Howard Rheingold addressing Stanford Communication dept. graduates:

To those engaged in cultural production: thanks to your education, I don’t have to detail what I mean about the assault on your right to innovate. The extension of copyright law at the expense of the public domain and the tradition of using culture to create culture. The use of digital rights management to protect old businesses from new means of expression. The instantiation of tight surveillance and control of innovation in the “trusted computing” technologies that are being planned for the next generations of chips and PCs. The regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum according to the laws of the 1920s and the wishes of the incumbent license holders. All these regulatory battles are not so much about protecting property as they are about controlling innovation.

The whole transcript is available on Smartmobs, Howard’s blog. Howard also spoke in April at a panel in UC Berkeley – here’s the webcast of the panel, by the Berkeley Journalism department. And here’s the MP3 recording, courtesy of Dave Winer.

Interesting talk on the complexities involved in the digitization of memories, by Jose van Dijk at the “What’s Life Got to Do with It” symposium in Lancaster. Picked up a couple of things:

– The desire to record one’s own life connects with the desire to hold back amnesia. The anxiety to forget is intertwined with the anxiety not to be forgotten. For the western audience, managing memories has become a prerequisite for maintaining control of one’s life.

– The digital secularization of funerals: displaying digital flashbacks of the deceased person’s life

– Changes in the gendered practices of remembering: In many families, the man wields the camera and operates the equipment, whereas the woman organizes the shoebox. But digital practices may alter this because the ordering and storing also now take place on machines.

– Googlization: the embedding of personal collections in global networks. In commercial visions like Microsoft’s MyLifeBits priority is often given to the image of a jukebox of personal memory artifacts. My guess is blogs, on the other hand, would emphasize the inherent connectedness of individual memory to a constantly evolving social context.

Capturing technologies shape the very nature of remembering as they become intertwined in our daily routines of our self-creation. It’s nice to see academics are paying attention.

Implanted RFIDs are a pretty startling way to discriminate the out crowd from the in crowd, both with non-humans and humans. Japan’s planning to implant foreign dogs with RFID, while a Spanish club owner offers implants to his VIP customers (via Joi Ito). I know this is an obvious thing to say, but this is not a simple good-vs-evil issue: the world of RFIDs is not black and the world without them is not white. We need knowledgeable non-fundamentalist discussion about the politics of electronic tagging, pressingly.

Back in Lancaster, working intensely now on the scraps of notes, fragmented narratives, fuzzy ideas, whatever there’s to go on in the general direction of a PhD thesis. Yet it’s June, and there’s always much happening in June: local Lancaster highlights include the Interface workshop (starting today!) and the What’s Life Got to Do with It symposium. I’m also hosting the Word in Edgeways lunch next Tuesday; I’m planning to discuss the technologies of ethnography there. I’ll miss the EVA party in Helsinki (featuring Joi Ito and Jorma Ollila among others). Steve Woolgar’s organizing an interesting workshop titled Does STS Mean Business over at Oxford later this month, which I am planning to attend. One last thing: up until now I purposefully haven’t blogged about the substance of my PhD research, but might start to experiment in that space… still need to do some thinking on that.

What brand of recording eyewear would match your style: Gucci, Armani, O’Neill… Or: Apple, Sony, Nokia…?

A few years ago my DJ friend taped a small condenser microphone to his glasses to record audio samples on the street, in elevators, wherever he went but couldn’t bring a conventional mic. Now the smallest affordable camera optics are about the size of his mic, so I wonder who’s going to be the first to integrate fashion with function and introduce eyewear that doubles as a stylish and intuitive image capture device.

A pair of such glasses might be built like this: the left framing could house the camera, the right one a directional mic. Behind one ear could be a jack for connecting to an iPod or a cell phone for power and data transfer. Perhaps on some models, behind the ears there could be pull-out earpieces and a pull-out handsfree mic tube.

It’s not hard to think of applications: no more hassling with digital cameras or camera phones, just touch your eyewear to start recording. OCR for reading glasses would be cool, and glasses that stamped each captured image with a GPS location and the direction the camera is pointing would enable someone like Google to build virtual walkthroughs of places by combining imagery from different viewers’ eyes.

Steve Mann has of course been inventing and using wearcam stuff for a couple of decades already, but now the technology is approaching a price point that warrants more commercial speculation. So I wonder, will one of the big technology players be first to bring recording eyewear to the market, or might the first-mover opportunity be seized by a new entrant perhaps joining forces with some well-known designer?

Some time ago I blogged about friendships that “dry out”. But there’s also the reconnecting, when you pick up from where you once parted with a person or an art.

Over the weekend I went skateboarding for the first time this season in Helsinki. Going up for a move there’s this instant when one realizes that it’s too late to turn back. Then: Thud! On landing the reflexes kick in and it’s either a complete mental and physical reunion with the knowledge of the board’s behaviour – or a painful encounter with the concrete pavement.

Which brings up the Dreyfusian observation that virtuosity (what Dreyfus calls the stage of expertise) has to do with this uncodifiable capability to connect with the world and be one with whatever one is practicing: to take something mundane like riding a piece of plywood (or preparing food, booking meetings, whatever) and turn in into a form of art. What would it mean to apply that attitude to one’s entire lifestyle? Introducing the skater ethic :)

Responding to the “Post-user, post-consumer” thread on Blackbeltjones.

Dear friends, designers, thinkers; the user debate is biting its own tail. It was so already before we contributed to it, and I’m worried that it’s likely to go on fruitlessly so as long as it takes for granted a quite specific interpretation of atomism—the belief that the world is made of individuals with inherent characteristics and definite boundaries.

I’m tempted to propose that to be seriously committed to the user question, requires a pause, a willingness to question this worldview. What counts as a person? What might it mean to design not for preexisting, independent individuals with fixed boundaries but for partially known, locally enacted performances, out of which ‘individuals’ may temporarily materialize as relational effects?

How might a non-atomistic metaphysics be enacted in the mundane practices of design, amidst the very real pressures of for-profit mass production? How might one sustainably practice design, insisting that the division between people and machines and other nonhumans is not a stable, universal lawlike division, but a locally negotiated temporary cut? What would it mean to even ask such a thing? To risk it?

At the very least, it leads to following threads that weave their ways through locations quite ‘Other’ to the blogosphere. I want to point to Karen Barad‘s thinking on agential realism. Her article is here, password-protected as if to say: ‘for academics only.’ And I’d be surprised if non-academics would profit much from her cryptic writing even if it was technically accessible (but do note, her book is forthcoming). What’s it going to take to make a difference? Boring wormholes that traverse discourses? speaking allegorically? magical realism? I don’t know.

One of the reasons I post quite seldom is that it takes a while to articulate things; thoughts don’t ‘naturally’ come out in the weblog format. Perhaps it has to do with the shifting relational effect that is “me”, the blog author. Sometimes the effect is not singular but dispersed, diffracted, unstable: I contradict myself or worse, simultaneously enact multiple incommensurable bits of narratives that interfere with each other. What comes out simply isn’t a coherent story.

Blogs, like email addresses, assumedly stand for an individual person. Sometimes they stand for a group of people or an organization, like the Aula POV (sort of) stands for Aula. Much of the configuration work that is required to maintain this setup gets erased in the name of coherency: colleagues, friends, partners, and also machines and other nonhumans contribute to these messages and posts, sometimes even act as stunt doubles and ghostwriters. But more often than not these shifting configurations don’t produce anything postable. I’m looking for ways to practice greater sensitivity to the effacing that’s going on. Perhaps then I’d post more often :)

For a while, Alex has had something to say about the current state of social software. Now he has summarized the four main points of the argument:

1) For an independent consumer brand to rise out of the currently bubbling social software stew, consolidation of existing services may be the requisite next step

2) However, the business model of some of the ’small pieces’ out there appears to be a quick exit through acquisition by an existing big player

3) The blogosphere is very US-centric and this is hindering its economic growth

4) Most importantly: to break into the mass market, blogging needs to become less cool. This is, in my opinion, the most interesting challenge because it requires a transformation of the user experience into something that diehard bloggers might no longer recognize as ‘blogging.’ Posts need to incorporate simple objects that require less effort to create and manipulate than freeform text. Moblogs, reading lists, FOAF listings and such are interesting steps in this direction.

Perhaps in the future, blogging could become a convention for expressing object-centered sociality, to borrow a term from the sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina.

Here’s an internet prediction: As the cost of publishing the things you have and the things you want decreases linearly, the volume of non-monetary exchange (lending, sharing, donating things) will increase exponentially.

Open web services that connect ISBNs (for books) and UPCs (for DVDs, games, and other durables) to data about products enable bloggers to unambiguously identify what products they wish to peddle on online marketplaces like eBay. In the coming years, blogging the products we own will be further simplified when barcode- and RFID readers become embedded in cheap everyday handheld devices such as cell phones.

I think there’s reason to believe that the resulting change in social behavior will not be just quantitative—not just more eBay, more Amazon. It was the portal-driven Web of the 1990s that brought forth the revolution in retail and classifieds. This time it will be different.

The shift to a blog-driven Web can set in motion a new, lively circulation of pre-owned products among networks of friends who play with the dynamics of social capital, not financial capital. Where Amazon pioneered the Web’s retail layer, and eBay pioneered the bargaining layer, a service like Mediachest could pioneer a new lending layer in product circulation. Up until now, this layer has existed off-line, but it has been limited to enclosed and perishable social pockets where discoveries of eligible products in a suitable person’s possession is largely a matter of chance, and lack of appropriate forum for exchanging lending / sharing / donating initiatives complicates the face-saving rituals.

Some distinct characteristics of the emerging online lending layer:

– First, it is about retail products, but unlike Amazon, it is not about retail transactions. Rather, it’s about recycling, swapping, donating and borrowing (mostly) pre-owned products.

– Second, it’s about moving material goods, but unlike eBay, it doesn’t require national or global logistics. It’s about very local logistics—not the suburban neighborhoods as much as the trust-based interpersonal networks that inhabit every institution in our society: the workplace, the school, the sports team, the hospital, the university dorm.

– Third, it may not be about PC users as much as it is about mobile users (although that is contingent on the trend of more hackable mobile terminals).

– And finally, the emerging online small worlds oriented around non-money-based circulation of material objects might not at first reach many of the more affluent 30 to 40-somethings. But they are much more likely to reach their kids—or get originated by them.