Michael Zimmer.org

For the last 353 days, I’ve been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an interdisciplinary collection of nearly 400 scholars, researchers and graduate students interested in Internet and new media studies are descending on Milwaukee this week.
The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But …

The art blog Art Fag City recently published a brilliant and insightful photo essay by Jon Rafman, titled “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View”. Through text and Street View images, Rafman critically interrogates the gaze of Street View, exposing the ways in which it frames our view of the world, while at the same time constraining it.

In the post are some of the more compelling Street View images he has found, along with his closing remarks.

There’s nothing worse than listening to yourself talk.
Following up on March’s special issue of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0,” I was recently interviewed by Joy Austria and A.J. Hannah for the First Monday Podcast series.
You can download the MP3 (5.2MB, 15:16) or read the transcript. Hopefully you can read between the awkward phrasing of my responses (I think I was travel-weary at the time), and find something insightful to complement the special issue.
(Speaking of that special issue, the Washington Post recently quoted Anders Albrechtslund‘s contribution. I’m …

This spring I am running a reading group at the Yale Information Society Project (but open to all) titled “Technology, Law, Society, Values and Design.” The description and draft syllabus are below — comments and suggestions are welcome!
Technology, Law, Society, Values and Design
The starting point of this reading group is the position that the spheres of technology, society, law, and values are engaged in an eternal dance, each guiding, influencing, and reacting to the other. Technologies are socially constructed, but also shape society. Values are embedded in technologies and …

Blogging has been light lately as I’m visiting family over the holiday break.
Today, however, I came across one of my favorite essays by the late Neil Postman, cultural critic and founder of my PhD-granting department at NYU, and felt compelled to interrupt my break from blogging to share it.
The essay, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” was delivered by Postman in 1998 to a gathering of theologians and religious leaders in Denver, Colorado.  Postman remarked on the things we should all endeavor to understand about how society is impacted by technological …

UNESCO has released an important assessment of the nature of knowledge acquisition in our technologically-mediated age. The “Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing” (PDF) recognizes that…

Knowledge is the key to social and economic development;
Creation, acquisition and sharing of knowledge have been going through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new information and communication technologies (ICT) and the societal transformations that they generate;
New approaches are needed to bridge international knowledge gaps while ensuring cultural and linguistic diversity;
The Internet and new education technologies provide manifold opportunities …

Philipp Lenssen points out that when you search Google for “she invented,” on the results page you are asked “Did you mean ‘he invented’?”
There has been lots of discussion on this seemingly misogynistic “correction” that Google provides, and those familiar with my research know that I’m a proponent of critiquing algorithm and system design for potential bias. But in this case I think it is more a function of the n-gram table of adjacent word frequencies. A user searches for “x y”, Google determines that “x z” is related, and …

Sherry Turkle has an excellent essay in Forbes about the alienating consequences of the digital revolution. (She gave a related talk for the McLuhan Lecture at NYU a few months ago). Her thesis is that “Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected–or more alienated”:
We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no …

An important press release came out this week regarding a coalition of Internet companies, IT providers, human rights organizations, and academics joining forces to address human rights violations enabled by technologies and practices by some of the member organizations, such as providing means of surveillance for regimes like China to identify and jail dissident citizens. From the release:
A diverse group of companies, academics, investors, technology leaders and human rights organizations announced today its intention to seek solutions to the free expression and privacy challenges faced by technology and communications companies …

Siva Vaidhyanathan says “no thanks” to Time magazine naming “you” Person of the Year. From his essay on MSNBC.com:
… Well, thank you, Time, for hyping me, overvaluing me, using me to sell my image back to me, profiling me, flattering me, and failing to pay me. As soon as I saw myself on my local newsstand, I had to buy a copy of Time.
Notice that Time framed the Person of the Year as “you.” That should sound familiar. Almost every major marketing campaign these days is about empowering “you.”
“You” have …

I am pleased to announce that selected papers from the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” graduate student symposium held at New York University in September have been published in a special issue of First Monday. Here are titles and abstracts:
Identity and Identification in a Networked World
by Tim Schneider and Michael Zimmer
Summary of events and acknowledgments.
Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites
by danah boyd
“Are you my friend? Yes or no?” This question, while fundamentally odd, is a key component of social network …

A student (thanks, Gui!) pointed me to this Financial Times story about how Google Earth is fueling the push towards a more egalitarian society now that poorer citizens can spy on the massive and extravagant properties of the wealthier class:
The site allows internet users to view satellite images of the world in varying degrees of detail. When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land …

The FTC is holding a set of public hearings November 6-8 called Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade, bringing together a diverse collection of scholars and practioners “to examine the key technological and business developments that will shape consumers’ core experiences in the coming ten years.”
The agenda is expansive, covering topics ranging from general Internet trends, social networking, user-generated content, RFIDs, marketing and communication trends, and user privacy. Presenters include Helen Nissenbaum (NYU; my dissertation advisor), Vint Cerf (Google), Ari Schwartz (CDT), danah boyd (SIMS-Berkeley), Esther Dyson (CNet), David Farber …

I presented at the Social Software and Web 2.0: Critical Perspectives and Challenges for Research and Business seminar and workshop a few days ago at Aalborg University in Denmark. My talk, “The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0: How Web 2.0 Platforms Act as Infrastructures of Dataveillance” can be downloaded here (PDF), and the slides from my presentation are here (large 7.1MB PDF). Two other excellent presentations were made:
Søren Mørk Petersen, a PhD student at IT University of Copenhagen, presented his research on moblogging and challenged us to break out of …

Registration is now open for the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” multidisciplinary graduate student symposium, September 29-30, 2006 at the NYU School of Law. Twenty graduate students from across North America and Europe will share their exciting research on the social, cultural, philosophical, legal and technical perspectives of systems of identity, identifiability and identification. In addition to graduate student panels, a keynote talk will be delivered by Professor Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law & Technology at the University of Ottawa.
The symposium is free and open …