ICTlogy

Live notes at the eResearch seminar by Roger Canals (Universitat de Barcelona) and Juan Ignacio Robles (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) entitled Visual methods: Knowledge production and ways of representation. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, April 29th, 2009.

An introduction to Visual Anthropology
Roger Canals

Visual Anthropology is the part of anthropology that takes the:

• Image as an object, an object whose goal is to be seen. And this object creates social relationships, are social enablers;
• Image as methodology, as a way to approach the reality; either by using already existing images and measuring the reactions of social actors towards these images, or by producing new images (photography, cinema, etc.)
• Image as a discourse, images being used to transmit the findings, conclusions of the research itself.

Three steps: how images are represented, how a relationship is created between people and images, how a relationship is mediated amongst people through images.

Burke: image is valid in social sciences if it is contextualized.

Specificities of ethnographic cinema: the camera as a special object that needs “problematising”, putting it in context, make evident its use, its influence on what is seen and how it is seen…

On the one hand — a positive approach, by e.g. Vasant — we can believe that the genesis of the photographic image is automatic, unconscious and objective. There is no human intention (e.g. like in painting) in photography or cinema. Thus, we have to believe in the photographed object.

On the other hand — a post-modern approach, by e.g. Deleuze — we can also understand photography as a built image and, hence, it is useless for anthropology.

Of course, both points of view can co-exist. It is the double regime of the cinematographic image, with an immediate component and a complex component.

Use of cinema in anthropology:

• Register. Though the context is very important to correctly frame this register. E.g. Nanook of the North is not a good ethnography about Eskimos, but it is a good ethnography about the encounter of Nanook and Flaherty.
• Meeting point (dialogic camera)
• Performance. As the camera is not invisible, all cinema is, on a certain degree, a performance.

All three combined provide a cinematographic way to approach reality: the data one gets are different (than without a camera), and the way these “data” (findings, reflections, etc.) are explained is also radically different than with other ways of representation (e.g. written language).

It is possible to think cinema ethnographically, as the way we produce the film (lightning, screenplay, etc.) does affect our research. And ethnography cinematographically: as post production, editing and mounting, etc. are also parts of the analysis of our subject of research

Transcultural cinema: camera is a research instrument and cinematographic decisions come (partially) determined by the characteristics of the subject of research.

Examples of visual ethnography
Juan Ignacio Robles

Markets, lives and suburbs

Juan Ignacio Robles presents a visual ethnography that does research on how different retail sellers in downtown markets face competition by supermarkets and illegal groceries. Footage is shot in three different European cities.

Problems: sometimes it is difficult not to break the space-time environment of the representees as sometimes it is not allowed to tape inside supermarkets. On the other hand, the quality of the equipment also determines how and what you can tape, depending of the circumstances of the people to be taped (e.g. noise in open air markets).

Rachida’s Kids

Project to show how Islam is taught in Spanish public schools. The camera enabled a higher degree of openness of the taped people, showing more things and shadows that would have remained hidden had not been the camera there. The people taped were the main characters of their own story and were able to explain their own point of view without intermediaries.

Muñeiras, Cows and Churches

How the franquist regime used the NO-DO to show Spanish traditions, to praise the dictator and to foster tourism. The NO-DO was said to be “ethnographic”, and the research wants to deconstruct how the different documentaries from the NO-DO were really designed and built.

Social Theatre

The Spanish-Equatorial association create performances on the street to transform feelings of hate, apathy into social vindication. It’s a Francisco Boal’s approach to activism theatre, to humanize the oppressor-oppressed relationship.

Q & A

Ismael Peña-López: how does the camera causes fake performance instead of empowering taped people to talk with their own voices? why not use invisible cameras (with the due permissions ex ante or ex post)? how do we go from describing to finding relationships of causality, from the how to the why?

Isidor Fernández: does anthropologist have to master the language of cinema? Roger Canals: yes, of course (though I don’t think there’s such a thing like cinematographic language).

