I really enjoyed presenting at Ignite Liverpool on Thursday night – to me, this was a new format, presenting 20 slides in 5 minutes with an automatic slide change every 15 seconds.  It’s best described by WimpyKing.  I took the bullet and went first – hopefully getting over some of my passion about working with creative artists in the digital economy.  My presentation is below – I just used a few words and clipart to get the message over  quickly – or try to!

Thanks to Frances Bell for organising this event yesterday for ISOS, Salford University’s Information Systems, Organisations and Society Research Centre in the very well appointed Think Lab.  I really enjoyed the discussion afterwards, thanks to the group for some food for thought.  Presentation below:

Pleased to say that I’ll be working with some colleagues at Southampton on a set of four forums supported through Roberts funding over the next year, on the theme of Energising Technology Entrepreneurship.  Really, this is about pipeline development – getting some of our STEM PhDs to consider commercialising the outcomes of their research, perhaps using the excellent SetSquared incubator here at Southampton.  The forums will be based around guest speakers who have been there and done it – people who can motivate and inspire through example.  Look forward to announcing more details later.

“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

There has never been a better time for innovation in the Digital Economy. The barriers to disruptive innovation by non-computer scientists have been lowered by a nexus of possibilities, namely:

• Widespread access to broadband technologies
• Smartphones that enable new forms of communication, handheld internet access and bespoke applications development (Ling, 2004)
• Software platforms that enable a high degree of networked connectivity and communication, such as blogs, wikis, twitter, Facebook, ning, youtube, flickr. As well as connectivity, there is the potential for rapid-fire one-to-many and many-to-many broadcasts and interactions that have the power to amplify any interaction very quickly to a very wide, possibly global audience.
• Readily available real-time geographical location data
• Increasing availability of government datasets to the public, e.g. for e-citizenship (van Deursen and van Dijk, 2009) or for practical applications, such as data from the Ordnance Survey in the UK

It has never been easier to not only access and use technologies, but to extend them, to customise them, to develop mew combinations, to access and develop new sectors and markets. My focus in 2010 will follow on from last year’s work in the creative industries  to seek out new ways of creating value from novelty, towards new business models, new products and services.  Part of that will involve working with those who have the ability to use social media, probably connecting with people outside my existing sphere of influence, developing new activities based on real-time information and breaking news. So this time next year, I could very likely be working with people I don’t know yet on something that hasn’t happened yet — that’s what makes it so exciting!

References

van Deursen, A.J.A.M and van Dijk, J.A.G.M (2009), Improving digital skills for the use of online public information and services, Government Information Quarterly Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 333-340

Ling, R. (2004)The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, Morgan Kaufmann

I’ve often said when I’ve been advocating Social Media that I find it useful for connecting with industry, spotting trends, looking outside my sphere of influence and noting what’s out there on the periphery. This is useful not only for keeping my own research alive but also for keeping students abreast of where the best upcoming entrepreneurial and innovative opportunities might be. I’ve been asked to explain this further, so here’s an example. As I set out in an earlier post, I do have an affinity for ICTs – although I never worked as a systems developer, I have an MSc in Computing which means I’ve always kept up with new technologies and can at least keep up a conversation with those in the field. So it’s here where I look to for ideas as to what might come next – and I pass on my guessology to students who might be looking to set up their own businesses, or maybe hoping to impress potential employers with a bit of future-proofing. So, a couple of years ago, I would have been pointing them in the direction of i-phone apps. While my students aren’t developers either, they should be able to think about new markets, new product development, business planning, new venture creation and so on, thus aiding others with better technical skills and forming teams with mixed expertise. Where does social media come into it? Just keeping my eyes open and following some of the livelier industry analysts and developers on Twitter. Firstly there’s my mate @Jas , http://www.jasdhaliwal.com/, who in return gets to laugh at my attempts to get stuff working on my laptop. Secondly, @monkchips, James Governor, who occasionally produces quick takes on trends. Both sources are really useful – and I don’t have to understand everything – on the ‘trends’ list for example, I only really ‘get’ the first three, because they link in some way to my work on www.creatorproject.org. I don’t need comprehensive coverage, I could read an industry newspaper or feed for that, but I wouldn’t have time – so tweets are ‘good enough’ as fans of Christensen are likely to say. It doesn’t have to be ‘correct’ or come true, it just has to be interesting, possible, geared to start a dialogue or a conversation. So, that’s how it works for me!

I wasn’t able to go to the ISBE conference this year http://www.isbe.org.uk/, so it was great to see some expert live tweeting from Kelly Smith, aka @KellyJS.  To put the cherry on the cake, I saw that my paper [co-authored with Ted Fuller and Sally-Jane Norman had been selected as best in our track – another twitter first!  Anyway the slides are below – just pleased to see that the EPSRC Creator project is starting to attract attention.

To me, it’s really obvious that an academic needs to build a sound online academic presence – in fact, that’s why I’ve spent most of the summer building this blog, with the help of @Jas.  In fast-changing times, academics are in a global marketplace and you need to be able to make your work count for you as quickly as possible.  Of course it’s imoortant to publish in a range of outlets on and offline, but the timescales to publication offline can be so long that by the time the work comes out, it’s long past it’s sell-by date.  I’ve been having some good conversations with @lisaharris about this recently.  From a practical standpoint, we’re both up and running (see www.lisaharrismarketing.com) and are also  ready to take the show on the road, as I did in an embryonic form at Aberdeen RGU this year (see the presentation below).  Conceptually, I bring my work about entrepreneurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her thinking concerning digital marketing. I’m really looking forward to getting some good work together in this space soon – more later!

neurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her digital marketing expertise into the frame.  More later, but I think we can start to get some good theory/practice linkages going in this space.

At BAM this year, I continued the work on emergence and complexity that I’ve been developing with Ted Fuller over the past few years.  It went down very well compared with last year, I think because the concepts are now being related to new projects in the creative industries that people can relate to.  Last year’s presentation was a bit conceptual and the philosophical side was perhaps a bit inaccessible.  Now though, the idea that entrepreneurship is agile, dynamic, fast-moving and takes place in reputational ecosystems is starting to come across – though I’m not sure everyone there agreed with me!  Here’s the presentation: