ICTlogy

Lead: Michael Best, Ethan Zuckerman

Mobile Telephony in Developing Countries, by Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman introduces TEDGlobal 2007, which was held in Africa.

African issues about ICTs can be tracked at Timbuktu Chronicles, by Emeka Okafor, or at Africa Open For Business. But TED just focused on Foreign Aid, mainly lead by Bono (see Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda — all via Ethan Zuckerman’s blog).

The point should be to fix, before you pour into Foreign Aid, government/governance, so the money goes to the appropriate place/hands. More indeed, investment should go hand to hand with entrepreneurship and infrastructures.

Number of handsets is still increasing in Africa, but the difference (among many others) between blog analysis and mobile communications analysis is that these last ones they are so difficult to track. But it is an infrastructure that can be used for entrepreneurship, activism, or governance, etc.

Interactive Radio for Justice, for instance, allow users to send SMS questions to the radio, which can feature DRC deputy minister for defence, head of military operations for MONUC. This is a way to close the loop of media system.

mobilemonitors.org also represents another way of making elections more transparent, by calling to the radio and report abuse on voting places. And not just phone, but the pervasive of phone cameras is also a fact that is changing witnessing.

M-Pesa hire air (phone) time. But it is also being used for money transfer: I load the phone with money (say, air time) and a third party “downloads” the phone and gets the money back, with even a bank account intermediating.

Even activists upload speeches in the format of ringtones that can be downloaded and installed on your mobile phone.

Vodacom Congo is a compelling example on how strong is the demand for communications in Africa.

Success of incremental infrastructure in Africa

• built on small (compared to huge projects) investments that quickly yield revenue
• partially user financed and owned
• replacement technology

Already incremental: mobile phones, internet. Possibly incremental: power grids, roads. Problems in the possibly incremental: inefficiency, coordination problems.

Answering a couple of Ralph Schroeder‘s questions, Ethan Zuckerman states that we see that there’s more voice traffic that text on mobile networks. Actually, low literacy is quite an issue for a lot of mobile users.

And concerning the role of the State, so far it seems that the mainstream is just to put some requirements on communication services, such as covering rural areas that otherwise (without State regulation) would remain uncovered. Surprisingly, telecoms end up by finding ways to actually make profit out of these requirements, by making up new business models that take into account those new clusters. But pricing regulation, etc. does not seem to be the most common answer.

Daithí Mac Síthigh expresses his concern that all the infrastructures are owned by the private sector, making it difficult to build upon them national strategies. Ethan Zuckerman’s concern is what happens with those infrastructures if they are owned by a government that you do not trust.

Incremental Infrastructure and the Democratization of Provision, by Mike Best

The question is not if we should give a poor a computer instead of e.g. food, but if there is a role for ICTs in providing the poor with food.

ICT4D – Africa – Innovation

• Technological and engineering challenges
• Supportive public policies and regulatory environment
• Smart businesses, especially SMSs
• Collaborative and socially aware interventions
• Rigorous monitoring, evaluation, assessment

Post-conflict countries are being the ones with highest mobile phone use growth… but it might be because of replacement of fixed phones. So, is the indicator a good one?

A Knowledge-based Rwanda

• Physical infrastructure
• Human capacity
• Peace, security and reconciliation
• Good governance and supportive public policy
• Grassroots opportunities
• Spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship

Where fiber is not available (and not easy to build), wireless technologies come to the rescue: VSAT, GSM/GPRS, Wi-Max, Wi-Fi, UMTS, etc.

Readiness Assessment

• Pervasiveness
• Geographic Dispersion
• Sectoral Absorption
• Connectivity Infrastructure
• Organizational Infrastructure
• Sophistication of Use

Conclusions on the e-Readiness Assessment for Liberia

• A strong independent regulator is critical to growth of the overall ICT sector
• The lack of a fiber network in metropolitan Monrovia along with a national fiber backbone limits significantly domestic Internet capacity. A revitalized Liberian Telecommunications Corporation can serve naturally as a network service provider.
• A connection to the submarine cable that travels from Portugal along the west coat of Africa (SAT3/WASC) can be realized perhaps with a link via neighboring Côte d’Ivoire

My reflections

• We’ve seen many successes of mobile phone but… what are the limitations? is there a need to shift to the desktop anyway? or can we stick to mobile communications?

