"In his dream he was standing on a staircase, watching a man sweet talk a girl at a window. Gandy was in love with the girl. Suddenly, a stranger took his arm. You must take her by force, he whispered; I am your friend, and will show you how. The man took him to palaces and dinners, and gave him presents. You are the Devil, Gandy exclaimed. He was seized, and woke in Hell. It was a city manufacturing luxuries in glass and gold, where "heavy cranes ... lift Foreign Goods from Ships". Hell was modern London."
"The writer Will Self, a dedicated walker, well captured the sense that the pedestrian life is one so removed from daily consciousness that to participate in it implies some higher purpose. “Whenever I tell people I’m going to walk somewhere utilitarian—like an airport; or even a long distance walk that seems quite prosaic to me, they always ask: ‘Is it for charity?’ ”"
"We're trying to work out whether places have memories and if so, how can we help people relate to these memories," says Tim Cole, a lecturer in History at the University of Bristol.Psychogeography project reported by Wired UK
"Virtual guide points out the sights
You can't beat having a local show you around their city, one who knows exactly where you are and points out fascinating details about your surroundings. Now a new smartphone app from Google called Field Trip aims to do just that. The app, only available on Android phones in the US for now, uses Wi-Fi or GPS to place you, then feeds you relevant information about your location, alerting you to interesting places as you pass near them.
The user decides how much or how little info they want, and alerts range from historical facts about buildings to reviews of restaurants and local money-off deals. For those behind the wheel, a driving mode announces details aloud."
""This is classic Google," says Blair MacIntyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. "They may get information about new monuments, and that actually helps them generate more interesting search results, because these are the things that local people say are interesting.""
"“The technology is just a tool, and what really matters is how you use it,” she says. “Historical geography means putting place at the center of history. No supercomputers are required.” When I asked about her math and computing skills, she replied: “I add, subtract, multiply, divide.”"
"Those other writing apparatuses, mobile phones, occupy a little bit more of the same psychological space as the pen. Ten years ago, people kept their mobile phone in their pockets. Now, they hold them permanently in their hand like a small angry animal, gazing crossly into our faces, in apparent need of constant placation. Clearly, people do regard their mobile phones as, in some degree, an extension of themselves. And yet we have not evolved any of those small, pleasurable pieces of behaviour towards them that seem so ordinary in the case of our pens. If you saw someone sucking one while they thought of the next phrase to text, you would think them dangerously insane."
'via Blog this'
