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!
Posted 7 months ago at 5:57 am. 0 comments
Turns out I don’t need much in life and some days most of the things in life that make you happy come along and make what started out as an ordinary day into one that puts a big smile on your face. Don’t need big parties or grand schemes or loads of money to make me happy … I’m a simple girl just need sunshine, freedom, laughter, music, wine, stars, candlelight, food on the barbie and friendship and most of that you don’t even have to buy.
My day got better as it went on as meetings I was supposed to have melted away leaving me with a working day to concentrate on my tasks in my own time frame without interruption. Even better I didn’t break anything. Headphones on I worked my way through a Moodle upgrade listening to the full Gladiator soundtrack on Spotify upgrading to Premium on the way. Much as I absolutely agree with giving blood (when mine decides it wants to come out) I didn’t want the Give Blood advert spoiling my music stream any more. So now I have a world of music at my finger tips simply and instantly (and their upgrade and payment process was simple and instant – oh joy).
Then surprisingly I find Microsoft are doing something interesting to make me late leaving work. Hello Education Labs a kind of marginal space for interaction between Microsoft and the education sector. Their first offering is a plugin that integrates Microsoft Live services into Moodle: access to email, messenger and single sign on using a Live ID. Kind of interesting if you are a Moodle developer whose users complaining they don’t get Moodle messaging and whose email team is just about to outsource all student email to Live@edu. It’s even licensed under the GPL and has already been downloaded 1011 times. It’s gone on my product backlog. Still old habits die hard – click on the RSS feed to subscribe to Education Labs updates and yes it will launch and subscribe you in Outlook without giving you the option to use any other reader without good old cut and paste. Boo.
Home time towards glorious blue skies and a warm summer evening and for the first time in a long time an evening with nothing planned, no responsibilities – more of that freedom. Actually not true I did have some things to do last night so apologies to all who have asked me to do things I was supposed to do that I ignored – the evening just unfurled in a more chilled direction.
Now my Australian housemate has lived over here for 20 years – I’ve been her friend for 12 and it’s probably a good thing she is going home in 2 months because when I got back was she outside firing up the barbie taking advantage of this rare summer evening delight. No. She was sat inside cooking roast pork in the oven. Talk about role reversal – thank goodness she’s still baiting me about the cricket otherwise I’d be really worried.
Chores done, wine poured I’m out there throwing some sweet red peppers and seas bass onto the barbie and eventually tempt her outside for 2 hours of wine, conversation and exploring music joy as dusk falls. I love Spotify – legal access to all the music you could want evening’s like this demonstrate its genius. We didn’t know what we wanted to listen to we just went from track to track exploring artists, themes, decades, memories – the whole lot a soundtrack to our lives and friendship. We started with Erasure and The Innocents (1988) and ended with Elvis. In between we challenged Spotify to play us Australian classics (it failed on the whole) and had a debate about which was the best version of Angel of the Morning (I went for The Pretenders Jen for Jill Johnson although I do like the Blackman and the Butterfly version which isn’t on Spotify and the German version is absolutely hilarious).
Recent research suggests the 14-24 year olds aren’t falling for Spotify because they want to own not stream music. This is kind of a false dichotomy, because unless you are the originator of music you never actually own it. You purchase a license to listen to it for your own personal use. Whether you choose to store a licensed copy of a manifestation of it on a local device or storage medium yourself, or let someone else do the storage and stream it will probably become increasingly redundant particularly as streaming services become embedded in devices themselves. For the work of art in the age of digital reproduction licenses and links matter more than bits.
* Days Like These – The Cat Empire
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?
