During this period of social distancing, Jews the world over took to video conferencing platforms like Zoom to celebrate the Passover Seders. The Seder is typically the most elaborate family get-together of the Jewish year, with traditions passed down from generation to generation. Elaborate meals, long recitations of prayers and rituals from the Haggadah, and … Continue reading The First (?) VR Passover Seder
The biggest objection I hear when I tell people about meeting friends and colleagues in VR is this: “But you’re not yourself, right? You’re an avatar.” I had that response when I first thought about it, too. Wouldn’t you rather be yourself on a video platform like Zoom or FaceTime, rather than someone else in … Continue reading On Being an Avatar: Mirroring, Violating, and Being Together
A few days ago, I described how I was hanging out and shooting hoops, with some friends in VR. We were doing it in AltspaceVR , a social space where you can meet up with friends as well as strangers. AltspaceVR hosts a variety of events (music festivals, improv nights), educational programming (English conversation classes, … Continue reading Meeting Up with Educators in VR
VR has always boasted about the places you can go inside a headset. Now that it's April 2020 and we can’t leave our homes, this has even greater allure. While these experiences aren’t my main reason for exploring VR, I’ve recently used my headset to tour the British Museum, enjoyed the view from the peak … Continue reading Hanging Out in VR
I've heard that being in VR resembles being in a dream, but what if your dreams come to resemble VR? Attempts to answer the question, “What is VR?” almost always include a comparison to dreams. “Shared lucid dreaming,” is Jaron Lanier’s phrase. Long before Lanier, questions about cyborg reality and dreams occurred to Philip K … Continue reading VR//Dreams
30 Years of Technological Transformation It’s easy to look at the ways we’ve networked organizational life over the last forty years and see only a constant stream of endless changes. In retrospect, however, it’s possible to see three discreet phases to the way information and services have flowed through networks of individuals, technologies and organizations … Continue reading Introduction to the CyborgCOM: A History Lesson
A. K. Rice and Eric Miller authored one of the books at the origin of what we now call Organizational Development (OD). Their work at the Tavistock Institute usually merits a chapter in business school textbooks, as it pioneered a way of thinking about organizational life that considered the whole of an organization in an integrated way. … Continue reading The Socio-Technics and Systems Psychodynamics of Sales
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