On the horizon of a real-time networked society

On the horizon of a real-
time networked society
Chris Thorpe
On the horizon of a real-time networked society
Jaggeree
/think/help/create/work
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaggeree/
I want to talk about the real time space which is almost a by product of social media
What were seeing emerge currently I think have long term societal effects
Business models and practices that have seemed normal through the twentieth century may
fall away to be replaced by new notions of value

Jaggeree
and that’s not a bad thing if books as ridiculous as this become history, books talking about
dominating audiences within personal and conversational media

Jaggeree
and the ridiculous and unsustainable consumerist arms race that has given us the six blade
razor fuelled by mass media advertising
I don’t think advertising is the route to monetising this space
I personally want more and different

Jaggeree
Pattern of self-defeating,
self-destructive, value-destructive
behaviour.
Umair Haque
I’ve had enough of this zombieconomy, which Umair Haque so eloquently talks about
A world where advertising is the desired modus operandi of a communication medium is to
me a world which is entirely wedded to the conceit of unsustainable economic growth at the
expense of moral and environmental wealth

Jaggeree
Anew world
(please)
This is some of what I’d like
- Businesses that have the possibility to turn themselves inside out and find new value in
what they have
- Charities which can mould themselves into the likenesses of their supporters
- Manufacturers who can make things only when they have enough orders to make them
worthwhile
and
- An environment when the data which is beginning to float around us and surround us,
which at first seems to almost be a waste product of our digital lives will be used to improve
services
We need to find new business models built around the value of the stream itself rather than
ones which use the stream as a location to place adverts to sell something

Jaggeree
API OK
We’re creating enormous amounts of data at the moment, collectively through social
software. more than any publisher or broadcaster ever could
For a programmer like me there are an enormous amount of wonderful things called APIs,
sort of websites made for computer programs to read and remix the data and possibility that
they contain
Where we can stack up data and utility and algorithms like computational lego
It’s a very profound change, it puts true value into having access to data

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ogil/
Jaggeree
Making the impersonal personal
and it’s powered by something simple and profoundly changing itself.
For me, this collection of things we call social media is all about making impersonal things,
such as city life, personal again and giving people a voice to express themselves

Jaggeree
http://www.flickr.com/photos/celpelly/
The village, pivoting around you
and at a global scale
If you deconstruct it far enough, your social graph of friends and your actions and activities
within it look a lot like a village.
Albeit a village which exists within your environment with inhabitants strewn around the
world
A village with you as its fulcrum or pivot

http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/
Jaggeree
Real-time,
real-sentiment,
at scale
If you take a step back from that village, you pull away from it in a sort of Google maps zoom
out, what you see is not the village or people but sentiment, clouds of feelings about things,
be they people, or links or organisations or companies or products.
It is this real time stream which is slightly harder to get your head around but is of massive
import

Jaggeree
This was the fascinating sentiment view of the world at about 12pm the day after Alan
Rusbridger told his followers that The Guardian was gagged with a super injunction
preventing it from reporting on parliament.
What is wonderful to me here is that in amongst the outrage and the sentiment are mentions
not only of what The Guardian couldn’t point at in the names of organisations like Carter
Ruck and Trafigura, but also the presence of the words toxic, dumping and minton, referring
to the secret Minton report that The Guardian couldn’t mention which discussed the tragic
effects and damage to the Ivory Coast from the dumping of toxic waste.
A light had been shone and people could search and link and broadcast and amplify

We live in the age of
“point-at-things”
Tom Coates
Jaggeree
http://www.flickr.com/photos/simon/
Tom Coates said it best
We live in the age of point at things. Everyone can be a micro-broadcaster, everyone
potentially has their own amplification network of friends.
And when this is combined with a massive information store it has huge implications in the
world of investigation and discourse.