Readings

More info

• Closing The Loop: Zuckerman and Best on Africa and Technology, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Summer doctoral program at Berkman, by Ethan Zuckerman
• Balancing Africa News Update
• The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog (2005), by Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance
• To do with the price of fish, by Rob Katz
• The Global Diffusion of the
  Internet Project
• Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web
• Wolcott, P., Press, L., McHenry, W., Goodman, S. & Foster, W. (2001). “A Framework for Assessing the Global Diffusion of the Internet”. In Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 2(6). Atlanta: Association for Information Systems.

Student research seminar: Ralph Lengler

In this session I will first briefly show some of my works, namely our e-learning-project visual-literacy.org with the periodic table and the VIZ-HALL.

An ad (but also other forms of visual commmunication) which elicits a mental collaboration from the consumer is more likely to be an effective ad. As the consumer contributes in the process of making meaning, he becomes “part-author” and thereby he is moving from adversary to accomplice.

What Makes Visualization Effective?

VizHall, to rate a picture. As a peer-learning tool that it is, is that it requires involvement by the user to make full benefit of it.

Likeability

• Entertaining
• Relevant
• Empathetic
• Alienating
• Confusing
• Familiar

The power of the metaphore, based on intelligence. The problem is that you have to get them, to understand them, which is quite dangerous if you can loose your chance to send your message.

Where there’s a strong brand lovemark, it might be possible to subvert the discourse and first I have interest (lovemark) in your brand, you can catch my attention, persuade me and then push me towards action; normal procedure is to catch attention, get my interest and persuade me to come into action.

My reflections

More info

• Visual Literacy: An E-Learning Tutorial on Visualization for Communication, Engineering and Business
• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
• Ralph Lengler’s del.icio.us
• information aesthetics

Lead: Ralph Schroeder

Researchers increasingly work at-a-distance and across institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries. What are the challenges of online collaboration? How is working in distributed mode different from face-to-face meetings and collaboration? When people work in a distributed group, what are the implications for trust and leadership? There are also ethical and legal issues in e-Research, such as the privacy and anonymity of data, intellectual property and access to shared digital resources. And finally, different disciplines organize online research in different ways. What are the lessons from these ways of working together? The lecture will examine both general issues in distributed research and individual e-Research projects.

Millions of people spend lots of hours online, most of them having entertainment. Besides what the goal of going online is, it actually has potentially huge implications, because we spend increasing time of our life in virtual environments. Indeed, it’s not just online, but media: TV is mediated communication and this is what the whole thing is about: mediated communication.

Definition of Virtual Environment (VE) technology as presence, plus interacting, and copresence.

Sense of presence: in a virtual CAVE-like system, a precipice is pictures with a walking plank across: do people just walk around and over/on the precipice or do they “cross” the plank? Sense of copresence: do people walk through each other in VE?

Projects

• Blue-C
• CAVE, with Anthony Steed and Dave Roberts
• Onlive Traveler

Findings about small groups in immersive systems

• As good as being there
• Presence — high, low — but also interaction
• Presence — high, low and modality
• Technology determines “leadership”
• Following and not following conventions (through avatars, leaning, pointing)

Technology determines the quality (and output) of interaction. For instance, an interaction of three people, two of them on desktops and the third one with virtual reality goggles, it is highly likely (statistically significant) that, asked after the experience, the one with virtual reality goggles will be pointed as the leader of the group — even if nobody new what was the others’ interface.

