Internet Technologies

Berlin.
The third day at the Berlin Symposium starts with a brief keynote by Damon Horowitz from Google, who outlines some further research challenges for the new Institute for Internet and Society. He begins by considering the auto-complete function of Web forms (as in Google search) – this is a simple indication of how data is gathered about usage patterns in pursuit of greater systems efficiency: it can be beneficial, but also a sign of humans losing agency to the system.

Second, the social media status update: a simple way of starting a conversation, of sharing information, of spreading …

Berlin.
Finally, Karl-Heinz Ladeur responds to Wolfgang’s talk at the Berlin Symposium by also highlighting the fragmentation of the public sphere: first, on the one hand, there was a vision of a homogeneous political public organised in concentric circles, whose deliberative processes are facilitated by a supposedly neutral media; on the other hand, there was a view of a cultural public which integrates the imagined nation state with the society of individuals.

But through the gradual transformation of the media, a more active media role came to greater prominence; media were no longer seen as neutral, but as actors in …

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’ …