ciao!

“What does the recent news of a Wikipedia CEO who is also a lawyer, an “oversight” function that makes hidden revisions to Wikipedia, and the threat of the Debian Project severing its relationship with its legally chartered non-profit have in common? A strong indication that open communities with a formal legal standing are a conflicted beast. (…)”

addenda: Shay David

“The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.”

réplica: “On “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” By Jaron Lanier”. Responses to Lanier’s essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold

“HARD_CODE”: edited by Eugene Thacker (disponible en formato pdf).

[más ...]

addenda curso Rita Raley: “Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory: Reading Code” (más info “Reading Code”)

“Netizens, elancers, cognitarians, swarm-capitalists, hackers, produsumers, knowledge workers, pro-ams… these are just a few of the monikers that have been applied to the new social class emerging from the networked workplace.

In this short book, Richard Barbrook presents a collection of quotations from authors who in different ways attempt to identify an innovative element within society – ‘the class of the new’. Announcing a new economic and social paradigm, this class constitutes a ‘social prophecy’ of the shape of work to come. From Adam Smith’s ‘Philosophers’ of the late 18th century, down to the ‘Creative Class’ celebrated by sociologist Richard Florida today, the class of the new represents the future of production within and beyond capitalism.”

“[...] Thus my earlier question – how can I make sense of a culture that does not use verbal communication was largely irrelevant: instead the problem was one of showing that this is communication like in any other ‘real’ place.

Of course much more work has been done in the study of language and the Internet since I first began. But what I really want to share are the similarities with my colleagues who come back from the field to find their speech peppered with language from the field until they had fully integrated back into academic life. I was taking a walk with my beloved one evening when he said something amusing. To my chagrin I didn’t laugh, instead I said ‘LOL’.

This was the moment when I realised how difficult it was to leave the field behind.”

Denise Carter

["home is where the mobile device is"]

["i blog thefore i am"]

“Flickr is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. Search for ‘cat’, and Flickr will record the most popular photo clicked. By associating the colour and picture data within photos with keywords used to search, Yahoo is slowly building a database of human identification. It has often said that the differentiator between Yahoo and Google, going forward, is that Yahoo wants the web processed by humans and Google wants it done by robots. Google uses algorithms to generate anything to do with its business. Yahoo, with its acquisition of Flickr and Delicious and whatever else is on the horizon, wants people – and social networks – to define how it does business.”

(también referenciado en technology and the social: “web 2.0 and privacy”).

addenda: vía creativity/machine: “the cultural politics of flickr tags”

(…) “Putting this back in locative tech terms, that’s the same kind of approach taken by most pro-am arguments: the story ends with public users, as if they can finally stand firm and free on a platform like Flickr or Ning , or even a city, and we can forget about them. Sometimes, the biggest problem with user-centred design is that use and user are be-all-and-end-all. When appropriation is understood to be an individual act, then we train our sights on individual actions, and often exclude collective flows or assembling forces.”

addenda: vía tiara.org: “discourses of consent” interesante!!!

“And here’s what’s actually happening: People are obfuscating personal data by using pseudonyms that can only be identified within situated, contextual networks, or by using services which allow them to restrict who can view their personal information. This is really the only one of these solutions which makes any sense.”