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Jovan Maud

Meet Intel's Genevieve Bell: The Australian with the eyes of the tech giant's future - 0 views

www.smh.com.au/...nts-future-20140217-32v2v.html

technology design corporate anthropology

shared by Jovan Maud on 17 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 17 Feb 14
     
    Another version of the NYT article on Genevieve Bell.
Jovan Maud

Texas student suspended for refusing RFID tracker - Boing Boing - 0 views

boingboing.net/...-student-suspended-for-re.html

technology privacy ubicomp

shared by Jovan Maud on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 23 Nov 12
     
    Something on the ubicomp issue -- and in this case the way that tracking technologies intersect with religion.
Jovan Maud

Netizens warned against 'liking' photo | Bangkok Post: breakingnews - 0 views

www.bangkokpost.com/...eatened-for-liking-photo-gaffe

web 2.0 politics censorship

shared by Jovan Maud on 22 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 22 Oct 12
     
    "Netizens warned against 'liking' photo Published: 19/10/2012 at 06:04 PM Online news: Thai web users have been warned against sharing or "liking" the controversial picture of a Thai reporter standing near a photo of the late Cambodian king visible in a newspaper placed on the ground. Information and communication technology (ICT) permanent secretary Chaiyan Peungkiatpairote warned that anyone doing so may be in breach of the computer crimes law. At a press conference on Friday he appealed to the Thai social network users not to forward or click "like" on the photo or messages associated with it, saying doing so may lead to conflict between the two countries. It may also violate the Computer Crimes Act 2007, which prohibits the dissemination of content deemed threatening to national security. The law provides for a maximum five-year jail sentence, he said. Mr Chaiyan also urged the general public to refrain from disseminating or otherwise circulating the image to help maintain good bilateral ties between Thailand and Cambodia. Cambodia's social media network was abuzz on Wednesday over a photo of Thapanee Eadsrichai, a well-known reporter from Channel 3, in which it appeared she was standing over newspaper photos of King Sihanouk placed on the ground. The photo drew extensive criticism from both Cambodians and Thais. The journalist and her Channel 3 bosses quickly apologised. Ms Thapanee said she had no intention of showing disrespect to king Sihanouk and the newspaper wasn't actrually near her, it just appeared so from the angle the photo was taken. The Thai Foreign Ministry also stepped in to clear the air over the issue. The Cambodian government said in a statement released on Thursday that all Cambodian people should avoid ill-intentioned attempts by some political groups to use the case to stir instability in the country and cause problems with neighbouring countries. "
  • Jovan Maud on 22 Oct 12
     
    This is an interesting case where even "liking" a photo could be deemed a "computer crime" in the Thai context. It is worth noting there that relations between Thailand and Cambodia have been tense for a variety of reasons, and that in both countries placing an image of a respected person below one's feet (which are considered dirty) is deemed a grave insult.
Jovan Maud

Bitcoin transactions could consume as much energy as Denmark by the year 2020 / Boing B... - 1 views

boingboing.net/...jection-by-2020-bitcoin-t.html

energy climate change material culture

shared by Jovan Maud on 01 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 01 Apr 16
     
    Here is a good example of the materiality of digital technologies. Could generating a single bitcoin really produce 4 tonnes of CO2?
Jovan Maud

What Twitter Can Learn From Weibo: Field Notes From Global Tech Ethnographer Tricia Wan... - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...studying-social-media-in-china

web 2.0 Twitter ethnography

shared by Jovan Maud on 30 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 30 Jul 12
     
    Raises points not only about the sorts of things an ethnographer might consider when researching about digital technologies. It also considers the ways that digital technologies may feature as part of the research.
Jovan Maud

Intel's Sharp-Eyed Social Scientist - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...arp-eyed-social-scientist.html

technology design corporate anthropology

shared by Jovan Maud on 17 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 17 Feb 14
     
    Profile of Genevieve Bell, prominent anthropologist working for Intel.
Jovan Maud

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputatio... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...jtrig-manipulation

protest politics NSA surveillance public sphere hackers hacktivism

shared by Jovan Maud on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • hat these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
  • 1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.
  • In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As Anonymous expert Gabriella Coleman of McGill University told me, “targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs, resulting in the stifling of legitimate dissent.” Pointing to this study she published, Professor Coleman vehemently contested the assertion that “there is anything terrorist/violent in their actions.”
    • Jovan Maud
      Jovan Maud on 25 Feb 14
       
