… The report “The impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy”, published today by the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), finds that in 2008, 41% of EU Internet users were engaged in social computing activities through Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs, photo and video sharing, online multi-player games and collaborative platforms for content creation and sharing. This percentage rises to 64% if users aged under 24 only are considered.
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Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. You would probably have had to pay millions of dollars to create the necessary software on a proprietary operating system. The effort would have required a huge team of people taking many years. Since Google is a search engine, it most likely would have been given to the phone company to design and run. If you were using X.25, the international networking standard (the Internet equivalent of its time), you would have been charged for each packet of information that you sent or received, in a network in which each network operator had a bilateral agreement with every other network operator. This total project probably would have taken a decade, cost a billion dollars, and not have worked very well.
In fact, the actual cost of building and launching the first Google server was probably only thousands of dollars using standard PC components, mostly open-source software as the base, and connecting to the Stanford University network, which immediately made the service available, at no additional cost, to everyone else on the Internet.
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… The idea that digital and human memory work differently, and that we fail to recognize the difference between the two at our peril, is something I’ve been writing about for a while. So I was very interested to see a review by Henry Farrell in Times Higher Education of Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger’s new bookDelete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. It sounds like a book I need to read… or at least footnote!
At its heart, his case against digital memory is humanist. He worries that it will not only change the way we organise society, but it will damage our identities. Identity and memory interact in complicated ways. Our ability to forget may be as important to our social relationships as our ability to remember. To forgive may be to forget; when we forgive someone for serious transgressions we in effect forget how angry we once were at them.
Delete argues that digital memory has the capacity both to trap us in the past and to damage our trust in our own memories. When I read an old email describing how angry I once was at someone, I am likely to find myself becoming angry again, even if I have since forgiven the person. I may trust digital records over my own memory, even when these records are partial or positively misleading. Forgetting, in contrast, not only serves as a valuable social lubricant, but also as a bulwark of good judgment, allowing us to give appropriate weight to past events that are important, and to discard things that are not. Digital memory - which traps us in the past - may weaken our ability to judge by distorting what we remember.
Cierre de soitu.es en Cámara Abierta, octubre 2009 (via soituesvideos)
Here are the five stories that appeared in the special “Digital Cities” feature of Wired UK’s November issue.
Words on the street
by Adam Greenfield
Ubiquitous, networked information will reshape our cities.
‘Sense-able’ urban design
by Carlo Ratti
Digital elements blanket our environment: transforming our cities, informing their citizens and improving economic, social and environmental sustainability.
London after the great 2047 flu outbreak
by Geoff Manaugh
After the Dutch flu outbreak of 2047 decimated greater London, the politics of the city began to change: everything turned medical.
Your neighbourhood is now Facebook Live
by Andrew Blum
When it comes to technology and cities, today’s thrilling development is that social networking is enhancing urban places [and this is] significant for the future of our cities.
The transport of tomorrow is already here
by Joe Simpson
The main impact on city planning will be mediated through transport infrastructures, freeing up road space as it does so.
Now critics do raise issues about access to technology, and the more negative or nefarious purposes to which the same technology can, and will, be put. But what isn’t at all clear to me is how the imaginary can be used as critique. I wonder how exactly might technologists, designers and citizens proceed to reimagine the city in more critical ways. Any ideas?
Pregunta final de la revisión de una serie de reflexiones recientes sobre ciudad y tecnología:
CitySourced is a real time mobile civic engagement tool. CitySourced provides a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution; an opportunity for government to use technology to save money and improve accountability to those they govern; and a positive, collaborative platform for real action. Our platform is called CitySourced, as it empowers everyday citizens to use their smart phones to make their cities a better place. CitySourced is powered by FreedomSpeaks, the leader in interactive civic engagement.
Jack Dorsey, who came up with the initial idea for Twitter and co-founded the company often talks about his fascination with cities, mass transit, and bike messengers. He says it was this fascination that led to the inspiration for Twitter.
Dennis Crowley, the founder of Dodgeball and Foursquare, shares that fascination. When I first talked to him about Foursquare, he told me that he “tries to build things that make cities easier to use”.
