Moving forward

It's been, again, quite a lot time since my last post, but this time I have a pretty good excuse: most of this time I've been working on setting up my new web site: www.albertsuch.com, and it is finally alive and kicking....

And, now that I have my own house, it's time to move all my content, spread over different web sites, there. So this is going to be my last post on blogger; from now own, you can follow my posts in my blog People, places, technology, and such....

I hope to see you there!!!

It's that time of the year again

Yes, summer vacation is slowly dragging to an end (at least in the part of the northern hemisphere where I've spent most of my time lately). It is time to start thinking on what to do with these few months left until the end of the year, new projects to start this fall,....

And today it's also BlogDay. This year, O should have prepared this a little bit more, but I have not. Preparing your blog list for BlogDay is like preparing your the gift list for Xmas time, you always want to do it in advance, with lots of time to carefully think about what you put in the list, but at the end you end up doing it in a rush in the last minute....

Anyway, this is my list of five blogs for this year:

• Pasta and Vinegar: I don't know where the name of this blog comes from, but it is a very interesting blog about design and technology and its interaction with space and society. It is in the line of Jan Chipchase's Future Perfect (which I cannot list it today because I already did last year...)
• Barcelona Photobloggers: BlogDay is about blogs you have discovered lately. Well, since I came back to Barcelona, I' ve started to get more involved in photoblogging, and I've discovered quite a lot of good local photobloggers. Since I cannot list all of them, I link to the blogger's blog. It is in Spanish, and it includes lots of local interest information, such as photo exhibitions and competitions, but even if you don't speak much Spanish, take some time to look at the photoblog links to see some of the stuff that local photobloggers are doing....
  (Barcelona Photobloggers is, also, the organization through which, if everything works OK, I'm going to have one of my photos exhibited in a museum. Even if it is only for a few days and as part of a visual projection, it's a way to start...)
  
• Space and culture: another interesting blog that touches the topic of the interaction between space, culture. society and technology
• Streetpulse: as you can see from some of my latest posts and how this list is evolving, I'm getting more and more interested on urban spaces and street photography. This blog kind of combines both interests.
• Metroblogging in Rio: There's no Barcelona Metroblog yet (I'm registered to start writing as soon as there are four more bloggers from BCN, but it seems that there is not much interest in metroblogging from Barcelona...), and I think that last year I already listed Bangalore's, so for the time being, lets read the blog from one of the coolest cities on earth....
  

An this is it for this year.

Happy BlogDay to everybody

Love is in the ....

Saying that in Paris, love is in the air sounds like a big and banal cliche. What I guess is not so normal to hear, but it is true, is that in Paris, love (l´amour) is in the ground...


Seen on a street (I literally mean on a street) in the Quartier Latin

(More) space invaders

First seen in the streets of London, then in Paris, where next?

Update on august 30: I found in the Internet the map of cities that have been/are being invaded...

Color coding

Using color is a typical way to differentiate between slightly different usages of otherwise similar artifacts. Be it garbage recycling containers in Barcelona...


... or mailboxes in Bangalore...


As widespread as it is the use of color coding, it remains quite a local thing in many occasions. The meaning and associations attributed to different colors varies a lot in different cultures and societies, so color codes are constantly being invented to be used in specific situations and locations. Some of them may evolve to be fully global, maybe trough a formal standardization process, but in lot of cases they remain local, or are reinterpreted (translated) when moved to different situations and cultural environments....

A small test: what different type of garbage do you think you should throw in each container?, what type of letters would you put in each mailbox? (try to answer the question without reading the small print in the photographs...)

Writing about India

I've been back to Bangalore for a couple of weeks on a business trip.

I usually get quite a lot of questions about India when I get back from these trips. India is second only to China on attracting attention of business people and the public in general; but usually, the knowledge about the country and its economical, political, and social conditions is heavily mediated by the media news.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog entry from India about how western media usually approach the economic and social evolution of India in the last years, linked to the growth in IT and IT enabled services, and the stereotypes and cliches that are common in this type of analysis.

The authors description of a typical article about India seems to apply only to the English business oriented media. In Spain, in the last month and a half, there have been only two news bits about India in El País (my preferred local newspaper, and, discounting its political prefernces, a quite reliable source of information). One of them was quite a lengthly article about sati, the ancient practice of widow inmolation in the husband's funeral pyre. The article headline talked about the survival of this practice in today's India, and only when you got into the fine print you read that two cases have happened in the last couple of years and, in total, since independence in 1947, about 40 cases have been registered (remember that we are talking about a country with a population of more than 1 billion). The other was a short clip about the election of a woman as the country president, the first one to occupy the highest (but with very little real power) political position since the country independence in 1947.

