The New York Chapter of the Internet Society recorded and posted my “Dataveillance and Everyday Consciousness in the ‘Smart’ City” lecture from May’s Techno-Activism Third Monday event in NYC. Big thanks to Joly MacFie!
Privatization
Configuring a ‘Right to the City’ with a ‘Right to Research’: Towards a Participatory Smart Urbanism
I’ll be participating in the “Thinking the ‘smart city’: power, politics and networked urbanism” sessions (see Session I and Session II) at this year’s Association of American Geographers. Info and abstract below:
Title: Configuring a ‘Right to the City’ with a ‘Right to Research’: Towards a Participatory Smart Urbanism
Author: Gregory T. Donovan
Time: 04/10/14, 10:00AM
Place: Tampa
Abstract:
In this paper I draw on participatory research and design work with NYC youth to consider a ‘right to the city’ and a ‘right to research’ as deeply intertwined ontological and epistemological movements that can reconfigure the production of space and knowledge in the Smart City. Much of urban informatics has been defined by large-scale ecosystems of data that are privately owned and operated by corporations and/or governments. I historically situate these “proprietary ecologies” in a neoliberal logic of privatization operating in cities to spatially orient urban life towards capital accumulation via tactics such as zoning, policing, and enclosure. In studying the unevenness of such development, some scholars have argued for the right of everyday people to be represented in the social material configuration of our cities, while others have argued for a right of these same people to be represented in the aims and methods of contemporary research. Urban youth, in particular, populate proprietary ecologies with troves of data through their daily habits. Yet, they are among the least engaged in shaping how, where, and for what purposes, this research is conducted. I review two youth-based projects intended to shift this dynamic: one that developed an open-source social network, and one that maintains a local mesh network. These projects help consider how broader calls for rights to the city and research play out in the practical yet powerful ways youth are remaking the social material (and thus entailed, digital) configuration of smart urbanism.
SMW Panel: From Citizen Journalism to Hacktivism
Simon Lindgren (Umeâ University) has posted audio from the Social Media Week panel I participated in with Shawn Carrie (OWS/OccupySandy/OccupyData), David Huerta (CryptoParty NYC), Gregory Rosenthal (Free University NYC), and Laura Scherling (Green Space NYC). The panel — “From Citizen Journalism to Hacktivism: How to successfully use social media in grassroots campaigns” — was moderate by Simon and focused on experience-sharing, networking, and identifying pitfalls as well as best practices for harnessing the power of social media in grassroots endeavors.
I spoke on my experiences establishing and co-coordinating the OpenCUNY Academic Medium at the CUNY Graduate Center:
Audio of my co-panelists discussing their impressive work here: Shawn Carrie on OWS/OccupySandy/OccupyData, David Huerta on CryptoParty NYC, Gregory Rosenthal on Free University NYC, and Laura Scherling on Green Space NYC.
Doing Participatory Research and Pedagogy in Proprietary Educational Environments
This Saturday (10/13/12) I’ll be presenting with Kiersten Greene at Northwestern University’s InfoSocial Conference. Info and abstract below:
Title: Doing Participatory Research and Pedagogy in Proprietary Educational Environments
Authors: Gregory T. Donovan & Kiersten Greene
Panel: Participation, Socialization, and Memory Online
Discussant: Prof. Kevin Barnhurst, University of Illinois at Chicago
Time: 10/13/12, 3:15PM – 4:45PM
Place: Annie May Swift Hall, room 102
Abstract: The ubiquity of proprietary technologies embedded within informational modes of pedagogy and research unsettles industrial understandings of privacy and property within educational environments. As educational institutions commit a growing portion of shrinking budgets to proprietary software and outsourced ICT services, their informational infrastructure intertwines with corporations from Google and Blackboard to IBM and Apple. We offer a multi-disciplinary analysis of this proprietary infrastructure, drawing on our respective dissertation research in the fields of Urban Education and Environmental Psychology, to articulate issues of privacy and property experienced by young people and teachers in these educational environments. We begin by summarizing the findings from two independent cases: The MyDigitalFootprint.ORG Project and The NYC Teacher Blog Project. Our first case, MyDigitalFootprint.ORG, is a participatory action design research (PADR) project interested in the concerns of young people developing in proprietary information ecologies. This project began by interviewing young people ages 14-19 in New York City to identify shared online privacy, property, and security concerns. A collective of youth co-researchers was then assembled to further research and take action in response to these concerns through the development of a youth-based open source social network. Through this PADR project, young people participated in investigating and reconfiguring how information is experienced in their everyday environment. Our second case, The NYC Teacher Blog Project, aggregates, stores, and anonymizes the blog posting of New York City teachers for qualitative analysis in order to examine the tension between the realities of everyday pedagogical practices and the tacit privatization of educational policy. Whether at the federal, state, or local levels, teachers’ opinions, local knowledge, and expertise count for naught in the policymaking process as K-12 public school teachers are provided little if any voice in the construction of education policy. The traditional isolation of the teaching environment has provided teachers with little opportunity to connect, reflect, or engage with this process. Yet, as our everyday information infrastructure grows so to do opportunities for teacher expression and research. Blogs have proven an enduring aspect of this infrastructure by providing a space where teachers can reflect, connect, and share local knowledge. We conclude our review of these two cases by discussing strategies for reworking educational boundaries, relationships, and flows towards the privacy, property, and participation concerns of young people and teachers. With the MyDigitalFootprint.ORG Project, we look specifically at the open source software and PADR methods employed to engage young people as producers of social media and participants in social research, rather than as social media consumers and social research subjects. With the NYC Teacher Blog Project, we look specifically at how its partnership with the OpenCUNY Academic Medium, a student-based open source medium at the CUNY Graduate Center, afforded both methodological and epistemological breakthroughs around teacher privacy and property in educational environments.
Tweet
@gdonovan: #ShoestringDemocracy published in Journal of #UrbanAffairs w/ #SethaLow + @jgieseking #coop #privatization #openecology http://t.co/WhvqtMnQ
Tweet
@gdonovan: #Microsoft + #NYPD team up for “Domain Awareness” public #surveillance program http://t.co/pzcfnKbx
Newspaper CEO Finally Agrees Copyright Trolling Was a Dumb Idea
About a year ago MediaNews Group, publisher of 40 newspapers, signed a deal with Righthaven, a law firm. The deal allowed Righthaven to file copyright infringement lawsuits on MediaNews Group’s behalf in exchange for 50% of any settlement/verdict. Now, MediaNews Group has decided to part ways with Righthaven and John Paton, the chief executive of MediaNews Group, is quoted in Wired as saying:
“The issues about copyright are real … But the idea that you would hire someone on an — essentially — success fee to run around and sue people at will who may or may not have infringed as a way of protecting yourself … does not reflect how news is created and disseminated in the modern world … I come from the idea that it was a dumb idea from the start.” (emphasis added)
The idea that one could monetize news content (or any other content) by restricting its circulation and suing individual bloggers was always a dubious one. The RIAA and many other organizations that took this approach previously now appear to be abandoning it. And, as the Wired article also notes, Righthaven has lost a string of its lawsuits over the question of whether it even has the right to sue over copyright infringement when they are not the actual copyright holder.
MiND-Fi
Technology Loop from Portlandia (h/t Lisa Ashby Brundage):
Carrie: Welcome to MiND-Fi
Fred: Carrie, What’s that?
Carrie: It’s MiND-Fi, I just installed it. It’s like Wi-Fi, but for thoughts. Now, you can let go of all your electronic devices and just be free in your mind.