The Knowledge Economy
So Dave and I have been having many conversations about the current state of crisis in the global economy. The key crises happening right now as I see it are:
1) The bankruptcy of America… creditors are getting antsy, investors of the US economy are pulling out. It seems that the world is waking up to the fact that the US is a economic black hole… resources go in but only second rate culture comes out. Yesterday, the Loonie surpassed the American dollar and the governments of 2 Middle Eastern Countries gained control of the London and American Stock Markets. Dave has written more on it if it’s something that you would like to inform yourself about.
2) The nervousness about outsourcing… Lead paint in our China sweatshop toys; e-coli in our bagged leafy food; the ecological footprints from an ineffective global trade system… Consumers are now making considered choices in the products they buy and are using the Internet to gather more information to guide those considered choices.
3) The lack of faith in traditional institutions… like government and media and the big corporation. The flow of de-regulated information that has washed over us in the last 20 years has dragged in with it a foamy film of cynicism and distrust. The more we read, the more it stinks.
4) The huge gaps between the rich and poor… this has always been a strain on society, but coupled with the rest, makes instability inevitable and almost predictable.
With these issues in mind, we got to waxing on what we thought an ideal economy might look like. We can call it a Knowledge Economy, so long as you don’t place anyone else’s paradigms around it…
In order for this system of Western society to continue on in a form that somewhat resembles the one we’ve grown accustomed to, there needs to be an injection of institutional trust. We need to be able to believe that things are okay again, that our governments and journalists and economy are working for us, rather than the other way around. We need the systems to correspond with our lives, but the only way that this can happen is if the systems come down to our level.
It’s all about the grassroots baby.
Top-down models are ineffective and wasteful. And as more people step out of the pyramid, the shakier the whole structure becomes. The system is reflexive, but it is a system of reflexive consumers.
The notion of the “prosumer” becomes more important as user-generated content, and vernacular culture grows stronger. In vernacular culture (or locally-exchanged culture) the prosumers get that little added value of community recognition, or community fame… something that is priceless in this reality-tv obsessed culture that we find ourselves in. Where the reward for the consumer is external, the reward for the prosumer is internal.
Right now there is a disconnect, perhaps a power struggle, between the grassroots and the institutions that govern their existence. There needs to be more transparency and more needs to be given back. There needs to be real reciprocity, not just the appearance of it. In order for Western Society to weather this one out, there must be compromise between the two.
Best of Web 2.0 YouTube Videos
The Machine is Us/ing Us
The compelling Michael Wesch video from the YouTube Digital Ethnography Project explaining what Web 2.0 is, and how it’s different from Web 1.0
Does What Happen on the Facebook Stay on The Facebook
The flash video that really got me thinking about Facebook and Privacy.
If Second Life was Real Life
Very funny video making fun of avatar movement in Second Life.
The Facebook Song
There are a couple of parody songs about Facebook on YouTube… but this is by far the one done the best. By Rhett and Link
This is a pretty funny one too about how Facebook can ruin your life. By Team Tiger Awesome
Reflections on a Web 2.0 Conference – Part Two: Knowledge Generation
As noted in the previous entry, many of the presentations given at the conference dealt with usage of specific Web 2.0 websites. Facebook was definitely a hot topic, but also MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. Second Life was also represented, mostly in context with e-learning environments. While many presented basic descriptive analyses of the technology and the potential behind them, there were a few which had substantial analysis of specific aspects of particular sites or technology.
There were four presentations that really stuck out for me. One which had to do with mobile phone software, one which spoke to lateral survelliance on Facebook, one which was a content analysis of YouTube pregnancy and childbirth videos and one which was a pure quantitative analysis of social networking linkages.
Marcus Foth’s presentation, “Transferring Web 2.0 Paradigms to a Mobile System of Social Navigation in Public Inner-City Places” was based on a mobile phone software called “City Flocks” which attempts to combine personal narratives and experience with tourist type applications of urban navigation.
Basically the software works like this. People signed up to be “experts” on locations within an city, and gave ratings and commented on those locations. For example, restaurants or clubs or coffeehouses. Users could then search particular keywords and review what the local experts had said about the different locations. Not only could they review the ratings and comments, but if a user wanted a comment expanded on, they could click on the expert’s comment and actually telephone them for more information or clarification.