Adolfo Estalella: what’s the responsibility of the researcher when “stepping into” the performance that is being ethnographed?

Francesc Balagué: how does the media (cinema, TV, etc.) affects not only the result, but the research itself?

Ruth Pagès: Not make the camera invisible but even more visible, more present, and include the ethnographer inside the ethnography itself.

Juan Ignacio Robles: I don’t want an invisible camera, as the camera induces actions and events. The characters of ethnographies usually attribute the camera a leading role too. The camera is but another character.

Roger Canals: If the camera is not active in the ethnography, maybe it’s not ethnographic cinema at all. It is all the remainings of the positive approach that the reality is “pure” and we should not affect it. But this paradigm has been set aside as we believe there’s no “pure reality” at all. Anthropology only happens when there’s an encounter, hence the appearance of the camera is an absolute need for this encounter to happen.

Elisenda Ardèvol: the ethnographer is a participant and the camera mediates.

Edgar Gómez: technicalities (e.g. is the audio ok?) are not distractions from the core of the research? Won’t the camera get most attention that due? Roger Canals: it is not a matter of putting the camera in the middle of the scene/research, just to give it the appropriate attribution.

Roger Canals: for the anthropologist, the field research is very important. Before taping, there’s a lot of work to be done on the field and master the nature of the subject to be studied.

More information

• Roger Canals (2007) The Many Faces of a Venezuelan Goddess
• Roger Canals (2007) Rostros de una Divinidad Venezolana
• Roger Canals (2007) Visages d’une Déesse Vénézuélienne
• Juan Ignacio Robles (2008) Mercados, vidas y barrios
• Juan Ignacio Robles (2008) Mercados, vidas y barrios II

Live notes at the research seminar by Cristóbal Cobo entitled e-competence in the European Framework: 21st century literacies and based in his research Strategies to promote the development of e-competences. How to reduce the gap between the e-skilled and the non e-skilled?. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Barcelona, Spain, April 15th, 2009.

How to reduce the gap between the e-skilled and the non e-skilled?

Research questions:

• Why does the Knowledge Society requires highly qualified labour force?
• How effective have the IT & education initiatives been?
• What means e-competence?
• How should the coming labour force be trained?

Why does the Knowledge Society requires highly qualified labour force?

In the last years, complex communications and expert thinking have been increasing in the share of tasks performed by workers, while PCs increasingly do the tasks that consist of rutine.

The World Bank’s Knowledge Economy Index is an appropriate framework to measure this shift towards more qualification in labour demand.

This shift has implied a huge gap between what is being taught at schools and what is being needed — and will be needed in the next generation of professionals — in the labour market.

How effective have the IT & education initiatives been?

And though there are plans (e.g. in Europe or the OECD) to foster and assess these needed skills, the implementation is not straightforward.

The European Commission has established three levels of ICT skills:

1. Access to ICT
2. Basic ICT Skills
3. Advanced Use of ICT (Participation+Transaction)

But there is a physical digital divide, a growing demand of e-skills unmatched by a declining supply, a gender gap, half the population are non-users of the Internet…

Who needs digital literacy: age gap, gender gap, education gap, location gap, employment gap. Not new, but strengthened. Indeed, most non-users are due to lack of skills or e-awareness.

Still, self-learning still is the most relevant option when acquiring digital skills. Maybe policies should focus informal training instead of formal training.

Some issues in European assessments:

• The majority of teachers in most advanced countries (Dk. Se. Fi. Ne)* use ICT in less than 5% of their classes
• Students using PC more frequently at school do not perform better than others.Highest performances: students with a mediumlevel of computer use
• Impact of ICT on students’ performance was highly dependent on teaching approaches
• No correlation: ICT access & Øof teachers having used ICT in their teaching.No correlation: Levels of ICT use & levels of perceived learning gains from ICT use
• No clear advances (last decade) that can be confidently attributed to broader access to PC.
• Most educators use technology @ school for administrative tasks (fewer for class)
• The positive impact of ICT use in education has not been proved

BUT, the reason could be that computers/Internet are just used in old ways of teaching, reinforcing old methodologies, instead of focusing on educative innovation and applying them in new ways of teaching.

