On the horizon of a real-time networked society

On the horizon of a real-time networked societyChris Thorpe

On the horizon of a real-time networked society

Jaggeree/think/help/create/work

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaggeree/

I want to talk about the real time space which is almost a by product of social media

What were seeing emerge currently I think have long term societal effects

Business models and practices that have seemed normal through the twentieth century may fall away to be replaced by new notions of value




and that’s not a bad thing if books as ridiculous as this become history, books talking about dominating audiences within personal and conversational media



and the ridiculous and unsustainable consumerist arms race that has given us the six blade razor fuelled by mass media advertising

I don’t think advertising is the route to monetising this space

I personally want more and different



Pattern of self-defeating, self-destructive, value-destructive behaviour.

Umair Haque

I’ve had enough of this zombieconomy, which Umair Haque so eloquently talks about

A world where advertising is the desired modus operandi of a communication medium is to me a world which is entirely wedded to the conceit of unsustainable economic growth at the expense of moral and environmental wealth



A new world(please)

This is some of what I’d like

- Businesses that have the possibility to turn themselves inside out and find new value in what they have

- Charities which can mould themselves into the likenesses of their supporters

- Manufacturers who can make things only when they have enough orders to make them worthwhile

and

- An environment when the data which is beginning to float around us and surround us, which at first seems to almost be a waste product of our digital lives will be used to improve services

We need to find new business models built around the value of the stream itself rather than ones which use the stream as a location to place adverts to sell something




API OK

We’re creating enormous amounts of data at the moment, collectively through social software. more than any publisher or broadcaster ever could

For a programmer like me there are an enormous amount of wonderful things called APIs, sort of websites made for computer programs to read and remix the data and possibility that they contain

Where we can stack up data and utility and algorithms like computational lego

It’s a very profound change, it puts true value into having access to data

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ogil/



Making the impersonal personal

and it’s powered by something simple and profoundly changing itself.

For me, this collection of things we call social media is all about making impersonal things, such as city life, personal again and giving people a voice to express themselves



http://www.flickr.com/photos/celpelly/

The village, pivoting around youand at a global scale

If you deconstruct it far enough, your social graph of friends and your actions and activities within it look a lot like a village.

Albeit a village which exists within your environment with inhabitants strewn around the world

A village with you as its fulcrum or pivot

http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/



Real-time, real-sentiment, at scale

If you take a step back from that village, you pull away from it in a sort of Google maps zoom out, what you see is not the village or people but sentiment, clouds of feelings about things, be they people, or links or organisations or companies or products.

It is this real time stream which is slightly harder to get your head around but is of massive import



This was the fascinating sentiment view of the world at about 12pm the day after Alan Rusbridger told his followers that The Guardian was gagged with a super injunction preventing it from reporting on parliament.

What is wonderful to me here is that in amongst the outrage and the sentiment are mentions not only of what The Guardian couldn’t point at in the names of organisations like Carter Ruck and Trafigura, but also the presence of the words toxic, dumping and minton, referring to the secret Minton report that The Guardian couldn’t mention which discussed the tragic effects and damage to the Ivory Coast from the dumping of toxic waste.

A light had been shone and people could search and link and broadcast and amplify

We live in the age of “point-at-things”

Tom CoatesOn the horizon of a real-time networked society


http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon/

Tom Coates said it best

We live in the age of point at things. Everyone can be a micro-broadcaster, everyone potentially has their own amplification network of friends.

And when this is combined with a massive information store it has huge implications in the world of investigation and discourse.



Wired said it all for me, history made in real time, media censorship

http://www.flickr.com/photos/howzey/

scarcity, abundance and friends


Migratory, flocking...

