socialtheory - Yule Heibel on Diigo

19 Nov 09

"Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"

A "rough unedited crib" of danah boyd's Nov.2009 talk at Web2.0 Expo in NYC, which analyzes how information is delivered and consumed "in flow." boyd notes,
QUOTE
For the longest time, we have focused on sites of information as a destination, of accessing information as a process, of producing information as a task. What happens when all of this changes? While things are certainly clunky at best, this is the promise land of the technologies we're creating. This is all happening because of how our information society is changing.
UNQUOTE
She also some critical things to say about curating and/ or aggregating content:
QUOTE
We need technological innovations. For example, tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content regardless of where they are and what they are doing and tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don't think this will work. Instead, the tools that consumers need are those that allow them to get into flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are, whatever they're doing. The tools that allow them to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed.
UNQUOTE
That bit gave me pause. If I'm thinking of local context, I have no idea at this point what those tools might look like. Something to think about...

Finally, one of the most interesting angles she discusses comes at the very end of the paper, in her discussion of how business models have changed/ must change:
QUOTE
...we need to rethink our business plans. I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models. Advertising is based on capturing attention, typically by interrupting the broadcast message or by being inserted into the content itself. Trying to reach information flow is not about being interrupted. Advertising does work when it's part of the flow itself. Ads are great w

www.danah.org/...Web2Expo.html - Preview

danah_boyd web2.0 talks presentations information socialtheory

25 Jun 09

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, extract

I like this last bit (the prior sections are somewhat artificial, imo, but this works):
QUOTE
We are the victims of these two momentous and strangely optimistic ideas. There is immense unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and incompleteness in the human lot, the modern world denies us the possibility of consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame for having stubbornly failed to make more of our lives.
UNQUOTE

www.alaindebotton.com/...index.asp - Preview

alain_de_botton work socialtheory books

21 Nov 08

FINAL REPORT | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH

Portal page for the Digital Youth Research :: Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media project.
QUOTE
"Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures" is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives.
UNQUOTE

digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report - Preview

web2.0 research socialtheory youth danah_boyd education learning

16 Nov 08

Faster horses in the age of co-creation, by JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta blog)

Thought-provoking blog entry in Confused of Calcutta (JP Rangaswami) about innovation, focusing on the role of the user in co-creation (customer choice and voice, eg.).

confusedofcalcutta.com/...rses-in-the-age-of-co-creation - Preview

jp_rangaswami socialtheory confused_of_calcutta cocreation innovation

I was part of the Do Not Dumb Down group, by the way. But that was nearly thirty years ago, I had just trained to become a callow economist, and my head was full of strange ideas. Ideas like merit goods. Ideas that allowed us to get to a point where, in many nations, Nanny State Knows Best. Where it was apparently considered normal to visualise a class of people who knew better than other classes of people.

Now, as I look back on those times and those discussions, I wonder at myself. Was I that arrogant? What residue of that arrogance do I carry now?

Why am I sharing all this? To make the point that for many years, even for centuries, it was considered normal for customers to have neither voice nor choice. That it was considered normal for one group of people to decide what other groups of people could have, should have, would have.
We’ve had choice for many years now, but it’s been vendor-dominated choice. Modern, more sophisticated, more elaborate versions of Any Colour You Want As Long As It’s Black. Nowadays it’s more akin to Any Colour You Want As Long As It’s Mine. People consider it normal to ask questions like “So what’s your lock-in?”. How do you enslave the customer? Will you come in to my parlour, said the Spider.
5 more annotations...
- When it comes to voice, Nader and his crew did their bit, but it took the Cluetrain gang, Chris Locke et al, to get me going. Making me realise the problems caused by building walls between firms and their customers, the stupidity of Fortress Enterprise. That was then followed up by people like Esther Dyson explaining how the User is in Control, Kathy Sierra entrancing me with Creating Passionate Users, and Hugh Macleod working on the Social Object and discovering the evolution of Blue Monsters, David Weinberger explaining how folksonomies empowered customers, Doc Searls starting up the VRM movement.
- In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to deny customers both choice as well as voice. Capital and land tended to be the scarce factors of production. But that was a very long time ago. In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to deny customers control. Education tended to be scarce, and social status was allowed to be a basis for the bestowal of control. Mummy knows best. In the past, it was culturally not just defensible but acceptable to believe that the customer didn’t know what she wanted, that when she did know she was wrong, that the customer needed to be educated about what she really wanted, which fortuitously happened to be what you had.
  
