Communication has long been the most-touted invention of the modern era – first telecommunications, then the Internet spawned a society where people are not only able to communicate instantaneously, they are able to do so with complete ease and near ubiquity. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and the various Instant Messaging protocols connect us to each other at nearly every breathing minute.

A byproduct of communication – the one I'd like to focus on today – is collaboration. While communication and communication technologies provide the inroads to facilitate collaboration, the ability to transmit data of any form to one another instantaneously is not enough to genuinely collaborate. As network technologies, then web technologies, then rich media technologies began to grow, however, we have seen increasingly frequent attempts to provide a complete system for collaboration. Videoconferencing packages, for instance, provide unique features such as shared whiteboards or screens, allowing for work to happen across the globe in ways never before imaginable. However, this is still a fundamentally communication-oriented development, which while immensely beneficial to collaborative efforts, doesn't necessarily address the ultimate goal of building a single product, paper, or project.

So, how do we better use technology to facilitate direct collaboration?

There are several bits of software that attempt to address this issue head-on, but being by developers, they largely address developers' own needs – the rest of the world hasn't necessarily woken up to technology's potential in this regard, and so very little attention and effort have been raised towards furthering these projects in other directions.

These pieces of software are known as VCSs, or Version Control Systems. Several prominent examples are CVS, SVN, Git, and TFS. Three-lettered length aside, they all tout a number of core features – the ability to keep track of revisions and who made them, the ability to view or roll back to any of these revisions, and the ability to merge two versions of a file if, say, they were both being worked on at once. While very efficient, useful, and relatively simple for people working on software, these systems are on the difficult side for even moderately technologically proficient users, and setting them up is a nearly insurmountable task, one even seasoned experts tend to dread.

So, what's out there that's easier for the general public to use? The solution that my Amsterdam study abroad class appears to have chosen is to repurpose a wiki for the task. And at first glance, it appears to be a fitting choice – wikis generally feature user and revision tracking, and at least a rudimentary form of diff merging. However, they are also a very restrictive medium – one wouldn't be able to build a trifold brochure, or a technical manual on them with any sort of practicality: while it may be possible to format the wiki to look properly in these regards, these things tend to be done with real desktop software, with real formatting tools and rich output. Adobe has a solution for its Creative Suite that's slowly evolving, but what of the rest of the business and academic market?

(Broken record: this is an Amsterdam-related post.)

How primarily do the Dutch interact with their news and commercial media, and how has this shaped the general commercial structures and mediums of the industry?

In general, the most analogous conceptual framework by which this question lives is the synecdoche. The consumption of products in an economic sense drives the development and availability of those products from the supplier, and so in many ways the physical existence and prominence of media reflects synecdochically upon the consumption of media.

Through this observation, we can explore new and indirect methods of studying media consumption among the Dutch. Rather than query directly for the public usage of media, we can take the relative production of each medium as an indirect measure for that same usage data. In this way, we can get a complete picture with hard data with much less variability.

Caution must be taken, however. The premise of our question is that the consumption of media potentially shapes the production and mediums of media - that is, consumer demand drives the industry. Thus, if we simply take the numbers on the production end and infer the consumption numbers, we completely fail to address our research. In this way, it can be seen that in fact our very research question is based on the goal of addressing the extent of the synecdochical relationship between physical media existence and production and consumption.

It's been a while since a video entitled "Web 2.0 .. The Machine is Us/ing Us" circled around the web. For those of us who live in Web 2.0, who think constantly in its context, the video was nothing new, but simply provided a neat, bundled package summarizing a number of its tenets, potentials, and quandaries.

The core idea presented in the video is that of form and content. Mike Wesch, the author of the video, argues that with the advent of XHTML and RSS/ATOM, effective separation of form and content has been achieved, and information sharing has become not only easier, but a core principle of the Web, vis-à-vis Web 2.0. This is currently arguable, as the quality of code dictates the level of separation afforded in each individual instance. HTML5 is fascinating in that it provides more native mechanisms for determining these separations without sacrificing expression of form.

