Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote a wonderful piece on the rise of a new geek anti-intellectualism. The essay sparked much discussion and Sanger has done a terrific job responding to comments and even offering a thoughtful follow-up piece. However, I would like to write a short critique on a couple of points that have yet to be addressed.

First, I have to mention that contemporary anti-intellectualism was really my first academic interest, spurred in 2000 when I heard that Al Gore lost debates to George W. Bush because Gore “sounded too smart.” Hyper-focused on epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) at the time, it was learning about the differences between Wikipedia co-founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales that first got me interested in technology as a topic of research. Sanger, himself having an epistemology background, wanted Wikipedia to have a component of expertism on the site. When that was rejected he left and started the Citizendium project. At war are two epistemologies: one based in populism and the other expertism (though, this conceptualization is far too simplistic, it will have to do for this short post).

Today, I focus on theorizing technology and was, of course, quite interested when Larry Sanger took on the rise of a new geek anti-intellectualism, stating that,

more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms.

Sanger lays out what he means by “geek anti-intellectualism” in 5 bullet points:

1. Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known.  Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be.  (Cf. this essay of mine.)

2. Books are an outmoded medium because they involve a single person speaking from authority.  In the future, information will be developed and propagated collaboratively, something like what we already do with the combination of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, and various other websites.

3. The classics, being books, are also outmoded.  They are outmoded because they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the distractions of technology can’t be bothered to follow them; and besides, they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally antiquated ideas and attitudes.  In short, they are boring and irrelevant.

4. The digitization of information means that we don’t have to memorize nearly as much.  We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet communities.  We can answer most general questions with a quick search.

5. The paragon of success is a popular website or well-used software, and for that, you just have to be a bright, creative geek.  You don’t have to go to college, which is overpriced and so reserved to the elite anyway.

While I largely agree with this analysis, I think it can also be improved a bit conceptually in two important ways.

I. Geeks May Be Anti-Expert, But Are They Anti-Reason and Unreflectively Instrumental?
While Sanger cites Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, I think there is much contained in this book that is left untapped by Sanger, and his analysis suffers a bit. Some time should be spent analyzing the concept anti-intellectualism to get a proper definition. Following Hofstader (and Daniel Rigney*), we might say that anti-intellectualism consists of (at least) three dimensions: (1) anti-expertism, the rejection of specialized knowledge and the populist embracing of common-sense and the crowd; (2) anti-reason, which was religious evangelicalism for Hofstadter, and anti-rationalism for Rigney, however, I think it is better labeled anti-reason because it deals with all accounts where knowledge is not situated by reason but instead by some other dogma (which is, usually, but not exclusively, religious); and (3) unreflective instrumentalism, the notion that ideas and knowledge must be put to work rather than being appreciated for their own sake (the so-called “life of the mind”).

Sanger’s dimensions of geek anti-intellectualism can be similarly systematized. Sanger’s points 1 and 2 above both describe anti-expertism. They deal with a populist democratization of both the production and consumption of knowledge (i.e., “prosumption”). This is the populist epistemology where the crowd both produces content that is, then, collaboratively decided to be true or not.

Sanger’s point 3 reveals three additional aspects of geek anti-intellectualism: that material is more likely to enter our knowledge base if it is short, exciting, and easy to digest. I think these also point to the populism surrounding the “anti-expertism” dimension in that these attributes all describe how to make content appeal to many people (populism). Sanger’s point 5 deals with popularity, which most directly points to the populist notion of anti-expertism. (I’ll deal with his point 4 in a moment).

Thus, Sanger has done much to demonstrate that there is indeed a geek anti-intellectualism because it centers on a populist rejection of expertism. I think looking more closely at Hofstadter better organizes Sanger’s points. However, more work should be done to see if geeks display the other dimensions of anti-intellectualism: are they evangelical/dogmatic in their knowledge justification (beyond populism)? Do they appreciate knowledge and thinking for its own sake, or does it always have to be put to work towards instrumental purposes? Neither of these points are substantiated by Sanger (yet).

