Daniel Stafford: Daft Punk Debuts 'Derezzed' Video, Hipsters and Smartphone Ads

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Daft Punk Debuts 'Derezzed' Video, Hipsters and Smartphone Ads

Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web.

Read:

It's in the nineteenth century that we start to glimpse the modern sense of the word as a big category, a general thing encompassing news and facts, messages and announcements. The real turning point comes in 1948 when the Bell Labs mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon, in his landmark paper (later a book) "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," made information, as the OED explains, "a mathematically defined quantity divorced from any concept of news or meaning ..." We measure it in bits. We recognize it in words, sounds, images; we store it on the printed page and on polycarbonate discs engraved by lasers and in our genes. We are aware, more or less, that it defines our world.

The Viral Me

A more pessimistic way to look at it is that we're slave labor, getting lured by our desire to show off what we buy (Swipely) or our witty repartee (Twitter), by our need for affirmation (all of the above), or by our habit of looking at pictures of girls from high school all day instead of doing work (FB), and we end up not only driving traffic to these sites but filtering information so that FB and Twitter and Swipely can capitalize on it. They would say they're just trying to make it easier for us to find movies we like. That's probably true, too.

Google Nexus, BlackBerry Torch, Microsoft Kin: Why Are Smartphone Ads Filled With Hipsters?

I nearly threw up during the new Nexus S commercial that Google released Monday. Not because the Nexus itself is gag-worthy--the phone actually looks pretty sleek--but because of the shaky camera work, drunk-and-stumbling POV, and disorientating jump-cuts. What might make some viewers dizzy, though, is the ad's obvious pandering to the subculture known as hipsters.

Watch:

Go the classy route with your 'Star Trek' fandom by building a pneumatic bedroom door. [From: DVICE]

Know:

The NounProject, a Kickstarter idea from Edward Boatman, documents the often unknown designers behind the symbols and icons adorning our signs. [From: The NounProject, via: FastCo Design]
While early reviews reveal 'Tron' may not live up to the hype, Daft Punk's 'Derezzed' video offers a fun mix of the new neon-heavy film with retro gaming classic 'Joust.' [From: The Daily What.]

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