Kester Brewin

Been thinking about the post I wrote yesterday, and wanted to respond properly with a post rather than a comment. Actually, with a question, I think, which is this: Have you ever had your viewpoint transformed by online discourse? Sure, we’ve all received information, and perhaps become informed by discussions. We may have actually changed [...]

Dervish At The Door A dervish knocked at a house to ask for a piece of dry bread, or moist, it didn’t matter. “This is not a bakery,” said the owner. “Might you have a bit of gristle then?” “Does this look like a butchershop?” “A little flour?” “Do you hear a grinding stone?” “Some [...]

With the recent furore over The Guardian and Washington Post’s revelations about PRISM, and the apparent willingness of pretty much every large tech company to give the US government direct access to its servers, I’ve been mulling on a great book that Barry Taylor recommended to me: Geert Lovink’s Networks Without A Cause. It’s perhaps [...]

With the recent victory we had over Friends Life, it’s been a busy time talking about the campaign and thinking through more deeply what lessons can be learned from it. I’ve got a blog piece up over at the Huffington Post talking about the story behind the campaign, but I wanted to highlight one key [...]

Brilliant weekend away over the Bank Holiday, with loads of surfing, go-karting and some great evening conversations with a bright and challenging bunch of friends. One of the most interesting areas we talked about was around privacy in future technologies, and, when I outlined my major concerns about Google Glass-type devices I was quite surprised [...]

Tech writer Paul Miller’s contentious experiment to log-off from internet devices for a whole year is coming to an end in two weeks (HT Maggi Dawn for the story, which she flagged on facebook this morning), and in a very frank and illuminating article (sent in by post, no doubt – he has had no [...]

I very much enjoyed watching the first part of ’56 Up‘ last night – a programme that I’ve been aware of since… probably 21 up. What was particularly interesting about this episode – for those who don’t know it, the last one was 7 years ago – was that it was the first one to [...]

Re-pins, re-tweets, re-posts, likes, shares and reddits… sometimes social networks seem like a case of terrible digital reflux, where everything you consume is reprocessed, redigisted, remixed, reconstituted…and begins to repeat on you. Surfing the net soon makes me ache for the quiet privacy and mystery of making original. Sketching, writing, playing, thinking without surfing, reading [...]

Quick thought on the ubiquity of sharing… Retweets, reposts, links, shares… there are countless ways to propagate information, funny stories, things of interest (and obviously I rely on that for people to end up reading here.) But I began thinking yesterday… all of these shares are ‘non rivalrous.’ A rivalrous good, in economics, is one [...]

I’ve been writing a piece about Alan Turing – who was born 100 years ago in June and was the godfather of artificial intelligence. His ‘Turing Test’ still endures as a fascinating ongoing game between humans and computers, whereby a computer can pass the Turing Test if it can convince a human interlocutor that they are conversing [...]