Category: value

Posted on

Checkout @TOPOSExeter for some great art & events

TOPOS Exeter show: art-articles

This is post is really an invite, from the cultural geographers at Exeter, to an exhibition & associated events that are taking please this week at TOPOS on St. Sidwell’s street – with input and support from Prof John Wylie (Head of Geography at Exeter), and from Ian Cook et al. and Paula Cutchlow’s magnificent Museum of Contemporary Commodities.

TOPOS is a distinctive space for artistic installation/ exhibition/ discussion in Exeter, hosted and run by Volkhardt Mueller and is well worth a visit. So, please do!

This week’s new exhibition, Art-Articles, by Berlin artist Konstantin Bayer, offers a set of installations and objects which comment upon, and invite direct exploration of, contemporary encounters with commodification, originality, materiality and nature. See the link below for details of Bayer’s distinctive approach and products:

There will be a private viewing at TOPOS on Wed May 11th 17.30 – 18.30, and the exhibition will have regular opening hours in the days following (details here). There will also be a conversation/discussion event at TOPOS, on the themes of Landscape, Art & Commodity, Friday May 13th, 18.00 – 21.00

Please visit the TOPOS website for details of how to find it. And consider following them on Twitter for more information.

And here is a link to book a place at the discussion event on Friday: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/topos-conversation-art-landscape-commodity-tickets-25235555225

Posted on

Internet of Things, ownership and Ts & Cs

iot-toothpaste
Toothpaste terms of service

Decided to make a spoof image that follows some others’ attempts to satirically reflect on the kinds of business models that seem to be creeping in for ‘Internet of Things’ products and services. My impetus is that I’ve enjoyed some of the recent posts on the @internetofshit satirical twitter stream, which lampoons IoT business ideas. These got me thinking…

Many of the successful posts take to the extreme a model we are already experiencing – which is that we do not necessarily totally control those things we think we own. I am aware that other folk will probably have commented in more depth and with greater nuance, but there we are… this is just a blogpost! (I welcome suggestions for further reading though)

For example – I recently bought a Kindle Paperwhite and to remove the inbuilt advertising I had to pay (in addition to the retail price) a £10 fee to ‘unsubscribe’ from ‘Special Offers‘. So, I had bought the device but to remove the adverts I had to pay more.

This, of course, resonates with the inkjet printer business model – in which the printer manufacturer can almost give away some models because the ink itself is highly lucrative, which led to stories comparing it’s value to that of gold…

In my most recent lecture for my third-year option module (Geographies of Technology) I addressed some of these issues and invited the students to consider the following questions when thinking about an ‘internet of things and places’:

Questions of ownership/responsibility:

  • Whose things?
  • Whose data?
  • Who has access? How? When? Where?

Questions of power:

  • How are decisions made on the basis of the data?
  • How doe these decisions influence our lives?

Questions of value:

  • How can/should we negotiate the value(s) of our data?
  • What are we willing to give(-up) for perceived benefits?
    • When does giving away lots of data become not worth it?

Later the same day, on the train home, I idly tweeted a speculative satirical scenario:

Which led me to create a still image (above). I think there’s a lot of scope of using speculative design techniques in a satirical way to provoke more debate about the kinds of relationship we want to enter into with and through the technologies we bring into our everyday lives. My key inspiration here is Anne Galloway‘s work, especially the beautiful Counting Sheep project.

Posted on

Interesting new paper: Performing the sharing economy – Lizzie Richardson

This new article in Geoforum [paywall] by Lizzie Richardson (@LizzieCIRich) looks really good – I’ve only skim read it so far but looking forward digging in 🙂

Performing the sharing economy

Lizzie Richardson

Here’s the abstract:

The sharing economy converges around activities facilitated through digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer access to goods and services. It constitutes an apparent paradox, framed as both part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative. This duplicity necessitates focusing on the performances of the sharing economy: how it simultaneously constructs diverse economic activities whilst also inviting the deconstruction of ongoing practices of dominance. Such performances hold open the question of what the (sharing) economy is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy ‘festival’ and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench ‘business-as-usual’ through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with ‘digital’ transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.

