Summer’s solstice, the longest day of the year seems to be a great day to sit in the backyard to read the usual weekly magazines and catch up on some writing. In a typical residential area in the middle of the city, my macbook detects almost a dozen different wireless networks including mine, of course. With a broadband connection and a high-end wireless router, there is no difference between what I can accomplish here or at the office on any given day. I’ll take the backyard every time I can.
Already in hackers & work culture I had discussed how the boundaries between professional and private live were blurred. First with a wave of mobile communication devices that made everyone accessible to attend business at any time of the day and now with ubiquitous wireless access points that are now converting everyone into a local nomad, pushing us away from our desks into third spaces, far more amenable and with a twist of social.
Connectivity seems to be an increasingly important factor when deciding where we are going to travel. After all, you wouldn’t want to be disconnected from twitter while travelling… or have to pass on a great project right in the middle of your trip. I’ll leave to other posts the discussion about entrepreneurial spirit, which may justify this obsession with being in the loop at all times.
In any case, knowing about what kind of connectivity you’ll get whether you are going to be away from the office for a few hours or a few days is now an essential factor in your decision process. While more and more destinations are offering wireless access (even for free), very few provide a good enough environment to support a productive work session. So that got me thinking on what are the “must-have” when it comes to connectivity?
We could talk about Wi-Fi, 3GS, EDGE, broadband, DSL, but there are far better forums for that kind of information if you are curious about the technology. Instead I propose the following test, a digital nomad test that expresses in simple human terms the quality of your connectivity:
- Price Voice: How much would it cost to make a 5 minute call to the top contact from your mobile phone? While most destinations would likely provide the means for your current mobile phone to roam, sometimes the fees involved are prohibitive.
- Price Data: Let’s assume you’re one of those modern workers who have achieved the goal of working only 4 hours a week. How much does it costs to be connected for those 4 hours on a given week?
- Delay to receive a message: in today’s hyper-connected world there is an implicit expectation that if you’re sent a message (email, instant messaging, Twitter, etc), you would respond within a reasonably short time frame. Of course, if you’re trying to save on your data plan because you’re roaming and you only connect once a day, you’re for all intents and purposes disconnected. So this attribute measures how long it will take before you’re able to get a message sent to you.
- Time to compose a 1000-words message: No, I’m not talking about how fast you type but to the misconception that you can be just as productive with your mobile than with a laptop or desktop computer. Let’s admit it, tiny keyboards are not built for typing long messages and when faced with the option we’ll likely postpone writing that long memo or document. So while we may fool ourselves into thinking that carrying a smart-phone is enough, sometimes we’ll have to wait until we’re in front of a computer to be productive.
- Time to download/watch a 15 minute video: This is the ultimate performance test in today’s world. With video demanding the most from your connectivity infrastructure, this will measure the overall quality of your network, end to end.
With this sort of standardized connectivity test, it would be easier for people to make decisions about how to remain connected when on the road. Is there any other dimension that needs to be measured?
Only a few days since posting digital breadcrumb have been necessary to come across an interesting collection of projects that have been running for the last couple of years with the objective of visualizing/analysing various data sets that one way or another reveal activity in urban centres:
- Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content: a paper published in IEEE’s Pervasive Computing exploring methods to uncover tourist movement using mobile networks data and geotagged photos. I have to say that this paper is particularly interesting given my current focus on tourism through PlanetEye
- Tracing the Visitor’s Eye: using a very large collection of geotagged images from Flickr, this project revealed patterns of tourists consuming important destinations.
- Real Time Rome: a MIT SENSEable City Lab project that created amazing views of Rome by using data on mobile phone usage.
- From Sentient to Responsive Cities: a compilation of various projects exploring the role of new technologies to gather information from the general population to uncover urban behaviour.
- Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE: includes an important collection of projects that use the urban setting as a canvas for their work, sometimes giving us a preview of the tools that will likely be used in the future to navigate the intricate geography of global cities
- Flickr Alpha Shapes: a Flickr project to reverse engineer shape files from their massive collection of geotagged photos
- Visualizar’08: Database City: a collection of projects developed during a workshop organized by MediaLab Prado, some of which had the objective of helping understand some of the processes that take place in an urban setting
- EveryBlock: is a web application that displays various sets of public records such as crime in a variety of visualizations, including maps
The experimental nature of many of these projects is obvious and suggests the early stages of a new discipline that has been labelled “Urban Computing” but could very well overlap elements of cultural anthropology and information architecture. With more projects exploring these areas a consensus for useful information will be built and it won’t be long before standard data sets are produced and maintained for cities along with their accepted visualization methods.
If you have knowledge of any other projects worth including in this list please leave a comment.
 Courtesy Jokin BCN @ Flickr While I’m not sure where the photo above was taken it reminds me of so many slums I’ve seen over the years. Earlier this week, The Boston Globe ran a provocative article about Learning from slums.
10 years ago, looking for material to write a collection of short stories during a prolific fiction phase, I developed a series of ideas around the various mechanisms that our society had developed to exchange information. While I was looking to create a story that was telling of the dot-com days, focused on certain technologies that would have the ability to sense implicit agreement between unaware people, it was a much simpler idea that distracted me and ultimately killed that project: the fact that money acts as a powerful medium to exchange information globally. Yes, the basic premise was that in a society that has learned to assign a sticker price to pretty much everything, money became the sole mechanism by which we were given clear instructions on what to do, where to live, how to spend our lazy hours, how far to travel, which people we should know, etc. The school of liberalism had had its message about empowering individuals to pursue happiness oversimplified to a slogan worthy of the most grotesque marketing campaign. This was clearly more the topic of a dissertation than material for a short-story and so it died.
