How is New Media designed and deployed?
Is it art or engineering?
The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds
Maybe the question that needs to be asked is how far apart art and engineering actually are. In general it seems that people put them at opposite sides of the spectrum with art being all about creativity and engineering all logical and scientific.
For me the art of engineering is so much more than just creativity – it is something that goes to the core of function, aesthetics, and problem solving. I believe that we as engineers need to create solutions that actually enhance people's lives. The point where all of this comes together is the point were we as engineers can start to be artists.
It is more than function and more than beauty – true engineering art should take your breath away and change the way you see the world. That is the kind of art that I want to create.
A digital ecosystem is any distributed adaptive open socio-technical system, with properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability, inspired by natural ecosystems.
Knowledge ecosystem
The idea of a knowledge ecosystem is an approach to knowledge management which claims to foster the dynamic evolution of knowledge interactions between entities to improve decision-making and innovation through improved evolutionary networks of collaboration.
Like natural ecosystems, these knowledge ecosystems have inputs, throughputs and outputs operating in open exchange relationship with their environments. Multiple layers and levels of systems may be integrated to form a complete ecosystem. These systems consist of interlinked knowledge resources, databases, human experts, and artificial knowledge agents that collectively provide an online knowledge for anywhere anytime performance of organizational tasks. The availability of knowledge on an anywhere-anytime basis blurs the line between learning and work performance. Both can occur simultaneously and sometimes interchangeably.
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down.
Without the rain, there would be no rainbow. (G. K. Chesterton)
The camera that turns light into living pictures
No more fighting with dials and settings and modes. No more flat, boring, static photographs. With a Lytro, you unleash the light.
How does it work?
The light field is a core concept in imaging science, representing fundamentally more powerful data than in regular photographs. The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it's all the light rays in a scene. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field.
Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.
By substituting powerful software for many of the internal parts of regular cameras, light field processing introduces new capabilities that were never before possible. Sophisticated algorithms use the full light field to unleash new ways to make and view pictures. Relying on software rather than components can improve performance, from increased speed of picture taking to the potential for capturing better pictures in low light. It also creates new opportunities to innovate on camera lenses, controls and design.
The way we communicate visually is evolving rapidly, and people's expectations are changing in lockstep. Light field cameras offer astonishing capabilities. They allow both the picture taker and the viewer to focus pictures after they're snapped, shift their perspective of the scene, and even switch seamlessly between 2D and 3D views. With these amazing capabilities, pictures become immersive, interactive visual stories that were never before possible – they become living pictures.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).
The concept of cloud computing fills a perpetual need of IT: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT's existing capabilities.
The Internet has brought new concerns about privacy in an age where computers can permanently store records of everything: where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.
Internet privacy involves the desire or mandate of personal privacy concerning transactions or transmission of data via the Internet. It also involves the exercise of control over the type and amount of information revealed about a person on the Internet and who may access said information.
People with only a casual concern for Internet privacy need not achieve total anonymity. Internet users may achieve an adequate level of privacy through controlled disclosure of personal information. The revelation of IP addresses, non-personally-identifiable profiling, and similar information might become acceptable trade-offs for the convenience that users could otherwise lose using the workarounds needed to suppress such details rigorously. On the other hand, some people desire much stronger privacy. In that case, they may try to achieve Internet anonymity to ensure privacy – use of the Internet without giving any third parties the ability to link the Internet activities to personally-identifiable information (P.I.I.) of the Internet user. In order to keep your information private, people need to be careful on what they submit and look at online. When filling out forms and buying merchandise, that becomes tracked and because your information was not private, companies are now sending you spam and advertising on similar products.
In today's technological world, millions of individuals are subject to privacy threats. Companies are hired not only to watch what you visit online, but to infiltrate the information and send advertising based on your browsing history. People set up accounts for Facebook; enter bank and credit card information to various websites.
With the creation of Facebook and the continued popularity of MySpace many people are giving their personal information out on the internet. These social networks keep track of all interactions used on their sites and save them for later use. Most users are not aware that they can modify the privacy settings and unless they modify them, their information is open to the public.
Another privacy issue with social networks is the privacy agreement. The privacy agreement states that the social network owns all of the content that users upload. This includes pictures, videos, and messages are all stored in the social networks database even if the user decides to terminate his or her account. Additionally, the advent of the Web 2.0, which is the system that facilitates participatory information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web, allows for Facebook and other social networking media websites filter through the advertisements, assigning specific ones to specific age groups, gender groups, and even ethnicities. Web 2.0 has caused social profiling and is a growing concern for Internet privacy.
