Fade to Play

Thanks to a tweet and post by djvibe of Vancouver, I discovered the The Obama Mix by DJ Z-Trip, which is a mix of music, political thought, and famous text.

Download the Obama Mix here.

It was created to help encourage people to get involved in the election process.
DJ Z-Trip worked with artist Shepard Fairey of Obey (who created the Obey Hope poster among others) to organise Obama fundraisers. The Obama Mix by DJ Z-Trip is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

And for those of us in Vancouver, DJ Z-Trip is coming with Bassnectar to the Commodore on Nov 22nd ($35).

Flickr photo courtesy of sallylondon

On CNN’s page there is an interesting article regarding research in Kenya exploring the social behaviour of zebras. Princeton researchers under a collaborative program called ZebraNet, have attached GPS devices to the necks of Grevy and Plains zebras. A particular emphasis behind the program is to gather data from the Grevy zebras, an endangered species whose numbers have dropped to 2000, as they social network, avoid becoming prey, and interact with others.

As a doctoral student at Duke University, Rubenstein was fascinated with how animals make decisions and why their societies form the way they do. He started studying equids — a family of mammals that includes horses, donkeys, and zebras — because they form associations among strangers.

He has also examined how the Grevy’s zebra social network — and he doesn’t mean Facebook or MySpace — may contribute to its endangerment. Associations between Grevy’s zebras are less close-knit than those of the Plains zebra, whose core societies consist of closed-membership harem-groups and bachelor groups.

In a harem, several females choose to live with one male that protects them against harassment in exchange for sex. Female Grevy’s zebras, on the other hand, don’t stay with one male for long periods of time, meaning they don’t have the benefit of a larger male watching out for them.

Relevance: I have Social Media and Location based Systems interests in relation to their use by humans. What can we learn from the animal kingdom and their social networks that is of relevance to our own everyday lives and research?

When is money used as a place holder rather than having monetary value?

In the game of pool, there are social conventions that exist regarding the desire to use the pool table next. One places a coin (e.g. a quarter) on the table above where the slot exists to insert money. On Mondays at this establishment, the pool table was free to use, yet the convention is still being followed.

Relevance: Is this convention unique to pool? Is it universal in other cultures outside of North America?

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I gave a presentation at the Media Annotations and Tagging workshop by MAGIC entitled “Playing tag in user-generated spaces” in which I discussed tagging in Facebook and Flickr.

I then attended a photowalk in Gastown (a section of Vancouver) organised by Kris Krüg that evening and afterwards we uploaded our photos to Flickr and and Facebook using appropriate tags to categorise our content. Some of us also became new friends/contacts on Flickr and Facebook.

After the walk Kris yelled out that we use a standardised tag “gastownphotowalk2″ to link our photos on flickr together. If you attend conferences, workshops, meetups, you will hear the organisers request that a common tag be used to link photos/blog entries related to the event. Although people believe in the power of the folksonomy, a little top-down intervention is very effective and sometimes necessary.

The result of using “gastownphotowalk2″ is that we are one of the hot tags of the last 24 hours on flickr. Sweet.

Check out our photos here.

Relevance: I am finding that I living what I research regarding tagging in flickr and facebook. It helps me better understand the culture of these spaces when I use these spaces daily because of my real world interactions and meetups. Having friends that live in these digital environments is quite beneficial.

Which symbols in society are universally recognised and which are particular to certain cultures?

Within Canada there are a variety of cues that people use to distinguish between washrooms for the males and females. Usually it involves looking at the door for an identifying symbol or word such as “Men” or “Women”. However, this is not always foolproof. I have been in a club where two doors beside each other were labelled as such with arrows pointing to the other door.

It was quite easy to miss the arrow and to enter a washroom that was different from what one had intended. Perhaps that was the intent of the club’s owners.

Relevance: Are there cultures where this symbol would be misunderstood? When are words preferable to convey information versus symbols.

The Times Online from May 14th discusses Jan Chipchase and how he is exploring what mobile phones will look like in 2022.

Emerging markets’ potential explains Mr Chipchase’s taste for mobile minutiae. Nokia’s patchy record – it missed a trend towards clamshell phones – is also factor. His basic mission, however, is to root out the motivation behind people’s behaviour, on the basis that it will not alter by the year 2022.

He is particularly interested in ad hoc mobile banking that has sprung up in Uganda, which uses prepayment systems as deposit accounts and relies on shopowners to make good promises to turn credits back into cash. “The question is: how do we design for people’s needs?” he says.

Relevance: As I am reading The Cell Phone (2006) by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, I am aware of differences in how people in Jamaica that are of low income use mobile phones differently than myself. I wonder what other technologies do people make specific to a particular culture.

