digital

Travel Tales

Don’t get me wrong. It is a privilege and an adventure to be able to travel. But it is also – occasionally – a real pain. Things like lost bags, missed connections, annoying people, sad food etc have a tendency to bring even the most positive of travelers down. My trip to Belgium has been an easy and comfortable one for me but all around me there were less happy people.

It began early when disembarking I noticed a bag which had been dropped

Someone’s toothbrush will not be following them home. Despite this my bag was not lost so I moved happily along. The hotel was nice, friendly and clean but the wifi was a bit too flakey so most of the time I either had difficulties or was unable to go online.

Travel has been made even more annoying with the new rules at the security check. Actually it is not too difficult but strangely enough too many people have not yet understood that if they do not attempt to have metal items on them – it makes you wonder whether people enjoy being fondled by security.

Just after the security I saw this wonderful sign in a window. What do you think? Is it a recruitment campaign or simply a way of adding insult to the security insult of not being able to carry liquids?

I think its Belgian humor…

Posted on by mklang

Procrastination with technology

Questioning the social affects of technology is not necessarily a knee-jerk luddite approach to technology. One of the affects of technology is the increase in annoyances they create. For example: complex manuals, batteries running down, updates, failures and incompatibilities with other gadgets etc.

Another area is the scope for procrastination digital technology offers. A whole major area is the Internet which enables everything from simple surfing to losing real-life identities due to prolonged participation in online worlds.

Via Question Technology here is an interesting study showing a study that technology increases the amount of procrastination in the world. Prof Piers Steel states that procrastination is natural and not procrastinating takes planning, effort and will. (Globe & Mail).

In the meantime, it seems the Luddites were onto something. Technology has hastened the pace of procrastination, according to Prof. Steel’s research.

“Multitasking destroys performance,” Prof. Steel said as he chided our BlackBerry addicted culture of instant messaging.

So stop checking e-mail! Yes, this one is such a time-sucker it deserves an exclamation point. Turning off the e-mail icon that alerts users to new messages will increase productivity by 5 or 10 per cent per day, Prof. Steel figures. Check e-mail only when it’s convenient — perhaps as you scarf down lunch at your desk — and finally shun that Pavlov’s dog-type reaction to the e-mail alert.

The professor of procrastination also maintains a website called Procrastination Central.

Posted on by mklang

University building

The university in Namur is a large concrete building in the middle of town. Despite the building material it is not a very ugly building â?? in fact its bare concrete finish (inside and out) has a very retro feel to it. Usually I do not have any such feelings towards concrete.

The meeting room was at the dept. of informatics in the Alan Turing room â?? I do like when peoples names are used for rooms, even if this could be considered a dubious honor. Alan Turing is a bright room with a high ceiling, blue carpet and windows on three walls. No big surprise here. What is more than a bit unusual are three rings mounted in the ceiling intended for climbing…

Apparently the rings are not used by abseiling computer scientists (as I had hoped) but are rather there to be used by the window cleaners. Once again reality spoils a really good theory.

Posted on by mklang

Namur

Oh no – it’s a grey rainy day in Namur so not really a flattering for the city but it looks like a very nice town with lots of small cobbled streets.

The first analysis of Belgium is that there are plenty of bars, not many cafés, people seem to ignore umbrellas but like dogs (too many pitbulls). The good news is that the hotel has wifi.

Posted on by mklang

Why the internet is cool: reason nr 324

In February last year I wrote a post about a painting by the African artist Pilipil Mulongoy which has been hanging in my home since before I was born. It is, as I wrote, the stuff which makes me and my home. In the post I included a photo

pilipili

A couple of days ago I recieved an email from a publisher working on a book about African art history. They would like to use a picture of the work in their book. Stuff like this cannot happen in the analogue world, or at least it never happened to me.

Posted on by mklang

Video Campaigns and Responses

Starbucks and the government of Ethiopia have been discussing the trademark rights to some of the finest coffee in the world. The root of the conflict is that Starbucks has not recognised Ethiopia’s ownership of the Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe names. (BBC News 26 October & 30 November 2006).

Oxfam began a campaign against Starbucks in order to help the Ethiopian coffee farmers. The idea is that if Starbucks signs the agreement with the Ethiopian intellectual property office the Ethiopian farmers will have more control over their products and this will result in better prices.

The Oxfam campaign is a typical online/offline mix with physical demonstrations being augmented with an information website containing documentation, photographs etc, and an â??act nowâ?? part where individuals can get involved on their own. A textbook example of an information campaign.

Oxfam have also created a video shot from their â??The Starbucks Day of Actionâ?? on December 16. The most natural place to leave a video on the Internet today is on the site YouTube so naturally Oxfam posted their video on YouTube (Watch it here). The video features demonstrators explaining their views and the positive reactions of people they meet.

What is interesting is not that the Internet is being used in this way but rather the Starbucks response. Starbucks created their own video response on December 20th  featuring the Head of Starbucks Coffee team answering questions. They too posted their video on YouTube (watch the Starbucks response on YouTube).

What is unique about the whole story is the way in which Starbucks as a corporation reacted to the unconventional protest use of YouTube. By responding in kind they showed that they understand the way in which information is created and consumed on the Internet.

Digital video cameras – and in particular mobile phone video cameras – have made the documentation of resistance a necessity. Websites such as YouTube and Google video have created an infrastructure for sharing of the results. By removing the need for camera crews, production teams and broadcast capabilities the creation and distribution of film has fallen into the hands of the creative amateur. The implications of this is that both the protesters and their corporate targets need to quickly master and use this medium of communication.

Whatever the outcome of the Oxfam campaign â?? this is the future of resistance information warfare.

Posted on by mklang

Infotoxicated

Somewhere in the end of last year I became annoyed with Flickr. I used Flickr to upload my photos (original, ey?) but since I used too much bandwidth they started limiting the amount I could put online. One alternative would have been to pay for an account. But instead I just stopped posting my photos. Now I have decided to post them somewhere on my own site and stick a few in my blog. Most of my pictures are of street art from different places. Here are two from Stockholm that I took a while back – they don’t really have anything in common.

Gandhi in Stockholm
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Infotoxicated? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

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Posted on by mklang

Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration

MIT is holding it’s fifth conference on Media in Transition with this years theme being Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration. This may be a wide theme but the conference itself sounds interesting.

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

The deadline is fast approaching (5 January) but all they need is a short abstract (200 words) – read more here.

Posted on by mklang

Christmas Reading

So when you have tired of the good company, food and presents here is a hot tip on what to take a look at. Its a pdf entitled “Best Practice Guide” for “Implementing the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Age” written by Urs Gasser and Silke Ernst released in December 2006. Here is a short extract from the intro:

At a time where the existing EU copyright framework is under review, this best practice guide seeks to provide a set of specific recommendations for accession states and candidate countries that will or may face the challenge of transposing the EUCD in the near future. It is based on a collaborative effort to take stock of national implementations of the EUCD and builds upon prior studies and reports that analyze the different design choices that Member States have made.

I shall be saving it for Boxing day 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Gathering of the Clan

Right, it’s too late now to avoid it and too close to ignore it. Christmas is here. This means that it’s time for the annual gathering of the family for communal grazing, socialising and extended computer-free time. It usually looks something like this:

Hippos by Andries license by CC

Wherever you are and however you celebrate – have a good Christmas…

Posted on by mklang