Everyday we see more and more of daily lives are entering the digital realm. We’re communicating electronically, make electronica things, trade them, want them. And while doing so we leave little bits of information behind us, a digital cookie trail. So far the computer power and resources to analyze all that information was really, until now that is.

Thanks to “Moore’s Law”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law , not only do we have the power to analyze that kind of information but with the internet was also have the means to collect it.

But, what does this mean? Well, look at this paper, “Unraveling the Taste Fabric of Social Networks”:http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/01/22/unraveling_the_.html

bq. Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness—the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would afford completely novel ways for representing and reasoning about web users and people in general.

Interesting huh? But I think we’re starting to reach the point described in “this Finacial Times article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c22f7fa4-891b-11da-94a6-0000779e2340.html

bq. So, in technology, Moore’s Law is alive and well. But technology does not operate in a vacuum. No business or government institution can change at 50 per cent a year. While stability and tradition are important, if a fundamental technology progresses far beyond society’s ability to absorb its impacts, a growing disconnection occurs. When, in the 19th century, technology proceeded at a rapid pace while social institutions did not, the results were upheavals and revolutions. Today, again, the key elements of the information economy are progressing at a scorching rate, while private and public institutions are lagging behind.

So wow do we deal with this new found ability to _reveal the structure of social connectedness_? Well, it’s probably still too early to address that question. Right now, we are only just exploring what is possible and so far the results are amazing. “Look at this”:http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/web_game_provides_breakthrough_in_predicting_spread_of_epidemics_9874 for example…

Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.

“We were confident that we could learn a lot from the data collected at the “www.wheresgeorge.com”:http://www.wheresgeorge.com bill-tracking website, but the results turned out far beyond our expectations,” said Lars Hufnagel

Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. They found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws (from local to regional to long-distance scales). Using the game data, they developed a powerful mathematical theory that describes the observed movements of travelers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometers to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modeling of the spread of epidemics.

We are now starting to collect enough data to model really interesting ideas. With the help of our own personal digital cookie trail, who knows knows what we will be able to model next.

“What are we afraid we’ll see if we look into a stranger’s eyes?”:http://spacing.ca/stealing-glances.htm

bq. Sometimes I feel an urgent need to get out of Toronto, and this is one of those times. The strain does not come from difficult friendships or celebrity magazines or the noise, so much as my relationship to my fellow pedestrian. The crisis is almost always a crisis about strangers; it’s a crisis of eye contact. Someone approaches and the problem of whether to look away or look at them — and if to look, how long to keep looking for — does not resolve itself easily, quietly, in the background. It becomes a loud problem, and as people pass by, the anxiety of how to act and this question about responsibility to my fellow humans, paid out in a momentary acknowledgement of our mutual humanity, prohibits me from thinking about anything else.

This is something that really resonates deeply with me. Living and commuting in London exposes you too so many people on a daily basis, especially if you ride the tube. The one thing that I have a hard time getting used to is how people avoid all eye contact on the tube. You can sit right across someone for close to an hour and not recieve even a glance.

bq. Most of us accept as inevitable the sort of eye contact that is most pervasive, that rushed and fearful glance. You might argue that this way of looking is respectful; that since privacy is so scarce in a city, it is gracious to look away. But I have experienced such gentle looks away — giving them, getting them — and they’re not what I am talking about and not the norm. There still remains that quick glance away, which often leaves me with a feeling of shame or a sense of the diminishment of my humanity. And as I sweep my eyes rapidly from someone’s face onto the mailbox, I recognize that, in my wake, I may leave that person with this same anxiety.

Thats why I take comfort in “my own personal protective bubble”:http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/2005/01/24/the-bubble-effect. It’s real easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who ignore you everyday. I’ve always wondered what all this meant.

Our culture is such that a greater value even than freedom is productivity, utility. I was having a conversation with a friend about leisure, and she was saying how much she enjoys doing nothing, just wandering aimlessly around her house, thinking. “I find it so productive,” she decided. Even an activity we enjoy precisely because it is not about production we must ultimately justify by way of its productivity. This being the situation we find ourselves in, how can we ever justify to ourselves or to each other the value of those most fleeting relationships, lasting at most two seconds long, with a stream of people we will never see again? What is the utility of the quarter-of-a-second-long relationship?

When we look and look away, we reveal what we want — communion, citizenry — and what we lack — communion, citizenry. It is not unreasonable to think the health of a culture can be judged by how many seemingly inconsequential encounters and experiences are shared among its citizens. Take the option of making real eye contact with strangers — frank, fully conscious, unafraid, respectful, not obtrusive. This level of engagement would be satisfying, but so exhausting to sustain; possibly too relentless and demanding for a city-dweller, since to look at someone in this way is to acknowledge and recognize how they’re like you, how they are like everyone you know and love, and so to become responsible for them, just as you are responsible for those you love. But while your duty to your friend is directed only at your friend, as needed, your duty to a stranger can be paid only to the collective, constantly.

Via: “Space and Culture”:http://www.spaceandculture.org/2006/01/stealing-glances.php

The most fantastic discovery since moving to London has got to be the discovery of “dubstep”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubstep. And the really fun part is that, even to the real heads that have been around from the start, everyone is discovering it as it mutates, develops and accelerates off into music history books.

The wikipedia’s reference does provide a good introduction to, dubstep, the genre but nothing can really prepare you for dubstep in person. The exicitment in the air at all of the events I’ve been too, ie a grand total of 2 DMZ’s, is tangible. The vibe at the last “DMZ”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/drumzofthesouth/sets/1802773/ was absolutely electric. You easily get the impression that you’re witnessing something historic in the making at these parties.

