Call for Papers

2013 Special Theme:
Organize, Challenge, Re-Imagine: New Media and Social Movement

Join fellow Technology Community members and discuss your shared interest in the complex and subtle relationships between technology, knowledge and society. The community interacts through an innovative, annual face-to-face conference, as well as year-round virtual relationships in a weblog, peer reviewed journal and book imprint- exploring the affordances of the new digital media. Members of this knowledge community include academics, technologists, consultants, educators and research students.

If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, click here.

To submit a proposal, click here.

Please note that if your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the Conference.

Registration

Those who wish to attend this conference, especially those who have submitted their paper proposals, should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options or to register for the 2013 Technology Conference, click here.

Themes

• Technologies for Human Use
• Technologies for Participatory Citizenship
• Technologies for Autonomous Communities
• Technologies for New Learning
• Technologies for Common Knowledge
• Technologies for Development

Asking 150 contemporary scientists, intellectuals and artists how the internet changes the way they think is a bit like giving the Large Hadron Collider an extra four notches on its speed-dial. You know they’re going to use it to the max, smashing up ideas and generating spin-offs, though perhaps picking up a few radiation-burns along the way. Thus it proves with this book on “the net’s impact on our minds and future” – regularly illuminating, but sometimes intriguingly conservative, in response to the crisply formulated question.

Edge.org, the site which yearly generates these billowing steam-clouds, is itself worth a critical query or two. Its founder, John Brockman, is a counter-cultural hustler turned literary agent to the science elites. Many of the Edge participants are clients of his, so there’s a faint whiff of the performing don to many of these short essays as they tap out routines that will wow the TED crowd or close the literary deal. But this pecuniary tang makes Edge.org a bona-fide marketplace of ideas, and thus a good data-set from which to assess the intellectual climate of the North and the West of the planet.

What’s surprising is the significant minority of “Distractionistas” here: those who believe that the internet’s compelling, always-on nature is shallowing and hollowing our capacity for reflection, extended argument, even the seat of our consciousness. Brian Knutsen and Thomas Metzinger claim our ability to maintain our attention is the core of selfhood. The way the net pulverises our focus turns us into “Public Dreamers”, displaying “dementia, intoxication, infantilisation”. More…

GEORGE CHURCH, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director, Center for Computational Genetics, and Science Advisor to 23 and Me, and J. CRAIG VENTER, Founder of Synthetic Genomics, Inc. and President of the J. Craig Venter Institute and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, taught the Edge Master Class 2009: “A Short Course In Synthetic Genomics” at The Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood, the weekend of July 24th-26th. On Saturday the 25th the class traveled by bus to Space X near LAX, where Sessions 1-4 were taught by George Church. On Sunday, the Class was held at The Andaz in West Hollywood. Craig Venter taught Session 5 and George Church taught Session 6. The topics covered over the course of a rigorous 2-day progam of six lectures included:

What is life, origins of life, in vitro synthetic life, mirror-life, metabolic engineering for hydrocarbons & pharmaceuticals, computational tools, electronic-biological interfaces, nanotech-molecular-manufacturing, biosensors, accelerated lab evolution, engineered personal stem cells, multi-virus-resistant cells, humanized-mice, bringing back extinct species, safety/security policy.

The entire Master Class is available in high quality HDEdge Video (about 6 hours). More…

Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an exceptionally good post with an exceptionally good title: “The Triumph of Kodakery.” Inspired by the sad news that Eastman Kodak may be on the verge of bankruptcy, he points out that the dream the company was built on–making photography so effortless that it’s everywhere, and enjoyed by everybody–is hardly in trouble. It’s just that its purest expression today is the camera phone, not a Kodak camera that takes Kodak film that’s processed by a Kodak lab.

The dream originated in the brain of the gentleman in the above photo, George Eastman (1854-1932). He was the founder of Eastman Kodak, and he didn’t just start one of the most important companies in the history of consumer technology products. He played as important a role as anyone in inventing the idea of consumer technology products.

Even more than such other pioneering technologist-entrepreneurs as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford, Eastman seems astoundingly contemporary. If he showed up in Silicon Valley today, he’d be right at home. (Actually, he might have as good a shot as anyone at fixing what ails Kodak.) More…

Image via Technologizer.com

High school drop out and bank clerk George Eastman’s technological breakthrough in the late 1870s and 1880s was the development of dry film.

Previous to Eastman’s invention, photography was an expensive, cumbersome and messy hobby. Cameras were enormous and the wet film required processing straight away.

In September 1888, New York-based Eastman registered the made-up brand name “Kodak” and offered the first branded camera, a handheld box-shaped model sold with the promise, “You press the button – we do the rest.” More…

WHILE the panoramic view of ocean, mountains and city never ceases to enthrall, living half way up a hillside, over three miles (five kilometres) from the nearest telephone exchange, means putting up with a pretty awful DSL internet connection. Even in the still of the night, download speeds rarely top 700 kilobits a second. Yes, cable television snakes its way through the hillside community. But, no, swapping excellent satellite television for abysmal cable—just to get faster broadband—would be the worst of all possible deals. Fibre-to-the-kerb? If only.

