Author: JulietWaters
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AI Literacy: Reframing Attitudes
This is a thought piece I wrote for a panel on Algorithm Literacy that I was invited to moderate at UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week in September. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to Paris, but still worth thinking about for 2024, so sharing it here… Recently, out of curiosity, I asked Chat GPT 3…
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We all deserve to know more about AI
Since you bought your first smartphone, an entire generation of kids has been born that will never know a world not mediated by AI algorithms. Why is this important? For one thing AI and kids is serious business. According to a Pew research report released in 2019, YouTube videos targeted at and featuring children were…
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The Write Mood
In his book Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, British evolutionary psychologist Dylan Evans argues that one of the things that distinguishes us from animals is that we are the only species that has invented artificial technologies to alter our moods. The first of these was language. “Our ancestors probably consoled each other with hugs and…
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On The Difference between Writer’s block and Blogger’s block
I wrote this a few years back when I was a more prolific blogger. As I head into the last stretch of a book manuscript, I’m suffering from a bit of both writer’s and blogger’s block. Hoping this re-post will dislodge some cognitive sludge. Lately I’ve been experiencing a bout of blogger’s block. I’m long…
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Q: To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind.
A: And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs,…
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International Tweet Grace Paley Day, December 11
All that is really necessary for the survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar. Recently, I set out for a short stroll through Twitter. I follow too many people, for too many reasons I’ve long since forgotten. I’ve made lists to filter my feed and increase the…
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Prize Season
I was a book critic for many years, so I know November is a heady time in the book world. Because December is the month where the vast majority of books are sold (Merry Christmas!) if you can get a book noticed in November, through a spot on a shortlist, or better yet, a prize,…
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A Personal Glossary of Writing Disorders
An example of “alien handwriting” courtesy of www.abduct.com We’ve all heard of post-partum depression. But after giving birth to premature twin boys, who later died, Alice Flaherty developed a rare case of post-partum mania, and with it hypergraphia, a chronic, compulsive urge to write. “The world was flooded with meaning. I believed I had unique…
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E-reading For Pleasure
If you haven’t read anything yet on Twitter’s new blogging platform, Medium, here’s a nice place to start. Finnish HCI student Jussi Ahola contemplates the various ways that e-readers don’t, and could better exploit the design concept of “socio-pleasure,” the social pleasure we take take in objects beyond their use value. Designing for socio-pleasure
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Rakoff Revisited
Last week I saw Sarah Vowell on Stephen Colbert, there to publicize Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel the posthumous book by the brilliantly acidic, but always self-aware David Rakoff. I interviewed Rakoff for The Montreal Mirror in 2010. He was here to visit the city of his birth, and to talk about Half…
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