Steven Johnson, the author and co-founder of Outside.in was inspired to create that company when he was writing the Ghost Map which is about the urban scourge of cholera and how a map of the Soho neighborhood in London solved the question of the source of cholera.
Steven’s co-founder of Outside.in is John Geraci, who I first met at ITP’s senior project show when he was showing off a cool service called Found City which I blogged about at the time. John is now running an incubator for entrepreneurs that want to reinvent how cities and urban governments work called DIYCity.
And one of the crowd favorites at TC50 this past week was a company calledCitySourced, which built “a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution”. This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in my “public channel” post earlier this year.
These and many others are our new urban architects. I am not suggesting that the traditional roles of urban planning and architecture aren’t still important to our cities. They are and will continue to be…
URBZ MASHUP Mumbai explores, challenges, subverts, questions and celebrates Mumbai’s ideas and practices of heritage enshrined in its colonial (pre and post included) architecture, arts, culture and politics.
The MASHUP activities cover the oldest neighbourhoods of the city. Girgaum, where Khotachiwadi – the much threatened and celebrated trophy heritage habitat exists – exists just a stone’s throw away from Chowpatty beach which is one of the most historic sites for social dissent and free expression. A fifteen minute walk from there takes you to Crawford Market – Mumbai’s oldest and favourite shopping destination. In between lies a maze of dense streets and bazaars that testify to the city’s numerous communities who made the city what it is, a city of shops, markets, dreams and collective aspirations.
In this maze lie stories, images and ideas of a city that provide newer definitions of what it means to be a Mumbaikar, through the many languages the city speaks in, the many cultural practices it invents, its changing and evolving built forms, its bazaars and markets that are as vital and dense as the air the city breathes – making the question of its identity richer than anything the city officially celebrates. Way richer than the imagination of its political leaders and much deeper than the possibilities framed by its most conscientious citizens.
The URBZ MASHUP welcomes participants from Mumbai, India and the rest of the world to use their skills and imaginations and dive into streets, walk into homes, converse, make images, play, then reinterpret, examine, and recreate newer imaginative frameworks that do justice to the city’s layered, dense and complex life.
When it comes to Internet software and websites, there is a lot of confusion about the meaning of the words “free” and “open.” “Free” can mean “no cost” or “politically and legally free.” In using the term “free software,” Richard Stallman famously distinguished between the two meanings in his immortal phrase, “free as in freedom, not free as in free beer.”
So…assuming that we are using this latter definition of “free,” is there a difference between “free” and “open”? Isn’t an open Internet the same as a (politically) “free” Internet?
Well, it depends. A lot of commercial ventures on the Web like to be as open as possible because it attracts more readers and viewers, which in turn boosts a website’s advertising revenue. In this scenario,open access = greater commercial prospectsl. But does openness mean that a site is (politically) free as well? Is an open website the same as a commons?
A recent article by Phoebe Connelly, Web Editor of The American Prospect, dives into this issue by looking at the demise of GeoCities, one of the earliest online communities. GeoCities, which started in 1994, was a crude version of blogging and social networking. The site made it easy for Internet users to build their own free (no-cost) websites, and it let people create their own user profiles and organize materials by topic categories. GeoCities was a community in which individuals could build their own personalized spaces…
Once the Internet applications got sophisticated enough to host all sorts of online social life, the question arose: Who owns the information, photos and other digital material placed on the platform? If the materials are all accessible and shareable, does that mean that the space is a commons?
No. I call such sites “faux commons.” The corporate host is in business to make money, and their terms of service are typically crafted to advance that goal. If the company goes bankrupt, or if it decides that it needs to impose new terms of service on its website users to enhance revenue, what then of the community? What happens to the shared resource?
The community is subservient to the company, and the company may own the content and can dictate how the site is run. Corporate spaces come with “terms of service” agreements that lay out the rules users must abide by and what control they agree to surrender in exchange for using the product…
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P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » We need Open Scholars [Excerpt from a proposal and thoughtpiece by Gideon Burton. Definición de “open scholar”] |