      N.B. Gabriella Coleman, anthropologist and author of "Coding freedom". 
  • Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government. Ironically, the very same Sunstein was recently named by Obama to serve as a member of the NSA review panel created by the White House, one that – while disputing key NSA claims – proceeded to propose many cosmetic reforms to the agency’s powers (most of which were ignored by the President who appointed them).
  • Jovan Maud on 25 Feb 14
     
    A key issue in debates about how digital technologies are transforming political discourse. In this case, what new possibilities are open to states to manipulate opinion, spread misinformation and to discredit opponents?
Jovan Maud

Julian Dibbell » A Rape in Cyberspace - 2 views

www.juliandibbell.com/...a-rape-in-cyberspace

virtual reality avatar MUDs violence community

shared by Jovan Maud on 29 Apr 14 - Cached
  • here on the brink of a future in which human existence may find itself as tightly enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the architectural kind — demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us to shut our ears for the time being to techno- utopian ecstasies and look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones. And perhaps most challengingly it asks us to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll — and to try not to warp them beyond recognition in the process.
  • These particulars, as I said, are unambiguous. But they are far from simple, for the simple reason that every set of facts in virtual reality (or VR, as the locals abbreviate it) is shadowed by a second, complicating set: the “real-life” facts. And while a certain tension invariably buzzes in the gap between the hard, prosaic RL facts and their more fluid, dreamy VR counterparts, the dissonance in the Bungle case is striking.
  • No hideous clowns or trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident, no voodoo dolls or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any RL court of law has yet defined it. The actors in the drama were university students for the most part, and they sat rather undramatically before computer screens the entire time, their only actions a spidery flitting of fingers across standard QWERTY keyboards. No bodies touched. Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of electronic signals sent from sites spread out between New York City and Melbourne, Australia. Those signals met in LambdaMOO, certainly, just as the hideous clown and the living room party did, but what was LambdaMOO after all? Not an enchanted mansion or anything of the sort — just a middlingly complex database, maintained for experimental purposes inside a Xerox Corporation research computer in Palo Alto and open to public access via the Internet.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Which is all just to say that, to the extent that Mr. Bungle’s assault happened in real life at all, it happened as a sort of Punch-and-Judy show, in which the puppets and the scenery were made of nothing more substantial than digital code and snippets of creative writing.
  • ’m not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I’m not sure what I’m calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it.
  • Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face — a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere fiction. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.” Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player’s life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player exu issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle’s dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL’s lights, woefully understated by VR’s, the tone of exu’s response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.
  • For while the facts attached to any event born of a MUD’s strange, ethereal universe may march in straight, tandem lines separated neatly into the virtual and the real, its meaning lies always in that gap.
  • To participate, therefore, in this disembodied enactment of life’s most body-centered activity is to risk the realization that when it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic double, the bodylike self-representation we carry around in our heads — and that whether we present that body to another as a meat puppet or a word puppet is not nearly as significant a distinction as one might have thought.
  • Faced with the task of inventing its own self-governance from scratch, the LambdaMOO population had so far done what any other loose, amorphous agglomeration of individuals would have done: they’d let it slide. But now the task took on new urgency. Since getting the wizards to toad Mr. Bungle (or to toad the likes of him in the future) required a convincing case that the cry for his head came from the community at large, then the community itself would have to be defined; and if the community was to be convincingly defined, then some form of social organization, no matter how rudimentary, would have to be settled on. And thus, as if against its will, the question of what to do about Mr. Bungle began to shape itself into a sort of referendum on the political future of the MOO. Arguments broke out on *social and elsewhere that had only superficially to do with Bungle (since everyone seemed to agree he was a cad) and everything to do with where the participants stood on LambdaMOO’s crazy-quilty political map. Parliamentarian legalist types argued that unfortunately Bungle could not legitimately be toaded at all, since there were no explicit MOO rules against rape, or against just about anything else — and the sooner such rules were established, they added, and maybe even a full-blown judiciary system complete with elected officials and prisons to enforce those rules, the better. Others, with a royalist streak in them, seemed to feel that Bungle’s as-yet-unpunished outrage only proved this New Direction silliness had gone on long enough, and that it was high time the wizardocracy returned to the position of swift and decisive leadership their player class was born to.
  • Yet no position was trickier to maintain than that of the MOO’s resident anarchists. Like the technolibbers, the anarchists didn’t care much for punishments or policies or power elites. Like them, they hoped the MOO could be a place where people interacted fulfillingly without the need for such things. But their high hopes were complicated, in general, by a somewhat less thoroughgoing faith in technology (Even if you can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools — read a slogan written into one anarchist player’s self-description — it is a damned good place to start). And at present they were additionally complicated by the fact that the most vocal anarchists in the discussion were none other than exu, Kropotkin, and HortonWho, who wanted to see Mr. Bungle toaded as badly as anyone did.
  • I know you could because I too was there, in one of those pivotal accidents of personal history one always wants later to believe were approached with a properly solemn awareness of the moment’s portent. Almost as invariably, of course, the truth is that one wanders into such occasions utterly without a clue, and so it was with me that night. Completely ignorant of any of the goings-on that had led to the meeting, I showed up mainly to see what the crowd was about, and though I observed the proceedings for a good while, I confess I found it hard to grasp what was going on. I was still the rankest of newbies then, my MOO legs still too unsteady to make the leaps of faith, logic, and empathy required to meet the spectacle on its own terms. I was fascinated by the concept of virtual rape, but I was even more so by the notion that anyone could take it altogether seriously.
    • Jovan Maud
      Jovan Maud on 29 Apr 14
       
