blog byjoemoon

Please Don't Learn to Read
May 15, 2012

To those who argue reading is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with listening, talking, and counting: can you explain to me how Agamemnon would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the Greece if he woke...
An Amateur's Lament
November 30, 2011

Amazon’s advertisement for the Kindle Fire opens with a Voltaire quote: The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes property of all. Visions of the Future Taken from a certain angle, the...
We Are What We Choose
November 09, 2011

In this post on Cyborgology, PJ Rey convincingly speaks to the project of dismissing the concept of digital dualism. He argues that as technology becomes sufficiently advanced and ubiquitous, we begin to think of it as natural extensions of ourselves. As such, is [sic] not hyperbolic to claim, for example,...
In Defense of the New Google Reader
November 02, 2011

Brian Shih, a former PM for Google Reader, wrote a scathing take-down of the recent changes to Google Reader on Monday. And plenty of his criticisms are well deserved. It’s certainly true that the visual changes seem to prioritize consistency with the rest of Google’s visual redesign over the practical...
Intimacy is Performance
October 19, 2011

I was surprised to find a lot of interesting discussion around my last post about Intimacy and Performance on Facebook. Some of it was about the distinction between ‘intimacy’ and ‘performance’ and a lot was about mediated experience. Both of the discussion tracks got me thinking about our relationship to...
Intimacy and Performance on Facebook
September 27, 2011

Facebook launched three interesting new features last Thursday: Timeline, Ticker, and Open Graph. Timeline Timeline is a replacement for the profile page that collects and displays your Facebook status updates, photos, links, etc. in a clean, easily perusable way. One of the first things I thought of after seeing the...
"You are the product."
September 06, 2011

In a talk last Friday at the dConstruct conference, design luminary Don Norman repeated an increasingly popular refrain about Google: “[In] fact, the advertisers are the users and you are the product.” It’s the kind of glib soundbite that certain bloggers can’t resist, but collapses on close scrutiny. The argument...
Google's Open Hand and Closed Fist
August 29, 2011

Paul Buchheit coined Google’s unofficial motto–“Don’t be evil”–early in the company’s existence. But Google has only been pushing the vague notion of “open” in the last few years. The notion is vague at least partly because it’s so all-encompassing and partly because of Google’s penchant for using it in whatever...
A Different Kind of GUI
August 23, 2011

“In the beginning was the command line.” But then the command line became graphics and dwelt among us. From its earliest days, Apple privileged the lay user over the technical one, regarding the need to understand technical details as friction. With the Lisa and the Macintosh, Apple picked up where...