Making 2.0
Lecture One: Cyberculture
HCC Winter 2008
Julia Lupton
Defining “WEB 2.0”
::The phrase
“Web 2.0” was coined by Tim O’ Reilly, a “software guru”
::Describes the
internet era after the dot-com crash of 2000/2001
:: In Web 2.0, users
generate content on data base-driven sites
Reilly coins the
term:
http://oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Critical perspectives on Web 2.0:
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/263/showToc
Videos
by anthro professor Mike Wesch define and explore Web 2.0
Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (March 2007)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
A Vision of Students Today (October 2007)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
“MAKING 2.0”
In these final two
lectures of our quarter on Making, I’d like to explore the ways that “Web
2.0” helped create or support new scenes of making:
:: digital making, decentralized and
dispersed
:: but also hand-making, supported by social media
:: And, bridge
from last week: what are the links between real cities and virtual
environments?
My ethos here:
I speak as a
citizen-participant in our increasingly digital culture, and as an eager
contributor to contemporary scenes of making,
but not
as an expert in
computer science or informatics.
:: It is part of
the Web 2.0 attitude (and the Jane
Jacobs tradition!!) that non-experts provide some commentary and analysis.
:: Humanities
Core offers an opportunity for the large group of us to reflect on these
developments from the perspective of the humanities.
Cyberspace vs. Cyberculture
Pierre Levy’s distinction between “Cyberspace” and
“Cyberculture” can help us grasp what the humanities brings to studies of
digital phenomena:
“Cyberspace ... is the new medium of
communications that arose through the global interconnection of computers. “
“Cyberculture is that set of
technologies (material and intellectual), practices, attitudes, modes of
thought, and values that developed along with the growth of cyberspace.”
---
Cyberculture, p. xvi
Digital themes for research paper clusters:
art
and action / music and movements
digital
platforms?
built
environments
in
relation to virtual environments?
publics
and counterpublics
digital
coordinates of public speech today,
both
mainstream and oppositional?
From Urbanism to
Cyberculture
Jane Jacobs ends her book with a more theoretical
chapter, entitled “The Kind of Problem a City Is.” She writes,
“Cities
happen to be problems in organized complexity. They present ‘situations in
which a half dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying
simultaneously and in subtly
interconnected ways.’” (Death and Life,, p. 433)
Three types of problems according to Warren
Weaver
::
simple problems
two-variable
problems, leading to modern understanding of light, sound, heat, electricity
::
disorganized complexity
probablity
theory and statistics
::
organized complexity
biology
(Weaver)
the
city (Jacobs)
computing
and the Internet (Levy)
Remember Aristotle’s web of causes?
Here’s
what Professor Schwab said in his final Aristotle lecture about ecology as a
science of organized complexity:
“Ecology
as a discipline tries to gain knowledge of dynamic equilibria in complex
relations between climate, the earth, and living beings. This looks to me like
the attitude towards knowledge I [ARISTOTLE] have been advocating: gaining
insight into the orders of the world. Not, in my ethical view, with the purpose
of becoming tyrants in the realm of the earth, but with a view of integrating
ourselves and our interests into these orders.”
Jane Jacobs’ source :Warren Weaver
She cites
Dr. Warren Weaver, 1958 Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation:
“What makes an
evening primrose open when it does? Why does salt water fail to satisfy thirst?
... What is the description of aging in biochemical terms? … All of these are
certainly complex problems. But they are not problems of disorganized
complexity. They are all problems
which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which
are interrelated into an organic whole.”
(Jane Jacobs citing Warren Weaver, Death and Life, p. 432)
Warren Weaver, 1894-1978
:: Mathematician
and engineer
:: Director of
the Division of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, 1932-55
:: Headed the
Applied Mathematics Panel for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research during
World War II (cryptography, electronic calculating machines)
:: His 1958 Annual Report of the Rockefeller
Foundation, science, cited at length by Jacobs, has been called “the
founding text of complexity theory.”
[Source: Steven
Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and
Software, (NY: Scribner, 2001), p. 45-6.]
Mapping Connections
We can begin
visualizing the connections between ORGANIZED COMPLEXITY (a theory developed at
the interface between biology and applied mathematics), MODERN COMPUTING (which
includes systems theory and communication theory), and URBANISM (Jane Jacobs’
application of organized complexity to the life of
the city). WEB 2.0, or the rise of social media, connects computing to urbanism
by developing new forms of self-organizing social relationships.
