alexmuller / collective / tags / culture

Tagged with “culture” (15) activity chart

  1. Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge — The Long Now

    Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. "We’re building the Library of Alexandria, version 2. We can one-up the Greeks!"

    Start with what the ancient library had—-books. The Internet Library already has 3 million books digitized. With its Scribe Book Scanner robots—-29 of them around the world—-they’re churning out a thousand books a day digitized into every handy ebook format, including robot-audio for the blind and dyslexic. Even modern heavily copyrighted books are being made available for free as lending-library ebooks you can borrow from physical libraries—-100,000 such books so far. (Kahle announced that every citizen of California is now eligible to borrow online from the Oakland Library’s "ePort.")

    As for music, Kahle noted that the 2-3 million records ever made are intensely litigated, so the Internet Archive offered music makers free unlimited storage of their works forever, and the music poured in. The Archive audio collection has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands every day uploading.

    Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating—-600,000 of them are accessible in the Archive already. In the year 2000, without asking anyone’s permission, the Internet Archive started recording 20 channels of TV all day, every day. When 9/11 happened, they were able to assemble an online archive of TV news coverage all that week from around the world ("TV comes with a point of view!") and make it available just a month after the event on Oct. 11, 2001.

    The Web itself. When the Internet Archive began in 1996, there were just 30 million web pages. Now the Wayback Machine copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its 6-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second.

    "What is the Library of Alexandria most famous for?" Kahle asked. "For burning! It’s all gone!" To maintain digital archives, they have to be used and loved, with every byte migrated forward into new media evey five years. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new Bibliotheca Alexadrina in Egypt and in Amsterdam. ("So our earthquake zone archive is backed up in the turbulent Mideast and a flood zone. I won’t sleep well until there are five or six backup sites.")

    Speaking of institutional longevity, Kahle noted during the Q & A that nonprofits demonstrably live much longer than businesses. It might be it’s because they have softer edges, he surmised, or that they’re free of the grow-or-die demands of commercial competition. Whatever the cause, they are proliferating.

    http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/nov/30/universal-access-all-knowledge/

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    —Huffduffed by carldpatterson one month ago

  2. Imagined Futures — dConstruct Audio Archive

    "€œThose who don’€™t remember history are doomed to repeat it. Those who can’€™t imagine the future are doomed to fuck it up."

    http://archive.dconstruct.org/2012/imaginedfutures

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    —Huffduffed by banterability 8 months ago

  3. Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll — dConstruct Audio Archive

    It begins to look as if we might have been wrong. All those predictions driving us forward throughout history have brought us finally to the unexpected realisation that the future is, suddenly, no longer what it used to be. Oops.

    http://archive.dconstruct.org/2012/admiralshovel

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    —Huffduffed by banterability 8 months ago

  4. Kevin Kelly | Trends and Social Consequences of Technology

    Kevin Kelly discusses 6 trends he believes will make the web look as different in 20 years as the web does from TV today. These aren’t super new ideas though, they are things that are pretty clearly here today already, but Kelly articulates them very well in this talk. I generally dislike attempts to definitively explain the future but I recommend listening to this talk for the effective articulation of principles like access-based business models, augmented reality and Natural User Interfaces.

    Our long-term interaction with the web will be defined by six trends. These trends will will involve dramatic changes that will make computing more like what we are used to seeing in many of today’s movies. Kevin Kelly explains why he believes that soon the internet will beneficially surround us in ways that most users don’t imagine today.

    http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4930.html#

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    —Huffduffed by marshallkirkpatrick one year ago

  5. BBC - Podcasts - Four Thought: Russell M. Davies 21 Sept 2011

    Four Thought talks include stories and ideas which will affect our future, in politics, society, the economy, business, science, technology or the arts. Recorded live, the talks are given by a range of people with a new thought to share.