What means e-competence?

e-competence: Capabilities and skills to manage tacit and explicit knowledge, as well as to use digital technologies in a knowledge-based economy. There are several ways in which this general concept is put into practice or defined in deeper detail: the European e-competence framework, OECD, the ECDL by the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies.

Five stages of e-competence:

• e-Awareness: understanding the framework
• Technological Literacy: confident and critical operation of ICT
• Informational Literacy: read with meaning
• Digital Literacy: integration of instrumental and strategical skills.
• Media Literacy: understanding how traditional mass media and digital media are merging

How should the coming labour force be trained?

• Long Term Agenda and dialogue between education and business sectors
• e-Inclusion: forget the “ideal knowledge worker” but focus in potential excluded. Try to reach e-awareness, beyond just basic digital literacy.
• Standardization: set standards for ICT competencies: definitions, assessment, certifications… Standardization for the mobility of the workforce.
• e-Awareness
• Pedagogical Shift: avoid reductionist approaches
• e-Skills Teachers: impact of ICT on students are highly dependent on the teaching approaches, their skills and incentives
• R&D

Q & A

Q: where do we focus in ICT training for teachers? A: Probably most innovation comes from digital literacy, from the capability to analyse, criticise and assess, which somehow requires exploration.

Q: how do we teach how to innovate? A: a pedagogical shift is required prior to engage in innovation.

Q: where do we put the threshold in what is “sufficient” e-kills? A: it depends. This is why we have to draw standards depending of economic sectors, purposes, etc.

Ismael Peña-López: there’s evidence of ICTs being not a driver of inclusion, but a driver of exclusion: the question is not whether I’ll be more employable if I got specific e-skills, but whether I’ll remain employable at all if I do not have them. On the other hand, is not about e-skills, but e-competences. Skills might vary as technology does, but competences do not (e.g. a competence is going from A to B as fast as possible; skills, which change along time, would then be riding a horse, riding a bike or driving a car).

Q: if ICT in education is useless, because teachers are not prepared or committed, why don’t focus in informal learning? is it worth it? are policies correctly addressed?

Edgar Gómez: there’s a problem of fundamental skills like reading, talking and speaking, that undermine higher level skills.

Ismael Peña-López: why focus in informal learning? why not fix what’s broken (formal education) instead of fostering a patch (informal education)? (note: I’m actually for informal learning). A: Fixing formal learning is really costly — and not only economically — and its success, when there’s some, is long term. It might be cleverer to make technology pervasive and invisible in every day life, and make using it (and learning its use) more transparent and also pervasive. It’s not about teaching, but about embedding. It’s about making irrelevant the computer by using it very much.

More information

• OECD (2006) Skills Upgrading: New Policy Perspectives
• European Commission (2008) Digital Literacy Review
• Reader on Assessing Digital Literacy
• Technology Counts

Andalucía Compromiso Digital is a volunteering project to foster the use of Information and Communication technologies amongst the Andalusian citizenship, hence, an ICT volunteering project.

On March 27 to 29, 2009, the first Encuentro Andaluz de Voluntariado Digital (Andalusian Conference on ICT Volunteering) will take place in Jaén (Spain) to reflect about the past and draw applied strategies for the future.

I have been asked to make a speech about the impact of the Network Society in our daily lives, especially in everything related to access to knowledge and how this fact determines participation and engagement. I am to frame two following speeches by Juan Sebastián Fernández Prados on volunteering in the Network Society, and Pilar Jericó on personal skills for volunteers to network with people in risk of e-exclusion, thus why I’m standing on a quite theoretical level.

