[From Advertising Age’s The Media Guy blog] Instagram Is OK, But Photoshop Is Evil? The Truth About Digital Lies Photoshop Gets Bashed For Digitally Altering Reality. So How Come Instagram Gets a Pass? By: Simon Dumenco Published: May 28, 2012 When Facebook bought Instagram last month, pretty much all the media coverage focused primarily on a single narrative thread: how a tiny startup with just 13 employees and no revenue came to be worth $1 billion. That, of course, is an astonishing business story, but in obsessing about the economics of Instagram, its aesthetics — the real reason why it’s…

[From The Sydney Morning Herald’s Smoke & Mirrors blog] [Image: The walls of Sydney’s Town Hall Station resembled a Woolworth’s supermarket shelf in Australia’s first virtual supermarket. Photo: Getty Images] Virtual reality at a tipping point By George Wright June 4, 2012 Technology is only going to get more immersive and consume a bigger percentage of our attention. Take Ready Player One, a book by Ernest Cline. This work of fiction describes a near future where our over populated and environmentally damaged planet sees society flee their daily struggles to interact in a massively multiplayer world. When the eccentric Jobs/Zuckerberg-esque…

[From Matthew Lombard] During the spring 2012 semester that just ended, I taught a Temple University course titled Psychological Processing of Media. The course, for undergraduate and masters level students, emphasized telepresence research and theory; the syllabus is here. One of the optional assignments was  “Telepresence Creativity” with the only instructions to “[c]reate a high quality graphic or video on the theme of presence and telepresence; see instructor with ideas and questions.” Below are links to the work produced by students in the class. Do you teach or know of a course that covers telepresence? If so, please email me…