The common thread of the stereotypical article about Indian economic growth and the Spanish generalist media coverage about India is the focus on what makes the country different, while downplaying any development that may approach it somehow, even if it is just a little bit, to the concept of developed countries.

However, those development and changes exist, and even if they are small steps, the huge size of the Indian population male them very relevant. For example, in terms of technology evolution, the widespread diffusion of mobile phones usage has open lots of possibilities for new applications and use models that very few companies seem to be tapping in (the major exception I know about is the work that Nokia is doing to understand mobile phone usage in developing countries and that Jan Chipchase captures in his blog).

A few years ago, C. K. Prahalad popularized the concept of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Maybe we should also start talking about the Future Innovations at the bottom of the pyramid...

Back to blogging

It's been more than a month since my last post, and it has been a busy month!!: business meetings, travel, even some minor renovation in my apartment..., have kept me away from the blog. I've been a little bit more active on my photoblog, but I guess that is easier to grab some old photos, write a title and post them than writing a blog entry that makes some sense (as if my other blog posts made some sense...)

Anyway, enough excuses and lets get back to blogging....

(Imaginary) Street dwellers

In a globalized world...

We live in a globalized world....

How many times have you heard or read that sentence?. I've googled it, and there are more than 7000 references, counting both globalized and globalised spelling (by the way, which is the correct way of writing it?).

Usually, it acts as a starting point to two different types of arguments. On one side, the catastrophic view: due to globalization cultures and traditions will be lost, the natural environment will be destroyed and we will end up in a uniform, oppressive, orwellian world where difference will not even be remembered. On the other side globalization, serves as a excuse to push unpopular decisions (usually political or economical), like 'because we live in a globalized world, we need to dismantle the welfare state...'.

These two arguments are based on a typical deterministic view of technology. It is obvious that what we call globalization has been speed up by the advent of new communication and information technologies, and, from a deterministic perspective, those new technologies determine how society is going to evolve; there is no way out, society has to resign to its fate...

There are several pitfalls to these arguments. It is simply not true that globalization is a new thing, there have always been global relations between the different regions of the world. Cultures and societies are not closed entities that have grown up and evolved in total isolation (yes, there is, maybe, the exception of some communities in some out of the way areas, island in the middle of the Pacific, Hymalayan valleys,..., but even in that case those peoples had to come from somewhere...). The idea of an intrinsically pure culture of a community (country, region, people, race...) that can be polluted and must be protected from external influences, is just a myth fed by nationalistic interests.

And, although it is true that new ICTs expedite and facilitate communication, relation, and sharing between different parts of the world, that does not mean that this integration must evolve in the directions we usually (and wrobly?) associate today to the word globalization.

Faster and better communication technologies bring with them more interaction between people and cultures, but that does not necessarily imply reducing the cultural, social and economical diversity of the world, as most of the arguments that start with 'We live in a globalized world...' try to suggest.



And what about the photo?

I think this one illustrates cultural diversity in a global world at its best: a Brazilian barber shop in the Chinatown area of NYC, probably frequented by Hispanic customers that also live in that area...

Exclusive use

The text literally says: For the exclusive use of the Fire Brigade.

In the urban landscape, as in technological innovation, there is a constant tension between the originally intended usage of artifacts and spaces, and the creative modes of use that grow out of the daily interaction with them.

There are two approaches to this tension: the coercive approach, designing in a way that prevents different usages (mis-usages?) and, when design by itself is not enough, adding norms and rules, and the extensive approach, enabling, by design, the capability to add new modes of use that can extend the original intent.

Both of them have advantages and drawbacks: it is very difficult to completely prevent different usage models unless you resort to a heavily normative (policed) system; the best technological example being the completely unsuccessful attempt to prevent the sharing of music and, in general, content on the internet. But it is also quite difficult to ensure that the proliferation of new modes of use does not have a negative impact on the capability to deliver the original intended functionality...

Everything 2.0

Sometimes, when you learn something new, it seems that everybody and everything is suddenly arranged around that concept or idea; when you start reading about a specific topic and you try to apply to explain any situation or problem, regardless if the original idea has anything to do with it.. This happens at the personal level, but it seems to be much worst in certain situations, specially in the corporate environment.

Working for a large corporation, I've been quite unlucky to go through several of those everybody is crazy about a topic situations. We've gone through the eras of Total Quality, Lean Enterprise, Crossing the Chasm, e-everything,...

And, of course, we are now in the 2.0 era.

