Future Case

Uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existing symbolic order, norms and values and which way out to choose. In ‘Life as a construction box’, Swierstra^[1] et al. begin their publication with the conception of ‘way out’ which, in my ayes is a bit heavy (my connotation of ‘way out’ has to do with escape). But then, the publication is a bout the most relevant, current and rather important issues of our days. Issues like privacy, man and machine, ambient and pervasive technology, health and being unhealthy and, as would like to put it, the makebility of reality, an as fundamental as rather intangible confusion trying to surface through solid ethical questions and controversies. Dutch philosopher Peter Paul Verbeek^{[see Swiestra]} questions whether people have the possibility to withdraw themselves from ambient and pervasive technology. And what about our log-time disputed basic right of privacy?

Why would privacy be important? Mooradian^[2] quotes Rachel who writes that is important because privacy enables man to selectively enclose information and privacy would engage us to certain desired social behavior. And, privacy is necessary to create and manage certain relationships. Without such control mechanisms, says Rachel, diversity in relationships will disappear. Or better, fade away. Mooradian is less pessimistic. According to him, there is a difference between real friends and those as referred to in social media. And further more says Mooradian; we adjust our behavior according to the situation (or context, I presume).
Then have we passed the station of privacy? Are we beyond privacy? Not according to Mooradian. In our times of social media, one may decide for himself what and how much one speaks (tells) but one cannot control what other speak of him. What apparently seems to be a process of democratization – digital surveillance as Mooradian calls it – can also be interpreted as a panopticum resembling Orwell’s Big Brother spheres.
In her paper about Facebook, Danah Boyd^[3] says that information is not private – as in privately owned data – because information is limited and controlled which turns the issue of privacy into the rather difficult dungeons in terms of social convergence. For who limits and controls our data?

Could we, in the context of last months Month of Philosophy in The Netherlands recapitulate that I control my data therefor I am?

[1]  Swiestra, T. e. a. (2009). Leven als bouwpakket, Ethisch verkennen van een nieuwe technologische golf (1st ed.). Den Haag: Rathenau Instituut.

[2] Mooradian, Norman, The importance of privacy revisited, Ethis Inf Technol, Springer Science+Business Media BV, 2009

[3] Boyd, Danah, Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck, Convergence, Berkely 2088

I do this philosophy course at the university of Utrecht. Fascinating (and not in Spock’s connotation). The professors make us compare texts and write no more than approximately three hundred words about it. That is a challenge. Have a look of what I cooked up from the texts of

1. Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Phaedrus[1]
2. Jos de Mul’s chapter 1, part four of Filosofie in Cyberspace[2] (in Dutch) and
3. Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto[3].

Is there any coomunality in the texts and if so, what is it. If not what is the common difference? Etc. So, after a couple of work-through-the-nights, I came up with my common denominator: would Plato’s Cyborg be male? Make up your own mind!

Would or could Plato ever have wanted to ideate the Cyborg; as Haraway says: a hybrid creature, a cybernetic organism, a creation of both social reality and fiction; half apparatus, half human and socio-technological imaginary of the rhetorical strategy of (socialist) feminism?

Can Cyborg be grasped in a rhetorical concept; one of Plato’s five Rhetorics, as he teaches us in his Phaedrus (as the Phaedrus is about rhetorics in essence): 1- the false rhetoric, 2- love or inspiration of beauty, described as madness, 3- dialectics, the art of composition and division, 4- true rhetoric based on dialectics and the art of seduction rooted in truth and knowledge of character, and 5- superiority of the spoken over the written word? Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto reads is a rhetorical roller coaster of techno-feminist discourse, a deterministic discursive construct with social consequences and implications through technology (De Mul p.33).

In his introduction of the Phaedrus, Jowett quotes Socrates who says that true rhetorics is like medicine, and the rhetorician has to consider the natures of men’s soul as the physician considers the natures of their bodies. Such and such persons are to be affected in this way, such and such others in that; and he must know the times and seasons for saying this or that. This is not an easy task, and this, if there be such an art, is the art of rhetoric.

