The Digital Divide

Get over to those top folk from Minneapolis, Zeus Jones, for a little more detail on a wonderful post about the digital divide as they see it. It's a compelling chunk of writing and for me has all the makings of a hallmark digital anthropology post.

Socialising Media

UKYorkie

What's the point of it all?

I've been asked this time and again by a bunch of folk ranging from London planning honchos who don't have enough time to explore web 2.0 or friends who fired off a volley of concerned emails during a patch when I'd seemingly gone underground. I will however first off make a rough and ready psychographic division because not everybody is the same when I make this case.

A narrator or writer I came across (I'm struggling to remember where) asserted that there are roughly speaking two types of people plodding around the planet at present. Cold war survivors and the ones after, lets call them Post-Coldies. This has only a little to do with age as its a mindset that can easily be absorbed from say parents and different environments. Cold war people have been bombed by mainstream media (MSM) into believing that the world is divided into good and bad, and have trouble dealing with shades of grey or the texture and subtlety between. Go easy on them because its pretty close to a brain washing experience, but in principle a generation of Soviet 'evil empire' rhetoric, contrasted with Western neoliberal capitalist propaganda as saviour of the world leaves them with a sharply divided mindset that is wholly binary and extends to extraordinary statements like communism has failed and only capitalism works. Or "isn't it great the polar caps are melting, let's consume some more refrigerated ice cream".

Cold war survivors are a guarded bunch. MSM and their parents taught them to be that way. They manage their online identity with Stalinist control, feel uncomfortable with online pictures of themselves, default to using very spy-like online monikers, never use 'include message in reply' in their emails and compartmentalize their offline lives with a strict policy of not mixing say work friends, then family, and life friends. They also tend to tell default fibs if different groups happen to enquire about each other, but they are not being malicious.

I guess they're just trying to shore up their separate offline identities that they manage in this increasingly complex and connected world. This was necessary to hold the whole cold war mentality together. People who aren't paranoid or under fear of invasion make for lousy misguided patriots so it's in the interests of the State to make sure a climate of them and us prevails. It's not completely impossible to envisage the current attempt to exchange reds-under-the bed, with the now ubiquitous terrorists of today. But that's probably another post about propaganda's resemblance to heaps of contemporary advertising that I'm saving for later.

Anyway, the point of all this social(ist) media immersion is, in my view, to drive all that online activity offline. The most rewarding experience of virtual friendships is to meet those same people in real life. I started to be convinced of this through hooking up with big chunks of the London plannersphere. But take the argument even further, and the MMORPG or video gaming community is a good example. Its not hard to see that the apex of their digital community experiences are the championships and tournaments they hold in conventions centres from Seoul to South Dakota.

Another good potential example of this might be for Last.FM to create Last.FM bars. These would be bars where the community can have a say over the music, ranging from discovery mode, to play-me-the-classics-I-love. This used to be called a Juke Box but it was quite limited.

I can think of lots more examples.

So all that anthropological primate grooming with pokes, vampire bites, blogging and twitters pretty much self actualises when we get to have something like a cup of coffee or a beer with people of a likemind. Simple isn't it?

I got thinking about this again earlier because I see that PicnicMob are trying to get a large group of people together in one city and have an online picnic. By working out what your interests are they will seat you next to someone similar. Personally I quite like meeting people who are into stuff I haven't come across but I'm sure you see my point. The irony is that the Post Coldies are pretty much trying to create, with all this social(ist) media, what the Coldies have already being doing all their lives; albeit with global reach, greater transparency, less small talk and networking at the speed of light.

Its not for everyone but I am reminded that Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic technologies would lead us back to an oral culture.

Timo Veikkola - Nokia

Kjirstin

I went to PSFK's conference yesterday in London. It was billed as a morning of trends and ideas, and an afternoon of new marketing. The whole day was hugely enjoyable and I'm not just saying that because PSFK put me up at the Metropolitan and paid for those Cannes tickets I was moaning about. I made some notes of the thoughts and ideas that made sense to me or even didn't make sense but somehow needed to be taken down. Here they are.