Indeed, having waited fruitlessly for years for Verizon to lay its long-promised FiOS optical fibre to his front door, your correspondent finally abandoned all hope last year. When tackled, an engineer servicing a neighbour’s telephone confided that the carrier had ceased rolling out fibre, other than in a handful of inner-city areas where it was under contract to do so. In other words, DSL users beyond the suburbs were on their own.

The admission was half expected. Ever since the world’s larger carriers followed the lead set by NTT DoCoMo in Japan, it had become clear that the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless standard was going to be the wave of the future—and not just for mobile communications. More…

Image from The Economist

Contents of this issue:

Técnica, Normatividad y Sobrenaturaleza
Ontología Para un Mundo de Artefactos
Jesús Vega Encabo

El Esfuerzo de Vivir Ocioso
Carlos Mellizo

La Innovación Orteguiana en la “Circunstancia” Tecnológica Contemporánea
Un Análisis Crítico 75 Años Después
Ramón Queraltó

Técnica y Pensamiento en Ortega y Gasset
Alejandro Martinez Carrasco

Razón Vital de la Técnica
Ignacio Sánchez Cámara

La Técnica como Manera Humana de Forjar la Vida
Perspectivas filosófico-pedagógicas de la “Meditación de la técnica”
Margarida I. Almeida Amoedo

Ortega contra Pero Grullo
Estrategias retóricas en Meditación de la Tecnica
Thomas Mermall

La Filosofía de la Educación de Ortega y Gasset
Una crítica indirecta a las modas pedagógicas de hoy
Inger Enkvist

Para una Ética Orteguiana de la Técnica
Monsieur Homais, el gitano y el esquimal como paradigmas
Béatrice Fonck

THE Internet likes you, really likes you. It offers you so much, just a mouse click or finger tap away. Go Christmas shopping, find restaurants, locate partying friends, tell the world what you’re up to. Some of the finest minds in computer science, working at start-ups and big companies, are obsessed with tracking your online habits to offer targeted ads and coupons, just for you.

But now — nothing personal, mind you — the Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world. To be sure, the economy of Internet self-gratification is thriving. Web start-ups for the consumer market still sprout at a torrid pace. And young corporate stars seeking to cash in for billions by selling shares to the public are consumer services — the online game company Zynga last week, and the social network giant Facebook, whose stock offering is scheduled for next year.

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.

To Read More…

Image via The New York Times

Volume 7, Issue 4 contains:

• Sustaining Information and Communication Technology use among Canadians with at Least One Activity Limitation by Wendy Young, Jared Clarke, George Klima, Veeresh Gadag, Lan Gien and Irene Hardill.
• Analyzing Factors Influencing Students’ Productive Use of Computers: A Structural Equation Model by Ove Edvard Hatlevik.
• How Far Can We Reach? International Audiences in Online Museums Communities by Natalia Grincheva.
• Implications of Open-source Social Networking on Entrepreneurship by Emad Rahim.
• Assessing Pupils’ Perceptions of Schoolyard Habitats with the Use of Photoshop Drawings by Maria Savvaidou-Kambouropoulou and Michael Skoumios.
• Developing a Collaborative Health Informatics System to Foster Inter-agency Collaboration and Communication during Public Health Emergencies: Remote and Isolated First Nation Communities of Sub-arctic Ontario, Canada by Nadia A. Charania, Christine D. Barbeau, Daniel D. McCarthy, Donald Cowan and Leonard J. S. Tsuji.
• Speculative Art and Design Relationship with Communication Technology by Pauline de Souza.
• Ortega’s Tragicomedy of Technology: Our Starring Role by Langdon Winner.
• Investigating Risk Factors Affecting Infant Mortality Rates in the United States by Chau-Kuang Chen.
• The Relationship Between Good Governance and Foreign Direct Investment in East Asia’s Knowledge-based Economic Growth by Sajit Chandra Debnath.

CALLING “World of Warcraft” (WoW) a mere video game is seriously underselling it. The virtual world, in which millions of players cooperate to conduct quests, delve into dungeons and slay dragons, is both a commercial and cultural phenomenon.

Released in 2004, the game has now more than 10m active players, each of whom pays a monthly fee ($13-15 in America). Industry analysts estimate that Activision-Blizzard, the game’s publisher, rakes in annual revenues of well over $1 billion from WoW alone. On top of that are sales of “expansion packs” for the game, which come out roughly every two years.

But WoW is not just about playing online. An annual convention in Anaheim, California, called “BlizzCon”, attracts tens of thousands of WoW fans. There are popular sidelines in novelisations, comic books and card games. Occasionally, there is even talk of a film.

To Read More…

Image via The Economist