In a presentation given yesterday at Picnic for the Bloggers Lab, organized by the European Journalism Centre, Ethan Zuckerman brought up an interesting concept that has quite remotely been discussed over the internet for a while now. Today we are all enjoying this second step of the web evolution, the web 2.0, a read/write space …
Continue reading “PICNIC 08 – “Homophily Can Make You Stupid” by Ethan Zuckerman”
Orality versus literacy in the history of human consciousness In the book “Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the World”, Walter Ong compares orality and literacy, as defining features of oral cultures (cultures which do not have a system of writing), and “chirographic” cultures respectively (the ones who use alphabetic writing systems). He analyzes the …
Winter Camp 09 was an event which took place between 3 and 7 March 2009 in Amsterdam. Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, the event offered twelve networks for four days the space to develop and analyze their identity and practices. How does the “will to network” manifest in today’s society where the number of network …
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In the previous two days, after having discussed their identity, mission, core values, and crises, the sixteen members of Upgrade! gathered this morning with several issues on their agenda, which have not yet been touched upon this week at Winter Camp: collaborative tools and managing collaborative tools, lists and managing lists, and the decision making …
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According to their website the Genderchangers network initiated in 1999 and was inspired by the ASCII hacklab in Amsterdam. Genderchangers defines itself as a network for women, technology and freedom of information. They initially started with knowledge-sharing courses for women by women and because of the enthusiastic response to these initial workshops and courses the …
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According to their website, Microvolunteerism Project is an initiative of volunteers which aims to facilitate effective distributed volunteer work, captured under the term “crowdsourcing.” According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community …
Continue reading “Microvolunteerism’s Agenda at Winter Camp – Day One”
The Society of the Query conference was held in Amsterdam between the 13th and 14th of November 2009. It was organized by the Institute of Network Cultures lead by Geert Lovink. The conference aimed to generate reflection on the role of the search engine in our society, and particularly in our culture. What happens to our knowledge and culture when …
Matteo Pasquinelli’s presentation this morning at the Society of the Query was based on his paper, Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect. The paper can be downloaded from his website. The essay and presentation of the Italian media theorist and critic focused on an alternative direction …
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Teresa Numerico is a lecturer at the University of Rome, where she teaches history and philosophy of computer science and epistemology of new media. Her presentation brought a historical and philosophy of science perspective into the themes of this conference: web search, search engines and the society of the query. She attempted to see search …
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The Ippolita Collective brought a humorous and refreshing change of perspective into the attempt to search and formulate solutions for one of the issues addressed by the second session of the Society of the Query conference, namely Digital Civil Rights. They proposed to change the “what” style of questioning associated with positions of domination, as …
Continue reading “The Ippolita Collective: Stop Questioning and Start Building!”