Then what is truth? Is it embodied in our current days in which technology is an object to think with, in the rhetoric of technologized man and in which De Mul comprises presumptions about technology and society to a golden main path of technological interactionism; a bit of technological determinism and a bit of social constructionism? Considering that technological interactionism holds the middle in the polarity of determinism and constructionism and is therefor genderless, Plato’s Cyborg will never be female and Haraway’s Cyborg never male.

On Februari 16 of this year, Volkskrant[1] published an article called “The future of social media is automated sharing; handy but sometimes a bit embarrassing” in which the author Heleen van Lier notes that the future of sharing media texts lies in automated sharing. Central theme in her article stands Frictionless Sharing; a phrase introduced by social medium Facebook a couple of months ago. Representatives of Facebook, Reuters, Nokia and Microsoft debated Frictionless Sharing (FS) during the Social Media Week in London. The debate panel came to the conclusion that FS is here to stay. Use of the technology is simple; after agreeing once, the user starts sharing his data with other in linked media.

Van Lier’s article has a discourse of, let us say, tempered techno-optimism and it represents the opinion of the mentioned soft-critical panel.

In this short essay I’ll try to analyze the phenomena of FS in social media using the concepts of Technological Determinism and Social Constructivism as compasses with the objective to gain insight in the usability. The reason for using the two concepts lies in the central theme of this writing: Frictionless Sharing: a critical view on automated sharing of media texts in social media. Or to put it in a question: Who profits from Frictionless Sharing?

Frictionless Sharing, automated sharing of data in social media, is a relatively new phenomenon and can be regarded as a form of automated hyperlinkability; de user agrees to the Internet provider’s service to publish certain data (information) on other Internet services. Think for example, of the announcements on your Facebook page that a friend is listening on Spotify to a song by some band.

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced the conception of Frictionless Sharing during the 2011 F8 Developers Conference. His explanation was that it would enable a “real-time serendipity[i] in a frictionless experience” (Sheilla Shayon 2011[2]). In his AdAge column of January 30, 2012, Dave Williams[3] explains that Facebook’s core mission is to help people share their lives and their favorite things, such as branded products, music, films, etc.

Williams also implies an economical objective for the introduction of automated sharing. Van Lier also touches the issue as she cites the Spotify example.

Whether Frictionless Sharing comes as handy is one out of a series of similar questions through which people try to explain the role of technology in society. These questions have different discourses running from academic neutrality to the rhetoric of marketing. Within these discourses long lasting and divers debates are carried out, all with one central question: is technology the determining factor for the development of the society (Technological Determinism) or does society cooperates to construct and shape products and services using technology (Social Constructivism).

Lister et al. (2009 p. 429[4]) state in their glossary that Technological determinism remains, as Mackenzie and Wajcman ([1985] 1999) argue, the ‘dominant account’ of technology in everyday or ‘common sense’ culture. So according to Mackenzie and Wajcman technology is the driver of society in the sense that social arrangements are determined technological arrangements. Yet opposite to Technological Determinism we face the conception of Social Constructivism in which Social Shaping of Technology is the key perspective. It is all about the ‘makeable society. Technology as such is not the goal, it is a mere auxiliary plea – or perhaps even, as McLuhan might have gimmicked, a medium – to make a better world. Up to recent days, a fitting example has been Kony 2012[5], the global viral attempt to trial the former Uganda guerilla leader Joseph Kony before an international jury. This action, using FS through mainly Facebook and Twitter disseminated at warp speed[6] as the Australian Times reported. Let us conclude that, at least for the initiators of this action, the available and dominant technology was used to accomplish a human (charity) goal.

Brussee and Hekman (2010) state that social media are highly accessible media; users need not have much (if any) knowledge of technology in order to use them. (Perhaps in this sense, it is more relevant to say that users need not have much literacy, media-usage-literacy that is. There is still overwhelming popular discourse in which social media are disputed leading to Netherland’s sovereign Beatrix who neatly copied the words of the Dutch government that social media lead to non-social behavior? In my opinion a rather dystopian technological deterministic fallacy.)

