Atemporality for the Creative Artist | Beyond The Beyond

Atemporality for the Creative Artist | Beyond The Beyond:

"There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor."

Bruce Sterling, as usual, stimulating and weird at the same time. And, doubtless, yes, perhaps now, because of the internet / web there is a cacophony of voices... but...
Someone -- who, I forget who, but someone much smarter than me -- wrote about the fact that the present is always on the brink of a future that is unknown. There is always a basic "atemporality" in Sterling's sense, but I don't think it is the right word. He laments that the master narrative has been lost, but the fact is that the master narratives we create are always failing, not because some line of history is being lost, but because we never really understand the present in a complex enough way -- the way we will understand it when it is past. Atemporality may be messy or an intractable problem at the moment, but why lament the lack of a master narrative -- this is just for a dionysian moment a realization of the truth: there is no real master narrative, there never was.

FT.com / Comment / Editorial - Google’s size puts it in the searchlight

FT.com / Comment / Editorial - Google’s size puts it in the searchlight:

"The overarching issue is: does the gatekeeping role of web search give it a public utility-like role? That is the difficult question that Mr Almunia must help to answer."

Several things lately have made me come back to the idea of the web as a city, one that started out as a medieval city of small houses close together--smaller communities that grew and merged organically into a densely populated and crowded urban space, where getting anywhere was difficult and finding things tricky and uncertain.
Google is like Baron Haussmann, who cut boulevards through the structure of Paris bringing ease of movement as well as water and sewer service, to the city.
As the FT article points out, Google is like a utility (and like a gatekeeper (another medieval urban image)). Its roles actually reshape the information space. So, yes, it is a utility.

Google Massive infographic

Google facts and figures (massive infographic) | Royal Pingdom

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The Future of the Internet IV | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

The Future of the Internet IV | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project:

"the Internet will enhance our intelligence – not make us stupid. It will also change the functions of reading and writing and be built around still-unanticipated gadgetry and applications. The battle over control of the internet will rage on."

Short history of the future of the Web

BBC News - MEPs condemn Nokia Siemens 'surveillance tech' in Iran

BBC News - MEPs condemn Nokia Siemens 'surveillance tech' in Iran:

"Euro MPs have 'strongly' criticised telecoms firm Nokia Siemens Networks for providing 'surveillance technology' to the Iranian authorities.
In a resolution adopted on Wednesday, the MEPs said the hardware was instrumental in the 'persecution and arrests of Iranian dissidents'."

And also a comment from Amnesty International:

Technology, particularly Internet and telecommunications technology, provides ‘the good guys’ with new tools to help them do their job: documenting human rights abuses, telling as many people as possible about it, mobilising people to try to stop them. But it also provides ‘the bad guys’ with new tools to do their job too – bugging people’s conversations, snooping on their emails, tracking their location.

Is technology really good for human rights?

E-books: Publishers poised for victory in latest battle - Times Online

E-books: Publishers poised for victory in latest battle - Times Online:

"It is believed that allowing buyers to print copies from Google Editions, or allowing the copying and pasting of extracts, is also now off the table."

Old media, doing what old media seems to do best in the information age.

A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 - New York Times

A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 - New York Times:

"But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data."

The more you search, the more the search engine knows what you are looking for. And on the other side of the coin, the more you search, the less anonymous you are to the search engine.

China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet - NYTimes.com

China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet - NYTimes.com:

"In the view of both political analysts and technology experts here and in the United States, China’s attempts to tighten its grip on Internet use are driven in part by the conviction that the West — and particularly the United States — is wielding communications innovations from malware to Twitter to weaken it militarily and to stir dissent internally."

The view from the other side: America and American technology as a tool for destabilization and disruptive change.

Google's Superbowl Ad

Edge: CLOUD CULTURE: THE PROMISE AND THE THREAT by Charles Leadbeater

Edge: CLOUD CULTURE: THE PROMISE AND THE THREAT by Charles Leadbeater:

"Digital clouds will be either commercial, social or public."

Charles Leadbeater gives a classification of digital clouds. And the growth of these clouds creates the possibility of what he calls "Cloud Culture" which could lead, he says, to "Exponential growth in mass cultural expression". And all of this culture could be / should be

a rare and delicate mix: more decentralised, plural and collaborative; less hierarchical, proprietary and money driven; the boundaries between amateur and professional, consumer and producer, grassroots and mainstream are breached, if not erased.

Yet, he is not blind to the other possibility, pointed out by Evgeny Morozov--the fact that authoritarian governments can also make use of the cloud.
Leadbeater is "hopeful but realistic," as much as it is possible to be about the unfolding future, but the truth remains to be seen.

Two futures of the internet: next cold war or up in the clouds | Technology | The Observer

Two futures of the internet: next cold war or up in the clouds | Technology | The Observer

Future 1: cyber war

"the world's dominant internet company is now in the crossfire of early skirmishes of the next cold war.

This thought was reinforced by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. He'd been to the International Institute for Strategic Studies for a briefing on its annual survey, Military Balance. 'The thing I found most interesting,' he said, 'was the confirmation that cyber-security is the hot issue … John Chipman, the head of the IISS, says the institute is about to launch a study of cyber-security which raises all sorts of issues. What if a country's infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits? What does international law have to say – might we have to revise our definitions of what constitutes an act of war?

'Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they will have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age.'"