Monday, September 29, 2008

IMKE at von Krahl















Some nerd aspect was still present at von Krahl also ;)

Von Krahl

The election ended up with even votes between von Krahl and Boheem, but the imke08 party convention decided to rule over for von Krahl.

See you all there around 19!

Being Social?

Tonight we are not going to be nerds but talk totally unmediated!

Mauri Kaipainen

Rss Widget

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Definition of media

Äripäev.ee

"ASi Eesti Meedia juhatuse esimees Mart Kadastiku hinnangul on praegu segane, mis täpsemalt on meedia ja mis mitte, selle selgumist ootab ta viie aasta jooksul."

Sloppy translation: boss of Eesti Meedia (one of the largest media groups in Estonia (part of Schibsted Group, one of the largest Scandinavian media groups...)) says that at the moment its difficult to define whats media and whats not and he thinks that it will be clear in about five years.

Very short conclusion of that article: Global economical situation is speeding up the change of media... Online will be even more important.

What do you think, where will it lead us?

Friday, September 26, 2008

Ubiquity goes to Mozilla

Really cool addon everyone try it out!

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/#comments

Brainframes, by Derrick De Kerckhove

Brainframes are technical prolongation created by the human being and now no more cleavable.

De Kerckhove, a McLuhan’s follower, considers the alphabet as the first brainframe of the history. He defines analogies between the occidental left-to-right reading method and the left-right division of cerebral hemispheres. This would have kept to what Abruzzese (in Industria Culturale) defines as the occidental privilege, which consists, according to De Kerckhove, in a typical confidence in rationality and in the rationalization of any experience, including the spatial ones. This would be due to a wider development of logic-spatial, chronological, sequencial and analytical elaboration, typical of the right hemisphere, developed by the left-to-right reading. Reading skills, as a matter of fact, would affect our way of thinking.

Widing the range of this studies, De Kerckhove says that, any technology which affects the language will involve changes on physiological, emotional and mental behaviour.

One of the first consequences of this occidental privilege is the try to reorganize the reality into a rational and mental structure: the perspective. The perspective as a visual strategy brought our culture to grab the world around us, to frame it spatially in order to analyze it temporally.

Television made a relevant blow to the supremacy of the alphabetical brainframe and it tried (successfully) to swap it with a new one: the videoframe. Our body reacts before our mind does to read the message the tv is passing on. Tv deletes the distance since our eyes are something like touching what we are seeing, and the time we need to interpret the information in our conscious mind. The watcher is passively watched by the tv, there’s no elaboration by him, so the elaboration is driven by the television. Besides the control the tv can have on people with the continuous solicitation of stimulus, it addicts the watcher to the screen, so he can no more escape the watching: his natural defences low down and he’s apt to a multisensorial involvement.

The perspective taught us to divide the reality into grids in order to rebuild the reality. A grid is the base for neural networks (NN), a sort of digital brain which has the duty to build link models which bring to wanted answers. Artificial intelligence and NN are invading the media, mixing electronic technologies through a massive digitalization of the world, in the perspective of a convergence of different technologies.

The highest level of integration seems to be virtual reality. VR is a joint of body and technology which seems to bring to the creation of a new brainframe: the cybernetic brain. The cybernetic brainframe seems to have the chance to realize what cubism had experimented: the convergence of different point of view different people interacting simultaneously on the collective thought in a same visual space. This is the direction which Lévy had pointed out talking about collective intelligence.

In the technogenesis of psychotechnologies is thanks to mass, speed and depth that the elaboration of information is come out from the private universe of the human mind to the public domain of cathode ray tube. While the mass man of television was surrounded by centred networks, the speed man of the computer age is everywhere in the middle. The depth is represented by the growth of VR industry. The culture of depth brings to watch through, watch inside, watch from inside, VR.

Design can be considered, in this view, as a skin of the culture, the external side in contact with our senses which gives sense to the technology. Computers speed up and disintegrate the traditional cultural screens and they rebuild them in a different way. The resistance of a structure is functional to its design, the material, the scale and the pass. The base of occidental economies has stood frequent changes: on the material level, from the agriculture phase to the information one; in terms of scale, from a local dimension to a global one and in terms of design, from nomads to ecology. The crisis are often considered symptoms of a changing era, a break, an imminent change.

De Kerckhove points out a new man, fest, informed, polyglot and with an ethic and environmental conscience. He defines then the brain as the place where the effects of technology transpose themselves in psychology and change culture to economy.

Lonely cyborgs in Web 3.0?

Assume that Web.30 will be about ubiquitous computing. How then will this contribute to peer communities and collaboration? Or are we going to forget about the social boom and turn to lonely cyborgs?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Autumn TriPP (01-02.11)

Last autumn in a small group we made a IMKE phototrip to a colorful autumn.
This year we could repeat the event in a larger, longer and deeper way so that it would become a traditional event- something as "IMKE autumn seminar".

The draft schedule could be something as that:

Saturday
10.00 arriving to the nature and taking a trip with cameras
14.00 full-filling lunch
15.00-19.00 seminar on the topic of interactive media (who could we invite as a presenter? I would propose Kristjan Jansen, interaction designer and information architect)
19.00 dinner and chat to continue in sauna :)

Sunday
10.00 breakfast and returning to the city

Financing:
Transport, accommodation, food- independently
Presenter- if possible from the university

Questions:
1) who is interested?
2) 1 or 2 days?
3) presenter?
4) place?
5) budget?- Katri promised to discuss with Mauri :)
6) suitable time (1-2 november)?

Please send your comments and ideas during this week, then we can decide what and when to organize..

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Olja Levistova invited you to join the group "IMKE"...

Olja invited you to join the Facebook group "IMKE".

Olja says, "Facebook of IMKE".

To see more details and confirm this group invitation, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=656421723&k=X4EY2YR2Q32M5GFGRD23RW

Everyone can join Facebook. To register, go to:
http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=656421723&k=X4EY2YR2Q32M5GFGRD23RW&r

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

___________________
This e-mail may contain promotional materials. If you do not wish to receive future commercial mailings from Facebook, please click on the link below. Facebook's offices are located at 156 University Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94301.
http://www.facebook.com/o.php?u=1527364033&k=82fadc

IMKE's LAST FM

http://www.last.fm/group/IMKE

regards,
Olja




Get news, entertainment and everything you care about at Live.com. Check it out!

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Shooting tragedy in Finland again: What's being mediated?

The second school shooting in Finland within a year. Apparently same kind of web fame strategy as last time. This shocks me particularly in the middle of teaching the virtues of the brave new community and collaboration media. Is this where it leads? What is it actually that is being mediated? (IMKE/Mauri)
There is a broad consensus about having a little social event on Monday 29.09.2008. Please mark it to your calendar. But where? Suggestions? 

IMKE community blog

Hey, this is intended to be the shared blog of the IMKE community.