High accessibility results in fast groups of people having access not only the original role of the (media text) user, or better consumer, but also to the functionalities of these technologies that actually provide control of other parts of media chain, i.e. aggregation and publication. High accessibility and ubiquity of the Internet (wired, wireless and mobile) are most likely the reason why so many people use the Internet and social media in particular. Or, as the voice over in the Kony 2012 video states: “There are people who have a Facebook account today than the amount living on the earth two hundred years ago”

According to the debate panel members in Van Lier’s article, automated sharing through social media is here to stay. In fact, it becomes a second nature to users. According to Facebook’s Trevor Johnson, one of the panel members, this may cumulate in Facebook being spammed with way too much uninteresting information. Facebook tries to clear this problem by offering users to personalize their profile pages according to ones likings en preferences in order to specify data streams. As Van Lier states in her article: “every website can be personalized on the basis of ones preferences and what friend suggest’.

Personalizing on the basis of preferences and deliberate admission of information of people certainly will limit the amount of information with which Facebook users are confronted currently. Whether Johnson’s approach bears the characteristics of Social Constructivism or Technological Determinism can only be made clear if we get a proper answer to his statement in which he says that Facebook is concerned about the people, not the company: “If one thinks of Facebook than not think of Facebook.com but at three million sites and hundreds of thousands of apps with which we are integrated. At first sight that seems pretty much SC but considering the intrinsic technological imaginary I am convinced that a company like Facebook, their representatives included, are rather techno-optimists and put technology in an (imaginary) position as shaper of (their) society.

Mark Zuckerberg’s “real-time serendipity in a frictionless experience” also sounds as a zenith of Social Constructivism. In my opinion it even bears a touch of a connotation of a utopic ideology (Facebook constructing a better world in which all are related as friends). Nice thought yet was it not Dave Williams who peoposed in his earlier mentioned article that “Because the new breed of apps measure actions and mentions, they make it easier for marketers to measure when people are talking about certain brands, activities, news stories, or other content. This improved insight onto the social graph gives marketers a far greater picture of users’ interests, helping them shape relevant ad experiences that can be used to drive engagement”. In this quote perhaps lies the thought of affordance of Frictionless Sharing in the context of both Technological Determinism and Social Constructivism. Lister et al. Summarize the difference between the two perspectives as: ‘[…] to be a realist about technology entails asking what technology really is’. This is the realism for which this concluding section pleads: we should attend not simply to the social constructedness of technological phenomena, but to the extended effects they create, the causes they exploit and the rearrangement of parts and processes they effect”.

For me, FS – Frictionless Sharing –min terms of marketing is a scrupulous tool to hyper-profile potential customers. I think I should start reading Pariser and Sloterdijk. They might clear my mind on matters of tech first or society first.

So, what do you think?

With the spectacular growth of Draw Something there’s been renewed chatter about whether Twitter is a viable platform for other products to grow on. Draw Some, after all, at least partly attributes their unprecedented growth to Twitter.

Will we finally be able to see a product grow and monetize with Twitter as its primary communication channel? Does Draw Some hold any lessons for other non-game products being able to use Twitter for growth and retention?

First, let’s establish what we need from a channel. To oversimplify, we want two things from “virality”:

1. The ability to acquire new users

2. The ability to retain current users

For example email offers both of these since I can invite a new user to the service, or bring a current user back by, say, letting them know that a friend just posted a picture of

them. But with notoriously bad CTRs on email its a crappy channel for both new and retained communication in most circumstances.

Communication for retaining users is often overlooked but incredibly critical. For example there was a long time where Facebook basically made it impossible to acquire new users through the feed because it would only show the item to people who had already installed that app. However the feed still was a critical channel. It just became something more akin to push messaging on an iPhone, a way to let people know to come back.

Through that lens we can look at Draw Something, as well as previous efforts like Spyhunter, and see where Twitter fits.

Twitter today feels like it can be a viable channel for user acquisition, for the right type of content that is tailored to be broadcast to strangers. After all, social games from Cafe World to Idle Worship are now allowing you to play with strangers on Facebook, which is far more tenuous a connection than the follower model of Twitter. Twitter, which thrives on the psychology of pride, can be a great outlet for things folks would be >proud of (ie a drawing) versus a beg need.

