Friday 25 April 2008

Photo workshop in Lancaster

I've been invited to a workshop on photos and interspace, which was held today. There were a number of interesting presentations (which should be online at the workshop web site in a couple of days.

The first key talk was by Michael Hulme; he talked about the concept of interspace, which I wasn't familiar with. If I got it right, it's meant to describe the time/space between two events, particularly events involving more than one person. He's done some work on how these interspaces are used, and apparently, they are increasingly filled with communication through mobile devices.

Another talk I enjoyed was given by Matt Watson and Elizabeth Shove. They discussed a number of things but there we two points that I thought were intriguing. One was the tension between faithful and unfaithful reproduction of digital photographs, and the (mis)appropriation of photos shared through the internet. The other one was that as photography and the use of photos is changing so is 'family' as a whole.

Haliyana Khalid and Alan Dix presented some work looking into the use of photo blogs amongst foreign students in Lancaster, in particular how it was used to communicate with their families abroad but also amongst themselves. They also talked about 'photo lurking', which is browsing through other people's online photos; there was some discussion whether this is the best term to use for the concept, as it has a negative connotation.

I presented some stuff based on Peter Dixon's final year project (using Graffiti and its code of conduct as a way to operate a public photo display), and got a number of interesting comments and questions.

Monday 14 April 2008

Here comes everybody (book by Clay Shirky)

I've just finished reading Here comes everybody by Clay Shirky. It's a book on how the social tools that now are available on the Internet (e.g. wikis, blogs, social networking sites, twitter) change the nature of society. He's looking into how the cost and effort involved in creating, maintaining and 'leveraging' groups (from small to large ones) have been considerably reduced with these tools. From this observation, he goes on to describe four levels/steps of group activity:

  1. sharing
  2. conversation
  3. collaboration
  4. collective action

There is much more in the book, including quite a few examples supporting his argument. I've found the book quiet an eye opener and very thought provoking, and somehow, the whole hype about facebook and other social networking sites makes much more sense to me know.

There is two things I though could be improved with the book: I'd like to have some concise summaries for all the chapters to make it easy to go back and read certain parts. Also, there is very little about what the effect of this 'new revolution' will be. I guess it's kind of hard to predict, yet it shouldn't be impossible

There is a podcast of a talk that Clay gave at harvard, which summarises the main points of his book.

Sunday 13 April 2008

A start?

CHI'08 in Florence is over; all in all it was quite an impressive and inspiring event. I still need to go through all my notes to make sense of it all :)