Kester Brewin

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 [...]

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 [...]

Thanks to the various people who popped me Google+ invite… I’ve really not known whether to jump in, and would appreciate any thoughts people have had who have made the switch or tested the water. The obvious issue is this: have Google made it worth it? If you are going to switch, do you do [...]

  Thanks to @designbygecko for putting me on to this extraordinary talk by Jim Gilliam at a web conference recently. Jim was brought up a fervent evanglical – and remains so, except that his faith is now truly in the Internet. He has his reasons for his conversion: he’s suffered multiple cancers and had to [...]

WordPress is fantastic, but a lot of people are using Facebook now as their portal into the rest of the web, so I thought I’d share some stuff for other bloggers I’d found on integrating the two, with Twitter too. I’ve recently come across the WordPress plug-in WPBook. I think it’s great, and if you [...]

I went to see The Social Network the other night, and have been mulling on it since. I have to say, I didn’t really fancy the thought of going to see a film about Facebook, but the reviews have been very good, and I’m a fan of Aaron Sorkin. It’s actually very funny, and very [...]

Connected to the previous post about Gladwell’s article on ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,’ I’m really excited about the next Apple event, which is coming up on 13th October. Dr Luke Bretherton will be leading a discussion on social media and social action, asking whether Facebook and Twitter have anything to add to community [...]

Excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, casting a sceptical eye over the optimistic view that social networks can and do lead to increased social action. His argument is not that they cannot have a good impact, but that the sort of impact they might have is very different from the hard work [...]

In a fascinating interview in the Wall Street Journal, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted that young people will have to change their identities in the future to protect themselves from all the embarrassing photos and information that will be available about them from their ‘misspent youths.’ ‘Every young person one day will be entitled [...]

Really pleased to announce that we’ve sorted out three new dates for Apple events over the next couple of months. The idea behind Apple is to get people thinking more reflectively about technology – whether that be digital culture or tool-use. Humans are tool-makers, and the technologies we use form us, just as we form [...]