Culture
Heard in "No Maps for Those Territories" (doc interview of William Gibson):
"when those events occur, it changes the nature of the game; another example and maybe a better one is when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter, a good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and said 'this made your job more difficult' and I knew exactly what he meant"
What he means is if that is the world, what can he does to make the world more fantastic in his novels.
Deloitte's new report "Eye to the Future: How TMT advances could change the way we live in 2010" is a curious read; especially when it explains how technology is expected to keep changing the workplace and who will be able to manage it.
"More and more, the ability to get things done is expected to depend on the ability to understand and use increasingly complex technology - and those with a greater degree of technological literacy may find themselves moving up the corporate hierarchy more quickly than those without."
To me, there is also another step that they don't address: the "disconnection literacy": the fact that in a pervasive world with always-on capabilities, people will definitely need to disconnect. This, of course, to step away from information overload or passive physical behavior.
Will we have to pay to have a non-connected place? Will there be social differentiation about who will be aware of such a need?
cph127 has a good point about what they call "the rise of beta": the very fact that . everything is launched as beta and everything happens to be unfinished. They wrote a beta-manifesto, here are some excerpts:
- being in beta is a natural state of life. Everything aroundus is either evolving or dying.
- beta is playing. Experimenting. Trying.
- beta is constant learning.
- beta is profiting in the true nature of the word “profit”. Making progress.
- beta is never perfect. Never completely without fault. Just like any human being. Everything can be made better. Allways. Achieving temporary perfection is better than aspiring for the ultimate perfection that is never reached.
- beta is release as soon as it is safe. But never sooner. Only daredevils flies planes in beta or takes unfinished medicine.
- beta is a natural state of things. Your body is in perpetual beta until you die (maybe..)
- beta is evolution. Many small gradual changes. Suddenly they may seem like giant leaps.
- beta is revolution. Not completely in control. Just like the real world.
- beta is open. Ready for dialogue. Open for change. Positive for co-creation.
- beta stands for things that changes. Change with consistancy.
- beta creates feedback loops for companies, individuals and products.
- beta is honest. Not superficial.
Why do I blog this? First I think the "beta" phenomenon is interesting as a shift in our society from all-set product to constantly evolving "stuff"; the assumptions behind this are both important (product can be improve and are opened) and intriguing (everything needs to change change change...). Second, what will be curious IMO is whether this beta mindset will also reach the pervasive computing world: we would then have unfinished objects and services. After the blue-screen of death for your bathroom, there would then be uncompleted features that you might not be able to use with a "beta-meter" close to the flusher...
Researchers in LA are trying to help world's biggest media companies and their high-profile clients understanding the divided consumer's attention span (source: NYT):
The Emerging Media Lab is run by Interpublic, a holding company for media- buying firms like Universal McCann and Initiative. Since February, clients like Sony, L'Oréal and Microsoft have been using the lab to try to figure out how to reach consumers who seem to be doing so many things simultaneously. (...) Market researchers as a whole are struggling to understand the realities of what often is called "concurrent media usage." (...) For advertisers, the challenge is getting the message across in one medium while the consumer is simultaneously active in several media. (...) In the Emerging Media Lab, advertisers can observe "engagement." Using cameras that feed back into an observation room, advertisers watch consumers use old technologies or try new ones.But it does seem that a consumer who is multitasking is not devoting an equal amount of interest to all those activities. "Terms like multitasking imply equal attention," said Mike Bloxham, director of testing and assessment at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. "But cognitive science tells us this isn't possible. You have to give priority to one in order to absorb the messages."
Research or market research? It's clear that they are facing a real challenge but I tend to be quite pessimistic towards the advertisement world, which is actually not so much of a problem to me...
Regine has been interviewed by fine art Trendbeheer. One of the topic they discussed is very relevant to me:
Trendbeheer: Art is all about hypes and media art more then that: there are so much sponsored/government subsidised events these days - at least in Holland - that there are more conferences then artists. There is a danger of disillusion for a new audience.Regine: I see a proliferation of new media art festivals all around europe. And there’s a lot of repetition, not always in favour of the best works.
On the one hand it’s great for new media artists, on the other hand the audience is not growing as quickly as the number of festivals.
Why do I blog this? I fully agree with this statement about repetition: it seems that as in engineering, media artists are sometimes not aware of other projects related to theirs (hence they reinvent the wheel on a regular basis). This is no an attack targetting artists but rather a phenomenon that I noticed both with engineering students and media artists which IMO is rather about the way they work than their intrinsical behavior. And of course, as a person working in the academic world, I have a strong bias towards an overamphasis on checking earlier work of others.