But it still feels particularly bad as a communication channel for retention. With Twitter seemingly slowly deprecating direct messaging, and throttling them regardless, there is no private way to message a friend that is akin to email or FB requests. And that means to get an appropriate volume your public twitter stream basically needs to be about that product, which very few people are willing to subjugate themselves to.

That just means it can be part of, just not all, of a product strategy. For instance an interesting thing about mobile is that you have a retention channel already, push messaging. So perhaps there will be a new wave of products that take advantage of channels like Twitter, Instagram, Path, and Pinterest for new user acqusition, and then use mobile push messaging (hopefully messages with meaning) that drive retention.

disclosure: Omgpop (makers of Draw Something) and Twitter are Spark portfolio companies

via OM Says: brinking. – Is Twitter now a viable platform?.

Fans of the classic 1982 science fiction movie Blade Runner will remember the ESPER machine that allows Deckard to zoom in and see around corners in a two-dimensional photograph. While such technology is still some way off, researchers in MIT’s Media Lab have developed a system using a femtosecond laser that can reproduce low-resolution 3D images of objects that lie outside a camera’s line of sight.

The experimental setup designed by the MIT researchers gained attention last December when video of it capturing a burst of light traveling through a plastic bottle was released. But as amazing as that capability is, it was for the even more amazing ability to literally see around corners that the team says the system was developed.

It works by emitting a burst of light from a femtosecond laser that reflects off visible surfaces – such as an opaque wall – onto objects that are hidden from the camera’s direct view. The light then bounces off the object before ultimately making its way back to a detector. This process is repeated a number of times with the laser targeted at different areas of the reflecting surface.

Continue via MIT researchers create camera that can see around corners.

I came across this amazing story by ROBIN WAUTERS

I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to not bring to your attention. It’s not really related to tech, though, so bear with me.

People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out of touch with reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be.

In the past, SABAM has sought to require Internet and hosting service providers to install filters that would prevent the illegal downloading of files. They lost that battle.

Then, they wanted social networking companies to install monitoring, filtering or blocking systems to prevent illegal trading of digital music and other copyrighted material. They lost that battle. Don’t expect those setbacks to make them back down in their quest to display a stunning amount of stupidity to the world, though.

If you questioned the sanity of the folks over at SABAM before, now I hope you’ll realize just how plain evil they really are.

This morning, word got out in Belgian media that SABAM is spending time and resources to contact local libraries across the nation, warning them that they will start charging fees because the libraries engage volunteers to read books to kids.

Volunteers. Who – again – READ BOOKS TO KIDS.

Continue via Rightsholders Group to Charge Libraries for Reading Books to Kids.

This text taken from Reuters via Online Media Daily Europe

* First screening of internet sensation in northern Uganda

* Disappointment and scorn greets scratchy screening (Adds tourism officials)

By Elias Biryabarema

LIRA, Uganda, March 14 (Reuters) – Few faces evoke more hatred and fear in northern Uganda than Joseph Kony, one of Africa’s most wanted men whose army of child soldiers preyed on this town for years and whose brutal legacy has been thrust back into the spotlight by a hugely popular U.S. video.

A wave of anger and depression swept over 27-year old Isaac Omodo as he stared at fuzzy images of young boys mutilated by the rebel warlord whose drugged and vicious fighters abducted Omodo’s brother at the height of northern raids by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in 2001.

Those grainy pictures came from the first screening in northern Uganda on Tuesday of a 30-minute YouTube video filmed by a California-based charity, whose appeal for U.S.-backed Ugandan troops to capture the LRA leader went viral on the Internet over the last week.

“When I see some of those things Kony did I get mad,” said Omodo, whose sibling is still missing.

As the sun dipped over a dusty park in Lira, Omodo was among thousands who gathered to watch the screening of the video, which has been seen by more than 77 million people. It has attracted massive support on Twitter and Facebook and endorsements from celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey in its quest to press for Kony’s capture.

But Omodo said he felt his raw emotional scars were being reopened.

“Why are we being reminded? I feel bad. We want to just forget all about Kony and the LRA madness,” Omodo told Reuters.

Some jeered as the projection neared its end and scuffles broke out as simmering frustrations boiled over.