Everything important has to have a version 2.0. There is, of course, web 2.0, but there is also school 2.0, home 2.0, work 2.0, There is love 2.0, and life 2.0. There is enterprise 2.0, organization 2.0, government 2.0, politics 2.0, war 2.0,...

It is very interesting to not that there are at least two concepts, that, up to my knowledge, have not been versioned yet: I haven't found any information about peace 2.0 nor about sex 2.0!. There is no relevant site about crime 2.0, but I guess that the term politics 2.0 covers pretty well the concept....

It is obvious that there is a lot of marketing and media hype in all this 2.0 thing, but the question is whether d we really need all these new versions and, even in the case that we do, shouldn't all of us be a little bit more original?...

This rumbling about 2.0 and the (quite stupid) idea of adding a version number to everything, was prompted by this funny video about a supermarket 2.0:

More on surveillance , CCTV, and security

When some time ago I wrote about the pervasive use of CCTV in the UK, my thoughts were based on a few observations while walking around and sightseeing in London (doing the typical touristy thing...), so there was always the doubt about how representative were those observations. I read today in the Spanish newspaper El País a data point that seems to confirm my observations: in England there is a surveillance camera for every 60 habitants (should I say citizens?)...

This datum is part of a review of a series of conferences and seminars that have been going on in Barcelona about the topic of The architecture of fear. Terrorism and western urbanism. The central topic of these conferences was the impact that the security concerns, raised specially after the terrorists attacks to New York, Madrid, or London in the last few years, have had on urban design, architecture, and the development and use of security (meaning anti-terrorism) related technology.

In Spain we are currently in the middle of the local elections campaign, and the topic of security has become central in the discourse of some political parties (mostly, but not limited to, right wing parties). Waving the fight against crime/terrorism flag has always been a political resource, and also a way to prioritize certain technological developments, such as automatic (intelligent?) surveillance.

Social Networking

One of the interesting consequences of all the noise around Web2.0 is all the renewed interest in social networking. If you read some Web2.0 evangelizers, or if you just google 'social networking', it may seem that the whole concept has just been invented a couple of years ago with MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, or any other of the zillion sites that are, more or less, trying to get attached the social networking label.

Obviously, as much as you try to upgrade them with the 2.0 version number, social networking is not only about those web sites, but rather an activity quintessential to human nature. Social networking is about linking and relating to other people and how to use those relationships to acquire and share knowledge, to get things done, or just to enjoy them. Technologies and technological artifacts do mediate in social networks (actor-network theorists would say that they are part of the social networks...), but no technology, and specially no trendy name applied to a tecgnology, can change the fact that we maintain links with other people and that we use those social relations tor multiple purposes.

The study of social networking is not something new either: in the early sixties Everett Rogers studied the process of diffusion of innovations and concluded that between adopters plaid a key role in the speed at which innovations were accepted, or rejected, by users; and in the seventies, Mark Granovetter published his seminal paper on the strength of weak ties in social networks, that opened the field of social network analysis.

But although social networking is a natural human activity, its characteristics and effects are completely mediated by specific cultures. In Maximum City, a book about Bombay (Mumbai) writen by an American of Indian origin (an NRI), Suketu Mehta captures very well the difference in importance and meaning attached to social networking in two different cultures: India vs the US (and the UK):

There is very little you can do anonymously as a member of the vast masses. (...)It has to be one person linking with another who knows another and so until you reach your destination; the path your request takes has to go through this network. You cannot jump the chain by going directly to someone who doesn't know you connected only by the phone line. Then it becomes a buyer and seller transaction rather than a favour. A friend went from Bombay to London and told me she was horrified that she could spend an entire day (...) without ever needing to make a personal connection.

Technologies (telephone, e-mail, Web2.0,... ) can mediate the formation and maintenance of social networks, expanding its reach and increasing (or diminishing) the strength of certain social links. It is also very probable that the adoption and use of certain technologies will help changing the cultural values and meanings associated to social networks and how they are used. But that does not mean, as it may be inferred from some of the media hype, and as much as some marketing gurus may like it, that social networks are not specific internet sites or features added to web services.

(The worst example I've seen of the misappropriation of the social networking concept and term is the title of an article in cnet: Ten reasons social networking doesn't work. Of course, it talks about some reasons why some of the web sites dubbed as social networking sites do not stand to the expectations created)

Infrastructure and ANT

Through Nicolas Nova's blog, I got access to a paper on infrastructure and ubiquitous computing. The point that authors try to make is that infrastructure, defined as 'the structures that lie below or beneath the surface of applications and interactions' plays a key role in defining how we experience and interact with the world.

