Week 5 - The World is Flat : Flatteners 3 & 4 (for Group 2) @H-H@!

I'm prompted to wonder if Kathy's choice of divvying up Chapte 2 between groups is to see if we would all merge upon the same interpretation of Friedman's 'flat world'. He seems to be rather fanatic in sporting his personal terminology all over the text...and in cascadingly context-savy circumstances wherein you might think you hadn't a clue what the hell he meant unless you'd read chapter 1 word for word. Still, he's very good with the prose. And his definitions aren't too hard to deduce. From his anecdote about Wild Brain's production M.O, the flat world looks to be the connected world - able to support simultaneous collaboration and offer access and input to multiple participants. All on the same plane, I suppose, which is perhaps why Friedman chose the visual analogy that he did. In his covering of the 'flows of revolution', that he highlights the 'grassroots' dynamics of connectivity as the primary molder of web innovation. Subscriber demand cast Netscape into new roles that it certainly hadn't originated for. The hallmarks he notes are of the ones involving major steps away from physical necessity. The integration of the PC and email, editable digital content, and standardized digital protocols - all burgeoners of multilateral innovation. Ultimately, Friedman's FLATNESS is digital SEAMLESSNESS.

"Once a standard takes hold, people start to focus on the quality of WHAT they are doing as opposed to HOW they are doing it," Friedman prescribes. TOO TRUE! I'd never really taken the same realization before. Digital innovation seems to come around in such cycles : development, competition, standardization, innovation, saturation, development, compe-... etc, etc. Of course, the ultimate is to have a proprietary standard, owing much to the examples of eBay's acquisition of PayPal and Mac's iTunes among others.

The flattened world is the geek's heyday. Shareware, digital art, blogs, wikipedia...with no commercial intermediaries, the digital ether now offers art for art's sake and logic for logic's sake via the UPLOAD, which seems to be sufficing as the ultimate market equalizer now that the market is digital. Cultivated by communities, uploading spurs a tremendously positive force for creative multiplicity and allows a higher degree of conceptual diversity than ever would have been offered in a top-down-only medium. But he goes on to follow open source software, Wikipedia, and blogging/podcasting, and each of the three have their share of things to apologize for.

It seems self defeating to employ open source as a standard. I don't know enough about programming languages to anticipate the difficulties, but if independent parties are augumenting original open source code and releasing it into the market for free in return, doesn't the standard deviate from itself? The regulation of open source software seems to be the patch system (almost viral sounding from Friedman's Behlendorf | Apache story).

I think the bottom-up approach to innovation works best with his account of Wikipedia. Viral information sharing. And the standard being balanced as a reflection of content edits. I hadn't really realized that anyone can edit any Wikipedia entry. And I'm surprised that more entries aren't radically changed on a continuing basis, what with all the connected anarchists out there. What else interested me was his description of uploading as a means of intercultural communication. A sort of digital play pen where we are all happy to share each other's toys and it would be considered rude to charge our friends to use them. Is the Internet's inherently community-based design at eternal conflict with the top-down mode of control? Top-down excludes participation. It relies on passivity. And Friedman seems to think that day is nearing an end. The new user is interactive and expects the digital liberties to do so.

Week 4 - One of Bush's keenest apologies for science and technology is that information is now to be passed on through the life of a race rather than an individual human being. It is the vastness of available information and the task to review it in a manner befitting any legitimate benefit that he proposes as the ultimate challenge. Is the Internet Bush's ideal solution? Or his worst nightmare? All the vast amounts of data Bush describes is readily accessible. But it is precisely because of the Internet that there is now far more than even Bush seemed to have anticipated.

The obstructions Bush addresses are refined to the physical, particularly in his descriptions of the progression of photography, calculating machines, typewriters. And in terms of cost, he didn't correctly anticipate that this would be passed onto the consumer regardless of material production. The market has evolved to assign majority value to the cognitive and less to the physical necessity of access, as there is barely any anymore.

