Internet Technologies

Berlin.
In response to Chris W. Anderson’s talk at the Berlin Symposium, Lorenz Matzat now discusses the question of ‘robot journalism’ and its impact on newsroom jobs. There is a substantial increase in the amount of data being collected (and to some extent, made available) by all sorts of devices; these data would also be valuable for journalistic purposes, of course.

Sport is especially advanced in this area, in fact – in many football stadiums, for example, a number of additional cameras are now tracking player and ball movements, generating detailed datasets and visualising them in real time. Given …

Berlin.
The afternoon session at the Berlin Symposium, on intermediaries in public communication, begins with Chris W. Anderson’s presentation on data journalism (he’s not the ‘long tail’ guy, by the way). He begins by describing journalism as a media form that’s meant to bring the public together – to assemble the reading public. In a sense, Google, and data algorithms, similarly bring the public together – and intermediaries emerge in this process.

Algorithms are predetermined sets of instructions for solving a specific problem in a limited number of steps; one of the best known algorithms of recent years is …

Berlin.
I’m chairing the next workshop at the Berlin Symposium, which features a paper by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Zarino Zappia. Zarino starts us off by highlighting the Obama administration’s statement that government should be transparent, participative, and collaborative – and a number of open data sites by governments and non-government have now been set up.

But where is the research into how this material has been used, by whom, why, and with what results? Will such re-routing of information flows bring about a democratic renaissance, or will we see the rise of intermediaries who wield new forms of power …

Berlin.
The second keynote at the Berlin Symposium this morning is by Philipp Müller, who will argue for the idea of ‘open statecraft’ in a networked world. He suggests that our world has become ‘unfiltered’ through the move from mass to networked and social media; the appropriate description for this is not simply many-to-many or few-to-few media, but n-to-n media, where all sorts of power games in pursuit of communicative impact, visibility, and success take place.

There are also some cognitive lags here – we’re missing a framework that allows each of us to work in these worlds …

Berlin.
The second day of the Berlin Symposium begins with a keynote by Rebecca MacKinnon, who begins with the story of an arts installation, the Berlin Twitter Wall, which reflected on the fall of the Wall in 1989 through the medium of Twitter. As it happened, though, the hashtag #fotw (fall of the wall) was taken over by Chinese Twitter users, protesting against the continuing censorship in China; this cold war view of state censorship as an ‘information curtain’, and of digital media as the samizdat of the day, continues to permeate today.

But this ‘iron curtain 2.0’ …

Berlin.
The next session at the Berlin Symposium is on crowdsourcing, involving two speakers (there’s also a lot of discussion, which I’m not blogging here.) We begin with Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, who begins by introducing the range of related concepts which describe the broad field of crowdsourcing. The Net is diminishing transactional costs for communication, collaboration and coordination; this facilitates collaboration amongst disparate stakeholders and provides more opportunities for individuals to participate. As a result, innovation has been democratised – indeed, users are becoming ever more important as innovators.

Internet-enabled innovation can be used as an umbrella term for these processes …

Berlin.
The first keynote of the Berlin Symposium is by Oliver Gassmann, whose focus is on societal innovation. He notes the changes to communication which are associated with the popularisation of the Internet over the past twenty years; when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, for example, there were no online platforms to tweet the news; there was no Google to search for information with.

In 2010, some 107 trillion emails were sent; Facebook has 800 million users (and 35 million update their profiles every day); but we still don’t live entirely ‘virtual’ lives – rather, the Net has become …

Berlin.
I’m in Berlin for the opening of the new (Google-sponsored) Institute for Internet and Society, a very exciting new research initiative which was launched today. The launch itself is accompanied by the three-day Berlin Symposium, which will map out some of the research agenda of the Institute, and the Symposium opens with a few statements of intent by the founding directors.

Jeanette Hofmann begins by highlighting her research interests – including issues of privacy, and broader online regulation (including co-regulation with users and operators, beyond state regulation itself – what Jeanette calls ‘online ordering’). Other key areas …

Seattle.
The final keynote at AoIR 2011 is by Richard Harper, who is the recipient of AoIR’s inaugural book award. He begins with a personal story: some twenty years ago, Richard was researching knowledge work across distances; the task was to engineer technologies which could connect dispersed workers in collaborative spaces. To trial this, individual offices within the same company were treated as distant places, connected through shared, collaborative editing technologies (along the lines of what we now know as PiratePad or Google Docs). At the time, simple conventions for coordinating activities were also necessary, in order to avoid …

Seattle.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Susan Kretchmer, whose focus is on the continuing digital divide. The U.S. ranks surprisingly lowly on broadband Internet adoption; some 14 million Americans do not have access to broadband, and 100 million could have access but don’t use it because they can’t afford it or don’t realise the advantages. Rates are especially low amongst the most disadvantaged groups.

This is being addressed through the development of a National Broadband Plan by the FCC, under instructions by the Obama administration. This envisages the U.S. as a 21st century information society …