  All that was in the past.
  
  Today, the abundances and scarcities that characterise our era are different. The scarcest, most precious resource around is the customer. That customer knows what she wants. If she doesn’t know it, she knows how to find out what it is she wants. She knows it when she sees it.
  
  That customer knows that part of what she wants is to be able to figure out what she wants. She is both consumer and producer, a partner in the process of co-creating value. The senior partner in the process of co-creating value.
- We need to be in the business of providing the customer what she wants when she wants it, where she wants it, how she wants it. We need to focus on making things that the customer wants to buy, rather than trying to get customers to pay for things they neither want nor need.
  
  There was a time when we could decide for the customer. There was a time when we could constrain the customer’s voice and choice. There was a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
- Stuart French said:
  
  “The next hyper-step in this age of consumer intelligence IMHO, is how much longer we are going to require political representatives to make the big decisions for us. But maybe now I’m thinking a little too far out of the box :-)”
  
  I don’t think so- I think it’s a social revolution, not just about consumers/ marketing- whatever you think of Obama’s policies, he won many supporters who voted Republican before, by (at the very least) making them feel like he was listening to their horse preferences. McCain didn’t do anything similar at all. The effect of this “marketing” difference is being widely underestimated by the media, where most things are framed in a primarily political context.
- The question I keep asking myself is “Why do people think that inventors, geniuses and creators of disruption are all *not* to be found in the class of humans called “customers”? What causes this separation? What happens if the tools used by geniuses and inventors and creators of disruption are made available to customers? Won’t we get *more* as a result? or is there a reason to have a holy of holies, a place where customers aren’t allowed to go but inventors can?

29 Oct 08

Young Professionals Meet for a Power Breakfast, but They Don’t Call It Networking - NYTimes.com

Nice article on the "new" social networking, with a special look at likemind meet-ups, the un-network.
QUOTE:
"Likemind gatherings have no formal structure, no fees and typically no agenda. But participants exchange ideas, job tips and useful contacts, while also batting around ideas about technology, art, business and culture."

www.nytimes.com/...26likemind.html - Preview

nyt likemind socialnetworks socialtheory piers_fawkes psfk

Likemind gatherings have no formal structure, no fees and typically no agenda. But participants exchange ideas, job tips and useful contacts, while also batting around ideas about technology, art, business and culture.
Likemind caters to young professionals in advertising, media and design who are products of the age of personal blogs, warts-and-all YouTube videos and viral marketing. For them, the best pitch is the disguised pitch. Nothing, participants said, is more uncool than the hard-sell of traditional networking (which may explain why likemind is not capitalized).
1 more annotations...
- In a sense, likemind gatherings are more like the networking-party equivalent of so-called “unconferences,” which arose as a rebuke to the staid $1,000-a-head industry gatherings. They are typically free informal retreats where people in the same field can engage in extended open-ended brainstorming sessions unified around a single theme.

19 Sep 08

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Transcript of speech Shirky gave at April 23/08 Web2.0 conference. For me, ineresting to think about in relation to cities, and how industrialization created anxiety about and problems relating to crowding ("slums"). Now, "here comes *everybody*" means that there's another wave of "crowding" or ...crowds, and it's interesting to think about how this might play out.

www.herecomeseverybody.org/...looking-for-the-mouse.html - Preview

clay_shirky history socialmedia socialcritique socialtheory web2.0

The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.
And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.
The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.
And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.
1 more annotations...
- The
  transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
  wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
  itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
  are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
  of London.

09 Aug 08

You can’t eat Whuffie (but it’s getting harder to eat without it) | ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon

Tara Hunt wrote an interesting post on "whuffie" and what it means today. She also then broached the minefield of how (if) the whuffie factor gets monetized. The comments board is fascinating, and I also added my 2cents (actually, more like a $1.25 since I inflated those 2 cents into two too-long comments...).

