The Blue-Green Digital Divide

While studying Digital Anthropology, digital divide was a topic which often came up for discussion in the classes. Digital divide which clearly demarcates those with access to technology from those with limited, borrowed or no access to technology. In this context, the stories of Yahoo-Yahoo Boys of Nigeria and the cyber-cafes in Ghana make very interesting reading. In my own country, digital divide has spawned into new forms of social and cultural equities.

So, I was so amused when I read Paul Ford’s ‘It’s kind of cheesy – being green.’ There’s a point in his post where he highlights Tim Cook’s quote from a WWDC event in which he had mocked upon the green bubbles. But are the green bubbles really ugly? Ford highlights how these are purely product decisions clearly in this case, to make the ‘iDevice’ user stand out from the rest. It’s now even a selling point! However, what appears stranger to me is the fact that the icon for Messages in the iOS universe is green and not blue.

It’s a little thing, so very little, but it matters. Perhaps, one small factor among many that allow the iPhone to sustain higher prices and margins and for people and societies to form opinions. There are many studies which show consumer decision making gets strongly anchored to a product or an association as an effect of colours.  The whole business around cherry-picking colours for different product attributes is now so well-entrenched industry trend, that Pantone, the proprietary colour-standardization company, has been for a couple of years has been selecting ‘colour of the year’ to influence design and product decisions from fashion to home, and packaging to interactive design. How they pick the colour of the year makes another very interesting story.

As a final word, I don’t think Apple did the iMessage colour coding on purpose but the decision around selecting blue over green has led to multiple ramifications impacting societal and cultural norms.

Irony

Line breaks: irony
Pronunciation: /ˈʌɪrəni /
NOUN (plural ironies)

[MASS NOUN]
1The expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect

Origin

early 16th century (also denoting Socratic irony): via Latin from Greek eirōneia ‘simulated ignorance’, from eirōn ‘dissembler’.

Via Twitter

Visualising the internet

The internet has been described in innumerable ways. At times, it is difficult to imagine the force which we interact we act with so often. Spending most of our days in front of a big screen and then the small screen in our pockets, my attention is certainly divided.

A couple of days back I read this wonderful book by Andrew Blum called Tubes. Blum became hung up on the lack of physicality associated with the Internet. The journey to find exactly what places support and connect with the Internet was triggered following an unusual interaction with a squirrel in his backyard.Once when Blum’s internet broke the cable guy came to fix it, he said something which appeared extremely preposterous to Blum.He said ‘I think a squirrel is chewing on your internet’. And this of course seemed absurd, because as all of you know the internet is the great changer of everything, it has changed revolutions, and dating and shopping and anything that you might imagine.And then Blum realised if he yanked off the wire from the wall, it had to go someplace. So, Blum went on an adventure to find the buildings, installations and people who make the Internet what it is today which ended up in completely unexpected but wonderful book.

Ben Mendelsohn explores this subject in Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors, a short documentary on the internet infrastructure. He takes us inside 60 Hudson Street in New York City, a nondescript building that houses one of the major nodes of the Internet on the east coast of the US.

Timo Arnall,a designer and artist from London, has documented the hidden spaces,the series of massive servers, wires and equipment tucked away in high-security buildings in his project Internet Machine.

And, there has also been an attempt to visualise the immaterial, the network around us which carries multiple giga-bits of data around us in the immaterials project.

In the words of the designers, the Immaterials project emerged from the humble preoccupations of a few designers dealing with some of the invisible, immaterial, intangible stuff we had in front of us. These small experiments led to larger and more visually and narratively communicative work. In the end what I think we’ve developed is an approach to technology that revolves around material exploration, explanation and communication.

Image via

EU’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’

My quick word on the recent EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ on Medium which will definitely have some long-term repercussions.

Are you right to be ‘forgotten’?

Big Data Cheer!

While I still learn to understand the magnanimity of big data, this one was hard to ignore.

How Spotify builds its products

this is really amazing!

Via the internet, of course.

The future of news will be written in code

I am enamoured and excited by the recent bout of venture investment in news startups like Vox, Pandodaily and Buzzfeed. This story from Quartz explains some of this fascination.

Continuing on the thread of the news websites, I thought I will take this moment to express my great fascination for Quartz. I begin my day with their most smartly curated newsletter. This story explains its making and how some of the smartest editors from the Atlantic (their sister publication) spend hours working on it everyday.

It is not surprising that Quartz is now amongst the most visited new websites in the world. It is no mean feat that they managed to get to this level in a period of less than two years!

This video by the Quartz publishers, from one of the Digiday events explains some of their ways of working. And it is not too different from the principles a technology company works on!

The Making of a Modern Publisher: Atlantic Media’s Quartz from Digiday on Vimeo.

I am really glad that Quartz is launching an India edition.