The Christian Science Monitor has a piece about this curious socio-cultural practice in Uganda: veejaying: the act of translating in real-time foreign movies for the audience:
"Veejaying" is now a central form of local entertainment. But the art involves much more than translation. Part sports announcer, part street preacher, part comedian, a veejay must fill in cultural gaps and keep the audience engaged, which - for many veejays - often means taking considerable creative license.The video jockey is an offshoot of the distinctly home-grown phenomenon of the video hall. Makeshift shacks commonly made of plywood and tin sheeting, they function as the main form of cinema for the Ugandan masses, most of whom cannot afford theater tickets or rentals of pirated DVDs. (...) The festival features a "Veejay slam," in which some of the country's best-known video jockeys display different styles and compete for the best audience response.
Why do I blog this? it's curious to see that this practice goes further than just translating, and it eventually lead to new forms of entertainment in the forms of slam competitions or DVD editions.
A new form of tinkering cultural content.
Visualizing the usage of these two terms with the new Google Trends tool:
I don't know to what extent the tool is reliable but the search volume is decreasing over time and there are some variations where ubiquitous is more searched than pervasive and vice versa.
Why do I blog this? just wanted to try Google Trends comparing two keywords which I am familiar with.
Worldmapper offers some exquisite "anamorphosis" (maps where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest). What is great is that their data are also available. Some of the distorted map are utterly crazy, look at this one: Royalties And License Fees Exports:
Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net exports of royalties and license fees (in US$) that come from there. Net exports are exports minus imports. When imports are larger than exports the territory is not shown.
Only 18 (out of 200) territories are net exporters of license fees and royalties. This means that a few people living in less than a tenth of the territories in the world between them receive the US$30 billion of net export earnings for these services.
The International Monetary Fund explained that royalties and license fees include "international payments and receipts for the authorised use of intangible, non-produced, non-financial assets and proprietary rights ... and with the use, through licensing agreements, of produced originals or prototypes ...". Thus these export earnings are payments for past ideas.
“Ideas shape our world. They are the raw materials on which our future prosperity and heritage depend.” Kamil Idris, 2006
According to the Wikipedia:
The cluster effect is the effect of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service congregating in a certain place and hence inducing other buyers and sellers to relocate there as well.For example in the mid- to late 1990s, several successful computer technology related companies emerged in Silicon Valley in California. This led anyone who wished to create a startup company to do so in Silicon Valley. The surge in the number of Silicon Valley startups led to a number of venture capital firms relocating to or expanding their Valley offices. This in turn encouraged more entrepreneurs to locate their startups there.
Why do I blog this? I was not familiar with this name referring to this concept of emergent/self-organization.
I'm looking forward to read JPod by Douglas Coupland.
From Publishers Weekly: Coupland returns, knowingly, to mine the dot-com territory of Microserfs (1996)—this time for slapstick. Young Ethan Jarlewski works long hours as a video-game developer in Vancouver, surfing the Internet for gore sites and having random conversations with co-workers on JPod, the cubicle hive where he works, where everyone's last name begins with J. Before Ethan can please the bosses and the marketing department (they want a turtle, based on a reality TV host, inserted into the game Ethan's been working on for months) or win the heart of co-worker Kaitlin, Ethan must help his mom bury a biker she's electrocuted in the family basement which houses her marijuana farm; give his dad, an actor desperately longing for a speaking part, yet another pep talk; feed the 20 illegal Chinese immigrants his brother has temporarily stored in Ethan's apartment; and pass downtime by trying to find a wrong digit in the first 100,000 places (printed on pages 383–406) of pi. Coupland's cultural name-dropping is predictable (Ikea, the Drudge Report, etc.), as is the device of bringing in a fictional Douglas Coupland to save Ethan's day more than once. But like an ace computer coder loaded up on junk food at 4 a.m., Coupland derives his satirical, spirited humor's energy from the silly, strung-together plot and thin characters. Call it Microserfs 2.0.
Why do I blog this? because I like Douglas Coupland's novels and that one seem to be quite curious. I expect it to epitomize the beginning of the XXIst century's habits/trends in terms of work/cultural practices.