I'm pretty sure my remarks are way too theoretical and esoteric, but they helped me make some connections and sort out a few things, so even if they're useless to others, I benefited. Not sure if that has anything to do with whuffie, but there you go...

www.horsepigcow.com/...tting-harder-to-eat-without-it - Preview

horsepigcow tara_hunt blogs whuffie socialtheory socialcritique socialnetworks comments

I believe Google is probably the closest thing we have today to a Whuffie meter. Whuffie, for those who are new here is (and this is my definition):

The sum of the reputation, influence, bridging capital and bonding capital, access to ideas and talent, access to resources, potential access to further resources, saved up favors, accomplishments (resumes, awards, articles, etc.) and the Whuffie of those who you have relationships with.
- Using google as a whuffie meter sets of alarm bells. It restricts whuffie to a reservation of sorts... - on 2008-08-09
Add Sticky Note

04 Aug 08

Night Life Reprogrammed - NYTimes.com

Everything is more intense in NYC, including the geek or nerd "party" scene (meet ups, tweet ups, "ignite" events, etc.). More people = more capital, in terms of creative energy and innovation. (And perhaps headaches... but that's another story...!)

Of course I'd love to figure out how to sustain a mini-version of this right here (Victoria). Vancouver works very hard at it -- but even in Vancouver (I'm told), it's the same people reappearing at the different events (i.e., nowhere near the critical mass of larger US metros). Part of the problem is enticing people to come out -- it's so easy to stay home, after all...

www.nytimes.com/...03webparty.html - Preview

nyt creative_class geek socialtheory ignite meet_ups

IgniteNYC was just one of 12 tech events listed that evening
Now, young Internet entrepreneurs, some holdouts from the old days and a few members of the city’s creative class (and underclass) are engaged in a new type of party, which mashes together Silicon Alley 1.0’s camaraderie and optimism, meetup.com’s spontaneity and informality, Burning Man’s home-brewed creativity, and a technology conference’s devotion to unveiling ideas.
3 more annotations...
- These days many of the ideas are about producing and delivering video content.
  - - interesting, with "prediction" aspects...? - on 2008-08-04
  Add Sticky Note
- some are just attracted to a night life that involves actually talking to creative people doing exciting things, rather than heading out to clubs and bars that beat you into silence with their thundering rhythms.
  “Instead of just going out to drink and be bored,” said Ilana Arazie, whose video blog, Downtown Diary, chronicles her love life, “you’re talking to interesting people who are starting companies and telling great stories.”
- 16 speakers made PowerPoint presentations. Each was allowed 20 slides that auto-advanced after 15 seconds — five minutes total — a modified version of a format pioneered in Japan called “Pecha Kucha,” loosely translated as chitchat.

20 Jul 08

Computer says get a life – and we have | Simon Jenkins - Times Online

Simon Jenkins ponders the seeming paradox that while music cd/ record sales plummet and prices for individual recordings drop as well, live concerts sell out at premium prices. He ponders other, related phenomena, too -- readings by writers, lectures, live performances of any kind: all seem to get more attention (and MONEY) than the products themselves.

He concludes and argues that people are willing to pay for what they want, and what they want is the real, authentic thing (i.e., person), not another technologically mediated simulacrum.

Two things: one, if he's right, this has dire consequences for visual art, unless the visual arts want to devolved strictly into performance art; and two, for those of us who are terrified of public speaking/ public performances, this isn't comforting news. Some of us like the internet because it preserves our sanguinity (if that's a word).

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article4276451.ece - Preview