Posted on

Imogen Heap on inventing new [blockchain] contracts for publishing/selling music digitally

This interview/article in Forbes with Imogen Heap offers an interesting insight into what some artists are beginning to think about in relation to how on earth one creates a ‘fair’ mechanism of reward/recognition of work as an artist in a world where one’s work is subject to near infinite digital reproducibility.

This, to me (in my naivety), seems to represent one of the more compelling and believable implementations of what the blockchain can enable. It’s worth checking out Heap’s articulation of Mycelia (the blockchain powered music publishing system she hopes to help create).

For years I’ve been so frustrated with the deep opacity of the music industry stopping me from really making the most out of my career and connecting the dots. The ‘black boxes,’ the NDAs, the endless contracts and statements. In the last few years, auditing labels and publishers seems to have become the norm, as it’s apparent how consistently the books don’t match up. You can pretty much guarantee you’ll find something, but it’s not always intentional; it’s just the deals, trigger points, and percentages are so complex – even more when mergers and acquisitions occur – that it’s hard to get it right every time, if you’re human!

[Mycelia…]

Its success will come from the adoption of millions of music lovers. A grand scale ongoing, collective project like no-other. To document, protect and share that which we love and build a place for it to grow, enabling future generations of artists to blossom as well as honouring those of the past.

Open source, a living, breathing, smart, decentralised, transparent, adaptable, useful, shining home for our love of music. A home which allows creativity to flow, connect and facilitate collaboration on so many levels, many of which just haven’t been possible. With this grand library of all music forming the basis upon which all music businesses from digital radio to tour bookings can then grow and thrive from. Empowering the artists, turning and landing the industry finally on its feet.

Inspired by the largest living organisms on earth, ancient, unseen, core to life itself, Mycelium (plural Mycelia) can stretch for miles, beneath the surface.

Each artist acting like its own Mycelium, in full animated dialogue with others on the global network.

Mycelia is huge, as it holds all music related information ever recorded anywhere ever ever ever but this organism stretches across our planet between hundreds of thousands of personal computers. It is the world’s greatest and most treasured library and it belongs to the two collective parties who solely make music complete. The music makers and their audience.

Read the whole piece here.

Posted on

Event> The Politics and Economics of Attention (14/12)

Both Clive Barnett and I will be speaking at the sixth seminar in the Behaviour Change & Psychological Governance series (funded by the ESRC) which is being held at the University of Bristol on the 14th of December.

I’ll be revisiting some of the things Patrick Crogan and I wrote about back in 2012 in the themed issue of Culture Machine we co-edited following an ESF-funded conference on attention in 2010. My move forward is probably being a little more critical in my thinking about what constitutes the process of valuing attention (critically reflecting on why a Labour Theory of Value might not quite fit) and thinking (with the work of Bernard Stiegler) about how the socio-technical systems that attempt to economise (something that gets called) attention are a kind of pharmakon (an indeterminacy, originating from the idea of a drug as both poison and cure). By looking at some examples I hope to offer some suggestions about how we might understand what’s going on (in networked technology systems in particular) when an attempt is made to place a financial value on ‘attention’.

Posted on

Reblog> Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

A really interesting post by Gary Hall on his blog around what ‘open access’ means and how we negotiate what might be understood as the ‘attention economy’ of academia in relation to the ways in which sites like academia.edu and research gate leverage the ‘respectability’ of our work and our collective need to find audiences in order to generate valuable metadata. As Hall argues:

 In this world who gate-keeps access to (and so can extract maximum value from) content is less important, because that access is already free, than who gate-keeps(and so can extract maximum value from) the data generated around the use of that content, which is used more because access to it is free.

