February 2012
8 posts
3 tags
jupitermission:
Hey, remember when you asked me...
3 tags
Dear startups and other relevant parties: It's... →
chartier:
Not offer a way to download our data in some sort of a standard, transparent, and at least somewhat human-siftable format
Hide or otherwise be opaque about precisely what personal data you smuggle out of our devices
Not offer a one-to-two-click process for deleting our accounts
Fail to actually remove our data from your serversafter we delete our accounts (while complying with...
5 tags
6 tags
4 tags
“So what do post-structuralist/cultural thinkers bring to the geography party?...”
– Sounds like there might have been a bit of a ding-dong about post-structuralism on the Critical Geography Forum mailing list. This defence by Jonathan Cloke (Loughborough) made some practical rejoinders.
[via @demilit]
5 tags
“Facebook’s revolution is obviously less Maoist than feudal. The “social graph”...”
– Also from Rob Horning’s commentary on the Facebook IPO. Saved for further thinking about…
6 tags
“People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families —...”
– Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, Popmatters) notes that Zuckerberg “intends to rewire the way sociality works in the world” in his “grandiose” IPO letter quoted above.
Obviously Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” takes on Z’s “diverse...
5 tags
Surveillance drone industry plans PR effort to... →
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems Association (UAVSA), a trade group that represents the drone industry to the UK government, has recommended drones deployed in Britain should be shown to “benefit mankind in general” be decorated with humanitarian-related advertisements, and be painted bright colours to distance them from those used in warzones.
Also worth noting that...
January 2012
17 posts
2 tags
5 tags
“We shed data all the time, like dead skin cells. With every click, every...”
– Code of conduct: The relentless march of the algorithm by Robin Barton, The Independent, 15 Jan 2012.
I wrote my Masters’ thesis on dust, on what it meant exactly that we are constantly sloughing off hair and skin - bodily fragments - which transform into waste strewn thinly and evenly...
3 tags
Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart, Rich, Or Pretty... →
If 2012 is the year of Big Data, it will likely be the year vendors and consultants start to over-promise, under-deliver, and put processes in motion that will generate insights and potential risks for years to come. […]
As Big Data becomes the next great savior of business and humanity, we need to remain skeptical of its promises as well as its applications and aspirations.
...
5 tags
Booklet: Why You Should Care About ACTA →
protoslacker:
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a multilateral agreement which proposes international standards for enforcement of intellectual property rights.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) opposes ACTA, calling for more public spotlight on the proposed treaty.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published “Speak out against ACTA”, stating that the ACTA threatens...
6 tags
4 tags
“[…] the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary...”
– Extracts from The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, which’ll be published on 2 Feb 2012.
I wish ideas like these were more widely known - that it was common knowledge quite how culturally contingent and historically specific our attitudes to...
4 tags
A Momentary Flow: Study shows that kids, unlike... →
wildcat2030:
Knowmads, Infocology of the future Growing up with the Internet gives today’s children a very unique view on the way the world works — one that is vastly different from that of older generations. These kids, the ‘digital natives,” are raised with modern technology deeply…
@machinestarts (Chris Baraniuk) commented, “I am not a fan of this research. Children 30 years ago...
3 tags
Does corporate ethnography suck? A cultural... →
I’ve found myself discussing this article on the comments thread, in the FACE office with my colleagues, and on Twitter with at least half-a-dozen people. It’s getting stacks of traction, so I figure it’s worth sharing it here too.
@SLadner asks the big question both academic and commercial ethnographers rather guiltily wonder - is what the other lot are doing any good? Surely...
4 tags
Hello world
I’m guessing you’re mostly here from the Tumblr Technology Spotlight. Thanks Tumblr! And thanks for following.
The 101:
Who: Jay Owens What: social (media / research / anthropology / theory). Interested in what technology means and what it does to us psychologically and socially.
Especially: identity, privacy, big data.
Basically: social nerd. Where: London, @hautepop and...
5 tags
The credit card that could stop (or hinder) fraud →
I was directed to this Ars Technica article by Aden Davies (banking innovation chap at HSBC), who pointed out the comments thread as rather more insightful than the article itself.
Indeed it was, and I’m just starting a new mobile payment project, so I wanted to aggregate the key points into one post for reference. What might actually be the solution to secure card payment?
First, the...
4 tags
Mortari's reply to: "Optimising" educational... →
hautepop:
“One company getting buzz is ConnectEDU, sometimes described as an eHarmony for college matchmaking. Its founder, Craig Powell, dreams that students won’t even have to apply to college “because an algorithm will have already told them and the schools where they would fit best,”
The algo dream: to replace human agency and choice.
We must start to ask, what is so bad about making...
3 tags
“One company getting buzz is ConnectEDU, sometimes described as an eHarmony for...”
– The algo dream: to replace human agency and choice.
We must start to ask, what is so bad about making a non-“optimised” decision? Do we not learn things - do we not sometimes learn more - from the things we do that don’t quite work?
This quotation is taken from an article,...
5 tags
Imperialist Tendencies [Jan Chipchase] →
Design researcher & tech anthropologist Jan Chipchase was questioned at the Pop!Tech conference about the ethics of doing his kind of work.