What I found more interesting is how the authors do not focus only on what we would call technological infrastructure. Infrastructure is not only about power supply, broadband connections and wi-fi hotspots, but also about space and things that populate it, about the ways we interact with, and the meanings we attach to them.

This conceptualization of infrastructure is aligned with Latour's view of the agency of objects. Objects play a role in the course of actions, they participate, as actors, in the formation of associations. But these associations are difficult to trace except in specific moments when they are rendered visible: when there are innovations, i.e. new object types or modes of interaction are created; when they are approached by users unfamiliar with them, or when they stop working (due to accidents, breakdowns, strikes...). These are exactly the situations in which infrastructure becomes relevant: when there is some change in it (innovation), when it is approached by somebody not familiar with it, or when simply it is not working any more, at least as the user would expect it to work.

New applications, new technologies, new artifacts, can change the strength of some associations, and maybe create new ones. In that process, part of the underlying infrastructure is going to become visible and relevant again, it is going to evolve and change, as the innovations and the way we associate to them adapt to it, and finally become themselves part of the infrastructure.

(Reading the) Layers

In paleontology and archeology the location of fossils or artifacts in different layers provides historical and timeline clues. Looking carefully, layers can also be found in the infrastructure, specially in the case of urban landscape.


In this image (taken in the Brick Lane area of East London) different layers are visible: the elevated train bridge structure dates from the industrial revolution era, the street sign in English and Bengali denotes the immigration flux in the second half of the twentieth century, the one-way signal indicates the necessity of traffic regulation related to street congestion, and the graffiti and stencils the current process of trendification (the phase prior to gentrification?) of the area.

The chronological relation between these layers may not be as straightforward as in the case of geology or archeology, where, basically, deeper means older; but there are also time cues, such as the rust in the Bengali street sign that can be read to understand how the different layers relate and overlap in the historic evolution of the city.

Castells, mobile communication, and the future

I read yesterday, in the Spanish paper El País, an interview with Manuel Castells. The motivation for the interview is the publication of the Spanish translation of his latest book: Mobile Communication and Society.

As usual, Castells' comments are thought provoking. I have specially found interesting his position against what could be called technological futurology, that he summarizes in this phrase (translatedd from the Spanish original text): "In reality, what most people calls future is the present, what happens is that they do not know it".

He shows his point describing how mobile technologies are changing the way the world gets access to communication and services. There has been a lot of talk in the past years about the digital divide and how most part of the world population does not have access to computers and, consequently, data networks and services. There have been lots of initiatives to reduce the digital divide, usually focused on providing some kind of access to computers to the 'disconnected' populations (internet kiosks, internet community centers, OLPC...), but what is really giving the possibility to access on-line services to many groups that would, otherwise, remain disconnected are mobile technologies: more than half of the world's population today has access to a mobile phone.

This concept of future is, precisely, what I want to refer to in the title of the blog. It is not about forecasting what is going to happen, and what the world is going to look like ten years from now. Lots of people have tried to do that with very little success. The possibilities of getting it wrong are much, much higher than guessing what is going to happen, so lets leave predictions to astrologers, chiromantics....

For me, taking about future is talking about what is happening today that is changing the way we do things, communicate, work, live.... Future is the path, not the destination, and when you want to follow a path that you do not know, you need to focus on the curves and slopes, the little changes, rather than trying to figure out what the destination is going to look like.

CCTVs and graffitis

I have stayed for a few days in London, and one of the things that has surprised me is the large number of closed-circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance signs that you can see in public places such as stores, the underground an even in the streets.

We have an image of the UK as one of the societies with a high level of concern on the protection of privacy. It is one of the few countries in Europe where there are no identity cards of any form issued by the government, and when, once in a while, an identity card initiative is proposed, it faces so much opposition that it gets dropped by politicians. The proliferation signs warning of CCTVs in operation is, at least superficially, opposite to this image.

Maybe the perception of the abundance of CCTVs was caused by the legal requirement to warn citizens of their existence, making CCTV signs quite ubiquitous in the London city landscape, but it certainly produced some estrange situations, like this CCTV sign besides a big graffiti (or street art?). Usually, the painting of street art such as this is somewhere in the fringes of legality, so the image makes you wonder what was first: the CCTV or the graffiti, and how those symbols of different lifestyles and attitudes ended up side by side in the street.


Beyond the curious image there is a whole reflection on how surveillance technology can change our habits and attitudes about the public space. Up to which extent do you change your behaviour when you know that CCTV is operating in a certain public space?, is the proliferation of surveillance warning signs going to trivialize it or, on the contrary, is it going to act to create social reaction to the technology?. And, of course, what happens when there is the possibility that some kind of surveillance is being done without any information signs?...