Social networking has redefined the role of Internet privacy. Since users are willingly disclosing personal information online, the role of privacy and security is somewhat blurry. Sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter have grown popular by broadcasting status updates featuring personal information such as location. Facebook Places, in particular, is a Facebook service which publicizes user location information to the networking community. Users are allowed to "check-in" at various locations including retail stores, convenience stores, and restaurants. Also, users are able to create their own place, disclosing personal information onto the Internet.
In one way or another, it is the user's prerogative to apply privacy settings when providing personal information on the internet and it should be done smartly.
Discover instant information around you for all of the interesting places, attractions, restaurants, movie theaters, shops, doctors or museums. Last train home? junaio 3.0 takes Augmented Reality another step forward, making the Augmented World around us come to life.
Compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad2. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.
How do we go about pushing interactive media closer to the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things concepts?
Metadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts (types). Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at design time the application contains no data. In this case the correct description would be "data about the containers of data". Descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content. In this case, a useful description would be "data about data contents" or "content about content" thus metacontent.
Metadata (metacontent) is traditionally found in the card catalogs of libraries. As information has become increasingly digital, metadata is also used to describe digital data using metadata standards specific to a particular discipline. By describing the contents and context of data files, the quality of the original data/files is greatly increased.
For example:
A webpage may include metadata specifying what language it's written in, what tools were used to create it, and where to go for more on the subject, allowing browsers to automatically improve the experience of users.
A digital image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, when the image was created, and other data. Metadata may be written into a digital photo file that will identify who owns it, copyright and contact information, what camera created the file, along with exposure information and descriptive information such as keywords about the photo, making the file searchable on the computer and/or the Internet. Some metadata is written by the camera and some is input by the photographer and/or software after downloading to a computer.
Metadata on the Internet
The HTML format used to define web pages allows for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, from basic descriptive text, dates and keywords to further advanced metadata schemes such as the Dublin Core, e-GMS, and AGLS standards. Pages can also be geotagged with coordinates. Metadata may be included in the page's header or in a separate file. Microformats allow metadata to be added to on-page data in a way that users do not see, but computers can readily access.
Interestingly, many search engines are cautious about using metadata in their ranking algorithms due to exploitation of metadata and the practice of search engine optimization, SEO, to improve rankings. See Meta element article for further discussion.
Ontology
In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain.
Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it.
Examples of applications using ontology engines
SAPPHIRE or Situational Awareness and Preparedness for Public Health Incidences and Reasoning Engines is a semantics-based health information system capable of tracking and evaluating situations and occurrences that may affect public health.
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.
Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.
A good example of a social website that utilizes folksonomy is 43 Things, a social networking website that is built on the principles of tagging, rather than creating explicit interpersonal links (as seen in Friendster and Orkut). Users create accounts and then list a number of goals or hopes; these goals are parsed by a lexer and connected to other people's goals that are constructed with similar words or ideas.
The Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a "man-made woven web of data" that facilitates machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web. The concept of Semantic Web applies methods beyond linear presentation of information (Web 1.0) and multi-linear presentation of information (Web 2.0) to make use of hyper-structures leading to entities of hypertext.
It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards. He defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."
"Semantic Web" is sometimes used as a synonym for "Web 3.0", though each term's definition may vary depending on whom you ask. Many believe that Web 3.0 is the "next big thing"[citation needed] but there only lies speculation as to just what that might be. It will be an improvement in the respect that it will still contain Web 2.0 properties while continuing to add to its ever expanding lexicon and library of applications.
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects (Things) and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure. The concept of the Internet of Things has become popular through the Auto-ID Center. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is often seen as a prerequisite for the Internet of Things. If all objects of daily life were equipped with radio tags, they could be identified and inventoried by computers. However, unique identification of things may be achieved through other means such as barcodes or 2D-codes as well.
Although the idea is simple, its application is difficult. If all objects in the world were equipped with miniscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet could undergo a transformation. Such a system could greatly reduce the chances of a company running out of stock or wasting products, as all involved parties would know exactly which products are required and consumed. Mislaid items and physical theft would be affected by the fact that the location of an item would be known at all times.
Where do we draw the line between man and machine?
Can we differentiate between an "enhanced" human (for instance, a person with an artificial hand or a heart pacer) and a cyborg?
What, if any, are the legal, moral, ethical and political differences between humans and cyborgs?
Will technology replace biology?
Cyborg
A cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial (e.g. electronic, mechanical or robotic) parts. Generally, the term "cyborg" is used to refer to a human with bionic, or robotic, implants.
Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than human intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict. The term was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes for the singularity.