The first speaker was Timo Veikkola (picture by lynetter) who is a future specialist at Nokia (what a great job), and seems to have a similarly exciting position as Jan Chipchase. Timo is one of those social science types that the Scandinavian countries excel at integrating into big business much more sympathetically than many U.S. corporations. His goal is to make communications as natural as possible while picking up on future trends to integrate into Nokia products and usability. Timo pointed out that there is no other stimulant like travel and I'd fully agree with him there. Anything else is just Disneyland really. Timo is currently planning for the year 2010, and reminded us of the question "can the human mind master what the human mind has made?" (Zygmnunt Bauman). For a Clinton Kid like me, the last 6 years have been quite depressing and Timo underlined how war is thematic for this decade despite the number of casualities at this moment in time. He talked how these visuals of the oxymoron 'war on terror' have started to seep into culture and may also explain why there is a considerable counter movement for the honest, fun and simple.

Many years ago I was in Vietnam and noticed that despite all the efforts of the mighty U.S. military machine it was Coca-Cola that had really won the war. One slide by Timo of a car covered in Arabic text reminded me that if we look at the population growth demographics for Islamic countries it shouldn't be too long before, along with India and China we should in the future begin to see more Arabic text creeping into our culture. I always find text fascinating and have even etched a few Khmer and Siamese tattoos on my body. I can think of nothing more exciting than nipping up to the Turk, Sri Lankan, Kurdish and Tamil supermarkets where I'm living and looking at 'foreign stuff'. Somehow Coconut Milk from Southern India is much more romantic and kosher than something packaged by one of the supermarkets. I am also quite frankly bored with all the web 2.0 cuddly logos sprouting, although I do realise that style is more important and useful than identity in this overloaded logo world.

Timo talked about how protest and political statement will likely be more present in design of the future and this was reinforced later by the sustainable design panel. I can certainly see a future where homogeneous brands, products and services are more likely to differentiate themselves by what they stand for - their values as it were. Timo also described that we seem to be living in almost biblical Revelations-like times with famine, pestilence, disease and floods from things like SARS, Hurricanes and Tsunamis, he then talked about the move from a celebrity culture to a knowledge culture which simply can't come soon enough for me.

Many moons ago on a hardcore right wing political chat channel that I liked to sharpen my teeth on I was arguing (or rather being shouted down) about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of driving SUV's in a world with rapidly diminishing oil and young Americans and British people dying for it while serving in the armed forces in Iraq which everyone knows (except the oil addicts) was invaded for its oil reserves and the Green Zone that will administer it. The one weapon that unsettled the frothy mouthed right-wing-nuts in the debate (95% of the channel) was the question, would Jesus drive an SUV? The unholy alliance between the Neo-Conservatives and the Christian fundamentalists is always unsettled by this simple question and mark my words for the future of sustainable consumption, religion and culture will be huge factors in the war of ideas. Ask yourself if Jesus would purchase an SUV, because it looks to me from the picture above that Mohamed wouldn't have minded a Big Mac. That is every reason for being optimistic about the future...... which according to Arthur C Clarke is going to be 'utterly fantastic'.

flickrvision

The latest mashup between Flickr and Googlemaps by Dave Troy, the inventor of twittervision is here. It's called flickrvision. Twitter is all about why short messages have a depth and resonance all of their own. Location now adds an important layer of context to many types of data.

This is why flickrvision is so great. The concept of geographically tagged pictures being uploaded to flickr in real time is a lot easier to grasp . Check it out for yourself. If you can't think of a few applications for this, go have a strong cup of coffee for inspiration. I've said it before, so forgive me for saying it again, these are exciting times we live in. Dave Troy created the original twittervision over a few spare hours on a Sunday and was in no time at all being flown to London to talk business opportunities. One of the issues that is emerging out of this recombinant culture as Faris puts it so well, is the compelling nature of the data streams now gathering momentum from geo tagging. It's almost as if the flat two dimensional digital world is spilling over into the real world by giving the data it holds coordinates. A great example is the project for ancient literature texts being given modern geographic locations. A bit like reading Homer's Oddysey or Chaucer's Canterbury tales with references to modern-day towns and cities. Much more easier and a lot more fun, don't you think?