The point at which this conversation becomes interesting is that at which we turn the argument upon itself: what is the medium of the video? One of Wesch's more tangential (and thus questionable) assertions is that the separation of form and content has directly led to the influx of the user-generated web. What is inarguable, however, is that without the user-generated web, his video could not have possibly existed in the plane it currently does. It is thus appropriate that a video about the web is in fact a video on the web.

Likewise, Philip Thurtle, in his book The Emergence of Genetic Rationality, focuses on, among many other topics, the necessity of effective information collection, collation, and communication in the rise of certain forms of social consciousness, among them genetic rationality. In fact, in the introduction of the book, he comments on the organization and information principles followed by the book - this bit of meta draws attention to the book as the medium, as the ultimate culmination of a certain process of information processing which is perhaps the most final and arduous of them all.

On the other hand, the media in general filters out instead most commonly over the mediums of print, the web, and television. The most interesting point here is in fact the medium itself - each communicates in an entirely separate way, organizing and shaping both form and content with radically deviant methods. When ground down to these separate considerations of form and content, the concept of the television as a medium seems to become the most bipolar, and the print medium the least. When we consider the effect of the content alone, it seems that given the wealth of content on the Web, to survive in the medium means that content is of absolutely key importance.

These deviations are things to consider when considering other concepts relating to media.

In mathematics and electrical engineering, convolution is "a mathematical operator that takes two functions f and g and produces a third function that is typically viewed as a modified version of one of the original functions." Commonly, this operation is performed by taking two transformations of the same wavefunction as the operands for the process, which then analyzes the wavefunction into a new one. This process is extremely useful for analyzing linear-time systems.

Walter Benjamin, a philosopher from the early 20th century, took this concept and applied it analogously to non-mathematical cases in reality, creating several concepts about which to analyze arcades in Paris. To aid in doing this, he created a multitude of convolutes about which to focus and organize his thoughts and research.

Of these, one interesting convolute is the one he has entitled N: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress. As the media of our society is built entirely on the dissemination and manipulation of knowledge, this is of particular note and relevance to the concept of the transfer of knowledge through the media. In the spirit of Benjamin's research, the following is a short entry following his form.

---

"Over the last decade, the major firms and cultural institutions that have dominated media and information industries in the U.S. and globally have been challenged by people adopting new technologies to intervene and participate in mainstream media culture."
Lievrouw, Leah A. "Participatory Design". Ninth conference on Participatory design: Expanding boundaries in design. New York: ACM, 2006.

It seems that the "new media" is gaining legitimacy quickly. This has been aided by numerous factors: more journalistic practices being weaved within the agile framework provided by new media reporting, providing for more accountability and thus credibility within society, and increasing feedback from blogs and new media back into mainstream media - for instance, Keith Olbermann regularly quotes the Daily Kos on his program. This increased impact of new media culture and the Internet has led to a radical reshaping of how knowledge is disseminated: user-generated content is rapidly gaining mindshare, and citizen journalism is reshaping ethics and accountability. This has a profound effect on the progress of our culture.
May 2007

(Conversely:)
As competition for audience revenues intensifies in the newly competitive media environment, programmers are hoping to harness the potential of the Internet. The present study explores potential online media service access in light of motivational factors, existing media use level, home communication technology infrastructure and demographic attributes. Findings indicate that perceived gratification expectation dimensions were strong predictors of likely online media service use. Although traditional media use was largely perceived as irrelevant to online media content access, online service was seen as a functional supplement to traditional media instead of a complement or displacement mechanism. An existing communication technology cluster in the home was not found to be predictive of likely online service adoption, as it might not have been deemed "functionally interdependent" of the online service. The younger babyboomers and post-babyboomers fit the profile of a likely online media service adopter, as characterized by their age and educational level.
Lin, Carolyn A. "Perceived gratifications of online media service use among potential users". Telematics and Informatics. New York: Pergamon Press, 2002.