My speech has two main parts:

1. A first part on development, network society and the different natures of the digital divide.
2. And a second part on the role of knowledge and digital literacy in determining e-inclusion and, most important, social exclusion.

More information

• Citation and downloads: Access to knowledge and digital divide.
• Citation and downloads: Acceso al conocimiento y la brecha digital.
• For a totally practical level, please see Telecenter 2.0 and Community Building

Acknowledgements:

I want to thank Isabel Díaz for her kind invitation and Antonio “Nono” Pérez for just making it possible.

Digital literacy (or digital literacies), e-skills, e-competences, skills for the Information Society, etc. There is plenty of literature about digital literacy in a broad sense. And there are even as many names as works to describe concepts, similar one to each other, but with shades and subtleties that make them have yet different meanings.

In my opinion, two problems are both the cause and the consequence of this lack of understanding, closely bound one to the other one.

The first one is that, most usually, digital skills are looked at at a very micro level. For instance, the most instrumental digital literacy (i.e. technological literacy) can be described without taking into account informational literacy, personal knowledge management, the sociocultural framework and so.

The second one is that, almost always, digital skills are not taken dynamically, but as a pretty static, closed black box. Take media literacy as an example, where a (for me) necessary corollary to the acquisition and mastering of instrumental multimedia skills should be followed by reflections on the change of the Fourth Estate, the rise of the Fifth Estate and so.

Actually, it is especially this last part, the dynamics of digital literacy and its actual application to everyday life — education, work, leisure, politics, social engagement — the most interesting to me and, to my knowledge, the most unattended one.

Had I to picture such dynamics, I would do it this way:

Towards a comprehensive definition of digital skills
[click to enlarge]

Where concepts are:

• Technological Literacy: the skills to interact with hardware and software
• Informational Literacy: the competences to deal with information, normally by means of ICTs (applying Technological Literacy). We could draw here two stages: a more instrumental one, related on how to get (relevant) information, and a more strategic one related to how to manage that information (or knowledge, if we speak of personal knowledge management)
• Media Literacy: skills and competences to deal with several media, make them interact and integrate them in a single output. I believe we could also draw a lower level, multimedia, where interaction would be more mechanical, and a higher one, crossmedia, where interaction and integration respond not to technical possibilities but to a strategic design, building an ecosystem of different media (and not a simple multimedia output)
• Digital Presence: Is centred in the person. These are the digital skills to monitor and establish a digital identity, and the skills to actively define it and use it for networking or interacting with other people digitally
• e-Awareness: the most strategic (even philosophical) stage is the one related with being aware on how the world and our position — as a person, group, firm, institution — varies because of digital technologies

These concepts can be rephrased as:

• Technological Literacy: HOW
• Informational Literacy: WHAT
• Media Literacy: WHERE
• Digital Presence: WHO
• e-Awareness: WHY

Some examples on what these digital skills and competences mean in everyday life are as follows:

Application of comprehensive digital skills in everyday life

[click to enlarge]

The approach above is completely exploratory and fails to be complete. It is, though, a reflection of what I sense is happening at the applied level, when sometimes too much conceptual figures have to be put to work at home, in the school, at work or social and political engagement. In other words, how do we put the tools — and problems, and questions — of the Information Society in the hands of leaders, decision-takers and policy-makers.

We need not static frames, but dynamic paths. From 0 to 100. From the simplest needs to the deepest understanding. And build bridges amongst them stages.

The Escuela Virtual para América Latina y el Caribe (Virtual school for Latin America and the Caribbean) is an organization (depending from the UNDP) whose mission is to build capacity and impart training in the fields that can promote social transformation, namely human development and democratic governance. As its name reads, it is a fully online school and uses ICTs as a means; but it is also worth noting that the Virtual School is in itself a showcase on how to apply ICTs in Development (ICT4D), specially in what we’d call e-Learning for development.