      A point that resonates with the experience of doing fieldwork, virtual or not.
  • here were the central questions, of course: thumbs up or down on Bungle’s virtual existence? And if down, how then to insure that his toading was not just some isolated lynching but a first step toward shaping LambdaMOO into a legitimate community? Surrounding these, however, a tangle of weighty side issues proliferated. What, some wondered, was the real-life legal status of the offense? Could Bungle’s university administrators punish him for sexual harassment? Could he be prosecuted under California state laws against obscene phone calls? Little enthusiasm was shown for pursuing either of these lines of action, which testifies both to the uniqueness of the crime and to the nimbleness with which the discussants were negotiating its idiosyncracies. Many were the casual references to Bungle’s deed as simply “rape,” but these in no way implied that the players had lost sight of all distinctions between the virtual and physical versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt with in the same way a real-life criminal would. He had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO.
  • “Where does the body end and the mind begin?” young Quastro asked, amid recurring attempts to fine-tune the differences between real and virtual violence. “Is not the mind a part of the body?” “In MOO, the body IS the mind,” offered HerkieCosmo gamely, and not at all implausibly, demonstrating the ease with which very knotty metaphysical conundrums come undone in VR. The not- so-aptly named Obvious seemed to agree, arriving after sufficient consideration of the nature of Bungle’s crime at the hardly novel yet now somehow newly resonant conjecture that “all reality might consist of ideas, who knows.”
  • They might have known. Stilted though its diction was, the gist of the answer was simple, and something many in the room had probably already surmised: Mr. Bungle was a psycho. Not, perhaps, in real life — but then in real life it’s possible for reasonable people to assume, as Bungle clearly did, that what transpires between word-costumed characters within the boundaries of a make-believe world is, if not mere play, then at most some kind of emotional laboratory experiment. Inside the MOO, however, such thinking marked a person as one of two basically subcompetent types. The first was the newbie, in which case the confusion was understandable, since there were few MOOers who had not, upon their first visits as anonymous “guest” characters, mistaken the place for a vast playpen in which they might act out their wildest fantasies without fear of censure. Only with time and the acquisition of a fixed character do players tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity, developing the concern for their character’s reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood. But while Mr. Bungle hadn’t been around as long as most MOOers, he’d been around long enough to leave his newbie status behind, and his delusional statement therefore placed him among the second type: the sociopath.
    • Jovan Maud
      Jovan Maud on 29 Apr 14
       