Findings about large groups in desktop non-immersive systems

• Non-verbal communication
• Control and flexibility (Sims)
• Sociability around objects (There)
• Avavatar appearance (consistency)
• Reality cheks and overshadowing
• Large groups and spaces: “Inhabitability”, stake, transferability, on- and offline relationships

Other New Media…

• Relax (visual) sense and place requirement — but people speak of presence and sharing space
• Nardi et al on instant messaging at work: outeraction as “reaching out”, awareness moments, stepping in and out
• Christian Licoppe on mobiles and SMS: copresent interactions… into a seamless web, connected management of relationships
• Other examples of Cyworlds, Japanese mobiles, webcamera use, Ling on mobiles

Linking SVEs and Other New Media

• Switching focus and multiple modes
• Mediated and face-to-face relations — more, richer, more dense?
• Being there together — historically, in media theory, and today
• Adding to and complementing multimodal connectedness

The Varieties of “Being There Together”

• Videoconferencing is proliferating in different forms, has practical constraints, and is mergins with other technologies
• Online spaces support spatial interaction, the development of social norms, and content that engages users
• Social networking relates to “always on” togetherness, and expresses identity and social “availability” and “awareness” (as with IM, mobile phones and social spaces)

My reflections

• To which extent are personal websites — specially those with dynamic content and high density of outlinking to other personal websites — shared virtual environments, in the sense that somehow the owner shares, by exposure, his digital identity to others, even in an asynchronous way? In other words, if my digital personna “is still there”, can I consider I am actually being there somehow, even if my physical personna is not?
• Does the time I spent in an asynchronous virtual environment counts as co-presence, even if there is a lag of time among digital experiences of different individuals or their digital personnae?
• If they are, a collection of them implies an emerging (in the sense of emergence), self-built virtual community made up of individual virtual environments?
• Provided there’s a bunch of academic personal pages, interlinked among them (i.e. in posts, blogrolls, comments, pingbacks and trackbacks), could be we talking about an asynchronous virtual faculty board?
• Maybe the concept of the “web page” is quite (really) poor, but imagine it evolves into a “construct” in the sense of William Gibson?

Readings

More info

• Being Ralph Schroeder, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

We’ll never thank Chintan Vaishnav enough for arranging our visit to the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Foundation, impressive places where to work (or study, of course: actually, a place to learn, either official role you get there with), really interdisciplinary.

MIT Media Lab

We visited Lifelong Kindergarden research group, which has Lego as main founder, and Lego Mindstorms as one of Lego-MIT Media Lab most interesting outcomes.

Jay Silver

We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:

Scratch

Jay Silver kindly introduced us to the rudiments of Scratch and how to get started on this tool. Actually, I still wonder whether it is a game, a multimedia design and production tool, an educational technology, a collaborative web 2.0 networking social software or all of them.

I’m pretty sure that Jay Silver was right when he said that tools the like of Scratch actually fit on what Ivan Illich wanted to state on Deschooling Society.

What’s Up

It then was turn for Leo Burd’s thesis Technological Initiatives for Social Empowerment: Design Experiments in Technology-Supported Youth Participation and Local Civic Engagement, most commonly known as What’s Up.

The project joins best of both worlds in VoIP, mobile telephony and social software for community building. The idea is that while the Web is quite spread, in most developing countries the ICT revolution is clearly led by mobile phones. Thus, What’s Up presents the usual community site but empowered with VoIP and all kinds of mobile enhanced features, just like SMS posted text and vodcasts.

One Laptop per Child Foundation

XO Laptop (AKA “OLPC” Laptop)

It is actually relevant that our visit at One Laptop per Child Foundation was lead by Samuel Klein, director of content of the One Laptop per Child Project.

A year and a half ago I wrote Negroponte and the Web 2.0 or the Four Classes of the Digital Divide to state that Nicholas Negroponte’s effort to bridge the digital divide will be worthless if digital literacy and provision of content and services did not accompany the infrastructures revolution and diffusion. Having Samuel Klein as spokesman or PR representative makes a tacit statement on what the One Laptop per Child Project is about: it is not about delivering laptops to children, is about opening them the gates of content, which is the real issue.

As he himself explained, every activity has comunity around it, being the goal to build education networks, an example of it the installation of Moodle for some community projects, being the management and coordination of this free software LMS done by the same educational institutions that provide wireless connectivity to the laptops.

The commitment with content can be on the other hand exemplified with the Summer of Content 2007 initiative to provide content to be packeted with the XO laptop.

Samuel Klein strongly encouraged the audience and anyone interested to both contribute to the OLPC Project Wiki and subscribe to the OLPC Project Wiki mailing lists.