A successful project, it is now in its way to train other organizations not only in their missionary content, but also in the “how to” part of the story: how to build up a virtual school (for government, for empowerment) in Latin America. These days (10th to 12th March 2009) it’s taking place a training-consultancy for people at the Instituto Distrital de Participación y Acción Comunal de la Secretaría de Gobierno de la Alcaldía de Bogotá (IDPAC: Participation and Community Building Institute at Bogotá, Colombia), so that they can build their own Virtual School of Local Participation.

I have been invited to give a conference on e-Learning for Development, entitled La Brecha digital y el uso de las TIC para la Educación (The Digital Divide and ICTs for Education).

The presentation has four different parts:

1. Slides 1-6: A brief introduction and some highlights about the crossroads between participation, governance, human rights and the changes that the Information Society is bringing in. The topic just frames my introductory presentation, and is later on developed in depth by professor Jaime Torres, Universidad de los Andes.
2. Slides 7-12: Second part is a characterization of the Digital Divide. It actually is about the digital divides, which is absolutely my point: there are many of them, and most of them usually kept out of the spotlight.
3. Slides 13-21: Third part is about networks. It is focused in development and development cooperation. There’ll be time to explore online volunteering, development 2.0, the gift economy, etc.
4. Slides 22-31: A last part is about (how great it is) e-learning for development issues, from different points of view: efficacy, efficiency, suitability, convenience, etc.

Citation and downloads: La Brecha digital y el uso de las TIC para la Educación.

I want to thank Andoni Maldonado and Gemma Xarles for their kind invitation, and to Nicolás Padilla for assistance and patience.

Research seminar by UOC visiting professor Derrick de Kerckhove entitled Digital Natives (and immigrants) and the potential pathologies. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Barcelona, Spain, February 16th, 2009.

The Body Electric: e-lag, Penelope Complex and other e-pathologies
Derrick de Kerckhove

The digital mode

Derrick de Kerckhove

Three stages of humankind, coincident with three representations of the body:

• the oral era: integration with nature
• the electric era: mechanization. The body is a separate object, the division between body and mind, etc.
• the electronic era: the telegraph marries language and electricity. The self, the body and the world relationships are once more transformated. The tecnobiology of electricity: electricity is both within and without the human body, an extension of ourselves. A transition from using electricity to emulate muscular functions of the body (the analogue mode) to emulate cognition (the digital mode), to amplify our senses (cyborgs: Steve Mann, Sterlarc, Kevin Warwick).

Wireless brings even one step further the digital mode: not only enhances cognition, but makes is permanent.

Cyborgs make it possible to stablish connections between cognitive systems, between central nervous systems (CNS).

The body electric

• An augmented body
• Fuzzy boundaries
• Total interconnectivity (by means of wireless)
• Sensory life restructured, just like the Baroque was a total restructuring of life because of the alphabet (the press).
• Changing our use of time ans space
• A bionic condition

Symptoms of Internet addiction

1. Using the online services everyday without any skipping
2. Loosing track of time after making a connection
3. Going out less and less
4. Spending less and less time on meals at home or at work, and eats in front of the monitor
5. Denying spending too much time on the Net
6. Others complaining of your spending too much time in front of the monitor
7. Checking on your mailbox too many times a day
8. Thinking you have got the greatest web site in the world and dying to give people your URL
9. Logging onto the Net while already busy at work
10. Sneaking online when spouse or family members not at home, with a sense of relief

Anxieties, depressions, phobias

• E-lag: guilt of not having answered tons of e-mail
• Fear of virus attack
• Passworditis
• Fear of giving out card numbers
• Broadband anxiety
• Control of bandwidth
• Weathering down-time and…
• Lack of connectivity
• Loss of self-confidence to decreasing e-mail
• Information-overload from increasing e-mail
• Losing unsaved content to unpredictable crashes
• Cyberphobia, technophobia, fear of the Matrix (surveillance)

“Screenology”: (a “science” — made up by Derrick de Kerckhove, adopted by noone — that studies the) emigration of mind from head to screen, we spend more time in front of screens than thinking on our own. We’re becoming Quixotes that read too much and thought too little.