A social network for the dead

Is it ever possible that the social network you use frequently will contain profiles of more dead people than that of living ones? And what challenges does it pose for someone who is trying to study the user behaviour of people on that social network? Is it ethical? Does it adhere to the basic tenets of doing ethnography? Your social network can afford to keep all our pages and data indefinitely. Living users will always generate more data than dead ones, and the accounts for active users are the ones that will need to be easily accessible. Even if accounts for dead (or inactive) people make up a majority of their users, it will probably never add up to a large part of their overall infrastructure budget. More important will be our decisions. What do we want for those pages? Unless we demand that the social network deletes them, they will presumably, by default, keep copies of everything forever. But there are a lot of questions surrounding passwords and access to private data that we haven’t yet developed social norms for. Should accounts remain accessible? What should be made private? Should next-of-kin have the right to access email? Should memorial pages have comments? How do we handle trolling and vandalism? Should people be allowed to interact with dead user accounts? What lists of friends should they show up on? T

hese are issues that we’re currently in the process of sorting out by trial and error. Death has always been a big, difficult, and emotionally charged subject, and every society finds different ways to handle it. In every place, culture, and technological landscape, we develop a different set of behaviour around these same activities. And it is this evolving behaviour, which poses great challenges when someone is trying to do study users on digital platforms. Death may appear to be an easier issue to deal with, if you keenly observe the different cultural sensitivities that come into play when people are expressing their opinion on religion, politics or other complex matters of the society. There are also issues related to user anonymity and state control. To add to the complexity, the ethnographer faces many methodological challenges like playing the dual role of participant-observer, contextualizing and arriving at normativity while conducting the research.

To pause, to ponder, to tweet or to move on

Sherry Turkle:

A 14-year-old girl tells me how she gets her device-smitten father to engage with her during dinner: “Dad, stop Googling. I don’t care about the right answer. I want to talk to you.” A 14-year-old boy reflects: “Don’t people know that sometimes you can just look out the window of a car and see the world go by and it is wonderful. You can think. People don’t know that.”

John Dickerson:

When you pause to write about something—even if it’s for Twitter or Facebook—you are engaging with it. Something within you is inspired and, at the very least, you’ve got to pick the words and context to convey meaning for your private recollection or, if you make it public, for the larger world.

Sounds & Notes from London

It may just sound weird but I often wake up in the middle of the night thinking of the woman who sells The Big Issue outside the Waterstones on Gower Street. Not that I am unsympathetic towards the cause of The Big Issue but there is something eerily scary about her voice. I even avoid going to that part of the Waterstones but still every visit to Waterstones is full of reminiscences of that sound. This gets me to think if there is a hierarchy of senses in a way that we end up remembering more visual experiences or associate sounds with visuals and then in a similar order may be taste or smell or touch. In most cases it is the visual experience that one recalls most often or if there is a visual associated with a sound or a smell or a taste or touch it becomes easier to remember. Is this the reason we take more pictures than we record sounds or has the medium somehow adopted itself to a hierarchy of senses which perches vision right at the top? Is this the reason we have more apps or platforms that make it easier for us to take pictures, record our visual experiences and share with others?

I think about sound as a photographer. I’m not a “good photographer” but I do it enough that when I’m out in the world I see things in terms of what I would like to see again or that I would like someone else to see from a particular perspective. That’s my guiding principle with pictures. I wonder why exactly we have such a different relationship with sound as compared to how we relate to images. We have music, of course, but that’s not like photography at all. Music is the brush of a paint on canvas or a sculpture or graceful curve of an atrium. But music is not photograph of sounds.

I found this group on Soundcloud, Sound Art, that advertises itself as interested in ambient recordings, but in practice it looks more like another place for people to post their sick jams. What I want is a place to hear things that people record in the spaces around them. This seems reasonable to me: An app with just one button to record and another to share. I’d have fewer “friends” than on Instagram, in the realm of sound, but there would surely be some. And some who use the app would be pushed to find better and more interesting sounds, and to appreciate those sounds in new and different ways.

It’s worth discussing why this audio-sharing network would be so much smaller than the visual ones and why there would be less interest. For starters, vision is the dominant sense. All I really need to prove this is to ask which sense you would rather lose, but it’s still important to look a bit closer than that. Research has shown that up to 85 percent of our perception, learning, and cognition is mediated through vision. Just think of absolutely anything you enjoy: “running,” “chocolates,” “plants,” or “cats.” If you’re an average person, you saw those things in your imagination. (Possible exceptions, like “sex,” are an interesting digression, however.)

On Instagram people share subjects. In my experience, they don’t share very much ambience. There is very little to be found in the sense of a place on photo sharing sites. Rarely do I get a chance to “like” a photo of a room or some field. This is a shame. I’d like to be better able to share environments and ambience in general. We’ve reached a particular point in evolution and technological advancement that we don’t need to dote on vision anymore to survive or at least not as much as we used to. We have a vision-based internet and given that the internet itself doesn’t exist as an actual space, in the sense of needing to be spatially navigated, perhaps sound just needs a better advocate than websites that autoplay horrible music.

So: a sharing network for sounds. Someone build that. I’ll be your first member.

 

Flickr image via