The media has two tribes, but there's only one winner

In England last year, over 126K freshman enrolled in ‘creative arts & designs’ programs while only 48.4K enrolled in computer science courses - but in the digital era, which will be better equipped for creativity?

Modern media are dogged by a “two cultures” mentality. On one side are the traditional bastions of media – humanities graduates who tell the stories in newspapers, on billboards, in adverts and books. On the other side are the tech crew: the developers who provide the increasingly complex and flexible infrastructure by which those stories can be told. At the moment, the two sides are largely unintelligible to each other. “Is this possible?” asks the writer of a cunning wheeze to make a story more interactive. “Anything’s possible,” replies the developer, a reply that closes off possibilities while pretending to open them.

In part, it’s a simple question of skills. The tribe to which I belong knows how to tell a story, but can’t grasp the digital possibilities. Being a technically illiterate journalist in today’s multimedia world is like being a pilot who’s a bit shaky on landings.

It’s not just a knowledge gap; there are subtler cultural divides at play. Paul Bradshaw, who runs Birmingham City University’s online journalism MA and is a visiting professor at London’s City University, says that different ways of learning are inculcated early on and are reflected in working patterns. The humanities graduates expect to read a book and learn from it. Developers are more hands-on, trying things out and adapting as they go. “Failure is part of the process,” he says. Different ways of working spawn garbled conversations.


Read more at The Guardian

The Avatar Economy

Are remote workers the brains inside tomorrow's robots?

Progress toward the "avatarization" of the economy has been limited by two technical factors that don't involve robotics at all. They are the speed of Internet connections and the latency involved in long-distance communication. Connecting a Thai worker to a robotic avatar in Japan with enough signal fidelity to carry out nonroutine work may be more difficult than engineering a cheap robotic chassis and related control systems.

How much bandwidth is enough? A "perfect" (just like being there) connection to a robotic telepresence system must accommodate a signal of 160 megabits per second. Theoretically, too, the distance between robot and worker shouldn't exceed 1,800 miles: any farther and the operator could get confused by the time lag as signals travel round-trip. Realistically, however, avatar workers can probably be effective janitors or doctors even if they are farther away and sensory fidelity is weaker. The VGo runs on Verizon's 4G network, for instance, and the U.S. military's drone-control facility in Italy is 2,700 miles from Afghanistan.
Read more at Technology Review

The Facebook Community Commons

There is a quiet revolution happening on Facebook that is really helping to bring back the concept of ‘marketplace commons’ to rural communities otherwise adversely impacted by the overwhelmingly one-sided and increasing trade deficit of online connectivity.

Read more at BuddeBlog

Digital participation and learning: 22 case studies

Imagemakers investigated participation and learning activity in the digital environment. They interviewed 22 organisations to produce case studies which illustrate a wide range of approaches to using digital media to engage people with heritage, from crowd sourcing to geocaching and from mobile applications to websites.

This report draws together key themes and lessons to consider when planning and delivering digital activity designed to engage a range of different audiences.
Download the report at the Heritage Lottery Fund

Value: Creating Markets in the Digital Economy

Download this keynote presentation by @irenecing

The Future of Communications

What we want is less noise, more context, ease of use, ease of access and the certainty that our listeners understand the message. We’d like our messages to end up with the right person, without governments, corporations or cybercriminals peeking at information that isn’t meant for them. We’d even like to spur people into action. We have always used communication to convince or even make other people do what we want. Improved communication technologies help us to do that quicker and on a larger scale, hugely influencing the next divide between the haves and the have-nots.Where will this lead us?

The Next Web asked 6 experts from different fields to share their view on the future of communication.

The complex effects of technological dislocation

As Donald Schon pointed out in the 1970s, for most of human history technological change has been sufficiently slow that we have had plenty of time to adjust to it. Contrast the time it took the steam engine to spread from invention to widespread social and economic effect with the time it has taken for the internet to have an equivalent impact. There was plenty of time to adjust to the effects of new technologies in the past, e.g. it took most of the nineteenth century for the railways to kill off the canals. Now, technological change is so fast and so pervasive that entire industries are transformed in less than a decade: look at how far the newspaper industry has been transformed by the internet in just ten years, with book publishing likely to go the same way soon. Indeed, W. Brian Arthur has gone so far as to argue that the whole basis of the economy as it exists today is being overhauled through technological change, a point on which he is probably right.

The upshot of my argument is that technological progress now happens so quickly that we have limited time to manage its social and economic effects through institutional change. This is particularly difficult for the losers in the technology game, who may have to transform their lives to face a new economic reality. I’m thinking, for instance, of those former industrial communities in places like Wales and the North-East, where technology has enabled the emergence of a global market that has simply overtaken them. Our institutions have yet to be recast in such a way that enables people in these places to catch up and to add value to the new economy, instead trapping them in conditions of chronic worklessness. Individuals, companies and the whole economy need to be more resilient and adaptable.

Yet even if we could develop a new institutional framework to respond to this kind of change, it would probably be out of date as soon as it were operationalized. This is again a function of technological change. Instability becomes the norm.

Read more at Synthesis

Karmic Assemblages and the Network Society

By now there is little doubt that the Internet has brought dramatic changes to human society on a global scale, and that probably more radical transformations are yet to come. Whether these changes are for the best interest of humanity and the planet or for intensifying exploitation, hegemony and ecological disaster is at the center of recent academic debate. The fruit of this critical debate, I think, should be the ability to generate emancipatory ideas and projects from a position of deep understanding of what is at stake. While some scholars raise criticism by analysing the evolution of the Internet as a means for the deepening and widening of commodification, hegemony, exploitation, surveillance and control, others point with optimism at the potential for change embedded in the technology. There is yet another view that systematically contests the expressions of optimism by translating the assumptions in which they are based into Marxist terminology, a critical reading that declares that 'free culture' is ultimately 'free labour', and a new form of capitalistic rent. Across the academic field, however, there is a nearly unanimous call to find alternatives to the current system that has spread poverty, brought ecological disaster, and dis-articulated the rich cultural heritage of communities around the globe, and to make them succeed before it is too late.

This research project seeks to participate in the becoming of these alternatives.

Read more >  PhD Research Project « Nicolás Mendoza

Open Digital Heritage

Michael Edson: Open Digital Heritage: Doing Hard Things Easily, at Scale (text version)

View more documents from Michael Edson

Michael Edson: Open Digital Heritage: Doing Hard Things Easily, at ...

The Physical Internet and Business Model Innovation

Introducing a new infrastructure such as the Physical Internet generates an intense wave of innovative change in business models. Firms are now in a position to leverage their asymmetries in order to push further value creation (Cimon, 2004). Electricity and the Digital Internet were game changers just as the Physical Internet will be.

Thus, the Physical Internet will instil a change of several orders of magnitude as this infrastructure and business models will continue to influence one another. We face a revolution as radical as the Internet Revolution. “Brick and Mortar Firms” will seize on the occasion to improve on a spectrum that spans from improving on current business model to radically altering them, and a vast room of opportunities is opening for “start-up” entrepreneurs that are able to invent new ways to create value through the Physical Internet.

Read more at TIM Review