Pierre Levy, Cyberculture: develops the
connection between computing and urbanism
Cyberculture commissioned by Council
of Europe
published
in French, 1997
published
in English, 1999
::
Writing before “Web 2.0,” Levy predicts and champions many of its features.
::
He uses the idea of “collective intelligence” to link computing to urbanism.
“The
development of cyberspace is a
particular form of urbanism or architecture, although not physical, whose
importance can only increase with time. However, the supreme architecture is
really political. It involves the articulation of different spaces and their
respective roles. To make collective
intelligence the command post of modern society is to again choose democracy,
to reactualize it by exploiting the most positive potential of our
communications systems.”
(p.
177)
About Pierre Levy
http://www.ieml.org/spip.php?article13&lang=en
:: Born in
:: Studied
history of science at the Sorbonne, Paris.
:: Ph.D. in
Sociology, 1983 and Ph.D. in Information and Computer Sciences, 1991.
:: Professor of
Communications,
:: Director of
the Collective Intelligence Lab
http://www.ieml.org/spip.php?rubrique51&lang=en
Collective Intelligence
MIT’s Center for
Collective intelligence sets itself the following problem: “Our basic research
question is: How can people
and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently
than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?”
Part
science / part science fiction?
“Collective
intelligence” is a concept and a value that joins together people working in
computing, biology, urbanism, business and management, and the arts and
humanities.
Alternative
concepts for “collective intelligence” include “crowd sourcing” (the idea that
a problem can be solved by sending it out to the general public, through
surveys, competitions, or other mass tools) and “loser-generated content,” a
phrase that grasps the extent to which Web 2.0 companies build their businesses
by getting free stuff from users.
Thinking, Making, Doing
The
concepts of collective intelligence and organized complexity link THINKING
(thinking as a social act involving dispersed individuals and groups of people)
to MAKING (especially the technical infrastructure and new forms of expression
that the internet has generated) and to DOING (are new decision making
mechanisms and forms of organization for political action emerging as a result
of digital communication?)
The Noah’s Ark Analogy
In
his Introduction, Pierre Levy develops an extended analogy between the story of
Noah’s
FIRST FLOOD:
= the Bibical
Flood
Noah’s
collection is a “microcosm” of the “macrocosm”: a complete sampling of the
world’s zoo
SECOND FLOOD:
= flood of
information
::We each are
building our own arks.
::We make our
own collections.
:: Our
collections are not complete.
:: We “dance in
concert.”
What’s your ark?
Mine is my
website, which allows me to archive, link, announce, share, self-brand.
www.thinkingwithShakespeare.org
But personal
webpages are “So Five Years Ago.” Blogs
provide a space for personal writing along with the chance for interactivity
(comments) and connectivity (blog rolls). Younger people prefer Facebook and MySpace, which allow for many of the archiving features of a web
page, but add the crucial social
dimension of linking up with other people on the same site. iPods are a different kind of ark, a
place to collect music and other media, but also to organize them in playlists
that often become highly personal statements of order and value.
Notebooks and journals can be personal arks as well. Notebooks
have a venerable tradition in Renaissance humanism – for example, the notebooks
of Leonardo da Vinci were a place for the artist-engineer to collect his
writing, his visual observations of the world, and his designs for machines.
Several students sent me scrapbooks as examples of their making.
Rather than being a rejection of digital culture, however, scrapbooking
and journaling, as physical activities of traditional writing, drawing, and
collage, are supported by multiple social media sites in which people who make
and use notebooks can communicate to each other about their private productions.
And of course the notebook has become the favorite metaphor for small portable
computers.
In many parts of
the world, including Africa and
Did you know …?
::
Mobile phone far exceeds landline and Internet use in developing countries
::
65 % of all African phone subscribers are on cellular networks, not landlines
::
BUT, penetration rate is still far lower than anywhere else in the world (5% of
::
in addition to daily communications, cell phones in Africa are used for price
reporting for greater market transparency and for political mobilizing and
organizing, as seen in a cell phone boycott organized by cell phone users in
Nigeria, September 19, 2003.
Sources: Okoth
Fred Mudhai, “Exploring the Potential for More Strategic Civil Society Use of
Mobile Phones,” Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global
Civil Society, ed. Jodi Dean, Jon W.