socialcomputing socialtheory reality face_time business art_reception arts

Futurology seminars have long been obsessed with one question: what next after
the internet? The answer is always the same, a new electronic gizmo. There
will be a novel way of downloading into the ear or eye, a new web phenomenon
or interactive device. Since the invention of the telegraph and gramophone,
innovation is interested only in kit that yields profit. What is becoming
plain, even under the strains of recession, is that the futurologist’s
answer should lie in the realm not of electronics but of reality. It is in
reality television, reality politics, reality entertainment and sport, the
immediate, the active, the present, the live.
Recorded music became overnight what it had not been since the invention of
recording: publicity for live rather than live being publicity for
recording.
11 more annotations...
- What is happening is a reversal of history. Artists can no longer sell the
  products of their genius because the internet supplies it virtually for
  free. What can be sold is that genius in the flesh.
- Nor is the “rise of live” confined to high-profile music, art and sport. The
  fastest growing cultural activity in Britain is literary and music
  festivals.
- These are not financial extravaganzas and pay their performers little or
  nothing, but they draw big crowds to socialise and meet, or at least hear,
  celebrity performers. They generate turnover and employ people. The
  musicians and writers who are their staple input will soon earn more from
  live activity than from mass-produced versions of their work.
  - Ok, I do have a problem with this assessment: if these festivals aren't really making enough money even to pay the performers, what's in it for the performers? Elsewhere Jenkins suggests that performance will pay the bills, yet here he references festivals that draw on free talent. Will that talent make money "in the future" (how far off, anyway)? Is that something to bank on? It's quite a gamble, imo... - on 2008-07-20
  Add Sticky Note
- when a poet’s work can be
  instantly disseminated on the web, the only real income will in future come
  from the gift book market and public recitals. The festival and lecture
  circuit, well exploited by retired politicians, may yet be many a writer’s
  chief source of income.
- Lectures – surely the most archaic form of public entertainment – now cram the
  London what’s-on schedules. Popular debating series such as IQ2 regularly
  sell out at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.
  - Just as with music (and with the Pope, in the next paragraph below), these crowds are getting all this entertainment and experience for free. So where is the business model? (And I merely ask because Jenkins points out that the internet's making so many products *freely* available has wrecked a couple of older business models -- such as CD/ record sales.) So if "live" presence is an alternative to the internet's culture of "free," where is the business model if the crowds we're talking about still aren't paying? Or, in the case of music festivals, the organizers charge the crowds (who pay for tix), but don't make enough money to pay the performers? Hmmm? - on 2008-07-20
  Add Sticky Note
- Cathedrals are booming thanks to the fame of their architecture and choirs.
  - THIS I find very compelling, and something to think about. I worried earlier about visual art, and about how it can compete unless it wants to be "performance" art.
    
    But here's the deal: if the art is *housed* in a building that is practically a performance -- i.e., that attracts an audience by virtue of its famous architecture -- then the art can use that sort of "live" or "reality"-based popularity as its frame or as a stepping stone to access public consciousness. - on 2008-07-20
  Add Sticky Note
- One demonstration of this phenomenon lies in the oldest form of human
  communication, politics. In the early days of the internet in 1992, Ross
  Perot, the Texan tycoon, claimed that he would transform democracy by
  campaigning for the presidency on the web. Bill Clinton responded by
  campaigning old style, from the back of a train.
  
  Sixteen years later, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still barnstorming
  around every key state in their primary election battle. They knew that
  people would not believe in them unless they were physically and visibly
  present on their territory.
  
  The difference of the internet to the campaign lay in sending messages and
  raising money. If it supplanted anything it was other media such as the
  letter post, radio and television. Obama’s online securing of $270m combined
  the e-mail with computer banking to sensational effect. As with show
  business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it.
  Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh.
- The reason why public figures such as Clinton and Tony Blair can command huge
  sums for “personal appearances” is not that people are eager to hear their
  wisdom. That is available on the web for free. The reason is that people pay
  to be in the presence.
- Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while
  ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise
  what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock
  of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the
  market supplies them.
  
  I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They
  crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see
  those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want,
  they will pay for.
- where is the money being made?
  For that’s where we should be”.
- The money is now being made in supplying a public craving not for technology
  but for human experience. It lies in flesh and blood. Live is live.

28 Apr 08

Victoria set to ship criminals home

- interesting idea, but once again this program is another example of overreliance on off- or downloading costs to citizens (the last in the great food chain that runs from Federal through Provincial to Municipal and then Citizen level) that should be borne by other levels of government. See annotation / note.

www.canada.com/...story.html - Preview

downloading criminals victora canada socialtheory

Victoria is seeking the same provincial funding as Vancouver, which received $40,000 from the solicitor general's ministry last month. But a ministry spokesman said the government has not yet made a commitment to give Victoria any grant money.
The provincial money will enable Vancouver to send about 30 people to other parts of Canada. It costs around $2,500 per trip to send a warrant subject and the required police escorts to Toronto by commercial airline, Vancouver police estimate.
So far, Vancouver has shipped 10 people back. It estimates as many as 2,500 criminals in the city are wanted in other provinces.
Some other police departments, such as Edmonton, Lethbridge and London, Ont., have agreed to pay to have their suspects returned. Vancouver police have also started a petition asking Ottawa to fund the program for other forces.
Vancouver's program leans largely on the support of the community to pay the bills. The Vancouver Board of Trade and local citizens have offered to help pay airfares by donating frequent-flyer points.
- Note the last 2 sentences: Joe & Jane Citizen, aka "the community," as last in the food chain of downloading. - on 2008-04-28
Add Sticky Note
a crack-cocaine addict typically steals $2,000 worth of goods a day to support the habit.
1 more annotations...
- In Victoria, about 175 active criminals commit the vast majority of property crimes in the city, police have said.

