From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.

This site documents the process and the results.

amateur cultural production

Yochai Benkler: The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets

Yochai Benkler, Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School speaks about the Wealth of Networks at the Annenberg Center for Communication's Networked Publics program.

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition. The phenomenon of social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment.

Yochai Benkler address how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves.

lecture video: 

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Submitted by admin on November 22, 2008 - 3:02pm

Geoffrey Bowker: What's Memory Got to do With IT?

Geoffrey Bowker, Executive Director and Regis and Diane McKenna Chair in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University, delivered his lecture "What's Memory Got to do With IT?" at the Annenberg Center for Communication on Thursday, January 12, 2006.

Abstract: What we hold about the past and how it has changed root and branch since the development of the Internet. We tend to think of the new media form teleologically—what is it changing about the future and future possibilities. In this talk I explore the ways in which the past itself is irrevocably altered by the new technology—we are building a new past at the same time as we are marching backwards, to adopt McLuhan's felicitous phrase, into the future. I argue that it is not only possible to reconfigure our past more flexibly: it is a political and cultural necessity.

Bio: Geoffrey Bowker is Executive Director and Regis and Diane McKenna Chair in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University. His books include Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940 (MIT, 1994) and Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT, 1999), co-authored with Susan Leigh Star. His forthcoming book, Memory Practices in the Sciences (MIT), discusses geology in the 1830s, cybernetics in the 1950s, and biodiversity science today.

 

lecture video: 

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Submitted by admin on November 22, 2008 - 2:15pm

Howard Rheingold: Technologies of Cooperation

Howard Rheingold spoke on Technologies of Cooperation: A New Story About How Humans Get Things Done on Monday, April 3, 2006.

Howard Rheingold, author of “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”, sees a common thread in such disparate innovations as the Internet, mobile devices, and the feedback system on eBay, where buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. He thinks they’re the underpinnings of a new economic order. “These are like the stock companies and liability insurance that made capitalism possible,” suggests Rheingold.

He is now helping lead the Cooperation Project (PDF, 236 kb), a network of academics and businesses trying to map the new landscape of cooperation in business, and looking for ways organisations might enhance their creativity and stimulate innovation with cooperation-based strategic models.

A first result of their work can be read in the publication Technologies of Cooperation (PDF, 1.1 MB) and in the beautifully designed cooperation maps, available in a small version (384 kb) and a large version (4.1 MB).

lecture video: 

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Submitted by admin on November 22, 2008 - 1:47pm

Networked Public Culture

Click Read More for the Culture Essay from the upcoming Networked Publics book and... leave your comments!

Submitted by kvarnelis on June 19, 2006 - 3:20pm

future shock

The future mashups were produced by netpublics. More info soon...

wither film

The Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, said Thursday that it would stop making most of its film cameras and lenses in order to focus on digital cameras.

The company, based in Tokyo, is the latest to join an industrywide shift toward digital photography, which has exploded in popularity. Rivals like Kodak and Canon have already shifted most of their camera production into digital products.

Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models "one by one," though it refused to specify when.

Submitted by todd on January 12, 2006 - 11:21pm

the Newest New Media: the OS

2006 marks the start of the second half of the decade and just an hour ago, Apple announced Macbooks with dual-core Intel processors as well as dual-core Intel powered iMacs . Assuming there are no unpleasant surprises, these machines should be able to run Windows, Mac OS X, and various flavors of Linux. In this brave, new world, the OS, becomes nothing more than a form of media. Meanwhile, Google is rumored to be providing an alternative vision of an OS that can run through your web browser. Certainly they have to do something with all that iron they own and those minds they employ.

Submitted by kvarnelis on January 10, 2006 - 9:32pm

Del.icio.us Y.ah.oo!

Web 2.0 mania continues as Yahoo buys Del.icio.us.

Read about it here.

Submitted by kvarnelis on December 10, 2005 - 5:10am

word of the year

So its official. Podcasting is dead. The New American Oxford Dictionary has declared the word "podcasting" the "Word of the Year" for 2005. That surely is a sign that the technology/phenomenon is on the decline, right?

Does anyone remember how quickly "weblog" moved from initial use to mainstream ackowledgement? IIRC, it was a log longer than it took for podcasting.

Submitted by todd on December 7, 2005 - 9:37am

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