Out of the Fishbowl (2005, video), Len Choptiany. How many mental disorders come form literate, visual people and cultures? But if the written word enables fixing knowledge and working with it, it also puts binds on it: the press mechanizes and segments and fragments knowledge creation and transmission. If the written word eases analysis and rationality, the press leaves aside mysticism, transcendence. Electronic images bring in loss of meaning, of self-conscience, are simulacra — something already stated about the novel when it appeared.

Health in the Digital Era

Change of self-image, due to total, ubiquitous, broadband, always on, mobile access. In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin (Marshall McLuhan).

Personal Thoughts

Is it the dichotomy between self-consciousnesses and loss of self-consciousnesses, our between we-consciousness and being part of the herd? Aren’t we now maybe more community oriented but much more self-aware of our own selves and our role in this collective being?

The increase of mental diseases, is it due to visual literacy and mass production, or because we’re really more complex, more clever, more reflective, more evolved as a species?

Is humankind an emergent system? Do we tend towards a unified collective that produces things that individuals cannot do on their own?

In the end, what’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with these changes? What is really wrong (dangerous, loss of crucial human aspects, etc.) and what is just resistance to change?

Update

Derrick de Kerckhove e-mails the attendants of the seminar a choice of websites of especial interest to him. As part of this list has already been published at the Observatoire International du Numérique, I reproduce it here:

Here is a tentative list of sites that over the years have attracted my attention. I am putting them all together to save them from terminal loss. The trouble with great web sites is that they appear in your life like excellent jokes, you hear them, you love them, you swear to yourself and to anybody who cares to listen that you will remember that one and tell it to everybody in sight, and you forget them immediately.

Good oldies (search engines)

Thinkmap

A lot of imagination went into the hypertextual possibilities of links even before pageranking implemented by slashdot,com and later Google. I was very inspired to write my book on Connected Intelligence by Thinkmap, a site that is now an industry that began as a thesaurus using a hyperbolic tree connecting all the words that related in clusters around a central one that gave it the theme. I recommended them for the Ars Electronica prize back in 1996. Today, the New York based company offers a number of interesting services. <http://www.visualthesaurus.com/>

The Brain

Every one one knows about this good, clean design, for browsing one’s own content classification. I like the design, but I don’t use it, except occasionally as a substitute for Powerpoint when I have the time: <http://www.thebrain.com/>

Kartoo

I loved this one at first sight, a French invention of ten years ago, that allowed one, much faster than even Google today, to locate exactly which John Smith you were looking for. They are still around with a clean design and fast interactivity. <http://www.kartoo.com/>

Grokker

Not humongously useful, considering how many city or name-based search engines exist today, but still thrills me for its design. <http://www.grokker.com/>

Smart Money Map-of-market

Martin Wattenberg who created this site is a master web designer. Again this oldie shows an artistic side (check many other sites by Wattenberg) that uses a Mondrian-like design to indicate variations in stock market. Intelligent, beautiful, alive and useful (for those who had money before the crisis!) <http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/>

Last Fm

Everybody knows this one too, although more recent than the previous ones. The ancestor of this one got a Jury mention at Ars Electronica 1994. It was called homr.org and allowed people to rate music and obtain not only a list of other music they might enjoy based on their ratings, but also created an automatic community of people whose choices were similar to yours. Subsequently it changed names and then disappeared. LastFm is a kind of re-incarnation of the principle, but without the community creation, something that I dubbed, “electronic tastebud” .

<http://www.last.fm/>

Newer issues

There are tons of new things since web 2.0, social bookmarking and Google-everything (and specially umteen variations on googlmaps). I am including here the ones that come to mind spontaneously, but the list is FAR from exhaustive, and I welcome any suggestion on your part.

