Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Here's a nice fantastic fable about books and their people, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" (2011):

(thanks to Robert Fagerlund)

The Haunting of Sunshine Girl

The Haunting of Sunshine Girl is a Web video series that follows two women and their paranormal experiences.

Like other YouTube series it starts off with a low budget and basic, personal/webcam style. For instance, this scene from a bathroom, or this nicely creepy daytime incident:

Sunshine offers lots of nice, knowing Gothic touches, from locating many scenes in the bathroom to a potent hidden object.  Good, low-budget multimedia creepiness as well, like unsettling audio, mysterious correspondance, disturbing digital glitches, ghost-photo-style pasted-in images, and EVP:

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The whole story is divided into chapters, of which I've only worked through the first two ("The Original Haunting", "Haunted Hotel Road Trip") so far.  Chapters consist of dozens of short clips, each usually preceded by explanatory or epigraphic title cards.

Overall it reminds me of young adult fiction, partly due to the emphasis on the teenage daughter's perspective.

(thanks to Sally Gilman)

Fearing Google Glasses

They barely exist in the world, yet already there are ways to fear Google Glasses.

Forbes broods about surveillance:

Imagine how helpful this could be for reporting crimes. If you witnessed a boy being attacked in your yard, or a hit and run, or a robbery, you could immediately upload that file to police databases. Inevitably, we would all become watchmen, critical parts of the surveillance society. Alternately, law enforcement could use cell location tracking to figure out who was in a certain area at a certain time and get a warrant (or subpoena) for access to their vision logs.

Interesting how the author finds good surveillance alongside the bad. As she concludes, "It’s creepy. It’s awesome."

Meanwhile, Gawker: "the 'Google Goggles' unveiled today take creepy tech to the next level."  That text focuses on intrusiveness and data collection. 

At a third level, this video pokes fun at the possibility for too much/too intrusive advertising.

It's early days, so there hasn't been much time for other media fears to kick in.  Google Glasses depraves children, is being used by eQaeda, enables horrific copyright violation, ruins relationships, wounds, kills: expect 'em all.

(via Reason)