media

Our Gutenberg Moment: It’s Time To Grapple With The Internet’s Effect On Democracy

Curated on October 18, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alberto Ibargüen at HuffPost: “When clashes wracked Charlottesville, many Americans saw neo-nazi demonstrators as the obvious instigators. But others focused on counter-demonstrators, a view amplified by the president blaming “many sides.” The rift in perception underscored an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth about the flow of information today: Americans no longer have a shared foundation of facts upon which we can agree.

Politics has long been a messy, divisive business. I lived through the 1960s, a period of similar dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and disunity, brilliantly chronicled by Ken Burns’ new film “The Vietnam War” on PBS. But common, local knowledge —of history and current events — has always been the great equalizer in American society. Today, however, a decrease in shared knowledge has led to a collapse in trust. Over the past few years, we have watched our capacity to compromise wane as not only our politics, but also our most basic value systems, have become polarized.

The key difference between then and now is how news is delivered and consumed. At the beginning of our Republic, the reach of media was local and largely verifiable. That direct relationship between media outlets and their communities — local newspapers and, later, radio and TV stations — held until the second half of the 20th century. Network TV began to create a sense of national community but it fractioned with the sudden ability to offer targeted, membership-based models via cable.

But cable was nothing compared to Internet. Internet’s unique ability to personalize and to create virtual communities of interest accelerated the decline of newspapers and television business models and altered the flow of information in ways that we are still uncovering. “Media” now means digital and cable, cool mediums that require hot performance. Trust in all media, including traditional media, is at an all-time low, and we’re just now beginning to grapple with the threat to democracy posed by this erosion of trust.

Internet is potentially the greatest democratizing tool in history. It is also democracy’s greatest challenge. In offering access to information that can support any position and confirm any bias, social media has propelled the erosion of our common set of everyday facts….(More)”.

Open mapping from the ground up: learning from Map Kibera

Curated on October 10, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Erica Hagen for Making All Voices Count: “In Nairobi in 2009, 13 young residents of the informal settlement of Kibera mapped their community using OpenStreetMap, an online mapping platform. This was the start of Map Kibera, and eight years of ongoing work to date on digital mapping, citizen media and open data. In this paper, Erica Hagen – one of the initiators of Map Kibera – reflects on the trajectory of this work. Through research interviews with Map Kibera staff, participants and clients, and users of the data and maps the project has produced, she digs into what it means for citizens to map their communities, and examines the impact of open local information on members of the community. The paper begins by situating the research and Map Kibera in selected literature on transparency, accountability and mapping. It then presents three case studies of mapping in Kibera – in the education, security and water sectors – discussing evidence about the effects not only on project participants, but also on governmental and non-governmental actors in each of the three sectors. It concludes that open, community-based data collection can lead to greater trust, which is sorely lacking in marginalised places. In large-scale data gathering, it is often unclear to those involved why the data is needed or what will be done with it. But the experience of Map Kibera shows that by starting from the ground up and sharing open data widely, it is possible to achieve strong sector-wide ramifications beyond the scope of the initial project, including increased resources and targeting by government and NGOs. While debates continue over the best way to truly engage citizens in the ‘data revolution’ and tracking the Sustainable Development Goals, the research here shows that engaging people fully in the information value chain can be the missing link between data as a measurement tool, and information having an impact on social development….(More)”.

Comparing Models of Collaborative Journalism

Curated on October 5, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Center for Cooperative Media: “Working cooperatively is nothing new, to be sure, but how frequently and impactfully news organizations have been collaborating over the last few years is certainly something new. Dramatically shifting business models, technological advances and seismic shifts in audience have lead to groundbreaking and award-winning collaborations around the world, including the Panama Papers and Electionland.

Today the Center released its first full research paper on this topic, identifying six distinct models of collaborative journalism. The report, authored by Center research director Sarah Stonbely, explains the underpinnings of each model and also explores the history of collaborative journalism.

“As we document, collaborative journalism is now being practiced on a scale that constitutes a revolution in journalism,” Stonbely writes. “The many trials and errors of the last decade have generated cooperative efforts that have stood the test of time and are showing the way for others.

“While lessons are still being learned, collaborative journalism has evolved from experiment to common practice.”

In her research, Stonbely focused on cooperative arrangements, formal and informal, between two or more news and information organizations which aim to supplement each group’s resources and maximize the impact of the content produced.