The Economist this week has a very insightful report on "new media". They did a great job giving a complete overview of what's new in socio-cultural practices due to the advent of blogs, wiki, IM and so on. There are just two articles available for free and they're not (IMO) the most interesting ones. I was better interested in the one entitled "Compose yoursefl". The article addresses how journalism and old media are reshaped by new technologies. This nicely illustrate a phenomenon that is often misunderstood: new media does not bury old media. Of course, some old media are injured but there is - sort of - a new relationship that is being built; and it's not just Rupert Murdoch buying MySpace. What is funny is to see that, in the first place, old media tries to replicate the open-source/innovation (bottom-up?) phenomenon, as with wikitorial (a term coined by the Los Angeles Times to describe a traditional editorial that can be edited in the fashion of a wiki according to Wikipedia)... and it failed. But then, some more intelligent folks found that what was important was not transferring the idea of letting people publishing things to other others concepts. Then the article gives relevant recipe for old media to position themselves in the world of new media:
The first step, says Mr Jarvis [newspaper consultant], is to tear down any walls around the website. Nowadays, "it's not content until it's linked", he says, and bloggers will not link to articles that require logins and subscriptions to be viewed. (...) The sites that bloggers link to most are the online NYT, CNN, the Washington Post... These are free or mostly free stides and thus, in effect part of "the" conversation. (...) By the same logic, news sites should avoid the still surprisingly common internet sin called "link-rot". This refers to websites that publish an article under one web address but then change the URL when archiving the article. (...) Instead of assuming that readers will start on the front page, editors should expect them to enter at any point, probably having started our from google's search page or a blog or an e-mail from a friend. (...) The next step is to allow - indeed, encourage - reader participation on individual pages. This could start with a simple star-rating system of each article. Deeper engagement would include comment panes at the bottom of stories, or blog discussions between the journalists and invited guests.
Why do I blog this? I am interested by this as an observer of how emerging technologies reshape socio-cultural practices. In this context, it's pertinent to see how old media integrate new concepts from new media, with first a naive direct transfer (turning old school newspaper in a wiki-like edition style) that firstly fails and then it stabilizes with the inclusion of certain features from the new media practices (stable url, open platform, discussion features).
In terms of weird terminology, gtr consulting offers very curious concepts about the sociological impacts of emerging technologies. For instance, see their last report (see the pdf table of content):
- iJunkies - The world at the touch of a button
- Technomadism — Wireless life
- TechnoBling — Technology must look good in addition to working well
- Insulationships—How technology is mediating teens’ relationship with the world around them
- The Neighbornet—Teen world expanded on the net
- Ego Anglers—Looking for positive strokes on the net
- The Digital Disguise—Transforming identities on the net
- ACME Auteur—Creating, Producing & Directing on the net
- Life Caching—Memory replaced by knowing where to find it
- Brain Blur—Multi-tasking in 2006
- Dataddiction—Teens can’t live without the web
- The Chill-Challenged—Idle hands? Not today’s teens.
Of course, there is a lot of marketing frenzyness here, sort of having category to refer to subgroups, but the underlying rhetoric is interesting. Some trends appears: junkies+addiction / neighbornet+insulationships (creation of subgroups, do they talk to each other?) / disguise (ok maybe that's the way a person from one subgroup has to behave to take to another group / blur (the brain is blurred but what about the social bonds?) / eco anglers looking (the world is bad and they're looking for sth better?).
Why do I blog this? it's interesting to see how today's trends are reflected into language, with odd portmanteau concept.
Via: a new term has been coined (by werable computing researcher Steve Mann): Glog:
Early cyborg communities of the late 1970s and early 1980s were constructed to explore the creation of visual art within a computer mediated reality. Then with the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, cyborg logs (glogs, short for cyborGLOGS) became shared spaces.
The main difference between weBLOGS and cyborGLOGS is that blogs often originate from a desktop computer, wheras glogs can originate while walking around, often without any conscious thought and effort, as stream-of-(de)consciousness glogging:
nym from inforgargoyle says that he prefers the notion of "gargoyle log" (remenber Neal Steaphenson's Snowcrash?, a gargoyle is a guy "capturing vast ammounts of information around him")
moblogging is of course part of this
datablogging surely is too
I've been working lately on the social and cultural consequences of digitalization (for a client, not for my research). One of the side effect in the video game market is that boxed PC games decline as digital downloads rise according to marketing firm GfK:
But the way in which people get their games is getting a makeover as game makers experiment with online distribution as an alternative to boxed CD-ROMs. Some companies are even betting that PC gaming is on the cusp of a download revolution, much like its entertainment counterparts in music and video.Meanwhile, Electronic Arts Inc.'s Pogo.com, Comcast Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are offering games-on-demand services in which computer users buy subscriptions to access and download PC games, ranging from "Scrabble" to "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell." As more households get high-speed Internet connections, downloads become more practical. Downloading computer games can take anywhere from just a few seconds to a few hours, depending on the file size.
