A More Open Place: Photographing Privacy

What Mark Zuckerberg has to do with tyranny, memory and digital perishables.

Facebook is the largest photo-sharing platform in the world, with over 100 million photos uploaded daily by a half-billion active users worldwide. At the same time, Facebook’s ever-changing, ever-convoluted privacy policies remain among the most hotly debated issues on and about the social web. While most of the public discourse revolves around the personal information shared by and on Facebook, one particularly fascinating and unsettling aspect of the issue is how Facebook handles image rights — their terms state that any user automatically grants Facebook a sub-licensable, royalty-free, transferable, worldwide license to any image uploaded on the site.

This form of digital tyranny is exactly what conceptual artist Phillip Maisel explores in his A More Open Place project — a series of images each produced by taking long-exposure photographs of a computer screen while flipping through a Facebook album. Inspired by a quote from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerber — who famously said, “We’re going to change the world. I think we can make the world a more open place.” — the project examines both our reaction to this digital deluge of photos and their fleeting nature.

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

The technology is such that it allows one to view photographs in albums in quick succession, infinitely looping. Because of this, an entire collection of photographs can be experienced in a matter of seconds. Documents of entire vacations, whose seasons, can blur by in an instant. In this way, I see the document becoming as fleeing as the moment it initially tried to capture.” ~ Phillip Maisel

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

The documentary and narrative capabilities of photography as a medium render it nearly perfect in its potential to act as a surrogate for memory. [...] With the advent of websites like Facebook, the combination of technology and photography is playing an increasing role as a databank for our memories. At the same time, despite Facebook’s current popularity, its lasting prominence in our collective lives is uncertain, highlighting the ephemeral quality of photography in the digital age.” ~ Phillip Maisel

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

Image copyright Phillip Maisel | phillipmaisel.com

A More Open Place presents a compelling example of cross-platform, multimedia storytelling where a non-linear, unexpected narrative serves as the vehicle for an important social conversation about the givens of — as well as what is being taken by — the digital age.

via Photojojo

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The Talking Tree: Vegetation Does Social Media

Facebooking flora, or what biometric feedback has to do with broadening empathy.

We walk by trees all the time, rarely recognizing them as living beings rather than static objects. But that’s what they are — complex, delicate organisms that respond to their environment, from the weather to pollution to noise level, in ways too subtle for us to notice. If they could speak, what would they say? To find out, Dutch science magazine EOS decided to equip a 100-year-old tree in Brussels with a variety of sensors and devices. The Talking Tree was born. The tree has its own wifi station, sending data from all the different devices to custom software that then analyzes it to extract how the tree feels, eventually translating those feelings into words to be shared across the social web.

Between the ozone meter, light meter, weatherstation, fine dust meter, webcam and microphone, the tree was given a kind of technology-assisted eloquence that allowed it to “comment” on its living circumstances through constant biometric feedback translated into human language. The Talking Tree then shares these sentiments on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. A Flickr stream documents its immediate environment regularly and a SoundCloud set captures its auditory surroundings. (Which reminded us of Diego Stocco’s bonsai symphony.)

Lots of trees in big cities have a hard time due to the pollution. But when you’re walking past a tree that’s sick you don’t always see that there is anything
wrong with it or how he’s experiencing his environment. So, naturally, we got the idea to let the tree talk about how he’s experiencing all this.” ~ Ramin Afshar

The Talking Tree is part of EOS‘s Low Impact Month initiative, rallying for carbon-minimalist living in the month of November. But, more importantly, beneath the cheeky concept of social-media-savvy flora lies a profound provocation of how we relate to other beings, broadening our scope of empathy to encompass complex, sentient species beyond our own.

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SwiftRiver: Intelligence for the Information Age

What humanitarian crisis management has to do with brand monitoring and natural language.

Information management is easily the greatest challenge of the digital age, only intensifying as we go forth. While most of us make do with a careful selection of tools and a handful of trusted content curators, a holistic solution to information overload has been largely missing. Until now. Enter SwiftRiver, a brand new open-source intelligence gathering platform for managing real-time streams of data.

Developed by our friends at Ushahidi, whose platform of crowdsourced crisis information was the single most effective data management platform during the Haiti earthquake, SwiftRiver offers five different web services for validating and filtering real-time information:

• SiLCC is a natural-language processing tool that extracts semantic value from text — essentially, figuring out the human meaning of digital bits
• SULSa adds location context to content, which can be a life-or-death factor when responding to crisis information
• SiCDS reduces the number of duplicates, such as RT’s on Twitter that relay identical information without adding semantic value
• Reverberations measures the influence of content by weighing its popularity as it propagates across the social graph
• River ID scans the other four services to determine what and who is of value to different communities

Swift isn’t about replacing humans — it’s about maximizing their time.” ~ Jon Gosier

What makes SwiftRiver particularly noteworthy is its incredible range applications — from humanitarian crisis management to brand monitoring to political intelligence and beyond. What’s even more valuable is the multi-dimensional, relational way in which it approaches content — because the value of information is rarely absolute but, rather, relative to the context of who we are, what we do, where we live, and what else we know.

We have high hopes for SwiftRiver as the first tangible ray of hope for “curaggregation” — the holy-grail intersection of curation and aggregation. Give it a try.

via White African

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