Week 1 was initially about getting to grips with setting up the lifestream, managing the readings, setting up Tweetdeck, viewing and commenting on the films, and getting to grips on how to blog in WordPress.

I already had a Twitter account but had been Twitter silent over the summer – too much was going on and I hadn’t quite integrated twittering into my daily life. However, I had subscribed previousely to the IBM Center for Social Research’s twitter account (because I was interested in the work they were doing on visualizing unstructured textual material) and was amazed and pleased when I started up Twitter for the course last week that they were conducting a two day symposium on ‘Transparent Text’  www.research.ibm.com/social/transparent_text/index.htmland had a twitter hash code so I could follow it live. I incorporated that hash code into my TweetDeck.

The presentations were very relevant to the Hand article which I was reading closely and outlining at the time.  I used Delicious to keep track of them. They can be categorized as:

Government-led initiatives

• President Obama’s Open Gov’t initiative www.whitehouse.gov/open/ On January 21, 2009, his first full day in office, the President issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government and called for recommendations for making the Federal government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.
• FCC’s chairman’s  call for network neutrality and transparency rules ow.ly/qkGx

Marketing/corporate initiatives

• Crimson Hexagon’s VoxTrot listening platform provides companies with actionable insight into consumer opinion of their brand, product, or market. VoxTrot technology can identify opinion from large quantities of text, whether it’s an in-house content repository or the vast blogosphere. www.crimsonhexagon.com/product/

Activist/citizen initiatives

• MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws.
  This common practice is contrary to the public interest, yet legal. MAPLight.org makes money/vote connections transparent, to help citizens hold their legislators accountable. maplight.org/
• The Sunlight Foundation was co-founded in 2006 by Washington, DC businessman and lawyer Michael Klein and longtime Washington public interest advocate Ellen Miller with the non-partisan mission of using the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens… Sunlight’s ultimate goal is to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in government. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts. http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/about/

Education initiatives

• Via web application software, data citation standards, and statistical methods, the Dataverse Network project increases scholarly recognition and distributed control for authors, journals, archives, teachers, and others who produce or organize data; facilitates data access and analysis for researchers and students; and ensures long-term preservation whether or not the data are in the public domain. thedata.org/

I have just cited some of the presentations at this symposium.  But the way, they clustered into government-led, marketing/corporate, activist/citizen and education initiatives reflected the different consitutencies that Hand was outlining in his article in a very real way. What he is saying is already happening and while the symposium was a celebration of these various new developments and possibilities, given the dystopian slant of this weeks discussion it seemed that these various consituencies could be on a collision course of cross-purposes. For example, if the activist/ citizen initiatives do get taken up by citizens would government led initiatives start leaning more toward control rather than transparency.  And marketing initiatives seem very intrusive – with being able to collect data about ourselves on the net and use it for commercial gain. The tension between what Hand calls the “interacting” and the “interacted” seemed palpable to me.

As the week moved on I turned to the course’s dystopian videos and engaged in the twitter discussion of them.  While still following the IBM symposium twitter stream (and the summaries of the symposium some people put up on blogs), I found that it was easier to build a discussion in Twitter around the videos. I progressively became more adept with TweetDeck in terms of replying to people etc.  I also discovered I needed to check very regularly to keep up with the tweets – the lack of threaded discussions was a little disorientating but I found if I kept up I could manage that – also found that you could filter by using the search – which does the same thing as threads.  My lifestream was mostly Tweets at this point although I did find out about OneWorldDay which I saved in Delicious and referred to in a Tweet -

• “OneWebDay was founded in 2006 as an all-volunteer campaign to build a constituency for the Internet in the United States and around the world. Originally imagined as a celebration of the World Wide Web – the services and content the Internet carries – OneWebDay has grown into a movement of organizations, citizens and consumers who are committed to universal and equal access to the Internet.  Now in its fourth year, OneWebDay has a full-time Executive Director, powerful new partners and will see events in 50 cities across the globe.” Reuters

It seemed very relevant to Hand’s idea of a planetary information culture.

I also started to search Flickr and YouTube for relevant material.

Tags: activism, dystopia, government, Hand, IBM, Lifestream, marketing