Oskope

This is a very elegant and truly useful site to search, classify and store in a rapidly interactive way whatever you are looking for on YouTube, Flickr, E-Bay and whatnot. Check out the click and drag and set in folder function. Awesome. <http://www.oskope.com/>

Devonthink

Devonthink was recommended and demonstrated to me by Stephen Johnson, best-selling author of just about anything he cares to publish. He claims that he owes it all to this little-known but powerful search engines that probes the contents of your own computer (as GoogleDesk does, but much better) in a rational tag and keyword based fashion. The principle is simple but requires a minimum of discipline (which of course I do not possess!): you simply tag along the quotes and texts and references that you encounter in the course of your writing, surfing and storing, and five years later, you have another book that is almost self-written! If you think that is too ego-centric, just throw the theme of the book in <www.del.icio.us.com> and 24 hours later, the world will have given you stuff you can add to show that you are contemporary to the isssue! <http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/>

NB: del.icio.us has a system very much like Devonthink, but dedicated to the web, that is outside content as well as stuff inside your hard disk. Try it, you will never leave it.

The following few sites tickle my global art fancy because they all take advantage of the limitless potential for worldwide participation in a common realization or real-time global information.

World clock

This is an all-time, anytime, winner that allows you to see the statistically correct numbers of specific worlwide events, birth, deaths, maladies, car sales, house starts, oil barrels, prices, etc. You can ask for any configuration of data in terms of the day, the week, the month, the year or the decade. Impressive because it generates instantly a global emotion, the like of which began for me when I saw Apollo’s landing on the moon in 1969…

<http://www.poodwaddle.com/clocks2.htm>

Global emotional circulation

I am putting under this title a group of variations on the theme of global emotion by Maurice Benayoun, a French artist who has developed a strong global sensibility. You may need to dig a bit into this following URL to find stuff that suit your interest more specifically <http://www.benayoun.com/projet.php?id=32>

Sensorband

AtauTanaka’s great shared musical composition and playback site

<http://www.sensorband.com/>

Wefeelfine

Like Wattenberg, Jonathan Harris is another Webmaster to keep track of. I am very moved by this attempt to provide the user with a real-time array of expressions of emotions around the globe. It paratkes of the same sensibility of the beautiful Listening post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, but instead of merely showing you text-based messages flying across neatly arrayed screens, it allows you to interact and select clusters of real-time messages on your screen

<http://www.wefeelfine.org/>

The universe.com

The other Jonathan Harris must see, this site offers a dozen different way of arranging and sorting data about news, events and people you need or want to know about immediately. Useful and super aesthetically.

<http://universe.daylife.com/>

Bestiario

Another stunningly beautiful browser, not quite global in intent, but created by developers working for Art Futura (a great refernce in itself) to allow people to browse pleasurably and rapidly all the videos posted on line by the world famous TED conference

<http://www.bestiario.org/research/videosphere/>

Hyperlinking the Real World (courtesy of Eduard Vinyamata)

European researchers working on the MOBVIS project have developed a new system that will allow camera phone users to hyperlink the real world. After taking a picture of a streetscape in an urban area, the MOBVIS technology identifies objects like buildings, infrastructure, monuments, cars, and even logos and banners. It then renders relevant information on the screen using icons that deliver text-based details about the object when clicked.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hyperlinking_the_real_world.php

My own site (in construction but already visitable) is an attempt to provide a background history and a large sampling of existing gloabl artistic installations, web sites and other projects. Only the first four little screens of the 33 that make up the global person – hommage to Nam June Paik – are active, but it gives you an idea. I will be working with Paolo Branigade to complete the site over the year. Help and suggestions are welcome.

<http://www.globalhood.eu/>

See also the lovely site created by Franz Iandolo and his students on the same theme:

<http://www.mediaintegrati.it/prova/progetti/uomoglobale.html>

Some of my favorite Youtube videos: these are so well-known that they need no introduction. If you haven’t seen them, you simply owe to yourself to google them and check them out RIGHT NOW.

Battle at Kruger