Using public transport, we leave digital traces when checking in and out with our OV chip cards. Once our Bonus Card at Albert Heijn got scanned over the counter, we provide Albert with valuable information about what we like to buy and how often we do so. Even when getting our morning Cappuccino at Starbucks and using a discount coupon on our mobile phone, it’s all about moving data from one spot to another. In other words: we live in data-rich environments and our cities are gradually turning into ‘readable cities’. All that, based on the vast amounts of data which we ourselves perpetually produce.
With the mission of defining ‘the future of information consumption’, the founders of Qwiki, a self-proclaimed multimedia alternative to the text-based search provided by Google state to have launched the ‘next big thing’: a narrative search-tool based on the computer ‘telling you a story’ accompanied by videos and pictures about the term you are looking for. “Whether you’re planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family Google TV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search.”
In his presentation at the Video Vortex #6 conference in Amsterdam, graphic designer and project director Roel Wouters introduced the audience to interactive projects which include dynamic media such as web video and animation to install crowdsourced performances. With his collegues Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Edo Paulus he has published the Conditional Design Manifesto, which is based on the work of his collective called Conditional Design and emphasizes the idea of following processes in the digital realm rather than its products.
In his talk on the cultural value of amateur video at the Video Vortex #6 conference in Amsterdam, the author, scholar and artist Michael Strangelove explained how amateur productions will gain greater value due to their potential of challenging the meaning of things, their subvertion of capitalist modes of production and their use by individuals as tools for self-representation of the world. Why does ‘Laughing Baby’, ‘David coming back from the dentist’ or the ‘Star Wars Kid’ make a difference in our lives? And what is it that makes online video different from TV? Dr.Strangelove’s answer to this is straight to the point: “It’s the amateur”.
Last Wednesday, author and journalist Nicholas Carr presented his new book “The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember” at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. After his famous 2008 essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr again makes his audience ponder on how contemporary technologies have an immense effect on the way people think.
Open source, open government, open culture – as Nate Tkacz, PhD at the University of Melbourne points out in his talk at the Economies of the Commons Conference, the ubiquity of ‘openness’ as a master category of politics in network cultures turns into a multidimensional, and even more into a political term in the debate on the free and open. With referring to historical notions of openness, Tkacz makes some critical statements on the function of the open with particularly discussing it on the basis of Karl Popper’s work on ‘The Open Society and its Enemies”.
In his talk at the Economies of the Commons Conference on November 12th at De Balie in Amsterdam, Yann Moulier-Boutang, editor of the Quarterly French Review MULTITUDES and professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne, discussed the fate of digital commons by comparing them to the ancient commons of pre-colonial primitive accumulation, such as fishing, hunting and trade.
Let’s say it is Friday night, 7pm. All shops are closed and every normal working person went home to enjoy the weekend. Some people are heading home for dinner with their families, others are having drinks with friends. And then comes the Big Bang: Paris Hilton and her dog die in a car crash. Most certainly, tomorrow’s newspapers are going to write about it. And even more sure, everyone will already have read it online or watched it on the news. And this is just one of the several reasons why tomorrow’s paper is already so – oh, so yesterday today.
Data theft, child pornography, spying on governments and spreading destructive computer viruses. When thinking of the term ‘hacking’, we usually think of internet crime, computer breakdowns and some geeks sitting in front of their laptop looking for a fresh kill. However, for those who think of themselves as ‘hackers’, hacking means something completely different. It’s about creatively playing with technology, challenging the status quo of things and exploring the world. Did you know that you can hack your own life? I didn’t, but I learned about it yesterday at the conference named “The Future of Hacking” organised by the Club of Amsterdam in collaboration with the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
Create the change, become a Twitizen, fight injustice and eff the system. Revolution here and revolution there. Everywhere we hear about how social media and micro-blogging has brought about a tremendous change in the organization of social movements and political activism. We constantly get to hear about the so worn out issue of “Twitter Revolutions” all around the world and the news praising the immense effect that the influential social media movement is having on governance and political change. But where exactly is the revolution?
