First Spark of the New Season

Today, we launch season five(!) of Spark, my CBC radio broadcast/podcast. You can listen to it online here, or subscribe to the podcast.

The Sniffer Launches!

My podcasting pal, Cathi Bond, and I have launched the new season of our trendwatching podcast, The Sniffer. We began way back in 2005, and we’re still enjoying it. We’ve also pegged quite a few long range trends in our time. You can listen below, or at The Sniffer website, where you’ll also find links to the stories we talk about.
Sni-2011-09-09 by nora3000
 

Network Analysis and Privacy

There’s a great article in The Economist’s latest Technology Quarterly, called Untangling the Social Web.  It’s about how the field of network analysis looks at the behaviour of people in terms of the trails of data exhaust they leave behind, but not as individuals.  Rather, it considers the behaviour of people within their social context.  For example, by studying the pattern of phone calls made by telco customers, network analysis can determine who is an ‘influencer’, and hence more likely to get friends and relatives to change telcos when they do.  If you can tell who the influencers are among your customers, you can offer them better deals, thus ensuring fewer lost customers.

Leaving aside the question of how we non-influential misanthropes might feel about formalizing this two-tiered structure of clients, what I find fascinating is the way it refocuses how we need to think about the boundaries of privacy.  Often, we think about privacy in terms of the content of our information.  In this case, though, it’s not that companies are tracking who amongst their clients is saying things like “hey I think you should by stock in company x,y,z” or searching their client base to find out who have important jobs; rather they’re tracking the pattern of calls:  calls made late at night, length of calls, etc, and making inferences about the social relations that underlie those patterns.

Nothing To Do With Anything

This has nothing really to do with technology and culture, just an image I love from my recent trip to Sicily.  It’s the duomo in the Ortygia island part of the city of Siracuse.  It was built in the 7th century, on top of, and incorporating, the much earlier Temple of Athena (5th c BCE).  Such a meditative, spare, space, after all the fabulosity of the Sicilian baroque architecture throughout the south of the island.

Yes, That’s Right, It’s a New Post

A while back, I visited experimental architect, Philip Beesley, in his studio in Toronto’s west end.  I went to talk to him about the enormous, beautiful, installation piece he’s taking to the Venice Biennale of Architecture, representing Canada.  It’s a remarkable work, called Hylozoic Ground.  You can see some images here.  Hylozoism was the concept that everything contained some sort of life force, and this is reflected in Philip’s work metaphorically.  He’s working in the area of ‘responsive architecture,’ where structures can change or move in response to external, environmental conditions, or in response to the way the people within the space are using it.

What I love about Philip’s work is the way he’s breaking down the hard line between the built and the natural environment, creating spaces that are permeable, changeable, and, well, responsive.  As we humans start to generate more data about where we are, and how we are using the space around us (for example, with our GPS-enabled phones, we ‘check in’ at locations) will we be able to provide buildings with more information about us, and how we want to use the space?  You can imagine a future in which architecture, the environment, and us, are all in a loop of information and response to that information.

Anyhoo, if you’re curious about Beesley’s thoughts, my interview with him on Spark is here

How Soon Is Now?

Sending a note to yourself in the future is nothing new.  We’ve long called a voicemail message to home, or made use of some of the many ‘send me a message in the future’ online services, such as Future Me.  Consider, though, Futuris.tk. (via Crunchbase).  The premise is that you can message yourself, or others in your social network, at a specific time, up to 50 years in the future.  Your mother (provided she’s in your social network) could message you five years from now with updated reminders to make sure you’re getting enough protein.   The project imagines such uses as a parent sending messages to a child in the future, when that child is the same age as the sender is now.  Another feature lets you sort of future blog, where you write things that will be read in the future. (Don’t we always write things that will be read in the future?) Or you can use the post-mortem feature, to send messages after you’re dead.

I actually had to spend a fair bit of time looking at it to figure out whether it was ironic, an art project, or a serious social networking cum messaging service.  Such is the nature of our time-shifting existence that I find it increasingly difficult, really and truly, to tell whether something is A/completely absurd or B/ a great idea.  Is this of a piece, say, leaving a letter with a lawyer to be read after you’re dead? Or is a difference in kind….a sort of proto-time travel?

Everyone Loves a Zombie

Fox News (yes, I know) is reporting that a digital road sign in Austin, Texas was hacked recently. The impish hackers changed the sign to read “Zombies Ahead”. Heh, zombies.

Foxnews.com says that:

“According to the blog i-hacked.com, some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO’s ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed.”

The speculation is that it was the work of university students, which is the digital equivalent of drunkenly stealing a street sign for the dorm room.

In addition to reminding me to watch L.A. Story and Land of the Dead again, it made me think about what happens when digital information is more widely dispersed among our real, physical environment. Will it take the ‘true-for-now’ tendency of the web out into the wild?

Flying the Squirrel Flag

Another new coffee shop opened up in my area recently, called-ahem-Coffee Shop. It’s so new, I can’t find it online, but it’s right by Clafouti, across from Trinity Bellwoods Park. Nothing much unusual about that; every time you walk down that strip of Queen Street there’s something new opening up, or–more and more often, it seems–closing down.

What I noticed about it, though, was the clever sign (sorry, didn’t have my camera) which combined the generic “Coffee Shop” name in a generic white font, with a white silhouette image of a squirrel. Trinity Bellwoods Park is locally famous for its population of white squirrels–I imagine they have a form of albinism. So, the uber-generic name was matched with a kind of hyper-local signifier of local neighbourhood pride.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen the image. Fleurtje had a purse with one on for a while; one of the neighbourhood shops had t-shirts with a white squirrel logo. I’m intrigued by this hyper-localism. Is it just a reflection of the fact that we’re a bigger city now, and so the population base supports it? Is it because so many people in this city were born somewhere else that it’s feeding a desire for place, for settlement? Or perhaps it’s a reaction to a broader sense of rootlessness. I talked about it on the podcast with Cathi a while ago. Any thoughts?

McLuhan Fer Ya

A guest I interviewed today for Spark reminded me of a great McLuhan quotation: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

We’re always looking at technological change in its immediate technical impacts, but with very little sense of all the social organization that surrounds it. The way the social changes with new technology always seems to catch us by surprise. Reminds me of another great bit of McLuhanism: “As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse.”

What would it mean to look at our technologies, those ‘extensions of our own bodies’ as imbued with culture, and embedded within culture?

Life in the Perpetual Future

I saw this cool post at New Scientist, suggesting that we no longer have a clear sense of when “The Future” is, in the way that we once would have said ‘the year 2000′ or ‘the 21st century’.

I wonder whether it’s actually that we now live in a time of perpetual almostfuture. In the way that we have ennui about technological innovation, and lack surprise, hope and delight about the future. We seem perpetually not in the present, always in the almost tomorrow.