Connected Action

Next week I will be attending and discussing mobile social media and social networks at the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is my first time to Africa and I am excited to both visit and to discuss how mobile networked devices can change social organizations.  Mobile devices are in many ways more [...]

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A few weeks ago I attended a meeting at the University of Maryland in College Park of a working group proposing a new “National Initiative for Social Participation”.  The meeting brought together people from the major universities, research labs, and government funding agencies to think about an “Apollo Program for Social Media”.  The idea is [...]

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Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy

Here is the slide deck I presented at the “Studying Society In A Digital World” conference at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.  They just posted most of the conference slides.  I took some pictures and posted to flickr.  Here is the slide deck I presented along [...]

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Call for Papers: Workshop on the Social Mobile Web
Held in conjunction with SocialCom ‘09
29th-30th August, Vancouver, Canada
http://thesocialmobileweb.org
The mobile space is evolving at an astonishing rate. At present there are over 3.5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide and with continued advances in devices, services and billing models, the mobile web looks set to inspire a new age [...]

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On the theme of  instrumenting the interaction order, here is Tanzeem Choudhury (from Dartmouth) giving a talk titled: “Using Sensors to Make Sense of People: Inferring the Micro and Macro Level Properties of Social Networks from Mobile Sensor Data” which she delivered March 2, 2009 as part of the Program on Networked Governance CCCSN Seminar.

Program on [...]

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Harry Brignull, a User Experience Consultant, recently mentioned this on the Anthrodesign email list:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2GfOhFZkY8

This is one of the great works of empirical sociology: using a time lapse camera (and an analog clock) to study the flow of people over time through several spaces in New York City in the 1970s.
The associated books, City: Rediscovering the [...]

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The great sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a number of influential works about a domain of social life he called the “interaction order”, the realm of interactions between people.  Goffman studied how interactions are structured in the most common settings like how people pass by each other in hallways, manage eye contact, or show that they [...]

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After a lovely dinner you order a third glass of wine, take a sip and your mobile phone rings.
Its your health insurance company’s computer. You take the call.
“We’re delighted to see you are enjoying yourself this evening!” the cheerful voice synthesis exclaims.
“Please note, however, that you are now at the policy limit for blood [...]

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The next meeting of the “Quantified Self” group will be held on January 27th, 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.
The group focuses on the emerging practice of recording lots of data about your physical state and activity.  Its where life logging meets populations of people grappling with illness or seeking optimal [...]

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