Panopticon or 1984, the fact is that surveillance based distopias are, today, part of our collective imaginary, so this is going to be an area of friction between technology capabilities and social expectations and concerns...

Deslocalization(?)

A couple of weeks ago, I caught TV program on deslocalization. I guess that the term sounds quite strange in English , but in French, and also in Spanish, it has become quite a common word to refer to the process of migration of (more or less skilled) jobs from developed to developing countries.

Obviously, since the term has been coined in countries that, supposedly, are loosing jobs in this process (and where labor unions are quite powerful), it has a very negative connotation. Even the word itself shows this connotation: deslocalization seems to suggest that work is being moved out of a location, a place, to somewhere in hyperspace, rather than what is really happening: being moved from one location to another. Relocalization sounds like a more exact term to describe the concept, but this term would probably not have the same impact...

Going back to the program, I got interested because they were showing some images of Bangalore, including some places, streets and shopping malls, that I had visited several times while we were living there, but the fact is that, in terms of contents, it was not very good. It abounded in the image of jobs being steeled from the developed countries, while, at the same time, the traditional values of the destination countries is also lost. It focused, mostly, on call centers, so there were also the typical topics of English accent training classes and the hard job of spending 8 hours a day answering customer calls.

In particular, there was this portion where they showed how some call center employees went to the mall to do some shopping of western items after receiving their monthly salary. The funny (or maybe sad) part is that they made that sound as something wrong: why should people from a third world country spend their hard earned money in western items such as cell phones or jeans?.

The fact is that there were lots of underlying cliches on which are the expectations, needs and values of social groups in developing countries, and, using a very superficial analysis, the conclusion was that deslocalization was bad both for the source and the destination countries. I guess that the intention was to justify the opposition to the whole phenomenon not only on the basis of job losses but also on the supposedly perverse effect on the culture and way of living in the destination countries.

The effects of deslocalization, offshoring, job migration, or however you want to call it... are much more complex, deep (and unsettling?) that what a TV program can show in little less than one hour, and you cannot expect that a deep social analysis on those effects will keep general public's attention, but simplification should not mean just jumping into cliched conclusions...

When the program was shown I was also reading India's New Middle Class by Leela Fernandes, and, although offshoring is not the main topic of the book, it describes and explains the causes for lots of the consuming habits changes in the new middle class in India, and their complex relation to the success of India as one of the destinations for high technology enabled jobs. (Unluckily, I forgot the book, when I had read more than three quarters of its content, in an airport loungue...)

Generation icons

You start to feel old when some your generation icons become revival decoration items...Remember when space invders was the latest thing in arcade games?; well, after a few(?) years it is back as trendy street art.


Found by my 6 years old son in a pedestrian street in Covent Garden, London (and the day was my 42nd birthday, so maybe that's why I was feeling old...)

Lesson learned?

In the last months I've had several times a dejavu feeling. All this web2.0 noise is starting to sound more and more like the .com thing nine years ago.

On one side, it is a little bit deceiving: am I so old to tell yarns and anecdotes about how insanely money was made and lost those days?. But looking at the past is also a good way to reflect on what is going on, and question whether past lessons have been learned...

All these thoughts come because I've just read an article on the Lessons from the Las Bubble, and I found some of the ideas really interesting.

One of the best points is when the authors talk about network externalities and exponential growth. They rightly point out that the fact that you have an internet based business model does not imply that you are going to have network effects. Network externalities are not about the technology you use to build your service, but about the way users use it and value the social network that is build on top. And that was one of the mistakes repeated over and over again in the .com era. There are no network externalities to draw from in a internet based retail store, as there are no network externalities in setting up a brick and mortar retail store.

But that should not be a problem for Web2.0, isn't it?. Since Web2.0 is all about social networking, that mistake will not happen again: we are definitely going to have network externalities and, consequently, exponential growth. Wrong!!!

The fact that some of the technologies collected under the Web2.0 name enable the formation (I should say the facilitation) of social networks does not mean that any venture in the Web2.0 world is going to build one. It is not about social networks, it is about the value of they provide to users.

There have been lots of serious studies on how social networks are formed, used, and, at the end, valued by people. Social networking is a natural human activity, not something that was invented a couple of years ago by MySpace or Flickr. The fact that these two business (and a few others) have been very successful at using the human tendency to interact with other people to extract an economic profit does not mean that any venture that talks about network externalities in its business plan is going to be as successful and profitable.

When technological jargon becomes mainstream

It is very common that during the process of development of a new technology, an specific jargon is created. When the technological innovation starts to get deployed, the jargon acts as a symbol to differentiate those who know about it. But as the new technological features become mainstream, and with some good marketing help, the jargon words detach from the original technical field and get incorporated into the consumer language.