    After the internet and social media, what will be the next technological revolution? Writer, blogger and social entrepreneur Russell M. Davies argues that like the early days of blogging, we are about to witness another flowering of individual creativity. This time, he says, it will unleash "all sorts of interesting gadgety things", and determine our relationships with them. "It’s about making your own stuff, which might be a bit silly and a bit trivial and pointless, but you get the satisfaction of making it yourself," he says. This revolution in individual gadgetry - and designing our relationship with them - will prove "exciting, radical, life-affirming stuff". Four Thought is a series of talks which combine thought provoking ideas and engaging storytelling. Recorded in front of an audience at the RSA in London, speakers take to the stage to air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/fourthought

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    —Huffduffed by banterability one year ago

  6. The Value Of Ruins

    Between The Alexandrian War of 48 BCE and the Muslim conquest of 642 CE, the Library of Alexandria, containing a million scrolls and tens of thousands of individual works was completely destroyed, its contents scattered and lost. An appreciable percentage of all human knowledge to that point in history was erased. Yet in his novella “The Congress”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “every few centuries, it’s necessary to burn the Library of Alexandria”.

    In his session James will ask if, as we build ourselves new structures of knowledge and certainty, as we design our future, should we be concerned with the value of our ruins?

    http://2010.dconstruct.org/speakers/james-bridle

    With a background in both computing and traditional publishing James Bridle attempts to bridge the gaps between technology and literature. He runs Bookkake, a small independent publisher and writes about books and the publishing industry at booktwo.org. In 2009 he helped launch Enhanced Editions, the first e-reading application with integrated audiobooks.

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    —Huffduffed by carldpatterson 2 years ago

  7. Clay Shirky and Cognitive Surplus

    From Future Tense with John Moe:

    Sometimes at night I’ll wonder what’s on TV. Surf around for a while, not find much, and get on the computer instead. There, I might update Facebook, tweet something on Twitter. And I’ll think, “It didn’t use to be like this.” Time away from work and responsibility used to be passive, we watched TV mutely, we read a book. We didn’t post videos to YouTube or edit Wikipedia. Online culture has meant that instead of just consuming culture, we also create it and share it. We don’t just watch Lost, we watch it and then go on message boards or even make our own videos.

    This is a shift detailed in Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and has been a big thinker on the way we work together online for many many years. We talk to him about what this shift means for society in the long term.

    http://futuretense.publicradio.org/episode/index.php?id=686751198

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    —Huffduffed by ideasatrandom 2 years ago

  8. RSA Events: You Are Not A Gadget

    Keynote

    Jaron Lanier, philosopher, digital guru and architect of Virtual Reality, is worried.

    Individual creativity has begun to go out of fashion. Machines, specifically computers, are no longer just tools to be used by the human mind - these days, we treat them as if they are altogether better than humans.

    Join Jaron Lanier as he delivers a call to arms against digital collectivism and proposes richer, more productive ways in which technology might interact with our culture.

    Chair: Nico Macdonald, writer and consultant on design, technology and innovation

    http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2010/you-are-not-a-gadget

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    —Huffduffed by marshallkirkpatrick 3 years ago

  9. Dmitry Orlov, “Social Collapse Best Practices”

    via http://huffduffer.com/Clampants/2974

    With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as “Goldilocks”—just the right size—when in fact is was “Tinkerbelle,” and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach.

    Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) transportation, and 4) security.

    By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage.

    http://blog.longnow.org/2009/02/16/dmitry-orlov-social-collapse-best-practices/

    Transcript: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

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    —Huffduffed by marshallkirkpatrick 3 years ago

  10. On The Media - Japan’s Cellphone Culture (Moshi Moshi)

    For many in the U.S., life without a cellphone is all but unimaginable. But if you think you’ve maxed out its utility, a look towards Japan shows your cell can do so much more. OTM producer Mark Phillips phones it in from Tokyo.

    http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/01/30/07

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    —Huffduffed by marshallkirkpatrick 3 years ago

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