It is a medium which has flocking, it is as Mark Earls points out the sort of herd behaviour we’d expect, we are after all herd animals

Real time, real world




What can be made out of flocking intent data, some fascinating early examples are about place

Citizens as sensory organs




Treating all of the sensors we carry with us such as our phones as part of a nervous system for the built environment

We inhabit a point in time/space




This statement is true of all of us and we’re now able through our devices and through services which exist to update our time/space/sentiment at any moment

But often we’re scared of giving out our exact location, we feel bad things may happen (and they may) and we fear an erosion of privacy

Using your location just to send a local offer of 5p off a big mac at the store near by would be a lazy and short termist use of this amazing data feed which can improve our built environment, it would annoy users and they’d not want to play for long

A world of dataAn internet of things




Interesting things starting to happen when you treat things as if they are people and anonymise people as if they are things. anthropomorphosation is fascinating and it points the way to when we are more accepting about sharing time and place in the way that we already seem to be becoming about sharing our feelings

This photo was taken out of a window of a plane on my way back from Sweden last week, the big blocks of light are towns, the small blobs are ships



http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/

Ships can talk data, they can tell a service where they are which gives us information about how far from port they are, how busy shipping lanes are, imagine for a moment that people’s devices if anonymised could do the same things in cities

Terra Future 09On the horizon of a real-time networked society


Wayfinding

You could use it as the digital equivalents of cow paths to show routes through built environments



http://www.flickr.com/photos/blprnt/

Jer Thorp has been looking at migratory patterns discernable through twitter, looking for the phrases “arriving at” and then looking for a default home location of that user to map air travel



http://myskystatus.com/

There’s also a fascinating flip side where you can get objects to talk for you when you can’t do it, Lufthansa has set up a service where you can associate yourself with a flight and it can then update your friends as to where you are



Sometimes itʼs quite funto become a data thing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fourwalks/

I was interested recently to think of myself as a thing which generates data, ironically this was how I spent a recent holiday (I clearly need to get out more, but I had a really relaxing holiday too)

I created a new twitter identity so I could tell the story semi-anonymously, packed a big bag of kit and went off to Austria to walk for four days armed with lots of devices which could tell the stories of my walks



I created this web site which gave people information on the set of walks I was going to do to raise money for charity, a wonderful crowd sourced people centred charity called Childs I which I’m a volunteer for

For each day I told the story of my walk through words



and pictures



and especially data... I created a little Android app which could send my GPS location back to a server and you could see exactly where I was at any point in time

I really want to play with a firehose of data like the marathon or the Olympics now

I want the data that comes from every runner to automatically update their supporters who in turn can send them messages of encouragement

and just for one day I want to use the feeds of data from cctv cameras to record the journeys that these people go on so they can replay their personal adventure



http://www.flickr.com/photos/matlock/

Data + Time = Story

Matt Locke

As Matt Locke from Channel 4 points out, Data+Time = Story



I was very touched when Tom Watson wrote this



I kind of opened up my holiday and although I wanted peace and tranquility and solitude, friends and people I’d never met before alike followed along and in some cases donated to the charity and at the very least learnt a bit about it

I actually got something like augmented solitude, something not quite the same, but beautifully different, it’s what occurs in the new stream enhanced world



So coming back to what I said at the start, businesses are starting to turn themselves inside out such as The Guardian making its content available to developers

Seeing intrinsic value in the raw materials of the newspaper rather than the physical object or its digital facsimile



Companies like threadless are accepting product designs from the community and then only putting them into production when enough people want to buy them and listening constantly and innovating with their community



Charities are forming themselves out of their supporters like the fabulous Childs I, lowering costs and increasing engagement

Treating them not just as units of money or help but telling stories about their efforts

I could have waxed lyrical about Amanda’s work with Twestival here too



http://www.google.org/flutrends/

The left over data from the real time web is starting to tell us about the world we live in

Telling us new things and unexpected things and important things

Chris Thorpe@jaggeree

scarcity, abundance and friends



A new world(thank you)

On the horizon of a real-time networked society

Technology

time networked

jaggeree terrathe

future 09

future 09

time

jaggeree

location

personal