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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...
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...)
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...)
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.
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.
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...
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.
