Today my attention got caught by the title of the book Networks, Trust, and Social Capital: Theoretical And Empirical Investigations from Europe. I then found it on Google Books. It is the first time I read a book on Google Books, it is really great, for this book there are most of the scanned pages (I would say 150 out of 239 pages) so I was able to “read” the book by simply scrolling extremely fast with my mouse over the almost entire book. In this way I was able to decide that I’m not interested in buying and reading it. But what I would have done in a pre-GoogleBooks era? I would have thought “well, based on the title there should be at least one or two articles interesting for me, go and buy it” and I would have wasted some euros for a book I would have not read. Is the present situation better from a consumer point of view? Of course it is. Google Books or any similar program is helping in sharing knowledge and making informed decisions and this is what every author at the end really wants.
By Rentathing. In a single slidecast, they explain clearly a possible and reasonable future society in which interactions are based on trust and reputation (someone would call it “whuffie”). And it even shows examples of ridesharing (letting other people benefit from your car) and couchsurfing (letting other people benefit from your house). A slidecast is worth thousands words. UPDATE: As I was suggesting in the comments, read “Down and out in the magic kingdom†(Creative commons released so you can download it for free and much more) or just the Whuffie page in wikipedia: “Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.†BUT if you intend to read the book (suggested!!!), don’t read the wiki page!
And also check Ripple (really blowminding!) and its white paper “Money as IOUs in Social Trust Networks & A Proposal for a Decentralized Currency Network Protocolâ€.
Terrific course by Trebor Scholz which I would terribly like to attend.
Since it is released under a Creative Commons License ByAttribution/ShareAlike 2.5 and this blog as well, I’m legally allowed to redistribute the content on this blog and this is precisely what I’m going to do in the following. Try to attend the course, discussing for an entire courses about these topics should be an amazing experience!
Scholz, Trebor. A History of the Social Web. (unpublished, I’ll email you) Suggested Reading: "List of social networking websites – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." Main Page – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 16 Jul 2007. 16 Jul 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites>.
Udell, Jon. "Tag mania sweeps the Web | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-07-20 | By Jon Udell." InfoWorld – Information Technology News, Computer Networking & Security. 2 Jul 2005. 26 Aug 2007 <http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/07/20/30OPstrategic_1.html>.
Glickman, Matt, and Mark Horton. "Netnews History – Usenet Server, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin." Internet history, design, web, email…. 1 Jan 1996. 17 Jul 2007 <http://www.livinginternet.com/u/ui_netnews.htm>.
• Week 4 (09/18, 09/20) Social Isolation, the Public Sphere and the WWW Required Readings: Boeder, Piter. "Habermas’ heritage." First Monday. 21 Aug 2005. 26 Aug 2007 <http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_9/boeder/>.
Kluge, Alexander, Peter Labanyi, and Oskar Negt. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Theory and History of Literature). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Carr, Nicholas. "Nicholas Carr: The net is being carved up into information plantations | Technology | The Guardian." Guardian Unlimited home | Guardian Unlimited. 17 May 2007. 26 Aug 2007 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/may/17/media.newmedia>.
Zuckerman, Ethan. "My heart is in Accra “; Mapping land distribution in Bahrain." Ethan Zuckerman. 31 Oct 2006. 20 Jun 2007 <http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1085ap/>.
• Week 11 (11/06, 11/08) Motivations for Participation
Questions: What motivates people on the Social Web to engage? Required Reading: Gefen, David, and Catherine M. Ridings. " Virtual Community Attraction:Why People Hang Out Online." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 1 Nov 2004. 31 Jul 2007 <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue1/ridings_gefen.html#s2>.
• Week 12 (11/13, 11/15) The Ethics of Participation. Got ethics? Labor, what? (The production of value on the Social Web)
Questions: What are ethical standards on both, the side of the users and the corporate platform providers?
What’s the difference between moralistic posturing and discussions about context-specific ethics?
Does talk about ethics mean that we can’t have any more fun?
Do the activities on the Social Web qualify as immaterial labor?
Wyrick, Brian, and Dmytri Kleiner. "Infoenclosure 2.0." Mute magazine – Culture and politics after the net. 29 Jan 2007. 26 Aug 2007 <http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0>.
Rauch, Peter. "Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics (Part One)." Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 1 Aug 2007. 26 Aug 2007 <http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/08/games_and_ethics.html>.
• Week 13 (11/20, 11/22) Fields of Possibilities
Questions: What are the core characteristics of the Social Web?
How can networked publics fight back? Today, is it practical to live ethical lives in the context of the Social Web and mobile social space? If so, tactics could be learned and shared with others. Required Reading: Jarvis, Jeff. "New News: Deconstructing the newspaper." BuzzMachine . 18 Jan 2006. 26 Aug 2007 <http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/01/18/new-news-deconstructing-the-newspaper/>.
• Week 14 (11/27, 11/29) The Future of the Social Web
Required Reading:
Cascio, Jamais. "WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon." WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future. 4 May 2005. 12 Jul 2007 <http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002651.html>.
If someone tells you about the tragedy of the commons (in short, common goods will be overused by everyone and so get destroyed in short time), be fast in tell her about the cornucopia of the commons. Go figure.
The 8th of September in Italy is the v-day (aka vaffanculo day, vaffanculo means “fuck you”). It was launched by Beppe Grillo, an Italian comedian and most popular Italian blogger.
