superimposed on peaceful scenes.

(EDITED TO CORRECT URL)

Detroit redefines urban Gothic

More on that Detroit body story, from the Detroit News - Detroit redefines urban Gothic:

(via MetaFilter)

Detroit winter Gothic: losing a life

Detroit Gothic: man found frozen to death deep in in abandoned building.  Found eventually:

Detroit police searched a vacant warehouse for about 30 minutes after receiving a call from a newspaper that a body was frozen in an elevator shaft inside, according to documents obtained by the Free Press.

On Tuesday, police logged a call of a “body in elevator shaft in mid of bldg,” according to police reports. They took the call around 4:46 p.m. and officers dispatched at 4:57 p.m. to an old Detroit Public Schools warehouse on 14th street and Michigan Avenue.

At 5:18 p.m. police reported that they entered the cavernous building and at 5:45 p.m. logged in that they did not find a body.

Detroit News reporter Charlie LeDuff called back Wednesday and police and firefighters found the body of an unidentified man, using saws to extricate him. His name and cause of death are still not known.

(thanks to Tanya!)

Caution: Gothic traffic ahead

A fun Gothic prank: a Texas traffic sign gets hacked -

(thanks to my wife)

Outlawing hunting albino body parts

A Gothic law enforcement problem: how do you stop people from killing and dismembering albinos?  Especially when such human poaching is driven by both commerce and religion?

The killers reportedly sell albino body parts - including limbs, hair, skin and genitals - to witchdoctors.

Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda said on Friday the government was revoking the licences of all traditional healers with immediate effect.

This short BBC article, which teeters on the brink of colonialist Gothic, offers at least one classic horror story scene:

In the most recent case last Wednesday an albino man - named as Jonas Maduka - was killed in Sogoso village in the north-western Mwanza region.

He was reportedly eating dinner at home when some people called and asked for his help.

When he went outside he was strangled, before his assailants chopped off his leg and made away with the limb.

(via BoingBoing)

Dopplring through 2008

Dopplr just issued annual reports for users' travel, as Adaptive Path reminds me.  And my voyaging was a bit extreme:

Computer games as cigarettes: one Congresscreature has a warning label idea

Let's put a cigarette-style warning on computer games, suggests one Congressman.  Along the lines of the classic Surgeon General's admonition, Joe Baca (D-California) asks for this:

WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior

One of the powers of passive voice is hereby displayed - see, it's actually true.  Some people have linked games to violence. And isn't that collapse of violence and media entertaining?  Not "media containing violence" or "media portraying violence" but "violent media."  One imagines a chainsaw-wielding DVD.

I'm waiting for some retcon sequels:

WARNING: Excessive exposure to novels and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior

WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent religious texts and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior

(via Raph Koster)

Boys and girls from Brazil: Mengele's experimental doppelgangers

A Brazilian town sporting an unusual number of blond, blue-eyed twins?  Perhaps Nazi Dr. Mengele managed to run an experiment in Candido Godoi, according to one historian.  Today's nightmarish real-life Gothic:

Mengele found refuge in the German enclave of Colonias Unidas, Paraguay, and from there, in 1963, began to make regular trips to another predominantly German community just over the border in Brazil – the farming community of Candido Godoi.

And, Mr Camaras claims, it was here that soon after the birthrate of twins began to spiral...

"There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins."

There's this chilling bit of fond memory:

The urbane German who arrived in Candido Godoi was remembered with fondness by many of the townspeople.
"He told us he was a vet," said Aloisi Finkler, a local farmer interviewed by Mr Camarasa. "He asked about illnesses we had among our animals, and told us not to worry, he could cure them. He appeared a cultured and dignified man."

The more one thinks about this, the worst it gets.

(via bldgblog)