That evolution is specially visible in technologies related to consumer products (how many people who look at the L2Cache size spec for microprocessors has an idea, beyond bigger number is better, about the meaning of that spec?). But in certain circumstances this jargon evolution can also happen in other technologies not so consumer oriented.


In Bangalore, the major center of the software export industry in India, in an environment with a very high IT employment demand, IT and programming related skills becomes a very valuable asset. The consequence is that the programming jargon is becoming part of the regular language. Small signs advertising training in very specific programming technologies abound, and, in certain situations, it is quite easy to start a conversation with an stranger about specific programming languages, platforms, and techniques.

Web 3.0 (?)

Web2.0 has become the big buzz word of the year.

Reading certain news and hearing some people talk, it seems that we are back in time to 1999, but with tagging and social networking substituting portal and e-commerce as the bright ideas that will change the world, and make (some of) us very rich. Web2.0 has its new heroes (the googles, the flickrs,...) and villains (guess who...). And obviously, there are the pundits that talk a lot about it and create all the hype, and in some cases make a lot of money out of it.

But, we cannot say that we did not learn our lessons: the Web2.0 bubble may explode as the .com bubble did a few years ago, so it is better that we have a new concept ready when this happens: an the term is, obviously, Web3.0.

Web3.0 is just a fancy name for a concept that has been lying around for a few years: the semantic web. I guess that the term semantic web sounds too geeky to attract venture capital, so somebody came up with the fancier Web3.0, and then, publications such as the MIT Technology Review have picked it up, so it is becoming mainstream in the internet and technology related circles. According to Nova Spivack, blogger and founder of one startup using semantic web technologies, there is even a Web4.0 waiting somewhere in the future...

But besides all the naming fireworks, there is a more subtle issue around the concept itself of an intelligent (as in artificial intelligence) network. I've already talked about the goods and bads of the collective intelligence that some of the new internet based technologies enable. The underlying question is how much intelligence are you ready to outsource to somebody else, be it some artificial intelligence search engine, be it the collective seating somewhere in cyberspace or, most probably, a combination of both.

It is obvious that any technology, and Web *.0 is not an exception, embodies in its design lots of cognitive and social assumptions and when adopting those technological artifacts we are, up to a certain extent, adopting those assumptions. And that is fine if you are aware of what are those underlying assumptions and what do they mean for you.

An example with serach engines: although Google's page ranking algorithm is kept as the company's major trade secret, it is well known that it is somehow based on the number of pages that link to a certain page, so, when I'm using Google as a search engine, I know that I'm actually looking, more or less, for the most popular pages about something, and hope that the most popular are also the best. But of course, that is not always the case, so it is nice to have other search engines that are based on other criteria and even a different search space (some of them provided by Google itself, like Google Scholar for research papers).

At the end, I end up using different search engines for different things, and I guess that the Web3.0 response to it would be building some kind of intelligent agent that can embody part of the criteria I use to select between the different criteria embodied in the different search engine options. The only problem I see is that somewhere in this chain of building intelligence on top of intelligence there must be some place left to personal, private, options and criteria.

I have to admit that I have not digged deep enough in the semantic web theories and technologies to understand how personal option and individual difference can be implemented in a way that is also easy to understand and use. But it is also true that I have not seen this issue addressed by any of the Web3.0 visions and predictions I have seen so far. So, at least for the time being, I will remain in the skeptic side about Web3.0 and I'll be, at least, a little reluctant to outsource the small portion of intelligence I have left to some unknown agent...

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing U,

It seems that Web2.0 is the buzzword of the moment. Everybody is talking about it, and, as usually, lots of nonsense is being said, as people try to seem smart and proof that they know better, specially when talking about how Web2.0 is changing all types of social relations (and how they know the best way of making money out of it...)

That is why I find this video interesting. It is well done, goes straight to the point and it is thought provoking. It does not try to define what Web2.0 is (I don't think anybody really knows what it is...) but points out some of the changes that new web based technologies may bring and the controversies that they generate.

Beautification

The city landscape is full of dull looking artifacts that make things such as semaphores, street lighting... work. But they can also become aesthetic objects with some, sometimes minimal, intervention...

On being an ANT

These days, I'm slowly progressing on the self-imposed task of reading Brumo Latour's introduction to Actor-Network Theory: Reassembling the Social. Although Latour's writing style is relatively light, at least compared to other sociology theorists such as Habermas or Bordieu, I still find quite difficult to grasp all the subtilities of actors, mediators, translation, oligopticons, plug-ins...

