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.

lectures

Saskia Sassen: Networks, Power, and Democracy

Saskia Sassen spoke to the Networked Publics Group at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California on March 23, 2006.

Professor Saskia Sassen is in the Department of Sociology and The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She is also a Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.

Saskia Sassen’s research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. In her research she has focused on the unexpected and the counterintuitive as a way to cut through established “truths.” Her three major books have each sought to demolish a key established “truth.” Thus in her first book, The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press 1988), she showed how foreign investment in less developed countries can actually raise the likelihood of emigration; this went against established notions that such investment would retain potential emigrants.

In her second book The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991; 2nd ed 2002) she showed how the global economy far from being placeless, has and needs very specific territorial insertions, and that this need is sharpest in the case of highly globalized and electronic sectors such as finance; this went against established notions at the time that the global economy transcended territory and its associated regulatory umbrellas. In her most recent book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2006), she shows that the foundational transformations afoot today take place largely inside core and thick national environments; this allows her to explain that some of the changes inside liberal states, most evident in the USA but also increasingly in other countries, are not distortions or anomalies, but are the result of these foundational transformations inside the state apparatus. She shows how this foundational transformation hence consists not only of globalizing dynamics but also of denationalizing dynamics: we are seeing the formation of multiple often highly specialized assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights that were once ensconced in national framings. Today these assemblages traverse global and national settings, thereby denationalizing what was historically constructed as national.

 

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Submitted by admin on November 22, 2008 - 7:41pm

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.

 

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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

Chris Anderson: The Longer Tail

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication. 

Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito

Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.

1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?

2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?

3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?

The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine lectured on The Longer Tail on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2:30-4.00pm at the Annenberg Center for Communication. 

Comments by Todd Richmond, Julian Bleecker, Wally Baer, Kazys Varnelis, and Mizuko Ito

Notes on the Long Tail from http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

"The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of the sales chart at upper left, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

Our research project has attempted to quantify the Long Tail in three ways, comparing data from online and offline retailers in music, movies, and books.

1) What's the size of the Long Tail (defined as inventory typically not available offline)?

2) How does the availability of so many niche products change the shape of demand? Does it shift it away from hits?

3) What tools and techniques drive that shift, and which are most effective?

The Long Tail article (and the forthcoming book) is about the big-picture consequence of this: how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail."

lecture video: 

Your browser is not able to display this multimedia content.

Submitted by kvarnelis on November 4, 2005 - 7:23pm

Mike Liebhold Lecture: The Geospatial Web and Mobile Service Ecologies

In collaboration with ARNIC, Michael Liebhold, Senior Researcher, The Institute for the Future spoke to the Networked Publics group on October 27, 2005 in the living room of the Annenberg Center for Communication at 2pm. 

 

Submitted by kvarnelis on October 19, 2005 - 1:34pm

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