The sting of poverty, by Drake Bennett - The Boston Globe

March 30/08: "IMAGINE GETTING A bee sting; then imagine getting six more. You are now in a position to think about what it means to be poor, according to Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University."

Fascinating article on a "new" (different?) theory of poverty, which suggests that it's the cumulative effect of one setback after another that incapacitates people from acting on one setback, then the next, and so forth, to "bootstrap" themselves out of poverty. Like the bee stings when they come 6 at a time, you just don't know where to start acting to start making a difference, and so resign yourself to a kind of victimhood or passivity.

www.boston.com/...the_sting_of_poverty - Preview

poverty boston_globe charles_karelis socialtheory

In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.
To an economist, this is irrational behavior.
Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.
Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn't apply to the poor. When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.
7 more annotations...
- Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.
- If Karelis is right, antipoverty initiatives championed all along the ideological spectrum are unlikely to work - from work requirements, time-limited benefits, and marriage and drug counseling to overhauling inner-city education and replacing ghettos with commercially vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods. It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.
- "The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor,"
- The economist's term for the idea Karelis takes issue with is the law of diminishing marginal utility. In brief, it means the more we have of something, the less any additional unit of that thing means to us. It undergirds, among other things, how the US government taxes people. We assume that taking $40,000 in taxes from Warren Buffett will be a lot less onerous to him than to an elementary school teacher, because he has so much more to begin with.
  In many cases, Karelis says, diminishing marginal utility certainly does apply: Our seventh ice cream cone will no doubt be less pleasurable than our first. But the logic flips when we are dealing with privation rather than plenty. To understand why, he argues, we need only think about how we all deal with certain familiar situations.
- Karelis argues that being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn't have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of those costs, some fairly imposing ones still remain, which creates a large disincentive to bestir oneself to work at all.
- "The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity," Karelis says. "My argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty."
- Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. Simply giving the poor money with no strings attached, rather than using it, as federal and state governments do now, to try to encourage specific behaviors - food stamps to make sure money doesn't get spent on drugs or non-necessities, education grants to encourage schooling, time limits on benefits to encourage recipients to look for work - would be just as effective, and with far less bureaucracy. (One federal measure Karelis particularly likes is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, by subsidizing work, helps strengthen the "reliever" effect he identifies.)

10 Apr 08

Study finds gap between editors and readers in ground rules for online conversations - MIT TechReview

Fascinating study regarding the discrepancies between what MSM professionals believe and what its reading public believes. The latter think that anonymous comments are ok; that journalists/ authors participating in online conversations with readers is ok; and that expressions of personal views by journalists are ok. The 'professionals' believe the exact opposite. Hmmm.

www.technologyreview.com/...20542 - Preview

mit_techreview socialmedia socialtheory conversations media newspapers blogging

Newspaper readers agree with editors on the basics of what makes good
journalism, but they are more apt to want looser rules for online
conversations, a new study on news credibility has found.
Online Journalism Credibility Study released Tuesday
by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and the Donald W. Reynolds
Journalism Institute at the University
of Missouri
3 more annotations...
- Some 70 percent of editors surveyed said requiring commenters to disclose
  their identities would support good journalism, while only 45 percent of the
  public did. Similarly, 58 percent of editors said letting journalists join
  online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism, but only 36
  percent of the public agreed.
- ''There's some indication that readers are looking for something more online.
  Whether it's information about our expertise, our knowledge, our background,
  I'm not really sure.''
- Editors and readers also agreed on the desirability of depth, such as links
  to content published elsewhere and databases or other information visitors can
  explore on their own.