She separates various kinds of collaboration by comparing levels of integration versus time, which, when viewed on a matrix, creates six models of collaborative journalism:

Millions of dollars are being poured into such collaborative reporting projects and cooperative arrangements around the world. According to the Center’s report, for example, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has put nearly $32 million dollars into funding 29 local and regional partnerships as of earlier this year — and that number is still growing….(More)”

New program wants to improve cities with the power of tweets and Flickr uploads

Curated on October 1, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Marissa Clifford at Curbed: “Want to watch street life unfold outside of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, long after it’s closed for the day? Or uncover the hidden ways both tourists and locals alike use Manhattan’s most famous landmarks? Now you can, all thanks to the power of data.

Urban Pulse, open-source software developed at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, uses data to create a map that visualizes how people move through cities. From Urban Pulse’s interface, you can observe, for example, how tourists navigate Central Park.

Sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, who worked in the early years of the 20th century, developed a theory of urban environments that used the human body as an organizing analogy: They likened the mundane processes of everyday urban life (things like phone calls and taxi rides) to the heartbeat. Urban Pulse brings that analogy into the 21st century, replacing statistics about phone calls with social media and other digital data.

Essentially, Urban Pulse is a dynamic, comparative heat map. And the hot spots on the map are made up of what the research team dubbed “pulses” and “beats,” terminology that was inspired by Park and Burgess’s original analogy.

But Urban Pulse’s findings don’t simply reinforce what we already know about cities. By pinpointing how, when, and by whom city spaces are most often used, the data has the power to upend our preconceptions about civic space. This has potentially far-reaching implications for urban planners, architects, and city planners.

But what is a “pulse?” And where is that social media data coming from? Simply put, a pulse is a graphic representation of the kinds of open source data that serve as proxies for human activity, like tweets and Flickr uploads. Though Urban Pulse currently only uses data from Flickr and Twitter, it is free to download on GitHub, and its creators are hoping to see a wider variety of data types input by the open source community….(More)”.

Smart cities are great. Human-centric cities are (again) the future

Curated on September 27, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Naveen Rajdev at Quartz:” …You don’t want your smart city’s proverbial slip to show, and you don’t want to overwhelm your citizens with too much tech. So what’s the plan?

1. Start making technology invisible

Being able to “see” technology creates interaction, and interaction creates distraction.

To illustrate: Assuming your car and smartphone are connected, your phone should be able to notify someone—someone texting you, for example—that you’re driving and can’t respond. You don’t want to take your hands off the wheel, so your phone should instead be able to send an automatic response to the text sender: “I’m driving right now, but I’ll get back to you later.” It keeps you and others safe on the road, and it doesn’t force you to respond….

Detroit, for instance, is already investigating the idea of “invisible” technology, particularly when it comes to residents’ safety. Last fall, Detroit’s city officials partnered with Comcast to expand the area’s Project Green Light program, which allows businesses to install cameras police can use to monitor crimes (and solve them) in real time.

The program’s expansion led to a 50% drop in violent crime at convenience stores and gas stations. Thanks to the technology—which was by no means a distraction to Detroit’s residents—the city is safer, and business is better.

While Detroit excels at making tech inconspicuous, most of the country is doing what it can to be more on-the-grid than ever before, completely ignoring (or altogether missing) the subtleties “invisible” tech offers. Last fall, New York City officials introduced LinkNYC, a free Wi-Fi service throughout Manhattan in the form of 500 touch-screen kiosks available for public use.

As the adage suggests, sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. With the kiosks being essentially too visible in Manhattan’s streets, problems arose: The city’s homeless population began misusing them, and certain groups started insisting the kiosks help officials “spy” on its residents….

2. Your city must be conscious of digital overload

In a world where technology rules, it’s imperative we find time to think, breathe, and unplug, so city leaders must carefully marry tech and mindfulness. Otherwise, they face the consequences of information overload: weakened decision-making and the feeling of being overwhelmed, among others. A city’s occasional digital detox is crucial.

Why? Studies have shown that smartphones could be causing insomnia, social media may be spawning narcissism, and computer screens might be making our kids less empathetic. At some point, a line must be drawn.

Luckily, certain cities are starting to draw it. Late last year, Miami’s development authority department proposed turning lanes clogged with traffic on Biscayne Boulevard into a spacious greenway that welcomed both pedestrians and bicyclists. Beyond that, walking trails are growing along the river and bay, and another trail is in the works. City developers have also approved smaller residential projects in areas that public transit serves….

Even a simple art exhibit can be marred by too much tech. …Other gallery curators aren’t loving the marriage of art and tech. Connie Wolf, Stanford University’s director of the Cantor Arts Center, is particularly cautious. “In our busy lives, in our crazy lives, we’re always connected to technology,” she said. “People want to come into museums and put that technology aside for a moment.”

Bottom line: Being connected is great, but being conscious is better. City leaders would do well to remember this….(More)”.