PDF Europe: Geeks, Politics and the loom of digital ideologies 24. November 2009 – 18:23 by Rolf Luehrs

The beautiful city of Barcelona was a well chosen location for a conference taking place in November and it awaited us with unsurprisingly mild temperatures. Even warmer was the welcome at the pre-conference reception for the speakers. “In all beginnings dwells a magic force” (Hesse) which I caught a glimpse of when we mutually introduced ourselves by choosing three words to characterise our involvement in the cross-section of internet and politics.

Hence, my personal expectations towards the personal democracy forum were quite high when I entered the Torre Agbar tower the next day. The first thing I spotted was that the main hall was completely full – round about 300 people were waiting for Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry to kick of the event with some opening remarks followed by a keynote from Charles Leadbeater.

Leadbeater then talked (keynote audio) about the emergence of cloud culture, a term which has been derived from cloud computing. Using the metaphor of clouds for culture points to the fact that cultural contents are produced in a more and more collaborative and fluid way. Further to this cultural artefacts become to a large extend available digitally with the consequence that more people than ever have access to them via the Internet. “Many eyes make culture rich in the way the more an archive is opened up to many points of views and eyes the more value will be seen in it”, Leadbeater stated. Together with all the available “tools of creativity” which allow to add more value to existing content sort of “cultural mushroom clouds” happened to appear.
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Social separation very real in the online realm 8. July 2009 – 10:31 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

“Many of us believe that technologies can be these great equalizers”. This statement by Danah Boyd at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 holds true. Many of us do believe that technology can be an equalizer but it seems that this believe may not be true for popular social networks such as Myspace and Facebook.

According to Ms. Boyd Myspace can be called the “ghetto of the digital landscape” while Facebook is frequented by the “white, educated and privileged”. Besides the fact that there are very different demographics on these two social networks it has also been found that the divide between these user groups is very hard to overcome. Ms. Boyd goes so far as to state that: “There’s a cultural wall between users” and “If there’s no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.” This shortened result is based on a four year dissertation study called “Taken Out of Context - American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” and is summarized in her paper for the PDF “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”. Read the rest of this entry »

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