In preparation for the 2011 Graduate Center-Humboldt University Summer Seminar that I’ll be participating in, I thought it would useful to take stock of some of the recent informational happenings in Germany:
Germany is now the largest market for video games in Europe, driven primarily by German interest in the Wii Fit (more …).
German laws banning the distribution of photos of people or their property without their permission is forcing Google to modify its StreetView functionality before its launch in Germany (more …).
A number of German states, led by Lower Saxony, are now trying to prevent web services such as Amazon, Facebook, or Google from aggregating and sharing visitor information without the explicit consent of the visitor (more …).
Facebook has grown by 260% in Germany over just the past year and Germany is now the 18th largest country in Facebook with over 2M members. However, Facebook still remains much smaller in Germany than the Berlin-based StudiVZ social network which boasts over 13M members (more …).
A Hamburg court has ruled that YouTube can be held liable for damages when it hosts copyright-protected material without permission (more …).
Dead Drops — an anonymous, offline, p2p file-sharing network in public space — has been established by Berlin based media artist Aram Bartholl. Dead Drops embeds USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs in public space, allowing anyone to plugin their laptop to share their favorite files and data (more …). h/t jgieseking
This is, but of course, a very small sample of recent happenings. Hopefully I’ll have more to report post-seminar.
This presentation will draw on MyDigitalFootprint.org, a participatory action research project with New York City youth ages 14-19, to unpack the reciprocity between informational development and contemporary geographies of education. The near ubiquitous presence of cyberspace in young people’s everyday life has both compressed and expanded the space of the ‘traditional’ school and the time in which ‘formal’ learning occurs. Amidst the current transition from industrial to informational capitalism within the U.S., this space-time compression and expansion provides both opportunities for youth empowerment as well as domination. How contemporary spatialities, materialities, and practices of informationalism become produced and reproduced in young people’s everyday learning will be discussed as will the role of securitization in formalizing the boundaries, relationships, and flows that operate between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ spaces of education. This presentation will conclude with a discussion of the participatory action research methods developed to investigate such (re)production as well as strategies for reworking educational boundaries, relationships, and flows towards young people’s situated interests and concerns.
Carrie: It’s MiND-Fi, I just installed it. It’s like Wi-Fi, but for thoughts. Now, you can let go of all your electronic devices and just be free in your mind.
We are engaged in an information war. During the cold war we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said ‘OK fine, enough of that, we did it, we’re done. ‘ And, unfortunately we’re paying a big price for it. And, our private media can not fill that gap . . .
We are in an information war, and we are losing that war. I’ll be very blunt in my assessment. Al Jazeera is winning. The Chinese have opened up a global English language and multi-language television network. The Russians have opened up an English network. I’ve seen it in a few countries and it’s quite instructive . . .
We are in information war and we cannot assume that this youth bulge that exists not just in the middle east but in so many parts of the world really knows much about us. I mean we think they know us and reject us, I would argue the really don’t know very much about who we are. (emphasis added)
From Vice President Al Gore’s remarks to The Superhighway Summit at UCLA on January 11, 1994:
The pressure of competition on the information superhighway will be great — and it will drive continuing advancements in technology, quality and cost. Incidentally, when I first coined the phrase “information superhighway” 15 years ago, I was not prepared for some of the unusual images it would ultimately bring into our language. For example, one businessman made this point I’m making here about competition and the pressure of competition when he told me last week that his company was accelerating its investment in new technology to avoid ending up as “road kill on the information superhighway.” And just this week I received a letter from a group of companies wanting to be allowed to compete, who complained that they were scared of being “parked at the curb” on the information superhighway. (emphasis added)
GTD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member of the New Media and Digital Design Program at Fordham University. He is also a founding coordinator of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium and co-chair of the Mapping (In)Justice Symposium: Digital Theory and Praxis for Critical Scholarship. Donovan’s […]
– “Mapping (In)Justice Symposium: Digital Theory and Praxis for Critical Scholarship” – Symposium schedule (Nov 7-9, 2019), participant bios, and proceedings of the symposium. – “Databite No. 78: Remixing Modes of Knowing and Belonging in the Urban Platform” – Recording of April 2016 Databite Talk at Data & Society Research Institute. – “Making the Dissertation […]
