Big Data, Small Data, and the Ethics of Scale

Posted on September 17, 2014 in Infernal Machine
If we think of Facebook and Google and the computations in which we are enmeshed merely as information-processing machines, we concede our world to one end of the scale, a world of abstracted big data and all powerful algorithms. We forget that the internet, like any technology, is both a material infrastructure and something we do.
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Apple Watch and the Quantified Self

Posted on September 9, 2014 in Infernal Machine
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This may sound crazy, but what's the difference between tracking your daily prayer life with an app and doing so with another set of repeatable instructions, such as the Benedictine Rule and its set of daily readings and reminders to ponder God?
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