08 Jan 08

Arts study a culture shock (Toronto Star)

I read something about this study last week, can't recall where, and generally think it's a bit silly anyway. But what catches my attention in this Toronto Star article by Peter Goddard is how it brings out that visual art is currently at the very bottom of the totem pole. I see that in my own habits, too, and wonder why it's so. Is it because too much of the art being produced is uninteresting?, can't compete with other media or arts (like theatre, music, etc.)? Has visual art become somehow irrelevant, and if so, when did this happen and why? Does it have to do with time, with speed? Or simply relevance -- and format?

www.thestar.com/...290794 - Preview

arts cultural_support culture popular_opinion socialtheory studies surveys trends

Forget class versus trash, the elite versus the masses.
Divide culture consumers into four new groups, says an international study Oxford University researchers released late last month that will have far-reaching results for arts support everywhere.
"Univores," "Omnivores," "Paucivores" and "Inactives" are the new categories we can all find ourselves in. Which one depends on whether we believe Britney is a huge tabloid star or an area in northwestern France where Impressionist painters spent their summers.
But no matter what group is discussed, the visual arts do not figure very high on anyone's to-do list.
"When it comes to the visual arts, you find there's a sizeable part of the adult population that doesn't participate at all."
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- "Univores," the largest of the four groups, consume great quantities of pop culture – TV, pop music and Hollywood flicks – and little else. "But there are no truly popular forms in the visual arts that have as wide a media exposure as does pop music," says Goldthorpe. Tak Wing Chan was his colleague in the study for the Economic and Social Research Council in England.
- "Omnivores," the next biggest group, includes people who go to the ballet, symphony or opera on occasion while still buying lots of pop culture.
  For purposes of the study, cultural consumption was split into three basic categories: theatre, dance and the movies; music of all sorts; and the visual arts.
- Only "Paucivores," a decidedly small group, may be found at a blockbuster museum opening. But that's about the extent of it. Paucivores don't care much for contemporary art.
- The "Inactives," are the Goldthorpe-Chan version of couch potatoes, hunkered down in front of the television day and night. They're found in every culture. Along with the U.K., data was assembled in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Israel, Chile and the United States and analyzed by 13 researchers.
- In England, the report has caused something of a stir because it blew holes in the idea of an upper class forming a cultural elite.
- "We are unable to identify any numerically significant group of cultural consumers whose consumption is essentially confined to high cultural forms and who reject, or at least do not participate in, more popular forms," says the report.
  Status counts, not class. And status is defined by income not by culture.
  In short, the very idea of "pop culture" is a misnomer.
  There is no pop culture. Pop is culture.
- "Status is now attached to material consumption, not cultural consumption," Goldthorpe tells me. "People with status show who they are though expensive cars and houses rather than by going to museums and the like."
  Indeed, the report itself hammers home the blunt truth that "income has no effect on determining" the kind of culture being consumed. The bottom line? People who could help symphonies survive or back the arts don't want to.
  They are "self-excluded," says the report, "rather than socially excluded."
  - - sounds grim (for arts).... - on 2008-01-08
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- Better education does little to change this bleak picture. "There is a sizeable number of people in this group who don't participate" in the elite arts, Goldthorpe says
  Why?
  "The short answer is, I don't know," says Goldthorpe.
- Unfortunately, the Chan-Goldthorpe report will play into the hands of reactionary politicians who question whether the arts should be funded at all, since no one gives a hoot about them.
  Already the Labour government in Britain is showing signs of cutting back its cultural support as a way of funneling money to "the demands of the Olympic Games," Goldthorpe says.
  - - yes, the old libertarian argument, in action again... - on 2008-01-08
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Internet Research Conference - CFP

The Internet Research Conference in Copenhagen (October 2008) lays out its call for papers. The theme is " Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place."
Synopsis:
In the past few years, new forms of net-based communities are emerging, distributed on various websites and services, and making use of several media platforms and genres to stay connected. Now, as mobile and location-based technologies are reintroducing "place" as an important aspect in the formation of communal and social activities, it is time to consider and rethink the concept of online or virtual communities. Not forgetting the lessons we have learned from studying the early virtual communities, how do we describe, analyse, theorise and design the communities and social formations of the early 21st century? How do we address the blurring of boundaries between places and communities on- and offline.

We call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and academic communities that address the conference themes.

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, economic, and/or aesthetic aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

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28 Dec 07

Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places (PDF)

The abstract: "The mobile phone has become the central node of the ensemble of portable objects that urbanites carry with them as they negotiate their way through information-rich global cities. This paper reports on a study conducted in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London where we tracked young professionals’ use of the portable objects. By examining devices such as music players, credit cards, transit cards, keys, and ID cards in addition to mobile phones, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s identity and activities, mediating relationships with people, places, and institutions. Portable informational objects reshape and personalize the affordances of urban space. Laptops transform cafés into personal offices. Reward and membership cards keep track of individuals’ use of urban services. Music players and mobile devices colonize the in-between times of waiting and transit with the logic of personal communications and media consumption. Our focus in this paper is not on the relational communication that has been the focus of most mobile communication studies, but rather on how portable devices mediate relationships to urban space and infrastructures. We identify three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities."