      This strikes me as a key point about online sociality and socialization processes. The figures of the "newbie" (noob) and the psychopath (troll?) exemplified in not treating the virtual world seriously; i.e. assuming that it's not "real" and only a game. Either not understanding, or purposefully ignoring, the very real social nature of the virtual experience.
  • They say that LambdaMOO wasn’t really the same after Mr. Bungle’s toading. They say as well that nothing really changed. And though it skirts the fuzziest of dream-logics to say that both these statements are true, the MOO is just the sort of fuzzy, dreamlike place in which such contradictions thrive.
  • It was to be his last, for what he now decreed was the final, missing piece of the New Direction. In a few days, Haakon announced, he would build into the database a system of petitions and ballots whereby anyone could put to popular vote any social scheme requiring wizardly powers for its implementation, with the results of the vote to be binding on the wizards. At last and for good, the awkward gap between the will of the players and the efficacy of the technicians would be closed.
  • few months and a dozen ballot measures later, widespread participation in the new regime had already produced a small arsenal of mechanisms for dealing with the types of violence that called the system into being. MOO residents now had access to a @boot command, for instance, with which to summarily eject berserker “guest” characters. And players could bring suit against one another through an ad hoc mediation system in which mutually agreed-upon judges had at their disposition the full range of wizardly punishments — up to and including the capital.
  • Nor was this ease necessarily understood to represent a failure of toading’s social disciplinary function. On the contrary, it only underlined the truism (repeated many times throughout the debate over Mr. Bungle’s fate) that his punishment, ultimately, had been no more or less symbolic than his crime.
  • For I too was undergoing a transformation in the aftermath of that night in emmeline’s — and was increasingly uncertain what to make of it. As I pursued my runaway fascination with the discussion I had heard there, as I pored over the *social debate and got to know exu and some of the other victims and witnesses, I could feel my newbie consciousness falling away from me. Where before I’d found it hard to take virtual rape seriously, I now was finding it difficult to remember how I could ever not have taken it seriously. I was proud to have arrived at this perspective — it felt like an exotic sort of achievement, and it definitely made my ongoing experience of the MOO a richer one.
    • Jovan Maud
      Jovan Maud on 29 Apr 14
       
      Note this discourse of acquired cultural competence. A common feature of ethnographic writing.
  • But it was also having some unsettling effects on the way I looked at the rest of the world. Sometimes, for instance, it grew difficult for me to understand why RL society classifies RL rape alongside crimes against person or property. Since rape can occur without any physical pain or damage, I found myself reasoning, then it must be classed as a crime against the mind — more intimately and deeply hurtful, to be sure, than cross burnings, wolf whistles, and virtual rape, but undeniably located on the same conceptual continuum. I did not, however, conclude as a result that rapists were protected in any fashion by the First Amendment. Quite the opposite, in fact: the more seriously I took the notion of virtual rape, the less seriously I was able to take the tidy division of the world into the symbolic and the real that underlies the very notion of freedom of speech.
    • Jovan Maud
      Jovan Maud on 29 Apr 14
       
      Again, a common anthropological trope. This time it's the "making the strange familiar and the familiar strange"; the more one becomes socialized into a particular cultural world, the more the taken-for-granted also reveals itself as equally cultural and, therefore, "strange" in the sense that it does not slide by unnoticed but attracts attention and becomes itself an object of reflection.
  • For whatever else these thoughts were telling me, I have come to hear in them an announcement of the final stages of our decades-long passage into the Information Age, a paradigm shift that the classic liberal firewall between word and deed (itself a product of an earlier paradigm shift commonly known as the Enlightenment) is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.
    • Jovan Maud
      Jovan Maud on 29 Apr 14
       
      I suppose this is what code is -- incantations -- in the sense that the words "act" to create reality rather than merely convey meaning.
  • I would still have to learn this lesson many times over, of course. I’d learn it again when on the eve of my immersion in VR two separate and credible sources revealed to me that the virtual psychosis of Mr. Bungle had been even starker than anyone guessed: that the Bungle account had been the more or less communal property of an entire NYU dorm floor, that the young man at the keyboard on the evening of the rape had acted not alone but surrounded by fellow students calling out suggestions and encouragement, that conceivably none of those people were speaking for Bungle when he showed up in emmeline’s room to answer for the crime, that Dr. Jest himself, thought commonly to have reincarnated the whole Bungle and nothing but the Bungle, in fact embodied just one member of the original mob — just one scattered piece of a self more irreparably fragmented than any RL multiple personality could ever fear to be.
  • Jovan Maud on 29 Apr 14
     
    Here's the Dibbell article set for the seminar, along with some annotations.
janek_totaro

