Personas

Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:54 pm. 0 comments

My current research interests (if I ever get any time for research) are to do with the dichotomy in surveillance society (the fear of identity being public) and expose culture (the fear of identity not being public). At the same time my professional interests will soon turn back to managing identities within my institution and across federations of institutions where access to resources is shared or sold (if I ever finish our new institutional repository).

So I was interested in coming across Personas from the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab via Shirley Williams.

this tool is part of the Metro(pathologies) exhibit so it is an art project “about living in a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication”. It allows visitors to become part of the exhibit by contributing their identities. It’s a neat intersection of both my academic and professional interests.

Which personas to we make and which personas are made? Many of us will create carefully crafted personas that operate in different contexts: family, friends, professionally, publically. Can there ever be a sense of an authentic sense amidst the kaleidoscope of carefully calibrated masks that we put up in front of ourselves as social contexts demand or encourage. This behaviour is multiplied as we create profiles and personas for every web service and social application we use. We may think we control these views of ourselves but we don’t because we will never really have any idea what other people see.

Using data mining techniques this tool attempts to show us what the internet sees when it’s given our name. It is notable that this is what the internet sees of our name not of us. The name as identifier is pretty poor. Algorithms without names authority cannot easily distinguish one individual from another with the same name; but the whole point of the Personas tool is to illustrate this and reflect on how “digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant”. Perhaps we might want them to be socially ignorant, because the other fear – of having a unique identifier always attached to our name element as an attribute in an xml rich semantic web would leave us with little place to hide and expose all data related to us whether controlled by us or not. This is where are need to be may be undermined by a much greater fear of being made to be if our every interaction is sharply rather than fuzzily exposed.

As it runs there is a lot of stuff that definitely isn’t me, although I know there are other Alison Popes working in the same sector so they ‘could’ could have been me. I know enough to know that they weren’t, but would you?

This page though is definitely me!

Wordle of this Blog

Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 10:28 pm. 0 comments

I've had to write 400-500 words on Web 2.0 for my end of course assessment for T175 and I had to explain mashups.  I didn't use this example but as part of my research I created a Wordle for this blog and this is what it came up with.  Not sure what this says about my writing/thoughts! Ass a whole Wordle is a fascinating source of modern poetry and art. OK their isn't necessarily much craft but the serendipity in the poetics of watching random Wordles splash across the screen is sublime. Anonymous or named, lyrical or pragmatic, bright or stark, banal, joyful or aching in their pathos: Wordle sprays it's words across the ether, much as New Zealand seems to so successfully embed it into its pavements and walls. Librarians always seem to be Wordling!

Media Ecologies and Production

Posted 10 months ago at 5:28 pm. 0 comments

Many successful companies these days produce multimedia ecologies rather than products. They then profit by the production, consumption and distribution done by others in the networks they control.

For example the iPod is at the hub of a media ecology, the iPhone at the centre of a mobile application ecology, Google at the centre of an information ecology and Facebook at the centre of a social ecology. They control not so much the means of production as the means of distribution.

Facebook made a platform and seeded it with a few apps. They don’t charge users money to use the platform but profit from the content, applications and relationships created by the users of their platform. There was a recent controversy over their terms that tried to license user content in perpetuity effectively meaning that any content on Facebook became the property of Facebook not the contributor. The ire of users caused a rethink but this is quite a drastically reductive paradigm: in these ecologies to consume without purchasing a license is illegal, branding us pirates, yet this was an audacious attempt to claim the rights to our contributed intellectual property too without any other remuneration than consent to use a platform.

Further to my thesis on the progressive uses of digital technology this appears to demonstrate the false hope of Web 2.0. We are busy being more interactive and more productive but it is others who are profiting whilst our ability to consume becomes ever more circumscribed. It hardly seems the locus of control is shifting: the crowdsourcing in the cloud is a relief for powerful companies looking to cut costs but perhaps a false paradise for progressives?