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Locative_Commons.pdf (application/pdf Object)

- 5-page PDF by Marc Tuters; relates to / mentioned in Mobile City blog entry on locative media/ Starbucks vs. Boulevard culture, urbanism. "At stake is not only setting the terms for public access to the vast databases of open source information but constructing the sustaining architecture to do so. If in the construction of the public nation state, the 19th Century was defined by railroads and early tele-communications networks and 20th Century the development of the social safety nets, then the 21st Century will be recognised for making available the digital domains to the public at large in the tradition of furthering our concept and implementation of democracy."

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Mimi Ito - Statics: Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places

- portal page to PDF on locative media, chapter for "The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices"

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The Mobile City » Blog Archive » Towards a Starbucks-urbanism?

- discussion of Starbucks coffee house culture as locative networked culture where people "camp" with their media (laptop etc) to work, network, inform themselves -- but they're not by a long shot isolating themselves from other people. In fact, they choose these locations b/c of what they offer in terms of ambience, connection with others, feel, and culture. Calls into question Habermas's bleak assessment of the death of coffee house culture...

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Over Christmas I reviewed some literature on locative media, and came across a handful of texts that addressed the changing role of the coffee house in our urban culture. Perhaps we are seeing a paradigm shift here: away from a BLVD-urbanism of public culture and towards a Starbucks Urbanism of a networked culture?
This is not your great-grandfather’s coffeehouse, found on a tree-lined European Boulevard with an outside terrace. It is no longer the coffeehouses that functioned as the proverbial meeting place or ‘public sphere’ where citizens irrespective of their background (as long as they wern’t women or other excluded groups that Habermas in his theory on the emerging public sphere overlooked) could engage in discussion with one another.
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- the public sphere was not primarily a physical place, rather it was a discursive site where a literate public could conduct rational and critical debate. The assembly and dialogue that constituted this emerging public sphere occurred as much within the pages of newly circulated printed materials as it did within the walls of the coffeehouse.
  - - "then" - on 2007-12-28
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- In Starbucks people congregate not so much to communicate with one another. Rather they use it as a comfortable semi-public base from which they keep in touch with their personal friends or collegues through the 3 and 4-letter acronyms that make up our network society: GSM, SMS, UMTS, WIFI. As Marc Tuters writes in another key essay on locative media, this emerging Starbucks culture has often been described as antithetical to the public culture of the coffeehouses.
  - - "now" - on 2007-12-28
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- Particularly in the post-911 world, the function of these places to provide random encounter is practically eliminated in these insulted pay-access locations under the operative logic of ‘risk aversion’. Based on these observations, sociologists and urban theorists have developed a narrative of loss and decline in the contemporary literature on public space
- Yet other more empirical research studies, such as Portable objects in three global cities: the personalization of urban places by Ito, Anderson and Okabe show that this binary opposition is too simplistic. In the article they describe a number of tactics through which people appropriate urban space. One of them is camping:
  
  One brings a personal media device and works with it in a public space. Yet the goal is not to completely shut off public space, the public space is especially chosen because one finds it an agreeable location to work from. Like reading a paper in a café rather than at home. … They put down roots that have temporal limits, but are more extended than commuters who are simply passing through.
  
  Camping is not so much about shutting out the environment: ‘people saw value in residing for a period of time in a desirable location. Just as people seek out beautiful campsites to set out there gear and reside for short periods of time, urbanites find attractive public places to temporarily set up camp with the help of their information technologies.’ For campers Starbucks is not a proverbial non-place, but a local place they engage with, where they perform their identity, yet at the same time keep in touch with absent others, still being part of their ‘full-time intimate communities’
  - - think about the difference btw "camping" and old coffee house culture... - on 2007-12-28
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- We argue that culture is no longer localized in time and space, but neither is it non-place. Instead, individuals inhabit a physical world of simultaneous environments, of localized time and space as well as of multiple telematic worlds in which they can be co-present with others at a distance.
  
