As I moved around from friends’ houses and hotel to hotel over the Christmas and New Year period, I reflected on the need to continually charge devices, becoming ever alert to plug sockets on trains, planes and unfamiliar living rooms.  Where to sit to be close (and not leave wires for people to trip over), do I have the correct charger/adapter and dongles. I’ve managed to internalise the need to carry a raft of chargers, adapters, duplicates in different bags. I’ve become adept at flipping between wifi and network carriers, hopping in and out of hotel lobbies.  It occurred to me that I have become the equivalent of a 21st century hunter-gatherer drifting from point to point, picking up electricity, wifi or broadband juice where I find it – and in competition at times for sometimes scarce resources.  adds a frisson of excitement to the journey I guess!

As many of you are aware, I spend a fair bit of time trying to debunk the myth of the so-called Digital Native. Here’s a link to a blogpost in the new Tech publication, The Kernel.

The Shooting Star, Bevois Valley, Southampton hosted Southampton’s first one-day barcamp, organised by Chris Gutteridge and Chris Philips.  I didn’t get there until lunchtime, but once I read there was free chili I was roused out of my weekend torpor!  Good buzzing atmosphere when I got there, good mix of folk from local universities, IBM and elsewhere.  I gave a Lightning Talk to kick around some ideas as to how to mobilise open data for students.  Friendly atmosphere, looking forward to next year!

Really enjoyed this event which took place on Monday at the de Vere hotel in Southampton. Around 100 people from the University of Southampton (many, but not all from Electronics and Computer Science) and the City Council attended.  For me this was a great opportunity to take forward ideas about  how open data can be used to improve the student experience – particularly the international Masters students who are so important in our School.  the event was filmed, and I’ll post the link later.  Till then, the #opensoton hashtag gives a flavour of the event [at least for now]

Looking forward to working with Lisa Harris, Alan Rae and Cristina Cost tomorrow, giving a workshop in Southampton on how to get out there using Social Media.  My part of the presentation is here but for more detail, see Lisa’s blog here.

Just a very quick post to point to two great pieces  here and here from Cristina Costa at Salford – really looking forward to seeing you and Frances Bell in April, another great connect through Twitter! Interesting folks to follow: @cristinacost and @francesbell -> recommended!

Just a very short post to make people aware, if they’re not already, about a great new magazine I came across at the EPSRC’s ExICTe workshop in Birmingham on Wednesday.   Computer Science for Fun, or cs4fn, was created and is written and edited by Paul Curzon, Peter McOwan and Jonathan Black of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science of Queen Mary, University of London. Google, Microsoft and ARM are supporters from industry.  It’s a collection of fun stuff about computer science, teaching resources and advice.  The idea is to get sophisticated ideas over in schools by methods that capture the attention – such as magic tricks – while making a conceptual point as well – and encourage people to take up Computer Science as a career or at university.   There’s a high-quality magazine as well as a website, with entertaining articles such as Torchwood: In need of Backup Actually, grown-up kids would enjoy this too!

Boomers are tech-savvy, avid Internet users and multitask online while watching TV, says a recent report from eMarketer, Boomer Demographics and Media Usage. In the article, the author of the report Lisa E. Phillips points out that in their youth Boomers  “…eagerly adopted new technologies such as Walkmans, VCRs, PCs, DVRs and the Internet” .  In many cases this is true, and in earlier posts I have questioned the ‘Digital Native’ tag attached so frequently to Generation Y.  I’d go further than that too:  there are some very savvy Boomers out there, I speak from experience here, who came up the hard way through technology.  Many of them learned the basics of computing on command-line driven systems of various kinds, including DOS, and had to write short macros to get  office-style  applications to do anything remotely interesting.  Indeed for some of us it was dumb terminals on a mainframe.  We then got used to Windows/GUI WYSIWYG working, and started to work with ‘multimedia’, graphics, videos and sound, when applications were thin on the ground and processor power and RAM memory were low, and CD-ROM was the storage du jour.  To make things work, you had to know a fair bit about the underlying system, for workarounds and dodges.  And so it went on, as peer-to-peer networking and eventually the Internet became the norm.  Adopters expanded the capabilities of these technologies, through knowing quite  a bit about what went on underneath the interface – you just had to, to make early stuff work just that little bit harder.  So, yes, my settee looks a bit like mission control, as I mix TV, PC and smartphone, apps, location, cloud – looking forward to the next stage!

“Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads, Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them……..Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status” (Jeter, 1998, p. 14).

Such is the nightmare vision of a post-apocalyptic future where freedom from electronic communication is only available to the corporate elite.  Already, the idea that patterns of privacy and visibility might be clearly delineated in accordance with status is taking hold (O’Hara and Shadbolt, 2010). As yet though, the picture is not so clear.  Notions of privacy are continually being defined and redefined, with each new networking platform providing new pathways and also new challenges to our understanding of who we are in this space.  There are relative periods of calm, punctuated by ‘shocks’ (such as Zuckerman’s statement people don’t want privacy)  that challenges the ephemeral social structures emerging from this new milieu.

