A.I. Playlist
In celebration of our forthcoming BIG DATA BIG PROBLEMS panel on the 7th February, we asked The Isis team to submit their favourite tunes inspired by the theme of artificial intelligence. The resulting playlist features tracks jam-packed with autotune, synths, ironic titles and turn-of-the-millenium
Has Spotify changed the way we listen to music?
I sit writing this piece to the driving soundscapes of Rival Consoles, a British artist I first came across last year. I’m fairly sure that I discovered him through a Spotify algorithm, most likely a song ‘radio’ manufactured to keep me quietly happy as I focus on something else. All I can rea
Switching Off: The Pleasures of Idleness
Boredom today is the absence of a good 3G signal. I think that it’s worth asking whether or not that ought to be so – whether modern society’s conquest of boredom is something worth celebrating. * Boredom is the feeling we get when our surroundings imprison us – the feeling that there is not
The Problem with Facebook
Like most people my age, I used Facebook throughout my teens. I still check the site every day, several times a day. Realistically, I check it several times an hour. Yet using Facebook never sat easily with me. It put me on edge, and I always vaguely meant to consider the exact reasons for these [&h
Restless Modernity: How sleeplessness reflects the peculiarities of contemporary life
“We live as we dream — alone…”—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Attempting to characterise any period of history by one quality or sensation is, at best, a good way to cause an argument: at worst, a lazy oversimplification. Is the zeitgeist of a given era something that is generated
Memes, Politics and Social Identity
Memes are a way of hiding from the ‘real world’, and of negotiating our place within it. In recent years, they have spread beyond the formulaic humour of set images and captions and begun to take on the roles of political commentary and autobiography. They develop and mutate so rapidly, a
