Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Social software in the mental institution: EST

Cory Doctorow's latest, Eastern Standard Tribe, contains this neat social software idea/parody: SNA in a mental institution.

“Give the patients a good reason to wear their tracking
bracelets: redesign them so they gather stats on mobility and
vitals and track them against your meds and other therapies.
Create a dating service that automatically links patients who
respond similarly to therapies so they can compare notes. Ooh,
by comparing with location data from other trackers, you could
get stats on which therapies make people more sociable, just by
counting the frequency with which patients stop and spend
time in proximity to other patients. It’d give you empirical data
with which you track your own progress.”

I'd hazard parody, based on BoingBoing's turning on social software Web services. Then again, the project proves useful to the narrator in the book.

Bookmarks

I haven't posted this yet, so here: my bookmarks.

I built these over nearly a decade of bookmarking URLs to many browsers on many machines. Redundancies and lost information frustrated, so I simply whipped up a text-only HTML file. Categories came quickly, and continue to grow. After a few years, I trained myself into a reading schedule, which is now mixed into daily and weekly cycles. This has made my information-gathering much more efficient, and I recommend it to all.

More on German horror and crime from the NYT

The New York Times is carrying a brooding consideration of crime and horror in Germany, based in part on the recent Meiwes eroto-cannibalism case:

What makes the recent, extraordinary violence particularly disturbing is the seemingly irrational cause: not money or revenge or a barroom quarrel run amok, but a sort of free-floating cruelty, an unmodulated will to inflict suffering.

Alas, the article then moves on to the old villain, entertainment.

UPDATED: For contrast, Jana points us to the cannibal case of Issei Sagawa.

(thanks to Jesse Walker and Jana Wright)

Copyright imperial

Still more on the international nature of intellectual property battles: Copyright and the American empire.

"Of course, we are an empire, but we are different," he says. "Our empire is not defined by territorial ambitions but by ideas. A lot of ideas, like free trade, like democracy, like copyright laws."

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Digital video storytelling

Bernie DeKoven has fallen under my multimedia narrative spell. Bernie brings to this area a welcome, necessary sense of fun and play. Making these videos is a lot of fun, done the right way. Showing DVD'd work is also a delight.

Australian IP enforcers raid p2p app owner

International intellectual property wars continue: an Australian group raided the local headquarters of Sharman Networks, owners of KaZaA. Music Industry Privacy Investigations received a judge's ok, then raided the joint, looking for evidence of contributory infringement.

The Semantic Earth

Dave Weinberger picks up JD "WorldBoard" Sophrer's thread, and calls lyrically for The Semantic Earth (abstract only). Grid the Earth! Great big cartographic science!

Thanks to the constellation of technology that enables digital networks to be laid over the places of the earth, wherever we are we will be able to hear the human conversation that has occurred about that place – the history that occurred there, the aesthetics to be savored, the commerce transpiring at that very moment, recommendations offered by strangers and friends. The mute places of the earth are being given voice, and the voices are, of course, ours. Meanwhile, the places themselves are becoming digitally alive and are noting our presence, too.

This is happening now. It is not just spawning innovative new businesses. It will change our most basic sense of what it means to be in a place.

Of course, given the crisis in metadata, one wonders what new information architectures will emerge, should we similarly fail to tag Terra.

Moreover, the copyright issues are immense. Remember ThirdVoice or eQuill?

(thanks to Howard Rheingold)

Pattern Recognition: Jameson return to Gibson

Fred Jameson has an article on Pattern Recognition. Back during the postmodernism/cyberpunk heyday, Jameson's take on Neuromancer was very influential.

My notes coming soon.

(thanks to Semioclast)

Hertzian microclimates and softspace

The new Receiver has a good article on mobile-enabled augmented reality by Usman Haque, "Invisible Topographies". It includes a good nod to Hertzian Tales and goes on:

We are aware that hardspace affects our ability to make mobile phone calls because it has a direct effect on the electromagnetic intensity of the signal; what we often forget however is that the very act of making a mobile phone call also changes hertzian space because the phone itself becomes a transmitter of microwaves. We notice a materialisation of this process while talking on a landline: a few seconds before a nearby mobile phone makes or receives a call a distinct galloping beat is heard on the landline handset as the impinging microwaves penetrate the wired connection and ripple local hertzian space. Flashing stickers and accessories can be added to mobile phones to light up when a call is made or received. Such inexpensive devices are passive inductors of particular microwave radiation and function as consumer-friendly indicators of increased electromagnetic intensity.

The article also points to some interesting AR work: FLIRT, Urban Tapestries, spatial memory architecture, and Remain in Light.

Haque's new project sounds like fun: many helium balloons containing cell phones, lofted over London.

(thanks to Jim Downing)

Moblogging in Sweden

Patrik Svenson tells us about an exciting project with the Scandinavian Jokkmokk festival. A team from the excellent HUMlab at Umea is going to conduct a full-court press moblogging of the event, using various tools and approaches to bring the festival to the world via Web.

It is transient and permanent, direct and reflective, location-independent and location-dependent, and allows for multiple-perspective, multilingual and multimodal stories. The project involves exploring a new medium, managing different kinds of mobile technology under very severe conditions, meetings with many different cultures and narratives, and making it possible for a multitude of people to share and contribute to an important cultural event – the 399th Annual Sámi Winter Market

It starts on the 4th.