Q uantum Risk, Augmented Twitter and Meme Death
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there.
Quantum Computing is the Next Big Security Risk
By Will Hurd from Wired
- “The potential benefits of mastering quantum computing, from advances in cancer research to unlocking the mysteries of the universe, are limitless.
- But that same computing power can be used to unlock different kinds of secrets—from your personal financial or health records, to corporate research projects and classified government intelligence.”
- “Already, intelligence agencies around the world are archiving intercepted communications transmitted with encryption that’s currently all but unbreakable, in the hopes that in the future computing advances will turn what’s gibberish now into potentially valuable intelligence.”
- “Whether it was the discovery of fission or the launch of Sputnik, the United States has responded to scientific challenges of the past century with resolve and determination. The US must do the same with quantum computing.”
You can now use Twitter in augmented reality, in case your life isn’t bleak enough
By Adi Robertson From The Verge
- “I like Twitter. Tweeting helps me formulate thoughts in a unique way, and despite the company’s many missteps, I think it’s a net positive addition to my life. That should make me a good target audience for TweetReality: an augmented reality app, based on Apple’s ARKit, that puts your Twitter feed in the real world. Instead, I’m probably its worst possible test case.”
- “TweetReality on iOS looks mostly like a proof of concept. It’s harder to use than regular Twitter, without much benefit beyond a neat visual effect. And designer Oscar Falmer described his app as a prototype for future augmented reality headset apps.”
- “TweetReality doesn’t feel like it’s designed specifically around Twitter. Twitter is information-dense, designed to let you scroll a high volume of fast-flowing information at a glance. TweetReality, by contrast, is a giant board with a lot of white space. It asks you to shift attention across your entire field of view as you read, giving each tweet pride of place.”
A Unified Theory of Meme Death
By Lauren Michele Jackson From The Atlantic
- “At a glance—even from a digital native—meme death seems like a much less mysterious phenomenon than meme birth. While tracing the origin of any individual meme requires a separate trip down the rabbit hole, it makes sense to assume that memes die because people get tired of them.”
- “Why do some memes last longer than others? Are they just funnier? Better? And if so, what makes a meme better? The answer lies not in traditional memetics, but in the study of jokes.”
- “Memes capture and maintain people’s attention in a given moment because something about that moment provides a context that makes that meme attractive. This might provide a more satisfying, but also more expansive, answer than simple boredom for why memes fall out of immediate favor. The context that makes a meme, once gone, breaks it. New contexts warrant new memes.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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