I would argue that geeks are not dogmatic, but instead typically rely on reason (e.g., they employ reason in their defense of populism and the “wisdom of the crowds”; even if I and many others are unconvinced). Further, geeks indeed do seem to engage in knowledge projects for fun. Part of the success of Wikipedia is that it allows for purposelessly clicking through random entries for no other reason than because learning is fun. However, my task in this essay is to better conceptualize Sanger’s points and not really make the case for a geek intellectualism. I’m only half-convinced myself of these last two points. I’ll leave it to Sanger to describe how geeks are anti-intellectual on these other two dimensions of anti-intellectualism. Until then, the story of geek anti-intellectualism remains mixed.

II. Intelligence Versus Intellect
Let’s muddle things further by bringing up perhaps the main reason Sanger should take another look at Hofstadter’s famous book, and it deals with Sanger’s 4^th bullet point above (the decline of memorization online). Sanger has conflated intellect and intelligence in his essay. He repeatedly accuses geek culture as being anti-knowledge, which indeed follows from his analysis. However, Sanger’s title refers to anti-intellectualism. Hofstadter’s essential distinction between intelligence and intellect (see 1963;24-25) is that the former means having lots of knowledge and facts whereas the latter deals with creative and contemplative thought (the “life of the mind”). A computer has intelligence whereas Hofstadter and Sanger also have intellect.

The dismissal of memorization online is indeed an attack on knowledge and intelligence but not necessarily a dismissal of intellect. While the geeks argue that focusing less on memorizing facts provides more time for creative and contemplative thought, Sanger’s rebuttal points “only” to a geek anti-knowledge/intelligence stance, but not towards a geek anti-intellectualism. The creative and contemplative piece that differentiates intelligence and intellectualism requires little memorization. Some is necessary, sure, but it certainly is not the essence of the difference.

In sum, I think there is a partial argument to be made that the geeks Sanger describes are anti-intellectual; specifically, in their rejection of experts in favor of the crowd. However, the rest of Sanger’s analysis really points to how these geeks remain intellectual, even if they are anti-intelligence/anti-knowledge. What is missing in is evidence that these geeks reject the life of the mind.

To conclude, I am left partially agreeing with Sanger after re-conceptualizing his analysis: (1) the “geeks” are partly anti-intellectual (their populism); (2) they are perhaps partly intellectual (their seeming appreciation, at times, of the life of the mind; though I bet Sanger can convince me out of this); and (3) the geeks are often anti-knowledge (Sanger’s convincing argument surrounding their attack on memorization). And this final point, that the geeks have been shown to be anti-intelligence, is indeed an important contribution (even if mis-labeled by Sanger as anti-intellectualism).

*Rigney, Daniel.  1991.  “Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism:  Rethinking Hofstadter.”  Sociological Inquiry. 61(4):434-451.

This essay, like the one I posted last month on faux-vintage photography, is me hashing out ideas as part of my larger dissertation project on self-documentation and social media. Part II will argue that the media also overstate how public we have become, sensationalizing the issue to the point that the stigma associated with online imperfections erodes more slowly. It is no stretch to claim that we have become more public with social media. By “public” I mean that we are posting (1) more pieces information about ourselves online in (2) new ways (see the Zuckerberg Law of Information sharing), and are doing so more (3) honestly than ever before. We are connected to the web more often, especially given the rise of smart phones, and new layers of information are being invented, such as “checking in” geographically. And gone are the days when you could be anyone you want to be online; today we know that online activities are augmented by the physical world. People are mostly using their real names on Facebook and nearly everything one does there has everything to do with the offline world.