More info

• MIT: Media Lab, Stata Center, Press, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• MIT: One Laptop Per Child, by Daisy Pignetti
• ‘$100 laptop’ production begins

Leads: Henry Jenkins, Carrie Lambert-Beatty

What connections might we posit between the participatory culture which has grown up around popular media and the ideals of participatory democracy? In the last Presidential campaign, we saw the emergence of blogs, amateur film contests, and social networking software as significant resources for political activism and we saw signs that people were remixing media images for the purpose of creating their own political commentary. What seemed to be cutting edge practices four years ago are emerging as pervasive aspects of the current campaign season (witness the anti-Hillary “1984” advertisement, the Pro-Barrack “Obama Girl” video, and Hillary Clinton’s own spoof of The Sopranos, all circulated via YouTube in an election that is just getting started.) Similar tactics have emerged through the Save Our Internet campaign which was launched to promote Net Neutrality. How do such tactics mobilize our skills as fans, bloggers, and gamers as resources for promoting a more engaged citizenship? What does this suggest about the importance of protecting the rights of citizens to appropriate, parody, remix, and recirculate media content in an age of increases struggle over intellectual property? What might our educational institutions do to insure that young people acquire the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully participate in these debates? How might we understand these trends in relation to a growing backlash against what writers like Andrew Keen are calling “the Cult of the Amateur”?

Activism, civic engagement will not be top-down organized but really grassroots and participatory, active (i.e. spectacles that work only if the people help create them). Low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement.

Ideals of a Progressive Popular Culture

• participatory
• active
• open ended
• transparent
• transformative

My reflections

• The problem with popular media making politics become something suitable for “consumption” iis that the system gets subverted. In subversion, the supporter becomes the center of the spotlight and is no more supporter but the target. I.e. it is OK to have U2 sing Sunday Bloody Sunday (on anyone else doing such stuff) but it is absolutely unacceptable to have Mr. Bono speaking on behalf of Africa in a most illegitimate way.
• See Bono, I Presume?, Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’ and Bono versus Mwenda (all via Ethan Zuckerman‘s blog).

Readings

More info

• WochenKlausur
• ‘Chica Obama’ contra ‘chica Hillary’
• Debate ’08: Obama Girl vs Giuliani Girl
• Evangelicals and the Media
• Henry Jenkins Confronts Obama Girl, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• OII Day 5, by Alla Zollers

Student research seminar: Fred Stutzman

In this talk I will seek feedback on the potential framework of my dissertation. I am interested in the role social technologies play in the management of real-world social networks, particularly in the management of real world social networks in periods of transition.

What happens with online identity with (so much) Web 2.0 services, subscriptions, etc. How do we create digital identity? What does it mean to have a digital identity? How do we manage it?

How do Microformats play with online identity?

All along your trip through social networks, you can take with you some content, people, resources and leave behind the other ones. Across your transition through platforms… where’s the meeting point? the focal point?

This transition: is a personal strategy, or just follow the flow? What are the characteristics of this behavior?

How do you keep social capital? And… what happens if you ever take with you your social capital (i.e. friends), is this negative (you don’t let yourself evolve, mature)?

My reflections

• Can identity be tied to what you do, such as an e-Portfolio, as well as what’s your network of people?
• John Clippinger makes a very interesting point in saying that, at the beginnings of the Internet, everybody wanted to be anything (except themselves), and now the problem is to try and succeed in keeping a consistent digital identity

More info

• Fred Stutzman’s Vitae
• ClaimID
• Rossi, P. G., Pascucci, G., Giannandrea, L. & Paciaroni, M. (2006). “L’e-Portfolio Come Strumento per la Costruzione dell’Identità”. In Informations, Savoirs, Décisions, Médiations, (25), art.348. La Garde: Université du Sud Toulon-Var.
• DiMaggio, P., Hargittai, E., Neuman, W. R. & Robinson, J. P. (2001). “Social Implications of the Internet”. In Annual Review of Sociology, 2001, 27, 307-336. Palo Alto: Annual Reviews.
• Identity Parade, by Daithí Mac Síthigh