My first experience with ANT was in a doctoral course about Technology, Economy and Society, where different theories about the interaction between technology and society, such as technological determinism or social construction of technology, were briefly described. What I found most interesting about ANT, and differentiating to other theories and frameworks, was the role it gives to non-human actors.

Society and Technology Studies have always struggled to accommodate the mechanisms in which technological artifacts and society interact and shape each other. The solution that ANT gives to this problem is quite simple and, at least apparently, neat: there is no technology and society as two separate realms that interact with each other: technological artifacts, and also science facts, are actors in the social network, that interact with other actors in a process of constant reshaping and reassembling.

This concept may sound strange at first, but if you look at it in more detail it starts to make, at least, some sense. It is quite obvious that technological artifacts, such as for example the Internet, on one side embody the values, concepts, ideas, cliches.... of the people, groups, and organizations that participate in their design and development (in their construction...); but they also reshape, reorganize, reassemble those other actors, be them humans or not.

ANT has also had its antagonists and it has been, and still is, subjected to very passionate debates (passionate, at least, for academics standards...), such as the Science Wars episode of the early nineties. Hard core positivists freak out whenever the concept of science being socially constructed is introduced. Latour addresses this topic in Reassembling the social with, I think, a good point: saying that science is constructed does not mean that scientific and technological knowledge is not true, but rather that there are lots of resources, interactions and relations between different actors (remember both human and not human) that have to be assembled to construct it.

However, the part I've found most interesting of the book is the section about how to do ANT research, how to write risky accounts in Latour's terms. The author describes an ethnographic approach and a method to capture data about actors and associations, using four notebooks to ensure that both the actors' own perceptions and the effect of the field data on the research and the researcher are logged.

Technorati Tags: actor-network, ANT, society and technology, ethnography, technology

Standard wars in the Internet age

Standard wars are, probably, one of the better studied cases in technology and innovation management textbooks. There is no serious book in these areas that does not cite the VHS vs. Beta case, as a paradigm of how non technical issues play a key role in the evolution of technologies. This is a concept that is, very often, difficult to assume by pure techies that think that the best technology, best using some quantifiable measure such as speed, image quality,..., is the one that should win regardless of the environment. Market, society, culture... are concepts that are easier to describe than to measure (and, consequently, predict), so they should not appear in the engineer's drawing board.

But standard wars are here to stay, as one of the modes in which conflicts of interests around technology definition and evolution are deployed and, in most of the cases, closed, with winners and losers.

And they are important: can anybody think that internet, as the network of networks, would have evolved to the Internet we know today if the ISO/OSI standards, and its underlying centralized model, had won over TCP/IP in the standards war over computer networking protocols in the 1980s?. Usually, there are high stakes in the game (benefit, control, power,...) and the winner takes it all.

And that's why standards wars are fought with all the weapons available, and in the Internet age, that means, of course, the Internet itself. Standard wars are as much about perception than technology, and Internet is, today, one of the best mechanisms to build or destroy perceptions.

One of the standards wars that is very active these days is the one over standards for document file formats. It has been going on for a couple of years now, with different contenders and fronts: Microsoft with Open Office XML (OOXML) vs. IBM and OASIS with OpenDocument Format(ODF) on the office document front; Microsoft with XML Paper Specification (XPS) vs. Adobe with the Portable Document Format (PDF) on the fixed document front.

As in any standards war, different companies and interest groups are trying to push their standard as the one that better meets customer needs, which usually means the customer needs that can be met by their own standard. The difference is that, in this case, the battle is not only being fought in committee meetings, ballots over draft specs, or corporate alliances. Blogs and wikis have are the places where all the tricks (some of them clean, some of them dirty...) are being played, trying to change the perception of the different technologies at stake.

In this framework, the latest news about Microsoft paying somebody to change the contents of the wikipedia article on OOXML to make it sound more positive, and the reaction that it has caused shows how, for good or for bad, Internet has become an important medium to influence the shaping of technology.

For some this may sound positive: more democracy in the technology shaping process, while for others, it may sound really unsettling as more and more non technical issues will influence what gets designed and implemented. Welcome to the standards wars in the Internet age....

To be, or not to be....collective

Collective production of information, content, and knowledge is one of the activities that has been facilitated by the growth of communication networks and the internet. Actually, internet itself could be viewed as the result of a collective construction, and historically, collective creation has been the rule rather than the exception, specially in the case of scientific and technical knowledge. It was not until the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment era that the inventor appears as the creator of a new technology or discoverer of a scientific fact.