Unlike Zuckerman, my colleague Kieron O’Hara speaks of the link between privacy and autonomy, argues that the defence of privacy is a responsibility as well as a right, suggesting that part of being  a socially responsible person, is taking care over what is disclosed.  Another colleague, Tim Greenhalgh talks of the need  for a ‘currency of disclosure’.  Until we know more about the currency of disclosure, we are still placing bets that all will be well if we venture into constructing internet selves (as we are encouraged to do, often by our employers).  Of course there will be solutions, and many colleagues from ICT, Law, Business and Economics all work in this area developing new technology, rule sets and pathways that at heart see privacy as a tangible entity that may also function as a market construct to be assigned economic value.

Yet the complexity of the web is such that it may take some time before these techniques really help us as individuals and as a society.  And legal and economic constructs alone may be too simple to capture the richness of internet life on their own.  This underlying  uncertainty is becoming more pronounced as  we enter a Web 2.0 world, moving from static websites that are narrations of the past to ‘live’  interactive bricolages, where the boundaries between the professional and the private are now blurred in a volatile space (Warren, 2010).  Tim refers to our ‘multifaceted selves’ and in doing so, draws our attention to the widely debated notion of ‘identity’.  This is useful, as this is a good place for social scientists to make a convincing contribution to the debate: we can only defend (or manage) our privacy if we understand how we write our identities into being on the internet.

Influential scholars of identity  such as Goffman, Giddens and Berger and Luckmann have been around for some time.  More recently, in the 80s/90s, authors such as Turkle, Haraway and Castells took the debate into the internet age, once we realised that no-one knew you were a dog.  And of course there have been many others since then, lookimg at the potential of the internet to further decentre and delocalise our fragile postmodern selves.  The challenge for today’s researchers is to take that thinking forward, and also create new ways of thinking about identity, how it is constructed and performed, not only in  Web 2 world, but looking  forward into a web 3 world too.  In doing so, we can make a useful contribution to the debate on privacy – because identity is the nexus between the individual and society, and where so many of the debates are played out.

References

Jeter, K. W. (1998), Noir, Orion: London

O’Hara, K. and Shadbolt, N. (2010) Viewpoint, Privacy on the Data Web, Communications of the ACM, 53/3, pp. 1-3

Warren, L. (2010), The Entrepreneurial Academic in the Digital World: Narratives and antenarratives, abstract submitted for scMOI conference April 2010.

“I can create ‘behaviour’” says Golan Levin, one of the exhibitors at Decode: Digital Design Sensations, an exhibition running at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until April 11. The exhibition,  a joint collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations. Levin’s comment was made in an interview (transcript available in Decode’s accompanying programme) in response to the question, “What do digital technologies allow you to do or investigate that other design tools do not?”. For me, it really gets to the heart of the three themes of the exhibition:

Code as a raw material

interactivity

the network (as in digital traces)

As I walked around the exhibition, it was clear that people were fascinated by the exhibits, excited, laughing, talking to people they didn’t know already…..maybe not new behaviours in one sense, but fairly untypical of formal art exhibitions. And certainly, they were forging new connections, maybe developing new links outside their existing sphere of influence.  These kind of interactions and connections across contexts can be be the spark that ignites innovation – maybe a small, incremental innovation, or maybe something big enough to change a market, society or the world – who knows? That’s the beauty of complexity theory, which underpins much of my research, potentially large effects from small changes in initial conditions.  That is why it is so vital to fund the leading edge artists and groups who are able to to challenge us in ways that make us think and indeed behave differently – especially in the Digital Economy, as I know from my own work with Proboscis*.  Of course it is difficult to quantify that kind of contribution in straitened times, but we can and must do so.

In one of those quirks of timing, I came home to the fervour for the newly-launched  iPad on twitter.  My colleague Tim Greenhalgh suggests that the iPad will form a nexus between the liberal arts and the network and will change everything.  Whether that device is ‘the gamechanger’ or not, it’s pretty clear that the power to create content, move it around, enjoy it, in all kinds of ways is now out of the lab and into the hands of the public.  Let’s make sure our creative artists have the space they need to make that happen, as Levin suggests, through creating new behaviours.  And as  a researcher in innovation, I want to focus on value creation as new products, service and indeed behaviours emerge.

Footnote

If that last paragraph was about networking and interactivity, where does code as a raw material come in? Perhaps best illustrated by example.  In all the joie de vivre, beauty and colour of yesterday’s exhibition, I was perhaps most taken by a quieter work by Troika, Digital Zoetrope. I do see a lot of beautiful images as I love space stuff, Hubble, NASA and so on.  I love the different renderings.  I also look at fractals a lot, and i have seen interactive installations before.  A fabulous excess!  Troika is diferent, a monochromatic barrel with vertical, horizontal and diagonal typefaces rotating quickly, which merge into letters and words at speed.  It reminded me of Wender’s black and white masterpiece Wings of Desire, where Angels hear sense from the whispered thoughts of thousands in Berlin.  It made me think of two new friends I have made on twitter in the North of England.  It made me think we have joked of having a dvd film festival weekend of German, or film noir, together at some point.  It made me think I should do it soon.  Now, I may be giving an invited talk for one of them, a lecturer in the Performing Arts in early February.  Who knows what may come of that?

*makers of mischief, and pioneers of pie in the sky