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Social media cultures workshop

Ted Ted
September 25, 2011
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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.

Counter-networks [lecture]

Ted Ted
September 21, 2011
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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.

DIGC202 Counter-networks on Prezi

Bridges made of pebbles [lecture]

Ted Ted
September 21, 2011
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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.

DIGC202 Citizen journalism and new media audiences on Prezi

From liquid labour to presence bleed [lecture]

Ted Ted
August 15, 2011
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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.

DIGC202 Liquid labour on Prezi

The Network Society: utopian narratives of global communication [lecture]

Ted Ted
August 14, 2011
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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.

DIGC202 The Network Society on Prezi

Specialization is for insects

Ted Ted
August 14, 2011
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‘A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.’

-Robert A. Heinlein

Istanbul pictures

Ted Ted
August 4, 2011
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First it was Byzantion – the city of Byzas. Then it was Constantinople – the city of Constantine. The vikings from the Varangian Guard called it Miklagard – the Great City. Its citizens called it The City – as no other European city deserved to be called that in comparison. The Turks called it Istanbul – a corruption of the Greek eis ten polin (to the city).

I imagine the conquerors were pointing at the city while asking very slowly in Turkish a random Greek peasant ‘What do you call that’, to which the peasant probably replied equally slowly in Greek ‘Yes, that way to the city’. Hence Istanbul.

An amazing place.

Click on the image to see all my Istanbul albums on picasa.

Hagia Sophia