But we are not as public as this suggests. We need a balance to this so-called triumph of publicity and death of anonymity (as the New York Times and Zygmunt Bauman recently declared). “Publicity” on social media needs to be understood fundamentally as an act rife also with its conceptual opposite: creativity and concealment. And I am not talking just about those who use false identities on blogs (see Amina) and pseudonyms on Facebook, those with super-strict privacy settings or those who only post a selective part of their multiple identities (though, I am talking about these folks, too).  My point applies to even the biggest oversharers who intimately document their lives in granular detail.

I’ll describe below how each instance of sharing online is done so creatively instead of as simple truth-telling, but will start first by discussing how each new piece of information effectively conceals as much as it reveals.

The Facebook Fan-Dance
We begin by taking into account a lesson provided many decades ago by Georges Bataille, a philosopher and fiction author probably most notorious for his pornographic writing. Equally as important is his theory of knowledge that was of great influence on thinkers like Baudrillard and Foucault. Simply, Bataille argued that every instance of knowledge is also an instance of non-knowledge. Simply, and not precisely the way Bataille uses the concept, each time you learn something new you also learn more about what you do not know. For example, with each scientific discovery we might learn something new, but, simultaneously, we also start asking questions that we never could have before. Each time we learn something new (knowledge) the stock of what we don’t know (non-knowledge) grows ever larger.

Following Bataille, philosopher Jean Baudrillard develops the concepts “obscenity” and “seduction” around the knowledge/non-knowledge relationship. “Obscenity” is the drive to reveal all and expose things in full, whereas “seduction” is the process of strategically withholding in order to create magical and enchanted interest (what he calls the “scene” opposed to the “obscene”). That is, non-knowledge is the seductive and magical aspect of knowledge.

Let’s put this into the context of self-presentation and identity on social media. I once heard Sociologist Marc Smith describe Facebook as being like a “fan dance,” a space where one both reveals and conceals. I find the metaphor endlessly helpful because it helps shed the biased baggage of over-privileging the revealing half. Following Bataille and Baudrillard, we know that knowledge, including what we post on social media, indeed follows the logic of the fan dance: we always enact a game of reveal and conceal, never showing too much else we have given it all away. It is better to entice by strategically concealing the right “bits” at the right time. For every status update there is much that is not posted. And we know this. What is hidden entices us.

Indeed, Bataille typically discussed non-knowledge as an ecstatic “inner-experience“, and with Baudrillard’s contribution we can say that the inner-experience is one of seduction, enchantment, magic and enticement. The theory of non-knowledge helps us explain why we have an explosion of sharing, self-documentation and mass-exhibitionism online: it is not that we are enticed by the explosion of new information about ourselves and others, it is not about what we now know, but precisely what we do not.

We can make this a bit more concrete with some examples:

• This process is most clear when someone posts an obscure status update like “ugh” or just “am smiling so hard right now” that reveal only half-truths; often in order to beg some kind of follow-up response from someone else. However, every status update follows the logic of the fan-dance. Regardless of what is written, the observer not only views the status updates but also thinks of the space between them. What happened in-between? How do they relate to each other? What else do they imply?
• When one posts a photograph of themselves we might wonder who took the picture? Who else was there?  Where was this? How does this photo relate to the others in the album? While some of the information may be provided with the photo, the information cannot ever be exhaustive (remember, more information only means more questions).
• When one “checks in” using Foursquare or Facebook Places we wonder who they are there with? Why are they there? What is that place like? Are they having a good time?

While we may not always think these follow-up questions consciously, we always know that each piece of information is never the full story of any event. The totality of one’s social media Profile* is never the totality of who one is. The screen only ever contains a very partial story.

Poets and Scribes
So far I have discussed how what we post always hints at what is not posted. Another reason to be skeptical of claims that Facebook and the rest of contemporary social media marks the ascendancy of publicity and honesty online is to acknowledge that everything we post is done so creatively. Early writing about self-presentation online focused on the creative potential of identity construction when one could be any race, gender, even species one cared to perform. However, as I mentioned above, we currently view self-presentation on social media as more honest. Today, individuals typically use their real name on Facebook and interact online with those they also interact with offline.

