Monthly Archive for July, 2011

Networks Without a Cause, A Critique of Social Media

Published on July 29, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From the Institute of Network Cultures

Networks Without a Cause, A Critique of Social Media by Geert Lovink (forthcoming January 2012)

Author: Geert Lovink / Publisher: Polity Press 2012

With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’, at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? Networks Without a Cause examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture.

With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path- breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the WikiLeaks saga. This book offers a powerful message to media practitioners and theorists: let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud. Probing but never pessimistic, Lovink draws from his long history in media research to offer a critique of the political structures and conceptual powers embedded in the technologies that shape our daily lives.

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How Technology Makes Us Better Social Beings

Published on July 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Megan Gambino, Smithsonian.com

About a decade ago, Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, wrote a book called Bowling Alone. In it, he explained how Americans were more disconnected from each other than they were in the 1950s. They were less likely to be involved in civic organizations and entertained friends in their homes about half as often as they did just a few decades before.

So what is the harm in fewer neighborhood poker nights? Well, Putnam feared that fewer get-togethers, formal or informal, meant fewer opportunities for people to talk about community issues. More than urban sprawl or the fact that more women were working outside the home, he attributed Americans’ increasingly isolated lifestyle to television. Putnam’s concern, articulated by Richard Flacks in a Los Angeles Times book review, was with “the degree to which we have become passive consumers of virtual life rather than active bonders with others.”

Then, in 2006, sociologists from the University of Arizona and Duke University sent out another distress signal—a study titled “Social Isolation in America.” In comparing the 1985 and 2004 responses to the General Social Survey, used to assess attitudes in the United States, they found that the average American’s support system—or the people he or she discussed important matters with—had shrunk by one-third and consisted primarily of family. This time, the Internet and cellphones were allegedly to blame.

Photo Courtesy of Ed Quinn

Study Finds That Memory Works Differently in the Age of Google

Published on July 23, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From ColumbiaNews

The rise of Internet search engines like Google has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to research by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published July 14 in Science.

“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” said Sparrow. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

Sparrow’s research reveals that we forget things we are confident we can find on the Internet. We are more likely to remember things we think are not available online. And we are better able to remember where to find something on the Internet than we are at remembering the information itself. This is believed to be the first research of its kind into the impact of search engines on human memory organization.

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Robots: Zoobotics

Published on July 20, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Staff, The Economist

UNTIL recently, most robots could be thought of as belonging to one of two phyla. The Widgetophora, equipped with claws, grabs and wheels, stuck to the essentials and did not try too hard to look like anything other than machines (think R2-D2). The Anthropoidea, by contrast, did their best to look like their creators—sporting arms with proper hands, legs with real feet, and faces (think C-3PO). The few animal-like robots that fell between these extremes were usually built to resemble pets (Sony’s robot dog, AIBO, for example) and were, in truth, not much more than just amusing toys.

They are toys no longer, though, for it has belatedly dawned on robot engineers that they are missing a trick. The great natural designer, evolution, has come up with solutions to problems that neither the Widgetophora nor the Anthropoidea can manage. Why not copy these proven models, the engineers wondered, rather than trying to outguess 4 billion years of natural selection?

The result has been a flourishing of animal-like robots. It is not just dogs that engineers are copying now, but shrews complete with whiskers, swimming lampreys, grasping octopuses, climbing lizards and burrowing clams. They are even trying to mimic insects, by making robots that take off when they flap their wings. As a consequence, the Widgetophora and the Anthropoidea are being pushed aside. The phylum Zoomorpha is on the march.

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Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences

Published on July 17, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences by Marcus Breen is now available from the Technology and Society series.

The Internet has transformed the social relations that were once managed by the powers that be. As a rapidly maturing communications technology, the Internet has brought people together even while it has reinforced privatism. The desktop computer, the laptop, the cellular and mobile phone, the Global Positoning System, the pilotless drone aircraft, video games and Government documents courtesy of Wikileaks, all are connected on the network of networks. Together these converged elements of a global socio-technical system offer wonderful possibilities for human emancipation, even while those ideas collide with established ideas of civility and decency.

Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach, Uprising examines the way transgressive knowledge circulates in places and spaces where communication regulation has been removed. In doing so, the book offers a new approach to proletarianization. It is based on the theory that the deregulation of the digital infrastructure allows transgressive knowledge to be mobilized in ways that remake political economy. The current moment sees the Internet opening up questions about social organization, power and democracy. The unintended consequences that are attached to this analysis of the Internet are discussed in research about pornography and jihad. These case studies show how proletarianization can be used to understand the Internet, culture and society.

Marcus Breen is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, Boston.

A Webless Social Network

Published on July 5, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By A.A.K., The Economist

INDIA may be home to software giants, like Wipro or Infosys, which have thrived by harnessing the internet’s potential, but few of the country’s 1.2 billion people have so far embraced the web. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reported that at the end of March the country had just 8.8m broadband connections. By contrast, it boasts some 812m mobile subscribers. According to Gartner, a market-research outfit, in 2013 Indians will send almost 192 billion text messages.

With 57m registered users, Just Dial is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Indians’ love of texting. Set up in 1996 as a sort of phone-based yellow pages, it initially offered a fixed-line voice-based service dispensing information about the nearest coffee shop, electrician, tarot-card reader, hospital, or whatever else the caller happened to be looking for. Many users preferred it to the clunky, state-published phone directories. Cost was limited since all queries were handled in a single call, by a human assistant. “We would read out information which they would then write down on a piece of paper,” recalls V.S.S. Mani, the company’s founder.

Then, in 2002, India discovered mobile phones. Soon, the cheapest handsets cost as little as 900 rupees ($18), with call rates as low as 1 rupee per minute. The pieces of paper were replaced by a text message. Today, 95% of Just Dial’s callers ask for the response to be texted to them; this is done within a minute of their call.

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Announcing Plenary Speaker Victoria Vesna for the 2012 Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference

Published on July 4, 2011 in Conference, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

We are pleased to welcome Victoria Vesna to the 2012 Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference as one of our plenary speakers.

Victoria Vesna is a media artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci center at the School of the Arts and California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI). She is currently a Visiting Professor and Director of Research at Parsons Art, Media + Technology, the New School for Design in New York and a senior researcher at IMéRA – Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille, France and Artist in Residence at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bristol. Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Victoria has exhibited her work in over twenty solo exhibitions, more than seventy group shows, has been published in excess of twenty papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow, Minnesota Press. In Press is Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. Edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy. Intellect Press, 2011.

For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website.

Christiane Paul to Join as Plenary Speaker for the 2012 Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference

Published on July 2, 2011 in Conference, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Christiane Paul to the 2012 Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference as one of our plenary speakers.

Christiane Paul has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally on art and technology. An expanded edition of her book Digital Art (Thames& Hudson, UK, 2003) as well as her edited anthology New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press) were published in 2008. As Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she curated several exhibitions—including Profiling (2007), Data Dynamics (2001) and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial—as well as artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to Internet art. Other recent curatorial work includes Feedforward – The Angel of History (co-curated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain, Oct. 2009); INDAF Digital Art Festival (Incheon, Korea, Aug. 2009); and Scalable Relations (Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, CA; as well as galleries at UCSD, UCLA and UCSB, 2008-09). Dr. Paul has previously taught in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York (1999-2008); the Digital+Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design (2005-08); the San Francisco Art Institute and the Center of New Media at the University of California at Berkeley (2008).

For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website.