He spoke about potentially turning this into a Facebook application, where previous user preferences could also be incorporated into the search results, potentially leading to the ultimate application for the personalised tourist experience, based on local knowledge rather than the Lonely Planet tourist guide. I see a lot of potential for this. I can even relate my own experience in London, where I was fortunate enough to have friends show me around the city, taking me to those hidden nooks and crannies that I would not have found otherwise, but related to my personal atmospheric preferences.
Daniel Trottier presented in the same session that I did. His topic was one near and dear to my own heart… Facebook and surveillance. His presentation was titled, “Lateral Surveillance and Social Networking Sites: The Case of Facebook.” Taking an approach that I had never quite consider before in great detail, the surveillance of everyone by everyone… or for those of us who like jargon… ubiquitous surveillance.
While Daniel carefully avoided the topic of Big Brother, or the panoptic potential of Facebook… his presentation sparked the question in my mind, when everybody is spying on everybody else, is there really a need for the central watcher? He showed a great little video clip about how easy the News Feed Feature of Facebook made it for stalkers. It was a cheeky video, but highlighted the creepiness of potential peeping CyberToms.
The whole notion of ubiquitous surveillance reared its head later on my trip as the disquieting “Tube” voice in London told me on numerous occasions to be on alert for and report any suspicious behaviour that I might observe with my fellow Tube riders… but the Orwellian feel of London is a topic for another time.
Perhaps the most thought provoking presentation given was the one cleverly noted as “Pregnancy 2.0″ or “Eyes on You: Analyzing User Generated Content for Social Science” given by the lovely Chiara Fonio for her team which included Fabio Giglietto and Stefano Pedrioli.
Just when I thought that nothing could shock me on the topic of Web 2.0, Chiara presents a content analysis of 150 YouTube videos of ultrasounds, and birthing and pregnancy videos. It really shouldn’t surprise me that people are uploading videos of their c-sections and home births… it shouldn’t surprise me that some people are creating elaborate videos of the whole of their pregnancy (save for the conception part, which may be coming yet) and birth and into the first few months of the infants lives.
The comparison was made to the Jim Carey movie, The Truman Show. “Where Truman was adopted by a corporation, these babies are being adopted by the YouTube Community.” Bizarre, bizarre.
I said to Chiara after her presentation, it would be really interesting to try to do a longitudinal study on these YouTube babies… how much of their lives would be documented? Would they be on SNSs like Facebook a lot sooner? Would they despise their parents for making a public spectacle of their birth? Or would they themselves forward the link to their friends and co-workers?
Eyes on You was solely a content analysis, none of the parents or users were contacted… it would be interesting to know from the parents point of view who the intended audience was for the videos. I suspect they uploaded it to share with friends and family… I wonder how any of them would feel to know that their birth movies were included in an academic presentation and showed on a huge screen to an audience of 25+, all of which looking wide-eyed with jaw agape wondering what on earth would possess someone to expose so much of such an intimate experience.
That perhaps was the kicker for me. Especially since we here in North America tend to be very protective of our children and particularly infants. To expose those who are not even of this earth yet to such a public display is bizarre to me. Though, at the same time, I have autism clips of my own children uploaded to YouTube, so perhaps I should not be so judgmental.
The final presentation which I am going to comment on here was Mike Thelwall’s quantitative analysis of hyperlinking among and between Social Networking Sites, the title credited in the conference program is “How do General Social Networking Sites Embed in the Web”.
I was fortunate enough to get a copy of the paper from Mike. It was really an interesting analysis. Basically, he counted number of hyperlinks to the top 20 most trafficked social networking sites to find out where the links were coming from. In this, as he explained, he showed how Web 2.0 sites are actually layering on top of Web 1.0 traditional-style websites.
He also looked at the predominant domains which were associated with the SNS links. Some were fairly obvious (such as most websites that linked to MySpace with .com and most websites that linked to Facebook were .edu) but, the really interesting one came from a SNS that I had never even heard of before called “blackplanet.com” which is apparently a SNS predominantly for African-Americans. Very, very interestingly… well to me anyway… most links to blackplanet.com were coming from .edu websites. Perhaps blackplanet.com is a place where African-American students are organizing and interacting. It is refreshing to know… Facebook and MySpace are pretty “white”, but perhaps the African-American students and youth are opting for a platform of their own.