All this is true, but even if we are as honest online as off, we should not forget that offline self-presentation is a creative performance as well. Erving Goffman‘s dramaturgical model of self-presentation or Judith Butler‘s notion “performativity” make the point that simply being is a creative endeavor. And our documentation of our being on social media also has an important creative aspect. Susan Sontag was a great thinker of another documentation medium, photography, and noted that all photographs are always created with both a truth-telling and a creative intent. The photograph is both a depiction of something that is really in the world, but is also produced by a creative subject through choosing what is to be photographed, how it is framed, the camera settings, editing in post, and so on. Her metaphor is that a photographer is at once a poet (creative) and a scribe (truth-telling).

As I’ve argued elsewhere, social media documentation follows the same logic. When we (or someone else) create documents on social media -be they status updates, comments, photos, etc- we do so as both poet and scribe. We are creative in our self-documentation, even when we try to pass that creativity as pure fact (indeed, I think one the troubles of social media is the same trouble of all self-presentation: we constantly need to pass our fictive and performative selves off as authentic fact).

To summarize:
We all are poets and fan-dancers online. I think discussions around social media can get distracted by our current digital indulgence of the truth about ourselves in the form of incessant status updates, photos of everything we do, reviews, check-ins and so on. In fact, my first-ever blog post was about the triumph of so-called “mass-exhibitionism.” What I failed to account for was understanding that each new piece of information posted online also hints at what is missing. Interestingly, Baudrillard makes the same mistake in his thesis that the “obscene” has come to supplant and even eradicate “seduction” and the “scene.” Instead, my current view is that social media is not the death of concealment but its ultimate proliferation. Like matter implies anti-matter, new knowledge on Facebook implies new non-knowledge. New mysteries to that seduce us into checking back for more. Every bit as important as what is revealed on Facebook is what is concealed because what is creatively hidden, what is imaginatively only hinted at, provides enchantment. And this is just as true off as online.

Read Part II of this essay.

*I use the upper-case Profile to describe the totality of one’s online presence, whereas the lower-case profile describes a single site-specific profile. For example, one may have a Facebook profile, which is part of their larger online Profile.

Photo of the fan dancer comes from: flickr.com/photos/sharonkcooper/3059885202/

This image of digital poetry is from: http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/26/1969-lillian-f-schwartz-ken-knowltons-observances/

Today, Google announced a new service called “Google+” that explicitly attempts to replicate offline social norms onto an online platform. Besides the conceptual consistency between this goal and the concept of “augmented reality” that I write about so often, I also find the timing of the announcement interesting.

When Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google, I critiqued his statement that having multiple identities online shows “a lack of integrity.” Schmidt stepped down in April of this year and less than two months later Google announces Google+ (which is an umbrella term for a whole host of services centered on better replicating physical world social norms in a digital social media environment).

The service is brand new and invite-only so we can only speculate at this point what it will actually provide. However, the announcement of Google+ on the company’s official blog provides some interesting statements about privacy. The post is an implicit retraction of Schmidt’s insensitive statements and perhaps a lesson-learned from Google’s Buzz debacle that angered and even endangered many of its users. Further, much of the post is also a direct attack on the Facebook platform and its inability to reflect offline social norms that long-since predate the Web (e.g., the platform’s often incorrect usage of the term “friend”). Some quotes from the Google blog:

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in “friend” paper—and sharing really suffers

First, let’s acknowledge that the sappy text and cheesy videos that tug at our heartstrings really exist to make us feel good about a big, scary company with one ultimate goal: to make you share more. More sharing means more data which means more advertising-based profits for Google. This is a company that, like Facebook, is out to make a profit (for better or worse, depending on your perspective).