Jaggeree
Wired said it all for me, history made in real time, media censorship

http://www.flickr.com/photos/howzey/
scarcity, abundance and friends
Jaggeree
Migratory, flocking...
It is a medium which has flocking, it is as Mark Earls points out the sort of herd behaviour
we’d expect, we are after all herd animals

Real time, real world
Jaggeree
What can be made out of flocking intent data, some fascinating early examples are about
place

Citizens as sensory organs
Jaggeree
Treating all of the sensors we carry with us such as our phones as part of a nervous system
for the built environment

We inhabit a point in time/space
Jaggeree
This statement is true of all of us and we’re now able through our devices and through
services which exist to update our time/space/sentiment at any moment
But often we’re scared of giving out our exact location, we feel bad things may happen (and
they may) and we fear an erosion of privacy
Using your location just to send a local offer of 5p off a big mac at the store near by would be
a lazy and short termist use of this amazing data feed which can improve our built
environment, it would annoy users and they’d not want to play for long

Aworld of data
An internet of things
Jaggeree
Interesting things starting to happen when you treat things as if they are people and
anonymise people as if they are things. anthropomorphosation is fascinating and it points the
way to when we are more accepting about sharing time and place in the way that we already
seem to be becoming about sharing our feelings
This photo was taken out of a window of a plane on my way back from Sweden last week, the
big blocks of light are towns, the small blobs are ships

Jaggeree
http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/
Ships can talk data, they can tell a service where they are which gives us information about
how far from port they are, how busy shipping lanes are, imagine for a moment that people’s
devices if anonymised could do the same things in cities

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
Wayfinding
You could use it as the digital equivalents of cow paths to show routes through built
environments

Jaggeree
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blprnt/
Jer Thorp has been looking at migratory patterns discernable through twitter, looking for the
phrases “arriving at” and then looking for a default home location of that user to map air
travel

Jaggeree
http://myskystatus.com/
There’s also a fascinating flip side where you can get objects to talk for you when you can’t
do it, Lufthansa has set up a service where you can associate yourself with a flight and it can
then update your friends as to where you are

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
Sometimes itʼs quite fun
to become a data thing
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fourwalks/
I was interested recently to think of myself as a thing which generates data, ironically this
was how I spent a recent holiday (I clearly need to get out more, but I had a really relaxing
holiday too)
I created a new twitter identity so I could tell the story semi-anonymously, packed a big bag
of kit and went off to Austria to walk for four days armed with lots of devices which could tell
the stories of my walks

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
I created this web site which gave people information on the set of walks I was going to do to
raise money for charity, a wonderful crowd sourced people centred charity called Childs I
which I’m a volunteer for
For each day I told the story of my walk through words

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
and pictures

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
and especially data... I created a little Android app which could send my GPS location back to
a server and you could see exactly where I was at any point in time
I really want to play with a firehose of data like the marathon or the Olympics now
I want the data that comes from every runner to automatically update their supporters who in
turn can send them messages of encouragement
and just for one day I want to use the feeds of data from cctv cameras to record the journeys
that these people go on so they can replay their personal adventure

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matlock/
Data + Time = Story
Matt Locke
As Matt Locke from Channel 4 points out, Data+Time = Story

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
I was very touched when Tom Watson wrote this

Terra Future 09
Jaggeree
I kind of opened up my holiday and although I wanted peace and tranquility and solitude,
friends and people I’d never met before alike followed along and in some cases donated to
the charity and at the very least learnt a bit about it
I actually got something like augmented solitude, something not quite the same, but
beautifully different, it’s what occurs in the new stream enhanced world

Jaggeree
So coming back to what I said at the start, businesses are starting to turn themselves inside
out such as The Guardian making its content available to developers
Seeing intrinsic value in the raw materials of the newspaper rather than the physical object or
its digital facsimile

Jaggeree
Companies like threadless are accepting product designs from the community and then only
putting them into production when enough people want to buy them and listening constantly
and innovating with their community

Jaggeree
Charities are forming themselves out of their supporters like the fabulous Childs I, lowering
costs and increasing engagement
Treating them not just as units of money or help but telling stories about their efforts
I could have waxed lyrical about Amanda’s work with Twestival here too

Jaggeree
http://www.google.org/flutrends/
The left over data from the real time web is starting to tell us about the world we live in
Telling us new things and unexpected things and important things

Chris Thorpe
@jaggeree
scarcity, abundance and friends
Jaggeree
Anew world
(thank you)

On the horizon of a real-time networked society

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On the horizon of a real-time networked society