Urbanscale - 1 views

urbanscale.org

technology open access

shared by janek_totaro on 19 Jun 14 - No Cached
Jovan Maud liked it
  • janek_totaro on 19 Jun 14
     
    "Urbanscale was founded by Adam Greenfield in 2010 to bring a human-centered perspective to the design of products, services, and spatial interventions wherever networked information technology intersects the urban condition, for the benefit of everybody who lives, works, strives, and dreams in the world's cities. We work with municipal, public-sector and private organizations on one-off and long-term consulting projects, as well as developing our own products. Our expertise in interaction and interface design, ethnography, graphic design, typography, cartography and software development is complemented by extensive experience working in North America, Europe and Asia."
  • janek_totaro on 19 Jun 14
     
    Adam Greenfield also wrote books on that subject. If anyone is interested: http://speedbird.wordpress.com/my-book-everyware-the-dawning-age-of-ubiquitous-computing/
  • Jovan Maud on 23 Jun 14
     
    Thanks for that Janek. Looks very interesting, and provides a great example of how design, ethnography and ubiquitous computing can be combined.
Jovan Maud

Cell Phones in Papua New Guinea Used to Call Dead People | New Republic - 1 views

www.newrepublic.com/...w-guinea-used-call-dead-people

shared by Jovan Maud on 19 Jun 14 - No Cached
Jovan Maud liked it
  • We often fret that we’re too attached to our smartphones or that we let them wield too much influence over our lives. But our reverence for technology is relative. In the remote Ambonwari society of Papua New Guinea, villagers believe that cell phones are extensions of their human owners and can be used to commune with the departed.
  • When their calls don’t go through, they don’t blame shoddy service or wrong numbers; they believe the spirits of the dead can interfere with their connections.
  • They haven’t had time to develop telephone etiquette have, either. Back in Slovenia, Telban’s phone rings nonstop. “They really love just to ring me,” he said. He never knows who’s calling, since villagers share the phones, and as soon as he answers, the other person hangs up: They don’t have enough credit for an actual conversation. But Telban doesn’t mind. “They are my friends,” he said. “They’re just saying hello.”
    • Jovan Maud
      Jovan Maud on 23 Jun 14
       
      Interesting point about phone etiquette, about cultural styles of using technology, and also how it might be the act of connecting, rather than communication per se, which is attractive to people.
  • Jovan Maud on 23 Jun 14
     
    By the way, there is a whole special issue on mobile phones in The Australian Journal of Anthropology which has just been published. The research on which this article was based is on of them. The current link for an "early view" is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1757-6547/earlyview
Jovan Maud

Coffitivity - Increase Your Creativity! - 2 views

coffitivity.com

productivity web 2.0 sound background

shared by Jovan Maud on 06 May 14 - Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 06 May 14
     
    It's amazing the amount of sites and digital tools dedicated to productivity, and its interesting to note that they are often directed at trying to combat some of the perceived negative effects of digital technologies themselves. Take this site, for example, it seeks to reintroduce the hubbub of a social environment, like a cafe, into the office.
Jovan Maud

Oculus was the future of gaming. Now it's the future of Facebook. - Boing Boing - 0 views

boingboing.net/...s-vr-could-have-changed-b.html

crowdfunding facebook gaming politics open access virtual reality

shared by Jovan Maud on 27 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 27 Mar 14
     
    Crowd funding of VR system Oculus leads to huge purchase by Facebook. Interesting to think about the various debates connected to this: the relationship between crowd sourcing and corporate control, the different imaginaries connected with VR technologies and so on.
Jovan Maud

Cyberparks will be intelligent spaces embedded with sensors and computers - 0 views

theconversation.com/th-sensors-and-computers-26837

internet of things ubicomp leisure nature surveillance

shared by Jovan Maud on 26 May 14 - No Cached
jans-punkt liked it
  • Jovan Maud on 26 May 14
     
    Futurist thinking on how to embed digital technologies into the experience of outdoor leisure time.
Jovan Maud

Route 66, 2.0: A Gorgeous Glow-in-the-Dark Smart Highway | Living on GOOD - 0 views

www.good.is/...rt-highway-for-the-netherlands

technology ubicomp design

shared by Jovan Maud on 06 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Jovan Maud on 06 Nov 12
     
    Here is something on "smart environments" and the role of design in developing these.
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