Second, as much as Google is attempting to build a service that reflects the enmeshment of the physical and digital worlds, they still push the outdated semantic habit of calling the physical world the “real” world. If anyone should know that online is “real”, it is Google (and, of course, the offline is increasingly virtual at the same time). Is Google not reading the Cyborgology blog?

Much, much more will need to be said about Google+ as details come forward and people start using the service (that is, if people start using the service; Google has a mixed track record when it comes to social services).

Mediating Mediums, an architectural augmented reality video. Via Wired’s Beyond the Beyond.

The PEW Research Center just released new findings based on a representative sample of Americans on “Social networking sites and our lives.” Let’s focus on a conclusion that speaks directly to the foundation of this blog: that our social media networks are dominated by physical-world connections and our face-to-face socialization is increasingly influenced by what happens on social media.

Movies like The Social Network, books like Turkle’s Alone Together and television shows like South Park (especially this episode) just love the supposed irony of social media being at once about accumulating lots of “friends” while at the same time creating a loss of “real”, deep, human connection. They, and so many others, suffer from the fallacy I like to call “digital dualism.” There are too many posts on this blog combating the digital dualism propagated by these people who don’t use/understand social media to even link to all of them all here.

Further, our physical-world networks are increasignly being infiltrated by Facebook. The report states that,

we find that the average user has friended 48% of his/her total network on Facebook.

This is just more evidence towards what social media users already know: that the digital and physical are increasingly enmeshed into an augmented reality. The report goes further to illuistrate that not only are digital and physical networks enmeshed, social media tends to increase connections, even close friendships, both on and offline. Connection is not a zero-sum game where time spent on Facebook is time not spent socializing face-to-face.

Controlling for other factors we found that someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users.

And,

Internet users in general score 3 points higher in total support, 6 points higher in companionship, and 4 points higher in instrumental support. A Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day tends to score an additional 5 points higher in total support, 5 points higher in emotional support, and 5 points higher in companionship, than internet users of similar demographic characteristics. For Facebook users, the additional boost is equivalent to about half the total support that the average American receives as a result of being married or cohabitating with a partner.

These findings are not unexpected and have been found before. But given its persistence in spite of data, how can we better use data to put digital dualism to bed?

There is an important space between old and new media. This is the grey area between (1) the top-down gatekeeping of old media that separates producers and consumers of content and (2) the bottom-up nature of new, social media where producers and consumers come from the same pool (i.e., they are prosumers).

And in the middle are projects like Global Voices, what might be called curatorial media: where content is produced by the many in a social way from the bottom-up and is then mediated, filtered or curated by some old-media-like gatekeeper.

The current protests in Syria can serve as an important example of how curatorial media works. Especially because foreign journalists have been banned from the country, creating a dearth of information for old media. Alternatively, social media is producing loads of information in the form of status updates, photos, blogs, tweets and so on.

• For an example of old media coverage of the protests we can go to the New York Times page.

• For new/social media coverage, perhaps we can search the #syria hashtag on Twitter.

Of course, there are many other social media searches we could do to find on-the-ground information about the Syrian protests, and many other sites besides Twitter to search from. And this is precisely the problem. The New York Times is having difficulty getting direct information from the ground, and the sheer amount of information coming from so many different social media sites is overwhelming. Goldilocks meets McLuhan: one media is too hot, the other too cold.

Hence the need for something in the middle. Curatorial media acts as an old-media-style knowledge gatekeeper while still greatly democratizing just whose voice produces news. Curatorial media does this by sifting through tweets, blogs, photos, etc, whittling down the chaos of millions of people using social media tools into a manageable stream of information.

• Last, for an example of curatorial media, let’s look at Global Voices coverage of the Syrian protests.

Global Voices has devoted much coverage to the uprisings across the Arab world and North Africa this year, and these uprisings were influenced by the production of social media content to such a great degree that I suggested we call them an “augmented revolution.” Global Voices utilizes a few hundred editors around the globe to find important material to create a collage of knowledge more democratic than what old-media produces.