Anderson, and Geert Lovink (
Back to Noah’s Ark
When Noah, that
is, each of us, looked through the porthole of his ark, he saw other arks in
the distance, floating on the howling ocean of digital communication. Each of
these arks contained something different. Each wanted to save diversity. Each
wanted to transmit. Those arks will wander indefinitely on the surface of the
waters.
--Pierre Levy,
p. xiii
“Noah’s rescue
operation appears to be complementary, almost an accessory, to extermination.”
[Levy gives an account of book burnings, from Sargon of Agade to the
Inquisition and Hitler] “But the new deluge cannot erase the marks of the
intellect.”
Levy, pp. 6-7
Queries and questions
:: Post 9/11.
can we draw such a clear distinction between destruction (earlier information
regimes) on the one hand, and creation and collective intelligence (Web 2.0) on
the other?
:: Noah’s
:: Finally, how
“social” are social media? If we look at Facebook, MySpace, ipods, cell phones,
blogs, and our other arks, we see not only an increase in connectivity, but
also an intensification of individualism, self-display, and self-performance. A
number of critics and observers of the blogosphere have argued that the race
for links, hits, and rankings often occurs at the expense of generating
original and responsible content, or building genuinely reciprocal and
“intelligent” (collective or otherwise!) conversations.
Analogy, Substitution, Assimilation, Articulation
The
first three narrow the differences
between real and digital forms.
The
last term, articulation, emphasizes
the differences between real and digital forms, but in order to bring them into
new, more creative, productive, or socially generative relationships with each
other.
Analogy
A
virtual space IS LIKE a city (or museum, or school, or other pre-existing
institution).
Substitution
A
virtual space REPLACES a city (or museum, or school, or other pre-existing
institution).
Assimilation
An
existing powerful institution (the state, a media conglomerate, a cable or
phone company) TAKES OVER new forms of digital communication and
relationship.
Articulation
Real
spaces (“territories”) are brought into productive relationship with virtual
communities.
articulate (v):
to give clarity or distinction to;
to
reveal or make distinct
articulate
(v): to unite by forming a joint or joints (anatomy); to fit together into a coherent whole; to
give visible or concrete experession to the composition of structural elements
(architecture)
Anaology vs. articulation: The case of the
virtual museum
“Instead
of reproducing conventional exhibits on Web sites, why not attempt to design
trajectories that can be personalized or constantly redefined through
collective navigation in spaces that are completely independent of any
collection of objects?” (Levy, p. 168)
=
WEB 2.0
=
Flickr
Example:
the Library of Congress, the nation’s largest and most important library and
information repository, creates a Flickr account in order to share photos with
the public and invite them to assist with tagging and identifying these
historical documents.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
The
project “articulates” (brings into a new productive relationship”) the
traditional space of the public library and the new space of social media.
Geotagging
Adding
metadata (tags, photos) to digital maps
“Articulates”
real space with its digital representation
“Articulates”
satellite view of the world (as generated for example by Google Earth) with on
the ground images.
Example:
Tagmaps, a partnership between UC Berkeley and Yahoo!
http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/
Other “articulations” of real and virtual cities
Celluloid Skylines:
http://www.celluloidskyline.com
Global Cities at the Tate Modern, London
explores five major megacities across the planet. The site includes survey
tools and user-generated content.
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/globalcities/default.shtm
A digital urbanist: Reineke Otten
Photographer,
designer, brand researcher
Author of China Daily Life, a Flickr-style print
compendium of contemporary Chinese urbanism.
Otten calls
herself a “streetologist”:
“Streetologists
use the street and its people as a free unlimited source of inspiration. Not
only do I use streetology to make books like China Daily Life, I work for companies who want to understand their
brand better by getting to know the world it lives in.”
Her clients
include:
Heineken
Dutch Railways
Anyone want to become a
streetologist? The work looks really interesting, but the pay is irregular and
the benefits are intangible, like so many jobs for the new culture workers of
the global information economy. Your
generation will be inventing, exploring, and retooling these new
possibilities at the interface of real and virtual cities – and perhaps helping
to create an economic and political infrastructure in which these new forms of
thinking, making, and doing can maintain more stability, and have more impact,
on collective life – at home, and globally.
(If time: a few minutes
from Rem Koolhaas, digital documentary, Lagos
Wide and Close.)