Category: social networking

businesses and social media.. why should they use them?

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Fiona McQuarrie: Can social media mobilize audiences and consumers for non-commercial purposes?

Social media promoted as a way to create new relationship between producer and consumer. It looks at building relationships and creating consumer motivation to buy/use produce.

Business and social media use:

What difference does it make if they use it or not? There are four existing research:

  • they can use it for product development or pilot projects. A source of free market research information.
  • they can facilitate consumer flocks and swarms
  • social media facilitates community
  • reasons why consumers use social media.

Read More …

unstable platforms

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MIT 7 Unstable Platforms

Summary and Podcast here

Day 1: Forum 1

David Thorborn – Moderator: Emergence of technology are challenging our perceptions of art, academia, etc/ We are entering a disorienting future – mobile technology, understanding authors and the works they make is challenged by virtual technology. Profound forms of transformation created by technology. Edison envisioned ways for use of film before film appeared and this is instructive and comforting. There is a ceaseless transformation with rise and fall of technology that profoundly transform what is being transmitted. Printed book itself refined by generations and developed over decades of work and stability. Emergence of profoundly new ways and new systems for artistic and other forms of imaginative expression is remarkable in this world.

What’s the future impact on audiences and ways to communicate on unstable platforms.

The future of narrative. Public spheres. Visions and nightmares. Read More …

– technologies of dissent – a2k – mapping dissent

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DSC00289Laura DeNardis, Yale Information Society Project

The dissolution of boundaries between the virtual and the physical in activism. How does it require a re-conceptualization of social action. What are our responsibilities towards dissent?

Interested in DOS attacks as was used example during the Iranian protests. We have seen the use of social media in protest. We have examples of other forms of activism that have an impact on real life events.

Using mapping technology to depict for example same-sex couples in CA. An anonymous website creator created prop 8 maps that depicted donors to prop 8. How is this info available? they collected the info from state websites.

Commonalities of technologies of dissent: in the case of maps, it has privacy implications and the creator has remained anonymous and there is assymmetry here because he protected his privacy but revealed info about others.  Tech of dissent amplify and remix publicly known information but presents it in a way that amplifies it. It also emphasizes the role of private organizations – eg. Google is the one that enabled those maps.

Finally, the impact that these technologies have has to be only accompanied by social change.


– A2K4 – perespectives on access to knowledge – APC

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Questions to be discussed in the panel:

  • What is the relevance of A2K and human rights to each other? Which substantive aspects of human rights – for example, health, education, food, freedom of expression, and cultural rights – are implicated by A2K issues and how? Which methodological and institutional approaches hold relevance?
  • Do the A2K and human rights approaches fit together easily or in tension? What unique insights can each offer the other?  What would it mean to theorize A2K as a human right? Is access to knowledge better understood as a negative liberty or a positive entitlement?
  • Is the human rights framework – norms, institutions, and methodologies of advocacy – a useful one for advancing A2K goals? What are the risks, challenges, and opportunities involved in theorizing A2K as a human right? What venues, tools, allies and enemies might be acquired by this framing? [source: http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/a2k4perspectives/]

    • Jeremy Malcolm, Consumers International: A2K is about finding human rights dimensions to legal issues such as communication policies and intellectual properties etc.  A2K is a framework for other human rights issues.

    DSC00286Natasha Primo, Association for Progressive Communications: APC was a network of ISPs and started working with progressive NGOs and mainly in South Africa. Its membership is spreading across the world.

    What do these rights look like in the context of human rights? Access to info is also about access to tools which is access to infrastructure. APC outlined 7 themes: access to all, freed om of expression and association, access to knowledge, shared learning and creation – free and open source software and tech development, privacy, surveillance and encryption, governance of the internet, awareness, protection and realization of rights.

    What is A2K? this evolved and now deals with intellectual rights etc. The right to access to knowledge, the right to freedom of information [national and gvt.], the right to access to publicly-funded information.

    What then is the best strategy? A2K negative liberty or positive entitlement? should we step back from the human rights discourse and begin talking about development? is A2K a new right? interpreting an existing right in an information society contedst; claiming an existing right by pushing a human development agenda?

    APC talks also about linguistic access – ability to impart knowledge in their own language.

    Human rights or human development / human capabilities? There are development activists who claim human rights discourse is not useful – so do we then need to talk about development capabilities approach to social justice – including the rights-based approaches?

    Key principles of human development and the capabilities approach:

    must develop people’s capabilities to lead creative and fulfilling lives. Must allow us to examine the individual’s capacity for exercising choice of what to do and how to be without a context of real or substantive choice, rather than adaptive preferences. Should be the primary goal to economic development.

    10 capabilities and t he international bill of rights.: ability to live life, bodily health, bodily integrity, being treated with dignity, etc.

    Thinking of norms, institutions and methodologies for advocacy. Should we talk about human capabilities rather than human rights? how central is access to knowledge to human capabilities? what is the key challenge: to advocate for a new right or do we look at how realize existing rights and how we turn rights into capabilities? or both?

    – delete: forgetting in the digital age

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    Sounds like a great book because the idea behind it is great. I will read it and then post here what I think of it. First time I ever see a book trailer. 🙂 The book is Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, published by Princeton Univ. Press. [link]

    Here is what it says about it:

    Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all.

    Perfect.