Beyond Global Voices, NPR’s Andy Carvin has been expertly curating tweets from the uprisings, and there is even a (silly) physical book called Tweets from Tahrir that curates selected tweets from the Egyptian uprising.

Thus, we have three models of media all covering the same event in vastly different ways: old media relying on gatekeepers, new media on the crowd, and curatorial media utilizing both. Though, we should note that while curatorial media is good at looking at general trends given a large crowd of content creators, it is highly susceptible to individual frauds, like the Amina hoax.

Of course, social media content curation goes beyond news events. The service Storify lets users curate different social media content to tell whatever type of story they wish. Quakebook allows users to pull together different on-the-ground stories from the recent Earthquake in Japan. This article describes some participatory and curated film projects. And Iceland’s crowdsourcing of their new constitution is not pure wiki-style legislation, but instead a highly curated selection of ideas pulled from the citizenry.

There is a case to be made that the real action in social media is through its curation. What other examples of curated media can we think of? And, importantly, can we think of examples that pre-date the Internet?

A lot more.

Thought to be the domain of the political left by some, social media has come to be nearly ubiquitous for both parties. One may even argue that the political right in the U.S. has passed the left. While not a perfect measure, one can look at the number of tweets sent by members of congress. From May 8th to June 8th, 2011, members of congress sent 15,383 tweets. The 232 Republicans sent 10,846 tweets (that’s about 47 tweets per member for this month). The 168 Democrats sent just 4,537 tweets (27 tweets per member). Republicans are tweeting almost twice as much.

What other measures can we look at to compare/contrast the right and left’s usage of social media? Does social media inherently tend to the left or right?

via Mashable.

As the 2012 presidential race ever so slowly gains momentum it remains clear that social media will be influencing elections for a long time to come. In the long run, does the shift towards social media campaigning change who is perceived to be a legitimate candidate? If so, social media might change who wins elections and therefore changes how we are governed. Avoiding [for now] the issue of whether social media has inherent tendencies towards the left or right, what I want to ask is: opposed to old media, does new media benefit political underdogs and outsiders?

As Republicans announce presidential bids on Twitter and Obama gets friendly with Zuckerberg and Facebook, it seems that the presidential campaign has found itself augmented by and reliant upon social media tools; some of the very same tools many of us use, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. Part of their popularity is that one can view and be viewed by people from all over the world in an instant and for no cost. It does not cost money to publish this post or to tweet about it later on. Social media campaigning is also relatively cheap; indeed, often times free. Alternatively, print advertising is expensive because space is scarce and the scarcity of broadcast time makes television and radio too costly for underdogs and outsiders to fairly compete. However, when we exchange atoms for bits we enter into a world of abundance, a world where broadcasting a message quickly and globally becomes cheap and easy.

This cheaper social-media campaign style may remove or at least lesson the barriers to entry for candidates now considered too marginal to be legitimate. As the major national parties support well-known figures often with pedigree bloodlines and major corporate backers, major campaigns are simply too costly for many outsiders to become serious contenders. Many have argued from both sides of the aisle that American politics is far too controlled by money. Things grew more heated when the Supreme Court controversially stated that corporations should be treated as citizens when it comes to free political speech, thereby greatly increasing their ability to influence elections. However, social media allows anyone to create a presence and communicate one’s political ideas to anyone with an Internet connection. Today, your potential audience on Twitter is the same as Barak Obama’s.

Well, theoretically at least.

Even if all campaigning went the way of social media [and it won’t, campaigning will increasingly be an augmentation of social media, old media and on-the-ground efforts], offline inequalities tend to be replicated online. Social media is not the “flat world” so-called cyberlibertarians describe, where ideas rise to the top based only on their merit. Instead, those with the most fame and notoriety offline have a massive advantage when it comes to garnering Facebook “friends” and Twitter “followers” online.  Being an incumbent, having the support of a major party, and having lots of cash-on-hand are by far the most important factors in gaining a successful social media presence. While social media campaigning and fundraising may be cheap, building an impressive Internet platform like the highly effective my.barakobama.com is not. It seems unlikely that social media will bring a massive “revival of American democracy” by ushering in an age of candidates gaining popularity based on merit alone. Simply, the Internet is not flat.

