–+ ROAM DIGITAL +–

Bruce Sterling’s comments and responses are relatively interesting…

Also check out his keynote at http://www.transmediale.de/en/keynote-bruce-sterling-us-atemporality

Repost: http://www.cis-india.org/research/dn/dnrep

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and Hivos have assessed the state of knowledge on the potential impact of youth for social transformation and political engagement in the South. This report ‘Digital Natives with a Cause?’ charts the scholarship and practice of youth and technology and informs further research and intervention within diverse contexts and cultures.

The report displays that digital natives have a potential impact as agents of change. It concludes that multidisciplinary theoretical approaches venturing beyond the cause-and-effect model and providing the necessary vocabulary and sensitivity are crucial to understanding Digital Natives. The lament that youths are apolitical is a result of insufficient attention to activities that do not conform to existing notions of political and civil society formation. Digital Natives are sensitive and thoughtful. It is time to listen to them and their ideas, and to focus on their development as responsible and active citizens rather than on their digital exploits or technologised interests.

The report specifically focuses on youth as e-agents of change within emerging information societies to explore questions of technology mediated identities, embedded conditions of social transformation and political participation, as well as potentials for sustained livelihood and education. It identifies the knowledge gaps and networks and further areas of intervention in the field of Digital Natives.

As a first step in working towards enabling Digital Natives for social transformation and political engagement, Hivos and CIS will organize a Multistakeholder Conference Fall 2010.

Digital Natives with a Cause? – Report Summary    Download Pdf document  Here

Digital Natives with a Cause? – Report                    Download Pdf document Here

About Apple’s iPad via here and via iWorry …

“iWorry” is my foray into the iPad discussion, focusing less on the product and more on its support infrastructure:

But the iPad isn’t a phone; it is a general purpose computer. It does email and Web and documents and presentations and games and all of the other kinds of things we do with our “regular” computers. Yet it will suffer under the same restrictions as the iPhone–prohibition of any application that Apple doesn’t like, for whatever reason. Sometimes that means the application uses undocumented features, but startlingly often it just means “duplication of features”–the application does something that Apple’s own software does, but does it differently. (This raises the uncomfortable question as to whether the Kindle app for the iPhone–which works quite nicely, actually–will run on the iPad.)

As futurist Jamais Cascio told io9:

This is Apple’s big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that’s borderline acceptable, but it’s not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers.

The iPad has all the problems of television, with none of the benefits of computers.

GML = Graffiti Markup Language from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Original vimeo link also see the open database for GML

Watch out Does this mean more suicide bombers and machete wielding tall black men? Or a new generation equipped with a deep understanding of what it means to be on the outside and know how to win the hearts and minds of a scared minority and introduce the ideas and knowledge needed to re-shape how the world works…

“The great bulk of today’s 1.2 billion youth—nearly 90 percent—are in developing countries,” said Carl Haub, PRB senior demographer and co-author of the data sheet. Eight in 10 of those youth live in Africa and Asia. “During the next few decades, these young people will most likely continue the current trend of moving from rural areas to cities in search of education and training opportunities, gainful employment, and adequate health care.” One of the major social questions of the next few decades is whether their expectations will be met.

http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2009/2009wpds.aspx

Roberto Verganti’s DESIGN-DRIVEN INNOVATION

Changing the Rules of Competition by
Radically Innovating What Things Mean

How to create innovations that customers do not expect, but that they eventually love? How to create products and services, that are so distinct from those that dominate the market and so inevitable that make people passionate?

Design-Driven Innovation unveils how leaders such as Apple, Nintendo, Alessi, Whole Foods Market build an unbeatable and sustainable competitive advantage through innovations that do not come from the market but that create new markets. These leaders compete through products and services that have a radical new meaning: those that convey a completely new reason for customers to buy them. The cases, data and stories in the book show how to create this new vision and how to successfully propose it to customers. A strategy and a process that leverage the rich and multifaceted network of a firm outsiders, looking beyond customers to those “interpreters”– such as scientists, customers, suppliers, intermediaries, designers, artists – who deeply understand and shape the markets they work in.

Once upon a time, I thought that ‘anyone could an anything’… But I don’t think this now – not so much… Crowds  are useful to get a sense of trends. The world is curated and our stories are edited by a top down machine that, as written above, “convey a completely new reason for customers to buy them”.

But within that curated (=controlled) space, there still remains holes to intervene and glitch the system. A little hope…

Also see The Customer Isn’t a Human Being and the more comprehensive Marketing, Innovation and the Creation of Customers.

There seems to be many experts out there talking about the future of newspapers. But this guy – Clay Shirky’s claim to “Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good” is interesting to consider.

He seems to assume that news is considered by the public to be a public good… Here’s the full story from The Nieman Journalism Lab… Below is an extract from his talk:

What the Internet does is it makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain — not impossible, but harder. And it makes public models easier to sustain — partly because of the lowered cost… And it makes social models much, much easier. So we’re seeing, I believe, a rebalancing of the landscape in terms of the logic of the creation of public goods away from a market dominated by commercial interest into a market where all three of these modes of production are going to be operating side by side in different ways.

I think people will pay for quality news, if they were convinced that quality news is necessary for their lives. Sitting here in Melbourne, I am not sure I want to pay 30 cents to read about some pedophile priest in some town in the USA.

Also, the whole discussion about newspapers surviving the digital age is about old institutions adapting to new ways of working. Perhaps it’s more about me paying $5 to six journalists who are reporting the stuff I want to know more about.