I was reminded about it a few days ago while reading “Happy New Year – Why money is not enough” from Alain de Botton in Monocle #19. Trying to figure out what kind of year we have ahead, he quotes both Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin and their respective attacks on the ruling economic systems of their time, concluding the current economic environment will lead to deeper reflection about the real source of happiness, inviting us to
…set aside our monetary conceptions of wealth in order to take up a “life”-based view, in which the wealthiest people would not be the bankers and the landowners, but those who most keenly felt wonder beneath the stars at night or were best able to interpret and alleviate the sufferings of others.
2009 seems an odd year to reflect about happiness and yet, judging from the fact that I picked up the pace of my blogging as a result of the current financial crisis, it would seem that I may be at peace with the idea of monetary uncertainty but never with a doubt about being happy. Every Saturday morning I wake up to a new village around the world, hoping to grasp the popular wisdom that has made life in them the perfect example of simplicity.
Here is hoping that this weekly ritual leads to insightful ways to be happier.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been daring to dream about taking the Global Culture project to the next level. For almost a year I’ve been blogging consistently while interest from the community has grown at a good pace, but can’t help but think that I could be doing more with this idea. From the very beginning I knew the blog would be an excellent medium to fine tune the idea and have it cross examined by people with far more knowledge on the subject. I believe that much has been accomplished: some of the ideas have been nurtured while others discarded.
But with so many good ideas being tossed it is a shame to leave their execution to chance. This is why I’ve been running a few experiments:
- polls to measure how much interest there is to interact with the blog, which led me to realize that people respond very well to trivia type of questions but hesitate to participate when questions are a bit more complicated
- the Global Culturati community which has attracted very few but very passionate people, already engaged in deep discussions about measuring cosmopolitanism and other digressions. The technology is a non-issue but fostering the community is a huge one
- the interactive world map aimed at making it easier for people to find articles related to a particular region, but also testing receptiveness to interactive features
I have a few more ideas for the next few weeks:
- a promotional video with the core ideas of the blog to be shared in YouTube
- leveraging websites such as change.org and GiveMeaning to explore the possibility of becoming a non-profit
- applying some of the principles of entrepreneurship to identify other options for funding this initiative at a larger scale. At this point I’m following with interest Ask the Wizard and The Post Money Value
- finding volunteers to scale up the marketing efforts
- exploring synergies with sites that target the “global citizens” such as Dopplr and FlyerTalk
It is all part of the process of finding the right path. Of course, you can still expect the posts to continue exploring the idea of Global Culture.
The thing about The Namesake is not that it is a great movie (although most avid movie-goers will be satisfied), but that it treats universal themes with such clarity that anyone who has been through the experience of leaving one’s land should be able to relate, even if not from India. Directed by Mira Nair and with Kal Penn leading a great cast, the movie follows the lives of an Indian couple coming to New York in the 70s and raising children in this context.
I have a number of friends that are second generation to Indian immigrants for which reason I believe my understanding of their culture is above average, but even if that was not the case I’m sure these themes would not be lost on me:
- Abandoning the comfort of family life in the quest for better opportunities
- Struggling to make a living without help, in a culture where all values are different
- All the sacrifices that parents make for the sake of their children. I’ve always said that migration is cruel to our ancestors but selfless to our children.
- The agony of loosing loved ones being far away and the constant fight with the irrational thought that it could be avoided.
- The temptation of multiracial relationships
- The intimacy of the father/son dialog when the entire future of their lineage depends on them
- The cultural pride that one feels even after leaving the country behind, assuming all great achievements from our people as our own. In many ocassions this only happens once we leave our countries.
- The quiet professional triumph that occurs almost in the background to all the other events in our lives.
- The crude attempt to follow tradition even if this means to butcher them once in a while
- The cultural mix that is driven by well adapted “second generation” kids and their loose interpretation of their heritage in the context of their daily lives.
Go see it or continue reading the chatter at one of the Indian blogs I follow.
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival will be running in Toronto from April 19 to 29. A festival like this one is always a great opportunity to see the world through the eyes of others and discover how no matter how far they are, the themes are recurring and quite familiar. I’ve compiled a list of a few films that should be of interest to the readers of Global Culture:
- The Underground Orchestra (Heddy Honigmann, Netherlands):
Beneath the streets of Paris lies a rich and intriguing community of musicians and singers who hail from such far-flung countries as Iran, Algeria, Armenia and Vietnam. [...] Theirs are tales of escape from religious and political persecution.
Read more about Diasporas
- McLuhan’s wake (Kevin McMahon, Canada):
McMahon’s key concerns-the relationships between culture, technology, environment and national identity-coalesce in this artful and sophisticated overview of Marshall McLuhan’s background, ideas and insights.
Read more about the evolution of TV
- Losers and Winners (Ulrike Franke & Michael Loeken, Germany):
German efficiency and Chinese industriousness pass each other on globalization’s economic ladder in this revealing, candid and wryly humourous look at the efforts of 400 Chinese workers, supervised by 30 German foremen, to cut apart a virtually brand new coking plant so it can be rebuilt in China.
Visit the film website or read more about the outsourcing culture and our many posts on China
- The Big Sellout (Florian Opitz, Germany):
as the practice of privatization become similar to warfare, dehumanizing us and reducing us to mere statistics? [...] The Big Sellout offers an empathetic and sobering study of the human impact of global economics
We have our own collection of statistics about migration & globalization.
- Everything’s cool (Daniel B. Gold & Judith Helfand, United States):
Award-winning filmmakers Helfand and Gold bring you their latest “toxic comedy” about global warming, an issue that has created the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action.
Visit the film website or read our own little debate as a result of the post global warming swindle
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