And then there was “Dubstep Wars”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/drumzofthesouth/sets/1830747/ . The two hour, “Breezeblock”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/dance/breezeblock/ dubstep special. Seven of dubsteps most visionary djs got 15 minutes each to showcase their sound and what a showcase it was. I’d try to describe it but to really understand you have to “check it out”:http://dubstep.forumsplace.com/urljump.php?url=http://dubstep.kicks-ass.net/mixes/other_radio_shows/Dubstep_Warz_-_Breezeblock_-_10-01-06.zip for yourself…

Picked up this interesting bit of news via “BLDGBLOG”:http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/stranger-tv-and-world-of-cinemapolis.html

“Asbo TV helps residents watch out”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1974974,00.html

RESIDENTS of a trendy London neighbourhood are to become the first in Britain to receive “Asbo TV” — television beamed live to their homes from CCTV cameras on the surrounding streets.
As part of the £12m scheme funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, residents of Shoreditch in the East End will also be able to compare characters they see behaving suspiciously with an on-screen “rogues’ gallery” of local recipients of “anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos)”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASBO.

Viewers will then be able to use an anonymous e-mail tip-off system to report to the police anyone they see breaching an Asbo or committing a crime.

Obligatory “Big Brother”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance paranonia and “Privacy Advocacy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_surveillance#Privacy aside, BLDGBLOG sees this from a different perspective:

The 24-hour closed-circuit voyeurism we impose upon the voidscape of empty car parks and untraveled motorways all around us is already a response to the directionless sprawl of 21st century space. As such, security cameras are the next phase of an advanced urban sociology, a vanguard attempt at understanding the limits, contents and directions of our cities; these cameras have nothing to do with security – unless, of course, cognitive security is the issue at hand.

And he calls it…

to introduce a new term here, we would find ourselves discussing not “psychogeography”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography but *psychovideography*, the videographic psyche of the city. If security firms are the new providers of our urban unconscious, a hundred thousand endless films recording twenty-fours a day, indefinitely, then we should perhaps find that the outdated methodologies of the psychogeographers have hit an impasse. The ‘geo-’ is now in the ‘video-’, as it were, and the ‘-graphy’ survives just the same. Throw in some 24-hour ‘psycho-’, and we begin to see the city through the lens of an unacknowledged avant-garde: a subset of the film industry whose advance front has taken on the guise of security.

The security industry, in this case, finds itself a (presumably unwitting) heir to “John Cage”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage. As Cage himself wrote, ‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.’

Pretty interesting.

Hmmm… I spotted this over at “Smartmobs”:http://www.smartmobs.com about rising mobile phone usage in Africa this morning…

African leaders will launch a global fund to help people in poor countries buy mobile phones and Internet access as a step out of poverty and into economic growth, the president of Senegal said on Wednesday, reports Reuters

“There are more telephones in Manhattan than in all Africa,” President Abdoulaye Wade said at a news conference held on the sidelines of a U.N. General Assembly meeting.

The new fund, pooling voluntary contributions solicited from buyers of high-tech goods in wealthy nations, will be launched in Geneva on Nov. 17, Wade said.

While the fund will primarily help poorer countries, wealthy nations also have a stake in its success as the fund will bring in “millions and millions of dollars” that will be used to buy equipment from the industrialized world, he said.

This is a really old article so the news is, well, old news but I think it illustrates the dilema Africa is facing. Technology can definately play a strong role in shaping Africa’s future but the approach here, this fund, seems to be missing the point completely.

Looks at what’s happening in Brazil. Lawrence Lessig went and had a look at the “Brazilian free software movement”:http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_14505,300,p1.html

bq. As I listened to the Brazilians explain the free-software lab, I began to realize that this pattern was recurring. They were doing for culture what “Stallman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman had done for software. The lab was not so much about “free software.” It did not, for example, teach people how to make free software. Its aim instead was to help them build free culture using free software. The lab offered “workshops about video editing, audio editing, collaboration tools, [and] online collaboration,” all “on top of free software.” But the objective of this teaching wasn’t, or wasn’t just, better software. The objective was a different economy for culture. Culture itself, as one Brazilian explained to me, should be free, meaning, he said, “free as in free software.”

That’s the point africa is missing. Ok, there are more phones in Manhattan than in all Africa but so what? What do you actually want these phones for? _To help people in poor countries buy mobile phones and Internet access as a step out of poverty and into economic growth_ What does that actually mean? How can technology create wealth? and how do we make that wealth accessable to the average man?

And this bit really freaks me out:

bq. _While the fund will primarily help poorer countries, wealthy nations also have a stake in its success as the fund will bring in “millions and millions of dollars” that will be used to buy equipment from the industrialized world, he said._

Africa seems way too preocupied with becoming the ideal _emerging market_.

But, all that bitching and moaning aside, here is some really interesting research that looks at addressing the technological divide: “Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication”:http://research.nokia.com/bluesky/non-literacy-001-2005/index.html

The United Nations estimates the total number of illiterate adults to be 799 million worldwide, 270 million of which are located in India alone. UNESCO defines illiteracy as a ‘person who cannot with understanding both read and write a short simple statement on their everyday life’. In this article, the author uses the term ‘textually non-literate’ to reflect that there are many ways to define literacy. For example, task-literacy can be the ability to complete a particular task, computer-literacy the ability to make basic use of a computer. The author acknowledges that non-literacy is not caused by lack of ability but rather by lack of opportunities for learning.

The key question for mobile phone manufacturers who wish to address the communication needs of this potential customer base is: How does the inability to read and write affect the ability of mobile phone users to make effective use of mobile phones? How can we design communication tools that draw on the knowledge and experiences that these users do have?

The answers to these questions will help create technology of real value for Africa. This is where the focus needs to lie.