However, what technologies such as wiki, and its best known incarnation: wikipedia, change is the size and characteristics of the collective: now anybody can participate in the content production. And, as usual, changes come with controversies: how this impacts the quality of the content, in the particular case of wikipedia, the information?.

Jaron Lanier has coined the term digital maoism to refer to the 'appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise'. Obviously the term has a critical connotation that is elaborated in Jaron's assay and has been contested by other Yochai Blenker, Cory Doctorow or Larry Senger, one of the founders of wikipedia.

The whole controversy seems to be centered on the advantages or disadvantages of collective creation and production of content, or rather, the value that is given to the results of that collective creation, with the example of wikipedia to show the good and the bad. What I found surprising, and somehow disappointing, is that most of the arguments focus on the results rather than the process: it is true that, in many cases, the information collectively created for wikipedia does not meet the standards of a good encyclopedia or scientific paper, but it is precisely the process, discussions and negotiations that take place to create that content that can shed a lot of light on the underlying controversies. I usually find more interesting the wikipedia discussion pages than the actual entry, specially for highly disputed and controversial topics.

As part of my job, I have been trying to extend (proselytize?) the use of wiki based communication and documentation in our organization during the last few months, with, I have to admit, not an overwhelming success. I thought, and I still think, that the type of collective information sharing and the possibilities for knowledge creation and interaction that wiki provide were a perfect fit for the globally distributed environment in which we have to work.

For some reason (and I have some theories that I may discuss some day), things have not worked as I expected: although everybody praised the initiative its use is still marginal... I would consider a major success if some of the underlying controversies, technical and organizational, that we face were detected and addressed precisely in the process of collective creation, much as controversies are publicly highlighted in wikipedia. Unluckily, we are still too far to reach that point, so for the time being I'll be happy if I can increase the use of our wiki just as an information repository...

Virtual migrations

The last few weeks have been very busy, but I have been able to spend dedicate some time Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization by A.Aneesh. The book is an interesting attempt to view the phenomenon of software development outsourcing and offshoring from a different perspective. Given my current job, I have done quite a lot of reading about these topics. All the stuff I had read so far seemed to address only two specific areas: the economic effects of the phenomenon or on the methods to implement and efficiency that can be extracted from remote development.

On the first aspect, what is the economic effect of the transfer of software development and related activities from developped countries to other geographies, the materials range from the populist and simplistic analysis (ala Lou Dobbs), to more serious and analytical, and obviously less alarmist, materials. Of course, the problem is that it is much easier to get exposed the former, specially on the generalist media. I must admit that I have had the Report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software (ACM, 2006) sitting in my desktop for the last few months and I have only been able to read the intro, while in this time I've read at least 50 different poorly researched articles about offshoring in general newspapers and TV shows (and that's without counting the Indian newspapers, where there are news every day about the topic!).

On the second area, the materials also range from the simplistic, all the howto guides that, according to their editorial reviews, pretend to have solutions for everything and end up listing a few basic rules together with some anecdotes about cultural differences, to the well researched. In this later group, I must recommend Global IT Outsourcing: software development across borders(Sahay, Nicholson and Krishna, 2005), a book that using an ethnographic aproach analyzes several cases of successful and failed offshoring projects, extracting relevant insights, but without trying to give simple recipes or solutions that should work everywhere. (If I had read this book a few months before I did, I would have been able to skip some of the mistakes I did in the beginning of the project!).

In Virtual Migrations, Aneesh tries to address the whole offshoring/outsourcing/globalization issue from a different perspective: focusing more on what is the effect on the persons and organizations that participate in the whole phenomenon. This is how he comes up with the term that gives the title to the book: he claims that the whole topic can be analyzed as a change in the work migration paradigm. Instead of moving workers, only the work result is moved.

Hence programmers in India become virtual migrants, working for the big (mostly American) corporations from their Indian location. This enables capturing the advantages of migrant workers (basically lower salaries) without having to cope with the issues of integration of immigrants into a different society. This change is happening because of the availability of new digital communication and information technologies and facilitated by a change in the organizations towards what the author calls the algocratic model, where code and software plays a key role in the organizational and work structure.

This would be an example on how technology helps shaping the social structure, but the author escapes both from the fully technological deterministic or fully social construction perspective. For him code, distributed programming and related technologies are more an actor that shapes and is shaped by other economical, social, organizational and technological factors (more like an actor-network in ANT...)

In summary, Virtual Migration is a very interesting work, both from the theoretical perspective and the ethnographic data used in the argumentation, although, from my own experience, I find some of his accounts on how easy is to work IT related work around too optimistic. He does not talk too much about the issue of knowledge migration and its difficulties and barriers.