In Constant Digital Contact, We Feel 'Alone Together'

As soon as Sherry Turkle arrived at the studio for her Fresh Air interview, she realized she'd forgotten her phone. "I realized I'd left it behind, and I felt a moment of Oh my god ... and I felt it kind of in the pit of my stomach," she tells Terry Gross. That feeling of emotional dependence on digital devices is the focus of Turkle's research. Her book, Alone Together, explores how new technology is changing the way we communicate with one another. MORE

Breaking News Is Broken and Circa Wants to Fix It / Eric Johnson

Want to get news on your smartphone? You’ve got plenty of options. But if you ask Circa CEO Matt Galligan, none of them is especially good.

“The content gets a different design, so that it fits on the screen and the fonts look appropriate, but the content itself hasn’t changed,” Galligan said. “The time that you consume with this device is dramatically different.”

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Leave Your Cellphone at Home / Interview with Jacob Appelbaum

Cell phones are tracking devices that make phone calls. It’s sad, but it’s true. Which means software solutions don’t always matter. You can have a secure set of tools on your phone, but it doesn’t change the fact that your phone tracks everywhere you go. And the police can potentially push updates onto your phone that backdoor it and allow it to be turned into a microphone remotely, and do other stuff like that. The police can identify everybody at a protest by bringing in a device called an IMSI catcher. It’s a fake cell phone tower that can be built for 1500 bucks. And once nearby, everybody’s cell phones will automatically jump onto the tower, and if the phone’s unique identifier is exposed, all the police have to do is go to the phone company and ask for their information.
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Mobile Users Consume More News / DAN ROWINSKI

The decline of the newspaper industry has given rise to one of the great fallacies of the Internet Age: Fewer people are consuming news. A new study from the Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism shows just how false this notion really is.

According to the study, "The Future Of Mobile News," 43% of survey respondents who own a tablet say the device increases the amount of news they see. Outside of sending and receiving email, news is the most-used function on tablets, with 37% of tablet owners reading news on a daily basis and 64% on a weekly basis. News outstrips mobile gaming (34% daily, 60% weekly), the activity widely considered to be most common on mobile devices. 

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How To Buy A Smartphone: What Apps Do You Need? / DAN ROWINSKI

Knowing which smartphone is right for you is largely a matter of knowing what you want to do with it. If you are oriented toward productivity, an iPhone or BlackBerry may be best. Android is especially good at accessing information and keeping in touch. Windows Phone is good at organizing your life and personal contacts. What makes one platform stronger or weaker for certain kinds of tasks? The answer is apps.
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WHAT IS AN APP? / Ian Bogost

I was happy to fall upon this nice explanation by Steven An, left in a comment on a Gamasutra article about the new Mac App Store:

I think the primary thing that Apple did was create and market the concept of the "app" as a $1-5 unit. They're doing to software what they did to music: they broke it up into little pieces and then gave consumers a nice place to shop for the pieces. Before, the channels of distribution were much clunkier and inert. This is very much a good thing for smaller devs. Apple has removed so much of the headache of marketing ("Just find it on the AppStore!"), setting up payment systems, installation, etc.

This is a good start, but it only describes the business logic of the app store and its resulting apps. There's a bigger question embedded in An's observation: what happens when we break software up into tiny pieces?

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More Demands on Cell Carriers in Surveillance / ERIC LICHTBLAU

In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.
The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional inquiry, document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.
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Tablets to overtake notebook PCs by 2016: study

Tablet computers are expected to overtake notebook PCs by 2016 as consumers shift to newer devices such as the iPad, says a new survey.

The survey by research firm NPD said tablets will be "the growth driver" for the mobile computer market over the next few years.

Consumer preference for mobile computing devices is shifting from notebook to tablet PCs.Overall mobile PC shipments including tablets will grow from 347 million in 2012 to over 809 million by 2017.

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