While not the magic bullet for American democracy, will social media’s potential democratization of campaigning and fundraising reduce, if even slightly, the barriers for entry to the political process?

Costas K is a graphic designer who used Cyborgology Editor Nathan Jurgenson‘s post on digital dualism as part of a design project. The physical book explores the intersection of atoms and bits. The creator was invited to write a short essay about the project.

As kids, we were told to stop ‘wasting’ our time with electronic devices and that we should be outside, engaging with the ‘real’ world. Early on, the idea was planted into us that what we do using a computer is an alternative false state that bears no value. To still believe this is naive. Personally, I have met some of my best friends online. I make transactions, articulate opinions, receive feedback and get commissioned professional projects. How is this not real?

Still, when approaching the topic the first expressions that came to mind were ‘physical world’ and ‘digital world’ – the cornerstones of digital dualism. Nathan Jurgenson’s text ‘Digital dualism versus augmented reality’ helped me put things into perspective, before exploring them visually.

It is my belief that online activity is a continuation of what we do physically, following similar patterns – although this is not always recognisable. A room and a web page both provide a defined ‘space’ in which to hold different elements, and are connected with other such spaces. Facebook isn’t different to talking to your friends in a crowded city square, where other people can hear you. A ‘tweet’ is the equivalent of making a statement in front of the crowd.

As the digital aspect of life becomes increasingly important, so does design. The electronic environment is more formidable than the physical, and is not subject to certain limitations. Changing visuals is fast and cost-effective. Making a clean start is easy and this is not influenced by history (e.g. existing buildings) or nature.  Resources are almost endless. Some new limitations appear which are determined mostly by the choices and equipment of the user. The user also contributes to the design of the environment, by customizing it. The outcome is not determined solely by the designer.

The result of my exploration is called ‘Connected’. The centrepiece is a booklet which explores the relationship between the physical world and online activity and uses photography, graphics, typography and cut-outs to establish conceptual and visual relationships, in accordance with the text. The latter is a collection of found sources, mostly in the form of quotes, with an editorial written by me. The only complete article included is ‘Digital dualism versus augmented reality’. The project also has a web aspect which is currently in the form of a model website (with static links) influenced by Net Art. Since the project is about the interconnection of the physical with the digital, it was important to use both types of elements. The digital aspect though was limited significantly by time constraints and I hope to explore it further in the future.

The main concepts that are examined in the project are: (a) digital elements becoming one with the physical world [fig. 1-2] (b) the idea of digital dualism (c) social networking [fig.3-4] (d) the political role of the internet in suppressive regimes [fig. 5] (e) the notion of ‘information overload’ [fig. 6]

www.costask.com

Washington D.C.-based musicians Bluebrain created an album that is actually a location-aware iPhone app called The National Mall (out today via Lujo records). Open the app while on the National Mall in Washington, DC and the music reacts to how you move about your surroundings. As reported on Wired UK,

approach a lake and a piano piece changes into a harp. Or, as you get close to the children’s merry-go-round, the wooden horses come to life and you hear sounds of real horses getting steadily louder based on your proximity.

We have previously looked at augmented reality art on this blog, such as Jon Rafman’s compelling Street View images,  Google’s Street Art View and Clement Valla’s “Postcards from Google Earth, Bridges” project. The National Mall is an augmented album, imploding digital media with your specific movements within physical space. The listener-turned-cyborg’s experience of the album comes in the form of the codetermining interaction of media and physical space.

The artists will release their next location-aware augmented albums for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park followed by another set to the length of Rt1 in California.