In Canada, throughout classrooms and lecture halls, when someone wants to share information with a wide body of people, they will leave a note in the top right corner of the blackboard.

There isn’t any indication of the status of the person that left the message. They might be a teacher or a student.

The important cues that are used to let others know that the message is important and shouldn’t be erased are: 1. create a border that will separate it from the rest of the board and 2. write the initial PLO which means ‘Please Leave On’. Sometimes the writer will also note a date that it can be erased.

The presence of the PLO initials tells the cleaning staff or the teacher not to remove the message.

Relevance: What other cues to other cultures use to convey the importance of messages maintaining permanency?

18-year-old Katie Barnard’s prom date text-messaged her one hour before the big night that he couldn’t make it. (Laura Leyshon for the Globe and Mail)

This Globe and Mail article once again highlights a trend in teen/college dating today. Mobile and digital technologies are being used to supplement actual voice communication such as a phone call or a face-to-face meeting. Everyone uses Facebook and on Facebook is where you find out how your ex’s are doing, who your friends are dating, and about the dating status of _potentials_.

Stephanie, a 22-year-old living in Toronto, has a different problem: She broke up with her boyfriend in the real world, but can’t remove his presence from her virtual life. She hasn’t logged onto Facebook in four months, except to delete his name from the status line on her profile — “that’s kind of replaced getting rid of old letters and postcards.”

His face is in her photo albums, his friends are on his contact list, his comments archived on her wall. She’s not pining, she says, but it would be tempting to peek at his page. “You just have to click a button and you can instantly see how their whole world has changed since you left it.” She misses being on Facebook. “You have to cut off your relationship with this whole online world to cut off your relationship with one person.”

Relevance: An excellent article outlining some of the privacy concerns felt by today’s teens and young people as they balance the need for companionship with their desire to remain in touch with their friends using the _it_ social networking tool which right now is Facebook.

I am reading The Cell Phone (2006) by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller. It is a detailed ethnography of the mobile phone in Jamaica, focusing primarily on the low income inhabitants. It is a insightful window into the Jamaican culture to help provide a context to mobile phone usage.

I was fortunate at breakfast today to chat with Afua Cooper, she was a guest in my residence while here at UBC as the keynote for a conference. As she immigrated from Jamaica and is still quite connected to the island, she was able to provide additional information about the availability of landlines with the rural areas of Jamaica and about how mobile phones are been integrated into society. Apparently, some people have more than one phone, one is used to make long-distance calls, while the other is for local numbers.

Description

The book traces the impact of the cell phone from personal issues of loneliness and depression to the global concerns of the modern economy and the trans-national family. As the technology of social networking, the cell phone has become central to establishing and maintaining relationships in areas from religion to love. The Cell Phone presents the first detailed ethnography of the impact of this new technology through the exploration of the cell phone’s role in everyday lives.

Author Bio

Heather A. Horst is Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for New Media, University of California Berkeley. Daniel Miller teaches in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.

Relevance: This book is helping me understand my own West Indian background as well as provide some clarity regarding mobile technology within a developing country. Regarding technology, I wonder about the extent to which the Internet is used in schools and in the home outside of the urban areas or how common laptops are.

In today’s New York Times, there is an article about how mobile phones are being used in the field to assist health care workers in Rwanda in tracking diseases.

Operating through servers in Kigali that are owned by the South African telecommunications operator MTN, the Rwanda system gets field clinic reports via text message, a voice-call system or on the Internet using a computer or Internet-enabled cellphone.

Each time a new patient enters the system, the information is sent in, while weekly reports cover data like a clinic’s stocks of drugs, and monthly reports cover the number of patients under treatment. Clinics receive messages including the results of laboratory tests and drug recall alerts sent by the ministry of health.

This is part of a public-private initiative called _Phones for Health_ which builds on the success of the Rwanda project by branching out to 10 African countries.

Phones for Health will allow health workers in the field to use a standard Motorola handset equipped with a downloadable application to enter health data. Once entered, the data is transferred via a packet based mobile connection (GPRS) into a central database. If GPRS isn’t available, the software can use a SMS data channel to transmit the information . The data is then mapped and analyzed by the system, and is immediately available to health authorities at multiple levels via the web. The system also supports SMS alerting and other tools for communication with field staff.

“Rapid and accurate communications channels are crucial to tackling the many health problems faced by African countries and other parts of the developing world,” said Rob Conway, Chief Executive of the GSM Association. “The roll out of this health management software in Africa will clearly demonstrate how governments can exploit the expanding mobile infrastructure to enhance the well-being of their citizens.”

Relevance: Another example of how mobile phones are helping create a better Africa.