My attempt thus far has been to keep the posts on this blog related to my study abroad in Amsterdam fairly generalizable -- anyone should be able to, without prior context, pick up and read any post made on this page. Unfortunately, this has become more and more difficult as time has progressed, and I would like to apologize in advance to my readers for how contextual this post is.

On Monday, we were able to hear about three of the research projects that our group will be collectively executing during our stay in Amsterdam. Here is some commentary on the one I personally found the most interesting, the squatting group.

I must admit that I only had faint shadows of an idea about what exactly "squatting" is prior to hearing their explanation. My impression on the subject was that squatters were very little differentiable from the homeless, an impression which now would seem to be very much incorrect. As it turns out, there is a very definite distinction that squatters have - they own a space. This is not to say that they bought and paid for it, but rather that the Dutch government has enabled anyone to take over any abandoned private or public space a year after it has fallen into disuse. As long as the new occupant "claims" the space by means of populating it with a bed, a desk, and a chair, the space is legally theirs.

This is a fascinating take on a few of the more oblique issues with urbanization, and I certainly wish Isaac and Fiona luck on studying it, as it is a very compelling topic. From what I gathered, Fiona wished to study the aesthetic nature of squatting spaces: how the squatters decorate their squatting space. While this is a good way to investigate perhaps the squatter culture, I am not entirely convinced that a clear pattern will emerge - in my mind, squatters are mostly connected together by virtue of being squatters, and I have doubts as to whether there is indeed a unified culture that will extend as far as aesthetics. Rather, I think a perhaps more directly relatable issue would be perhaps to use the measure of aesthetics (and of course interviews) to determine the squatters' attitude towards their space. How much do they see the space they occupy as being "theirs?"

Isaac, on the other hand, wished to study something quite a bit broader - whether the practice of allowing squatting makes Amsterdam more habitable. This seems at first glance highly counterintuitive - how would allowing the homeless to just take over spaces make the city more habitable? In fact, however, there are numerous advantages to this practice. First, it gets people off the street, and gives them a means to perhaps get on their feet. Second, it prevents buildings from falling entirely to disuse - squatters usually pay to keep the utilities running, and naturally do what they can to keep their space from falling into disrepair. This is an extremely interesting topic on a societal and a policy level, and learning more in this direction could be extremely illuminating about urbanity and urban planning in general. My only thoughts are that the topic is perhaps too broad; even with a focus on gastronomy, I think that perhaps contextualizing the actual research down to a particular district or even building/block would make it a much more palatable and digestible piece of investigation.

I unfortunately did not catch exactly what Cassie wanted to do with her research, as she was sadly not here in person to explain in depth her topic. However, I wish all three of them luck in their research, as the topic seems extremely interesting and compelling, and should be rather illuminating as urbanity pervades more and more into human culture.

Our last discussion of the Waag Society was perhaps incomplete. We never did quite discover what the Waag Society is, in point of fact. So I did some more research.

And I still don't know.

The Waag Society claims to many things, and yet seems to work on projects in a completely disjunct set of many things. On their Organisation information page, they claim that their founding goal from 1994 is to exist as a "Society for old en new Media." Other mentions of the society around the web also allude to this goal. Their site continues:

The Society's -soon to be called 'Waag Society'- mission was to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality of living. After a complete restauration of the Waag building, a small group of enthousiastic idealists began their activities in 1996. [sic]

So really, it would appear that their goal was not to be so much a society for the study of old and new media, so much as the promotion and enablement of new media over old media. Now, however:

The medialab developed into an avant-gardistic thinktank whith a lot of freedom. But with an eye for commercial possibilities: attempts were made to bring Waag prototypes to the market. Waag Society grew into an institution that was active in the fields of networked art, healthcare, education and internet related issues like bandwidth and copyright.

And yet it seems like most of their projects don't reflect this new goal either, as given by example from my previous post. So, here is a question we may want to answer:

What are the Waag Society's goals, and how effectively are the methods they employ achieving those goals? What effect have they had on the media landscape in Amsterdam?