The purpose is to tell to our politicians “vaffanculo” and to let them know that they are really exagerating and the patience has a limit. As the “V for Vendetta” movie says “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people”. Which reminds me of Zapatistas and “aqui manda el pueblo y el gobierno obedece”
But in order to canalize the great hate against politicians that is mounting in Italy, the idea is to collect, during the v-day, real signatures in order to promote 3 bottom-up proposals of laws:
1) A citizen that has been judged guilty cannot run for the Parliament. 2) No citizen can be re-elected for more than 2 times. The rules is valid, retroactively.
3) Members of parliament are chosen directly by the citizens and not by the political parties.
We need 50.000 signatures for every proposal. This is largely achievable but I hope we can get at least 6 millions, one tenth of Italians. There will be a national march in Bologna but also local events in all the italian cities in order to collect more signatures. If you are in Trento, a local group is organizing the v-day here.
I’m especially proud and supporting the 2nd proposal. I think it can really change Italy, really. Just for your consideration, try to imagine that in Italy there is a politician that is deciding about Italy at the maximum levels since 1946! His name is Giulio Andreotti. I quote from the Wikipedia page: Andreotti has sat in Parliament without interruption since 1946, this means more than 60 years!!!. And basically all the other politicians are sitting there since many many many years. Nothing in Italy will ever change with those zombie faces. The law No citizen can be re-elected for more than 2 times. The rules is valid, retroactively will change Italy. It is our last hope I think.
This v-day will be also an interesting reality check for the power of alternative media. Television, newspapers and radio (old time, mass media) don’t speak at all about this v-day and the call for citizens. From what I can see this is true for newspapers and radio, I don’t have a TV so I cannot judge but I’ve been told the silence has been violently astounding. So people who will know about the v-day will know from alternative, non-mass media: blogs, word of mouth. I like to believe that blogs are already very influent but I know that this is not the reality. This would be an interesting test.
If you check Web aggregators (such as del.icio.us/popular or digg) you probably heard about Allison Stokke already. She is an 18 years old pole vaulter. And she is getting a lot of unwanted attention because a photo of her (here on the left) was posted on a football message board and then was hyped by bloggers, myspacers, etc. And then the Washington post deserved devoted an entire article on the front page to her and this of course made her even more popular and web searched.
I can totally understand she and her family does not like this unwanted attention. She is an athlete and she would like to be judged on that, if anything. However I believe that somehow this unwanted attention is an opportunity for her, she has a choice, she can (1) choose to let it fade away (because I’m sure that if she does not ride the situation, this attention will fade away soon, surely in one year few people will remember her or search for her on the Web) or (2) she can decide to exploit it (I’m sure she already received offers for books, interviews, for acting in movies and possibly more weird things that she can choose to exploit if she likes). I’m also aware that it should not be an easy period for her, I was reading that she does not feel like walking around alone.
Let me just mention passing by that it is just by pure chance that she (and not another similarly attractive athlete) got all this attention. This attention is just the product of Web aggregation. There is an interesting paper by Duncan Watts which empirically shows that, while aggregation produces items that got a lot of attention (the best sellers, top 10, etc.), in different separated worlds with the same items, the social processes will put at the top of the global attention list different items. In a different parallel world this could have been happened to you, yes you. So what happened is something that touches all of us and should make all of us think about it. But I guess this is not a relief for her and her family.
Personally, I think that you cannot control what other people tell about you, and this is become more and more true in the Internet age. I’m used to summarize it with “it’s the direction of the arrow, stupid!”, meaning that you can control what you say about other people (outgoing arrows) but you cannot control what other people say about you (incoming arrows). It is the reason by which PageRank algorithm is so clever and HITS algorithm is not so clever. I’m aware this can sometimes turn into bashing and horrible periods for some people but I think this is also a great opportunity for society and the risks can be mitigated if anyone is educated about this and slow in judging.
The last point I want to briefly mention is about privacy, especially privacy in time of web2.0. Is it ethical for me to write this post knowing that she does not like this attention? Is it ethical for the Washington Post writing an article about her? Is there any difference? I’m not sure about the first 2 questions but I believe that the answer to the third question is “no”. WithLeather asks her/his/itself How would I feel if it were my daughter that got this unwanted attention? Well, I suppose I would be upset but I think I don’t have the right to ask to all the people to not write about, I might ask for their comprehension on reporting facts accurately or to defer from speaking about this. Don’t know. And more, There should be a Wikipedia page about Allison Stokke or not?
What is great about blogging is that it helps you ask yourself lots of questions. Another advantage of this post is also that I can now check the access statistics to see if this post becomes the most read post just because it contains in the title the name of a buzzed girl and it is related to sex.
An interesting presentation by Robert Upton of Altruists.org
It is not very deep but a good starter on motivations. For more check “Money as debt” video and, much more, Ripple, an open-source software project for developing and implementing a protocol for an open decentralized payment network.
Delaminate the Bastards!
The only way to get Net Neutrality with teeth is by changing the business models of the businesses providing us with access. Bust ’em up so that the companies that connect us to the Internet don’t also sell us services over the Internet.
Mobile Technology: 2012: Online Only Video: The New Yorker
"Presentation by Younghee Jung who leads a multidisciplinary research team at Nokia called “Insight and Innovation.†She talks about what to expect next from your mobile phone, the newest ideas in the pipeline, and the questions that Nokia is asking w