Proponents of the singularity typically anticipate such an event to precede an "intelligence explosion", wherein superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds. The concept is popularized by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and widely expected by proponents to occur in the early to mid twenty-first century.
Vinge argues that the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence will mark the point at which "the human era will be ended," such that no current models of reality are sufficient to predict beyond it.
"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended," he says.
So, is becoming cyborgs part of our collective future?
Here are some of my thoughts...
Listening to and watching the videos of Kevin Warwick and his human experiments, I have no question or doubt that these experiments to merge men and computers will only grow and become more common in the future. We are depending on the technology more than we want to or are ready to admit. There are already so many technical implants in human bodies that help to cope with the shortfall of health - problems that only biology cannot fix. It is after all our natural instinct to do whatever it takes to survive. We have already made computers portable and as small as possible for comfortable use. Implanting them inside us is only one step further. And there are many of us willing to experiment with whatever new techology has to offer.
Cyborgs are already part of us, whether we call them anyone who use technology to repair or overcome their physical and mental constraints (including artificial limbs and hands as well as a device for helping colour-blind people to "hear" in colour) or more strictly those who experiment with technology to increase or enhance normal capabilities. The question is when we arrive to the point at which they become a majority. And does that mark the end of human era? Or is it only natural that we extend the definitions of what is human and what is normal as we extend ourselves?
It's also quite evident that to overcome the tecnologigal singularity, or in other words the intellectual event horizon, we need to become something more than human in today's sense, we need to extend ourselves. Perhaps it works like the natural selection where only those with advanced capabilities and ability to adjust will survive. And I must admit, my mind is at the point beyond which this topic becomes difficult for me to understand or predict. It sounds logical that to overcome the barrier, we need to create successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, but where do we draw the line between man and machine?
British mathematician Irving John Good has said, already back in 1965: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
Sounds a bit frightening to me... But who am I? A human with an unaided human mind.
1) How do you see the evolution of interacting with and through interactive media? Are natural user interfaces the future or part of the future? Are the previous interaction styles dead or condemned?
2) Should mobile user interfaces be regarded as a completely new interaction style? If so, what would their distinctive characteristics be?
Interactivity can be considered a central concept in understanding new media, but different media forms possess different degrees of interactivity, and some forms of digitized and converged media are not in fact interactive at all. Tony Feldman considers digital satellite television as an example of a new media technology that uses digital compression to dramatically increase the number of television channels that can be delivered, and which changes the nature of what can be offered through the service, but does not transform the experience of television from the user's point of view, and thus lacks a more fully interactive dimension. It remains the case that interactivity is not an inherent characteristic of all new media technologies, unlike digitization and convergence.
2) Do we drive interactive media or does it drive us?
While some perspectives suggests that the technology drives – and therefore is a determining factor – in the process of globalization, arguments involving technological determinism are generally frowned upon by mainstream media studies. Instead academics focus on the multiplicity of processes by which technology is funded, researched and produced, forming a feedback loop when the technologies are used and often transformed by their users, which then feeds into the process of guiding their future development.
Commentators such as Castells espouse a "soft determinism" whereby they contend that "Technology does not determine society. Nor does society script the course of technological change, since many factors, including individual inventiveness and entrpreneurialism, intervene in the process of scientific discovery, technical innovation and social applications, so the final outcome depends on a complex pattern of interaction. Indeed the dilemma of technological determinism is probably a false problem, since technology is society and society cannot be understood without its technological tools." This, however, is still distinct from stating that societal changes are instigated by technological development, which recalls the theses of Marshall McLuhan.
Manovich and Castells have argued that whereas mass media "corresponded to the logic of industrial mass society, which values conformity over individuality," new media follows the logic of the postindustrial or globalized society whereby "every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and select her ideology from a large number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects to a mass audience, marketing now tries to target each individual separately."
Media determinism, a subset of technological determinism, is a philosophical and sociological position which posits the power of the media to impact society. As a theory of change, it is seen as a cause and effect relationship. New media technologies bring about change in society. Much like the "magic bullet" theories of mass communication, media determinism provides a somewhat simplistic explanation for very complicated scenarios. Cause and effect relationships are reduced to their most basic premise, and explained as such. Techno-centrist theories make everything explainable in light of the media's relation to technological developments. Two leading media determinists are the Canadian scholars Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.
3) How is interactive media facilitated and what does it facilitate?
New media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. Another important promise of new media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content.
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is an example, combining Internet accessible digital text, images and video with web-links, creative participation of contributors, interactive feedback of users and formation of a participant community of editors and donors for the benefit of non-community readers. Facebook is an example on the social media model, in which most users are also participants.
The rise of new media has increased communication between people all over the world and the Internet. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media.