  Yet, this still leaves some questions. To what extent are the sites of Starbucks-urbanism parochial rather than public spaces? And if they are mainly parochial, to what extend is that a threat to urban culture? Are critics clinging on to old, nostalgic ideas about a public culture? Or could new locative media ‘discovery’ services introduce new forms of contingency into Starbucks-urbanism?

20 Dec 07

Technology Review: What Your Phone Knows About You

Sandy Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, talks about "reality mining."
- this is page 2 of a 2-page article

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You can really see things in a way that you never could before--a God's-eye view. One of the examples I've been stuck on recently relates to how transformative Google Earth has been. Imagine having something where you can see all the people moving around on a map. Think about SARS in Hong Kong. What if in a particular apartment building, nobody left for work that day? You could identify a major health problem in 12 hours instead of two weeks. Another example is the social health of communities. It's known that social integration, or how well people mix, correlates with whether or not a community is thriving. With reality mining, you can actually see social integration, as it happens or doesn't happen. Once everyone can see it, then you can start to have transparent political discussions. Why isn't the mayor putting more sidewalks and crosswalks in this area? Could more community events make the area more livable?
- - that does presuppose that EVERYONE has a cell phone, though, and I'd bet that there are plenty of instances where populations that are vectors for contagious diseases don't typically carry cell phones, for example. Not to mention that (as the interviewer says in the next question), "this all gets very creepy very fast." - on 2007-12-20
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But we definitely need to talk about it and figure out a new deal for privacy--to use this data and not be abused.
- - d'uh, no kidding, Sherlock! - on 2007-12-20
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- You know, excuse the example, but I've been in a downtown somewhere and I don't know where the nearest bathroom is, or it's raining and I'd like a taxi. I'd give up a little bit of personal information to find these things.
  - - but there are urban services being introduced where you can pull that information from your cell phone, w/out giving your cell phone all sorts of access about yourself. - on 2007-12-20
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- Reality mining will help us see ourselves and, in an anonymous way, compare ourselves to peers. And I see organizations and companies using this to help people collaborate more effectively and do their jobs more efficiently.
  - - jeepers, just when I thought Michel Foucault had become really unfashionable, here're shades of Discipline and Punish! It's like Jeremy Bentham's Panopticum gone digital! Brrr... - on 2007-12-20
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Technology Review: What Your Phone Knows About You

Sandy Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, talks about "reality mining." Pay attention, interesting stuff!
- this is page 1 of a 2-page article

www.technologyreview.com/...19968 - Preview

cell_phones mit_techreview sandy_pentland socialcomputing socialnetworks socialtheory

Based on phone calls and the devices' physical proximity to other people's phones (as measured by Bluetooth), Pentland and researcher Nathan Eagle developed social-network models that were more accurate and more nuanced than those constructed from the subjects' self-reports.
Sifting through cell-phone data to get at the truth of people's social interactions falls under the umbrella of an emerging field that Pentland has dubbed "reality mining." And he thinks that social networks are just the beginning. The same techniques can be applied to other sets of cell-phone data to help people communicate more effectively, manage their time better, and even make their neighborhoods more livable. And it's all thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones--the ultimate data-collection machines.
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- the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you've never seen in your life. That's an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic.
  - - and by making it automatic, you make part of an algorithm... - on 2007-12-20
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- It's about making the "dumb" information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life.
- Today's cell phones are on us all the time, and they come with hardware that can act as sensors for your environment. For instance, if Bluetooth is turned on, then the phone can see and be seen by other Bluetooth devices. You can start to make a record of the Bluetooth-enabled devices you encounter throughout the day. Then you can figure out, based on the frequency [with which] you encounter other people's Bluetooth phones, what sort of relationship you have with them.
  - - I think I get it, although it does sound a bit strange to let a device figure out what kind of relationship I have with someone...! - on 2007-12-20
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- And all phones have built-in microphones that can be used to analyze your tone of voice, how long you talk, how often you interrupt people. These patterns can tell you what roles people play in groups: you can figure out who the leader is and who the followers are. It's folk psychology, and some of the stuff people may already know, but we haven't been able to measure it, at such a large scale, before these phones.
  - - ok, now it's starting to sound a bit creepy... - on 2007-12-20
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The Mobile City » Blog Archive » Towards a Starbucks-urbanism?

Technology Review: What Your Phone Knows About You

Technology Review: What Your Phone Knows About You

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