Why do I blog this? I am wondering about how would the boxed game market will evolve. I tend to think that people like "things", meaning that with the explosion of digital music we've seen a total show off ipods and other mp3 players. It's as if the objects (which are now a repository for digital content) are even more important compared to past walkman/discman:
The Fourth Screen Global Mobile Media Festival Call:
The Fourth Screen Global Mobile Media Festival will focus on the mobile phone as an emerging social, cultural and technological phenomenon. We invite artists, technologists, and other creative thinkers to submit creations, inventions and concepts in two categories:1/ moving images: videos made with mobile phone, movies, animation and games intended for mobile delivery
2/ wise technologies: software art, software and hardware that proposes new uses for mobile multimedia communication, applications that have positive cultural, social and economic impact in diverse cultures
The use of phone cameras is already pervasive, millions shoot, share, watch video clips with this all-in-one personal production - distribution - player device.
Why do I blog this? cell-phones based art, that's an intriguing concept. What's cultural content creation with such devices? how they help circulating culture, there are interesting issues related to this festival.
Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival at the Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California (April 28-29, 2006).
This two-day event will bring together new media scholars and practitioners to exhibit and discuss the roles of audiences, activists, and producers in maturing networked media ecologies. The event is organized by the Networked Publics fellowship program (netpublics.annenberg.edu) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication.The conference includes a media festival and an academic program.
- “Do-It-Yourself: Emergent Networked Culture,” is an experimental news and entertainment media festival featuring new kinds of viral, remixed, and amateur media works enabled by current networked ecologies. Categories of curated work include: political remix videos, the digital handmade, anime music videos, machinima, alternative news, and infrastucture hacks.
- The academic program is dedicated to three topics: Politics, Infrastructure and Place. For each of these topics, netpublics fellows will convene a session to interrogate current issues and controversies related to emergent networked ecologies.
The format of the event is designed to promote interaction and dialog across a diverse set of participants. Our goal is to facilitate conversation on topics of shared concern and a mixture of formats that include screenings, debates, and interaction around computer kiosks.
Why do I blog this? I'll be there (thanks Julian!), the event seems great and very pertinent to my interests.
One of my favorite movie:"Polyester" (John Waters). Almost set here, with the odorama add-on:
According to Wikipedia, All Your Base Are Belong To Us:
"All your base are belong to us" (sometimes referred to as "All Your Base" and often abbreviated AYBABTU, AYBAB2U, or simply AYB) is a phrase that sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002. The text is taken from the opening found in the English version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing, the translation of which was terrible to the point of hilarity. The game was originally produced by Toaplan in 1989. Groups of game enthusiasts began digitally altering various images to include the phrase. Eventually, these images were collected together onto one site, Tribalwar, and a Flash animation produced from them, which was widely downloaded.
Another good meme is also the "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle!"
Why do I blog this? even though it's 5 years old, the meme is still there, showing how the Internet's can spread specific messages (uncovered by the traditional mass media as said in the Wikipedia definition) and then "install" it in the network's memory.
Read in the IHT:
A bill under debate in the French National Assembly may require iPods to be able to play music purchased from competing Internet services, not just Apple Computer's own iTunes Music Store, and force changes in the business model that sparked the revolution in legal digital music downloads. (...) "Just ask my 14-year-old, who bought music from another system and cannot play it on his iPod," said Bartholomew, who added that operators would benefit if more people exchanged music over their networks. (...) "From a technical perspective, it is extremely complex to get these devices and services to speak with one another," MacGann said [director general of the European Information and Communications Technology Industry Association, a trade group in Brussels]. (...) "The only format that currently works on all these players is the MP3 format and that is 100 percent unprotected."
It so reflects the tensions between openness (reading every format on my ipod) and copyright...
Mapping Switzerland was an interesting exhibition by Hosoya Schaefer Architects, Zürich:
This exhibition curated by Pius Freiburghaus and organized by the Perforum at the Kulturzentrum Seedamm looks at maps, art and myths. It attempts at finding new ways to describe the identity of Switzerland ranging from the scientific to the artistic. Participants in the exhibition include the ETH Studio Basel, the ETH Institute of Cartography, Büro Destruct und Ursula Palla.Hosoya Schaefer is showing eleven maps of Switzerland and its global context on 2m x 2m panels. With the panels leaning against the wall or propped up on wooden blocks, the installation alludes to the provisional and impermanent nature of the information on which these maps are based. Not an apodictic new ‘truth’ is searched for, but new ways of thinking. (...) Visualizations can help to propose new ways of thinking. They can help to see oneself not only in the historically grown context but also in the flux of globalization. We looked at a series of such factors. The graphic language of the maps, based on the density of information used in an atlas, is meant to go beyond the straightforward transfer of information and to evoke associations and open up space for fantasy.
There was also a nice article about it in the Weltwoche (pdf, 6.3Mb).
Why do I blog this? I like these visualizations that try to show things in a spatial way.