» What is it like working for BigCorps pillaging the intellect of people around the world for commercial gain?
» How do you sleep at night as the corporations you work for pump their worthless products into the world?”
As he says, “There...
2 tags
“The problem of course is that the “power” of big data to help answer...”
– Massive, crucial point, beautifully expressed - and by an undergrad no less (by name of Evan Freedman).
Comment on The Limits of Big Data by Klint Finley on RWW, June 2011
7 tags
About time – Examining the case for a shorter... →
CASE and New Economics Foundation public discussion
Date: Wednesday 11 January 2012
Time: 6-7.30pm
Speakers: Professor Juliet Schor, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Dr Edward Skidelsky
Discussant: Professor Tim Jackson
Chair: Anna Coote
As the economic crisis deepens, this is the moment to consider moving towards much shorter, more flexible paid working hours – sharing out jobs and...
December 2011
34 posts
3 tags
Influence marketing as Ponzi scheme
Ah the challenges of having an original idea! In the process of transferring my longer-form posts here to my new domain JayOh.net, I find that the themes in my last post Influencer marketing: two speculative stories were prefigured by Tom Ewing over a year ago:
There are “influencers” who live in the world of “social media”, and if you influence these “influencers” they will say nice stuff...
3 tags
“These extremes are called civilisation and barbarism - or savagery. But the use...”
– Georges Bataille, Eroticism p. 186 (Marion Boyers, London 2006)
3 tags
Influencer marketing, peers and trust - two...
01. The attraction of influencer marketing is in being able to leverage word-of-mouth and peer recommendations.
02. This is valuable because peer influence is the most effective form of influencing what we buy, or what we feel about a brand. [source]
03. Peer influence has this impact because it’s advice from people we trust. Key to almost every definition of an influencer is their...
3 tags
Michael Wheeler, THINKING BEYOND THE BRAIN:... →
[…] Andy Clark’s memorable description of human beings as natural born cyborgs. What this phrase reminds us is that although it is tempting to think of our cognitive symbiosis with technology as being a consequence, as opposed to merely a feature, of a world populated by clever computational kit, that would be to ignore the following fact: it is of our very nature as evolved and embodied...
6 tags
Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an... →
“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders—every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every...
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
1 tag
5 tags
2 tags
4 tags
Peak freedom?
I read an article a week ago which argued that this - here, now - is what peak oil looks like
A decade ago, those few of us who were paying attention to peak oil were pointing out that if the peak of global conventional petroleum production arrived before any meaningful steps were taken, the price of oil would rise to previously unimagined heights, crippling the global economy and pushing...
Crooked Timber » » DeLong, Scott and Hayek →
Brad DeLong has a review of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State which I found pretty useful in clarifying some of my disagreements with him (Brad, not Scott). What he sees as a fundamental problem in…
Spaces of Appearance, Spaces of Surveillance, and... →
[READ W/ REGARD TO SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING] Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault developed different but complementary theories about the relationship between visibility and power. In an Arendtian…
The Robot-Readable World – Matt Jones, BERG →
“What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them half-way – covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs, making a robot-readable world”
"Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity" [DANAH... →
No matter how many times a privileged straight white male technology executive pronounces the death of privacy, Privacy Is Not Dead. People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just…
5 tags
Things that will be banned during the London 2012...
Maintaining Olympic advertisers’ expensively-purchased monopolies of signification is a legal requirement for host cities. This means new laws:
Section 19: Advertising Regulations.
(4)The regulations may apply in respect of advertising of any kind including, in particular—
(a)advertising of a non-commercial nature, and
(b)announcements or notices of any kind.
(5)The regulations may...
Homelessness in Central Park →
hkhuntingblog:
These photos from @HKhuntingblog are from the Great Depression, where homeless people were living in shacks in Central Park.
A roof over their heads and public visibility at the centre of the city? It strikes me that this may have offered somewhat more dignity than homeless people are today able to find in America, where Occupy Wall Street may be helping but only under...
2 tags
“Whenever we talk about the Internet, the “mythological machine” in our...”
– Wu Ming, Fetishism of Digital Commodities and Hidden Exploitation: the cases of Amazon and Apple on MUTE. NB that Wu Ming is a mysterious collective of guerrillla novelists from Italy - not a singular individual.
Posted because this is a useful reminder following my last post Seeing Like A...
4 tags
Seeing Like A Database: the problems with big data
“Big data” has been one of the buzzwords of 2011, and grand claims are being made for its power:
The world is becoming data-ized as digital information and numerical measurement is being applied to all aspects of what people do, particularly things that couldn’t be measured before because it was impractical or impossible. (Think: using wireless and GPS in cars to base insurance...
5 tags
The Hudson's Bay Boys
Watching an exceptional documentary on The Hudson’s Bay Boys [BBC iPlayer] about the last generation of Scots who went out to work for the Hudson Bay Company in Arctic Canada in the 1960s - 1980s.
As 20-year-olds they moved half way round the world to work in the trading posts and general stores, appraising seal-skins and selling flour, sugar, (cigarettes, alcohol) - but more than that,...