Prezi from a lecture I gave on the social network revolutions in the #mena region, mainly concentrating on case studies of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen. I start by drawing a broad conceptual framework around the notions of nodes with power, participatory culture, and the empowerment of peripheries in the context of hierarchical systems of information control. There are many ways to approach the still unfolding events of the #arabspring, but I chose to focus on the way individuals acted as catalysts and leveraged social networks to achieve critical mass both on and offline. In that respect I tried to underscore – in disagreement with the arguments of Evgeny Morozov – that it is crucial not to underestimate the role of social media such as youtube, facebook and twitter in creating scale-free network effects for the protest movements. I also focus on the role of women – Asmaa Mahfouz and Tawakel Karman – in inspiring, organizing and leading the protests in Egypt and Yemen respectively.
Category: academic
Pictures from the HUMlab Social Media Cultures Workshop held at Umeå University, Sweden on 26-28 September in collaboration with the University of Wollongong.
Stop Tweeting Boring Shit – a ubercool limited edition poster set by the Division of Labor creative studio. Printouts available from their online shop for $25 per set.
My second day in Umea – a tiny little university town in the north of Sweden, where I am attending a workshop on Social Media Cultures at the HumLab. The program for the workshop looks quite hectic, peppered by series of 10 minute presentations to be followed by short discussions. Tomorrow [Monday] I am presenting on sociable objects, to be followed by a presentation on online knowledge creation on Tuesday.
The key theme I want to drive in the first presentation is that objects are starting to acquire the power to produce a semantically rich dynamic flow of data, which makes them (or rather their information output) hard to distinguish from humans. The implications are that you could friend and engage someone’s twitter feed in the same way that you could friend and engage a car’s info feed (in fact, the Toyota Friend program is going exactly in that direction).
In my second presentation I am concentrating on the importance of continuous, dynamic engagement with and reflection on content in an online environment. The idea is that knowledge creation occurs in a constructivist scaffolding-like framework where students continuously engage with content on a variety of levels, while simultaneously reflecting on that process.
Prezi from a lecture on hackers, hacktivism, wikileaks, and a couple of other things. I start with the Enigma cryptanalysis effort (how else?), talk a bit about Rejewski and Turing, and then move on to phone phreaking in the 60s, early hacking crews (LoD, 414s, MoD, cDc), hacker subculture [l33t sp34k], hacking in popular culture [nmap gets a mention], hacktivist case studies, and a bit on LulzSec and stuxnet.
Yet another prezi, from a lecture I gave on citizen journalism and new forms of news dissemination. I discuss digital content dynamics [scarcity/abundance, economy of access], the transition from gatekeeping to gatewatching [Axel Bruns], analyse Slashdot and Reddit, and use Steven Johnson’s metaphor of Twitter story development as a suspension bridge made of pebbles to illustrate the rising value of aggregation.
This is a prezi from a lecture I gave earlier this week on the shift from content-based to attention-based economy, and the way network power laws (the long tail) inform business practices online.
The answer is, in short: 70% males, majority of whom are students and/or tech professionals from the US.
Prezi from a lecture examining the influence of information networks on organisations and labour practices. To illustrate both dynamic, I am using notions such as network coordination and transaction costs, Mard Deuze’s notion of liquid labour, Norbert Wiener’s description of the feedback loop, and more importantly John Boyd’s OODA loop as a visualization of the way networks maintain themselves and coordinate the flow of information. The argument of course is that to understand the changes of organisational and labour practices one needs to understand the way networks deal with adversity (coordination and transaction costs); similarly, one has to understand how the length of the feedback loop inevitably leads to decentralization and decision making at the nodal level (Boyd). Crucially, references to sociological favorites such as ‘capitalism’, ‘power’, ‘the social’ are rendered irrelevant.
Prezi from a lecture on utopian narratives of global communication, tracing the roots of cyber-utopianism from the revolutionary influence of the telegraph, to personal computers and the technical architecture of the internet. The telegraph brought the metaphor of communication networks as nervous system, a metaphor also linking the separation of information from carrier to the separation of mind from body. These tropes are still with us more than 150 years later.