I saw a video interview on cnn the other day with steve wozniak. he had a small black box and pressed a button and a laser - projected, fully functioning keyboard appeared on the desk in front of him. I'd heard they were working on this for screens as well. I think ICT, or at least the access to it, will become more and more removed from the dependence on physical access - something Bush prognosticated as imaging/compression/storage increase in efficiency and decrease in size. With the more availability of information, information itself will become less valuable though.

In terms of long range technology, society gravitates toward uniform formats and diverse technologies. As a rule, we do not like proprietary formats (although Apple and others have proven that wrong on several occasions). And as interactivity becomes even more of a defining measure of ICT in the future, it will be necessary for survival. But it will also become the most challenging. Innovation for next gen technology looks to be pursuing points of divergency.

Week 3 - It's rather amazing to read the bit-by-bit innovations regarding the ultimate development of the telephone and how both one-upsmanship, collaboration, and exploratory integration of existing discoveries on the part of the tech-savvy "illuminati" of that day moved things forward. The propellant of transmitting sound electrically seemed to stem from the raw concept that speech is vibration - what can be oscillated naturally could be reproduced electrically. It seems science of the day regarded the possibility as mythical - Bell was working against both the challenge of telephony but also industry-wide downlooking. Also interesting is the notion that Bell's patent was based off of an undeveloped model : a gamble off of the guarantee that superior technology would inevitably be produced along those lines later. Is the race for technological innovation still following the same trends today? The race to control the industry between National Bell, Edison, Western Union followed invention faster than I ever realized...with that the quickness through which the telephone sufficed as an entertainment and news 'broadcast' medium, i.e. the technology allowed user to message reception for special events. Once released, the exploratory stage of the market plays a powerful motivator in the direction technology is to proceed.

'Supervening necessity' comes across as a recognized industrial, social, or consumer need for an alterier application of a technology other than was originally intended. The Internet itself suffices as a prime example of this, originating as a military communications and file access network, later broadened and augmented to the average user's whims. The concept alludes that technological success (in terms of widespread integration and use) is beholden to the needs of the market far more than the wants of the inventor.



U&G
The concept of uses and gratifications sounds very much derived from the microeconomist's standpoint: if you can predict the habits of ISP users and understand what they respond to, you can tailor your branding to their needs. U&G explains motivations and continued use and is thus very useful for tech developers seeking long term consumership, brand loyalty, etc. Because of the multitude of user interests and uses for the Internet itself, methodology as such is an absolute necessity. ISP users who log onto cnn.com every day may not necessarily visit ebay.com. The variancies of the Internet's audience, as a digital forum, necessitate U&G if you are to enter the market via the medium. In regards to U&G for our research projects, I have a difficult time imagining how it might relate to my topic of ICTs for Development, considering my area of focus is the most barren areas of the digital divide and do not approach the Internet in nearly the same capacity (if they approach it at all). But in the areas where supporting Internet infrastructures do exist and it claims some part of daily life, it may hold true in these areas as well.

Winston - Hmm, the first couple pages have me a little skeptical, I have to admit. So far, Winston is out to suggest that we are NOT in the middle of an Information Revolution, and it comes across as shock-value academics rather than sincere scholarship. He also uses words that my English professor expressly told me to avoid, lest I give the reader the impression I'm trying to impress them with style and not substance. Hopefully I'm wrong here.

What is good to note is the development of digital communication potential in direct development with the understanding of electricity itself. It's odd to consider the telegraph wasn't the first exploration of remote electric communication. I'd never even heard of the 'galvanometer' until this reading.

Necessity prompts invention. The railways, and the danger involved in sending communication, prompted the telegraph? Maybe this section sets the precedent for patterns of invention. Widespread need + available technology + existing infrastructure = invention.

Little innovations can affect for drastic format changes. The technology involved in Morse

Interesting to note the perception of electric communication being presented on such a raw spectrum of 'good & evil', by the US Postal Office no less. But strange to note that the telegram's potential wasn't instantly recognized on a widespread level.