I heartily recommend reading the whole piece…

Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

brief discussion took place this month on the Association of Internet Researchers air-l listserve concerning a new book from the publishers Edward Elgar: Handbook of Digital Politics. Edited by Stephen Coleman and Deen Freelon, this 512 page volume features contributions from Peter Dahlgren, Nick Couldry, Christian Fuchs, Fadi Hirzalla and Liesbet van Zoonen, among numerous others. The discussion was provoked, however, not by something one of its many contributors had written about digital politics, but by the book’s cost: $240 on Amazon in the US. (In the UK the hardback is £150.00 on Amazon. Handbook of Digital Politics is also available online direct from the publishers for £135.00, with the ebook available for £40.) As one of those on the list commented, ‘I’d love to buy it, but not at that price’ – to which another participant in the discussion responded: ‘I encourage everyone to use the preprint option to post their piece on ssrn.com and academia.edu, perhaps others have other open access suggestions (e.g. Institutional Repositories of individual universities)’. Now, to be fair, the idea that is implied by this suggestion – that the Academia.edu platform for sharing research represents just another form of open access – is a common one. Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository.

Read the whole post here.

Posted on

Reblog> I am not here to satisfy you: the NSS and our institutional knickers

Hester Parr tweeted this post by Julie Cupples from a few months ago. As an early career academic on probation it’s difficult to stick your head above the parapet, and os it’s great when you read someone else doing it. This post really does resonate with my feelings about teaching in a university and how that can or should be valued…

There are also some good comments, so take a look.

I am not here to satisfy you: the NSS and our institutional knickers

The neoliberal endeavour to convert university students into consumers is underpinned by a survey culture that is constantly attempting to measure a thing called ‘student satisfaction’. It’s part of the way universities compete with one another and manufacture what is termed the ‘student experience’. In the neoliberal academy, students, faculty and staff are constantly surveyed, a phenomenon that a New Zealand academic has recently described as a tyranny that may “degrade student achievement” and “harm staff” (Heinemann 2015). If you borrow an interloan, ask IT to fix a software issue on your computer, or order sandwiches for a meeting from the preferred corporate supplier, you’re then likely to be sent a survey to assess the level of customer satisfaction with the service. It’s tedious but fortunately most of them can be quickly ignored and deleted. But the survey that seems to produce a bizarre level of managerial emphasis and concern that is quite hard to ignore is the National Student Survey (NSS). In my view, NSS obsession is producing quite pernicious and pedogogically impoverishing outcomes. For those outside the UK, the NSS began in 2005. It is commissioned by HEFCE and carried out by Ipsos Mori. Students are asked 23 questions which relate to student satisfaction and the learning experience (see thestudentsurvey.com for more detail). It then produces scores and rankings to add to the dozens of other league tables in which contemporary universities jostle for position and which get deployed in a highly selective manner in university spin.

The biggest problem with the idea of student satisfaction is that our principal aim as educators should not be to satisfy students. My teaching philosophy is composed in part of the following ideas:

I am not here to satisfy you. I am here to encourage you to interrogate your existing knowledges and possibly your own privilege. This is likely to be a deeply unsettling and uncomfortable process, especially if your class, race or gender location has never required you to interrogate your worldview and how it harms and excludes. I will however do my best to inspire you and encourage you to think. 

In fact, our aim should be to unsettle our students, especially the most privileged ones, not to satisfy them. It can often be satisfying to have your pre-existing values and worldviews endorsed (which is why people with right-wing views tend to watch Fox News for example rather than MSNBC or Democracy Now). While it might be energizing to have them challenged, and sometimes clearly is, for some students it can be deeply and profoundly dissatisfying. Some students react negatively when they are exposed to explicitly feminist perspectives or are forced to confront how they continue to benefit from the legacies of colonialism or white privilege. Engagement with these issues starts at university but is probably not resolved if ever until much later in a student’s life. By the time I graduated after four years of study, I had begun to rethink my worldviews. It wasn’t until much later than I gained a much deeper insight into my own politics and cultural assumptions and began to reformulate them. So if students are dissatisfied, it could be because we are doing our jobs properly, not because we are failing.

Read the rest of the post.