We can begin to answer this question by putting it to the Waag Society themselves - through a series of interviews with their employees as well as their customers, we should be able to develop a good understanding of the organization and its impacts. Of course, there are moral implications to this study. Most significantly, we need to ensure that we do not invade the privacy of interviewees, particularly those not directly associated with the Waag Society. This involves methods for obtaining interviews, as well as the extent of interview questions themselves. Also important is that we gain a full understanding of the Waag Society and what they do, so that we do not misrepresent them in our final research.

As a follow-up to the previous post on news sources, I'd like to comment perhaps on physical manifestations of the same concepts. Specifically, I would like to refer to the news as provided by people with a similar agenda as ours - the Waag society. While the form of media they provide is not directly what we wish to study - which is to say that what we wish to study isn't necessarily particularly extant at the moment - their quarterly magazine represents an interesting fusion between a media instance of the news and research into society.

First, we require background. The Waag society primarily - as far as I can tell - focuses on performing projects that bring forward social unity and promote social progress. For instance, as a collaboration with the India festival in Amsterdam, the society put together an event, concurrent with a companion event in Delhi, which enabled participants to explore the city as a parallel of India: the theme was that of constantly shifting urbanization. Their goal was to allow participants to explore more of both the city and society of Amsterdam, and to bring the two together into a more unified whole.

Thus, the physical manifestation of their research and activities, their magazine, represents a form of news and media which seeks to promote and sustain the Waag Society. Their goal and their magazine are thus somewhat symbiotic: the magazine exists to sustain the goal by raising and maintaining awareness of the orgainzation, and the goal exists to provide the magazine with content. This setup is somewhat unlike most other forms of media, and thus represents a very interesting fusion of the topics we seek to study whil we are in Amsterdam.

Photos are coming soon.

The idea broadsided us on a leisurely Saturday afternoon, as such ideas delight in doing. Tasked with performing a cursory inquiry into a potential local research question, we had planned on making a trip to the Ave to flesh out our fragmented ideas of studying something related to physical location and ethnic makeup on a street defined by location in its proximity to a particular university campus and its ethnicity, embodied by its smorgasbord of culture-specific restaurants and boutique shops. We never got there.

Instead, as we crossed the Quad in a distracted state searching for friends, we suddenly saw a phenomenon which most students and the University have gotten used to in due time in a different light - the Quad was covered in chalk. This particular campus meme began with the self-promotion of Qdoba's new location several months ago by means of simply writing the name of the subject in white chalk all over campus. It was remarkably effective in obtaining mind-share, and reasonably permanent - one particular instance upon a pillar in front of McMahon hall persists to this day.

Thus, we retooled our research premise and began photographing chalk markings around campus instead of taking the journey over to the Ave. Two patterns emerged: first, nearly all of the chalk markings were advertisements for campus events (with a number of rather obscene exceptions), and second, most of these events pertained to either cultural or philanthropic events. These two observations, along with the very nature of the markings themselves, serve as trailheads for potential research questions.

Perhaps the most relevant and immediate question pertains to the effectiveness of this means of communication. When I have mentioned these advertisements in the past, some people note the same general observations I do, while some people haven't the faintest inkling as to what I am referring to - they simply do have not noticed the proliferation of messages appearing on the ground upon which they walk.

The most direct way of addressing this question is to address the human subjects - this would involve utilizing Lynch's subject observation method to a great extent. We could approach this several ways - we could ignore the chalk's existence and lead the subjects in a walk around the Quad and the HUB, taking note of whether they observe that the chalk is there, and if so, whether they bother to examine the actual message of each instance, or we could address nothing but the chalk and simply show subjects photographs of the markings, asking them to verbalize their immediate observations. Of the two of these approaches, the first is much more relevant to the question, noting the extent to which subjects read into the chalk without being directed to do so, but the second method is also interesting for analyzing the content itself of the markings.

The results of this small inquiry have very little bearing upon my initial research interests, those being related to news and news mediums. However, the concept of observing chalk as a communication method, or potentially as physical traces, is similar to another idea we considered for Amsterdam, which was to address graffiti in the city; we got no further than the initial idea, however.