Category: Recherche

Malte Spitz ‘Your phone company is watching’

This is a Ted-talk which tackles the subject of ownership of your own data. Malte Spitz talks about how he tried getting is mobile phone data back and what he did with it. What is most important to me is that he highlights why it is so important to hang onto (or claim it back) self-determination. So many times, people around me are convinced that all this gathered data isn’t really of great threat or of great potential.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/malte_spitz_your_phone_company_is_watching.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

When It Comes to Politics, the Internet is Closing Minds

I have been given this link to a video which I would like to share here. It is a debate on wether ‘the internet is closing minds when it comes to politics’. Robert Rosenkranz is introducing the four panelists, Eli Pariser, Jacob Weisberg, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Evgeny Morozov. It might not be obvious from the title why this video is relevant to my research focus, but as soon as you listen into it you will discover the many ways my research will refer to this.

http://fora.tv/2012/04/17/When_It_Comes_to_Politics_the_Internet_is_Closing_Minds

 

 

Martin Feuz

On the 21st of June 2012 Martin Feuz took the time to have a very interesting talk with me about my project. Martin is currently working as an Interaction Design Researcher (PhD) at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Apart from getting most productive feedback on the direction of my work, it was enriching to talk to an expert on the matter I just started discovering a few months ago.

We agreed on how interesting it can be as a ‘non-coder’ in the world of search engines and what freedom this position can give you. Then he talked about the differences between Information Retrieval and Information Seeking, how market-oriented the field of Search Engine obviously is and what this implies. Which lead us to Eli Pariser, whom I mentioned on this blog a while ago, his freshly (march 2012) launched website http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ and the topic of online-filters. On January the 20th, Google introduced a toggle button that allows the logged-in user to choose between a personalised and a non-personalised search. How come most people don’t know about this button yet? Something very interesting I find.

Martin raised a very good question: How can you inform yourself properly if you don’t know the answer? This is precisely where the topic of filter bubbles is crucial. It is important to Information Seeking that ‘you get a sense of the corpus’ (quote Martin Feuz) of information that there is.

There are a few projects that are proposing a search with a different angle;

http://www.horizobu.com/?q=&qt=w&s=58d06d86628e3242afed2f2b6a1538a2&l=en&r=US&t=&i=0#0

http://blekko.com/

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

http://duckduckgo.com/

Questions I have to answer for my project would be my personal interest in this topic, in what areas more transparency  is needed, how I understand the word ‘democracy’ in this context and why there isn’t any transparency when it comes to universal search engines such as Google, Bing ect, or why it seems to be so difficult to add some transparency there. Those are pivotal things to think about of course, but what was even more important for me to take from the discussion with Martin Feuz was a huge amount of push and incentive to pursue what I started working on.

Go ogle

A friend of mine told me about a facebook group she has created a while ago:

” (…) a group on Facebook, Go ogle, I created for fun some time ago for the simple reason that whenever I googled for images there would always come up some nakedish person even though the subject was really dry. You can see some examples there. I don´t know if that is relevant for your master project but that is medium internet to me when I´m lets say looking for logo for an evironmental organisation and a naked person is in the mixture (even with moderate filter).”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wordless Web

This is a plug-in I got sent to by a friend of mine; you drag the icon into your bookmarks, then go onto any website you want, click on ‘wordless web’ and the chosen website will appear without any text.

I don’t know how useful this is, but it certainly is interesting filter-research.

http://wordlessweb.com/

 

Rob van Kranenburg

At the beginning of May I had the pleasure to meet with Rob van Kranenburg during his visit to Switzerland. He is a busy man, so it was an honour to be able to ask him questions, to talk about the Internet of Things, The Council and also more in general how he views the world now and in the future. Apart from being very interesting and inspiring, Rob pointed me toward a concrete direction for my master thesis, which might have taken me a lot longer to see by myself.

http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/

He spoke about different kinds of intelligence and what a nice challenge it would be to create a platform which is catered towards all of them. Within the frame of my project, I understand this statement the following way (hoping not to translate it wrongly): There is different ways of searching, some people search online, some offline, some ask people directly, some go straight to the library, some search only on Google, some on other search engines, and maybe, in the future, some people won’t remember analogue encyclopedias. It is not about cataloging those kinds into right or wrong, or old and new. It is about making the path of online research more transparent.