Another really interesting tidbit that came of of Mike’s paper was the “co-inlink structure of social networking sites” where the strongest linkages were seen between MySpace and Live Journal. This was not really surprising to me, as I’ve observed the blogging community on MySpace to often overlap with Live Journal in my personal interaction with the MySpace blogsphere. Facebook and MySpace also had a strong co-inlink structure, as did MySpace with Friendster and Xanga.
So that is my “Best of” synopsis. For more on the Conference and Presentations given there, check out the York 2.0 page which links to a lot of different resources. Or, you can just go check out Ismael Peña-López’s ICTology blog for many more overviews of the presentations given.
Reflections on a Web 2.0 Conference – Part One: Overall Impressions
I have many many things to try and flush out through this post. It may zig zag a bit, and may use too many words, but I’ll try to focus my next few blogs around a few different themes I picked out from the jam-packed 2-Day conference. This blog will be more about the conference itself than any of the content presented. Some excellent presentations to be ruminated on later.
So if you haven’t guessed by now, for me the conference was an excellent, positive, evoking experience. What made it so, as with any type of social knowledge-sharing event, were those who conjure it into being. I truly enjoyed my interaction with everyone there, and sought to interact with as many people as I could, with one exception… but I’ll get to why I steered clear of K33n later.
It was a short conference which would have perhaps been better staged over a three-day period than a two-day one. The parellel sessions means that I missed far more sessions than I got to attend. There will, however be video podcasts available of most (if not all) the presentations and keynotes in about a months time. I will try to assemble a page to act as a central link to all of the presentations and people behind the presentations if the Conference wiki does not assume that role in the coming weeks. One of the things that was discussed in terms of the internal linkages and networking that was occuring out of the conference, was that those of us who have embedded ourselves into these mechanisms would do well to use this as a springboard for collaboration and collectivity. As George Ritzer said, “prosumers of the world unite!”
George Ritzer was certainly a highlight for me. He was the essential critical voice that was needed for the room full of “techno-apostles” as ourselves. It is unfortunate that it was not his debate that set the tone for the critical opposition, rather than the smarmy Mr. K33n, whose name I am not even going to give credential to. I cannot, however, resist commenting on Mr. K33n’s Keynote Address.
Basically and paradoxically, Mr. K33n both proved his point and discredited his thesis about how the Internet is undermining culture by speaking as an amatuer on socio-cultural phenomenon in front of a room of socio-cultural experts and being discredited as such by his audience. No one really took his criticisms seriously, not even Ritzer, the most oppositional critic in the room. Though one thing that becames clear in Mr. K33n’s “performance” at the conference, he is a character… and “plays one” in his expressions on the topic of Web 2.0. I think a few people were expecting me to confront Mr. K33n, I was worked up about him being there for months. And it was truly difficult to listen to someone not 10 feet away from you spout out these commerically-driven attacks on media and culture democratization, far more so than to read it… But in the end, I was certain that I would be confronted by the character and refused to try and engage in an intellectual conversation with him. And that is all I’m going to say about that…
One thought pattern that emerged from this only after the conference was over, emerged out of some of Dr. Ritzer’s criticisms. Basically, Dr. Ritzer (author of the sociological text “The MacDonaldization of Society”) raised debate about the exploitative nature of Web 2.0 technologies, where the line between producer and consumer of user-generated content is blurred but the benefits of the culture is clear, in the corporate world. While Dr. Ritzer was perhaps over-generalizing about ALL of Web 2.0 culture without actually having participated in the deep culture itself, he did get me to thinking about potential research issues surrounding the very “user-generated content” presented at the conference itself.
With presentations about YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Second Life, and del.icio.us… one might have got the impression that this brand of sociology is being funded by such ®’s in the Web world. Perhaps we might want to take a few moments to consider all of the potential market research exchanged over those stimulating few days.
In any case, it was truly a pleasurable few days… very legitimating, very thought-provoking, and who’d of thought an academic conference could be so much fun!
If you attended the conference and would like me to link to your paper, blog or web-presense, do not hesitate to email me or add me on Facebook, Flickr or del.icio.us. And here you can read my paper Which Web 2.0? It was suggested that a common tag be used for photos and web references to the conference, I’m just using “York 2.0“.