Notorious for his use of children as fighters and sex slaves, as well as his fighters’ fondness for hacking off limbs, Kony terrorised northern Uganda for nearly 20 years until he was chased out of the area in 2005.

via UPDATE 1-Why make Kony famous? Video rubs raw Uganda scars | Reuters.

Word broke early Tuesday that Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile handset maker in terms of unit shipments, is shuttering its mobile financial services business.The closure will reportedly include a freshly launched Nokia Money service in India.The reason given for the exodus, which won’t be immediate, is a renewed commitment by Nokia to focus on core-business aspects of its operation.“It’s not going to happen overnight and consumers already using the service are not at risk,” a company spokesman tells Dow Jones Newswires.Nokia had launched the side-business in 2009 in an attempt to bring secure electronic payments to users without a bank account, chiefly in emerging markets.“Our services will continue to operate while we work with our banking, market and technology partners as well as our employees, agents and others to plan future options in accordance with all customer and regulatory requirements,” Nokia says.Do you think the imperiled handset maker will benefit from its “evolving strategy” or this just another inauspicious sign of what’s to come at Nokia?

via Nokia Bolting From Mobile Money Business | Mobile Marketing Watch.

Credits: Thomas Schlijper

It’s no see-through glass exterior, but Apple’s new Amsterdam Apple Store is still offering some pretty good retail eye-candy. The overall motif, with white walls and classic, ornate architectural details, seems to call for marble statues rather than electronics on display. But you’ve still got the Apple design mainstays that let you know exactly where you are: the marble floors, modern wood tables and — of course — the clear-glass spiral staircase.

The Amsterdam location, which opens Saturday, is the first Apple Store in The Netherlands, which means Apple now has stores in 12 countries.

Fore more pictures, see Thomas Schlijper’s website.

via Inside Apple’s museum-like Amsterdam store — Apple News, Tips and Reviews.

Scientists have a limitless hunger for computing power and storage. That’s why three European agencies — CERN, the force behind the Large Hadron Collider; the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; and the European Space Agency — are cooking up a European science cloud to handle their compute-intensive workloads.

The Helix Nebula Science Cloud cloud aims to bring enough firepower to solve very hard problems and deal with tons of data churned out by the second. As an example of the size of the task, CERN alone stores about 15 petabytes of data per year, uses 150,000 CPUs continuously and writes data at 6GB per second.

“Physicists can consume as much compute power and storage as we can give them. There is so much data and so many ways to explore and mine that data, that we’re always looking for new techniques to increase that total capacity,” said Bob Jones, head of CERN’s OpenLab in an interview. CERN, or the European Lab for Particle Physics, is based in Geneva and funded by European Union nations.

The project is backed by commercial partners including Atos, Capgemini, CloudSigma, Logica, Orange Business Systems, SAP, Telefonica, the Cloud Security Alliance and the OpenNebula project.

Up until now CERN has been using publicly owned infrastructure — 150 data centers in all — which contribute resources for LHD data. “We want to see if we can use commercial infrastructure as an additional resource,” Jones said. Like any organization, the group is trying to build in flexibility and maximize price performance.

Discussion around the project started last summer and the group decided to use the new infrastructure initially for three projects. CERN will use the infrastructure to handle the Atlas Experiment, a particle physics project, at LHC. The European Molecular Biology Lab will build use it in a new project to simplify the analysis of large genomes and the European Space Agency, working with two partners, will build an application to study earthquakes and volcanoes.

The first stage of the project is a two-year pilot building a cloud to handle those three applications.

This is a Europe-only cloud. “The initial drive is from these European research labs and one reason it’s ended up this way is this whole question of data security and access. We have to be certain wherever we start to use these resources that we have appropriate legislative backing.”

There has been a movement to build Europe-only clouds with proponents usually invoking the U.S. Patriot Act as rationale. Because some European nations –notably Germany — have tougher privacy laws than those in the U.S., local companies want to make sure that data in their data centers cannot be turned over to U.S. authorities.

As the prototyping continues, Jones said the group will look into bringing other research organizations and cloud providers aboard.

Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Image Editor.

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via Super science cloud coming to Europe — Cloud Computing News.