Rob wondered wether it would be interesting to look into children and make them my target audience. Which is interesting to me because one of the options I am thinking about is to design for a self-given future scenario in the world of online searching.

This leads me to the conclusions I could draw from this conversation with the creator of The Internet of Things. There is three enquiries I will be doing over the summer:

1.HOW DO YOU SEE THE INTERNET? A large enquiry where I ask as many people as possible to send me an image/images of how they see the internet. I am trying to get instinctive (imagery) associations back which show the relationship the user has to the medium internet.

2. SEARCH BEHAVIOUR (OFF- AND ONLINE) A focused enquiry with 5-6 people where they search the answer to a given question; I will observe how and where they search. What is their instincts? What is their pattern? What do they avoid?

3. COMPARATIVE ONLINE SEARCH ENQUIRY  A large enquiry where I ask one specific question to people from different countries. How are their findings different? A simple search result from the same search engine can differ depending on .ch, .nl, .fr, .it ect.

These enquiries will help me to define

– what it is I would like to make visible in the online search process

– what my target group is

– what is it concretely I will be designing

 

 

Eli Pariser – “Beware online for Filter Bubbles”

Ich möchte hier ein paar Screenshots dieses TED talks zeigen, und ein paar seiner relevantesten Aussagen bezüglich meines Projektes zitieren.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zitat Eli Pariser via TED talk:

So it’s not just Google and Facebook either. This is something that’s sweeping the Web.There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times — all flirting with personalization in various ways. And this moves us very quickly toward a world in whichthe Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume somethingthat has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out.

(…)

That, in fact, you couldn’t have a functioning democracy if citizens didn’t get a good flow of information,

Er sagt, die menschlichen “Gatekeepers” der Informationen hätten sich in “algorythmic gatekeepers” verwandelt.

Als Schlusszitat dies:

Kevin Ashton: The Internet of Things

In 1999 hat Kevin Ashton den Begriff ‘The Internet of Things’ zum ersten Mal benützt. Seine Originaldefinition lautet wie folgt:

“Today computers—and, therefore, the Internet—are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. Conventional diagrams of the Internet … leave out the most numerous and important routers of all – people. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. And that’s a big deal. We’re physical, and so is our environment … You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today’s information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.”

Ich habe vor ca. 6 Wochen zum ersten Mal von dem Begriff ‘The Internet of Things’ gehört und finde es faszinierend. Es ist hochaktuell und betrifft uns alle.

Umso mehr freut es mich, dass Robert van Kranenburg zugestimmt hat, Anfang Mai sich die Zeit zu nehmen, um mit mir über die Idee des Internets der Dinge und mein Projekt zu reden. Van Kranenburg ist ein Dozent an mehreren Instituten und Universtitäten, Schriftsteller und Verfasser vom ‘offiziellen’ The Internet of Things.

http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/content/rob-van-kranenburg

Hans Rosling’s Data Visualisation

“The Amazing Power of Data Visualization, Augmented Reality and Social Discovery”, Hans Rosling

http://unitystoakes.blogspot.com/2011/01/amazing-power-of-data-visualization.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ein schönes Beispiel von Informationsgrafik; aber ich denke, dass man hier die technischen Möglichkeiten von Feld der Augmented Reality noch freier Nutzen könnte. Meiner Ansicht nach ist diese Visualisierung zu nah an einem Video und einer 2D-Grafik.

 

December 5th, 2012

I would like to correct my earlier comment on Hans Rosling’s data visualisation. My mentor questioned my opinion above, and I think rightly so. For the non-german readers, to quote myself on what I said: ‘In my opinion, this visualisation is too close to a video and a 2D-graphic.’ In a purely technical way this might be true, but my comment does by far not give enough credit to Rosling’s work. He is the founder of gapminder.org, an organisation which is dedicated to ‘show the fact-based world-view’ http://www.gapminder.org/.

In this TED-talk  http://www.gapminder.org/videos/religions-and-babies/  he works his magic with simple cardboard boxes for example to show the (non-) correlation between religion and childbirth-growth, and in what way the factor of income comes into the equation. If that is not ‘3D’, what could be?

Have a look and enjoy!