Archive for the ‘contextual’ Category

To Privacy and Beyond!

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Just finished reading Issue 19 of Open, ‘Beyond Privacy, new perspectives on the public and private domains‘. The angle is to stop crying over spilt milk, “taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and trying to gain insight into what is on the horizon in terms of new subjectivities and power constructions”. I particularly enjoyed the articles by Daniel Solove and Felix Stalder, both redefining privacy (not a fan of Stalder’s 2.0 addition, but the article is a good read) while refraining from putting all responsibility on the user/consumer/citizen, and investigating strategies for law and state to better protect the right of individuals to privacy.

In “Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-privacy”, Felix Stalder argues for Privacy 2.0: new strategies for connective opacity that should make clear what people outside a network can see of what goes on inside, and what providers of those infrastructures can see of the inside as well, and all of that using mandatory transparency of the protocols they use to provide their services, so that discrimination can be contested. (more…)

Can games change the world? Busting through to reality versus Escapism

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Online games are getting more and more popular and game mechanics are being applied everywhere in an attempt to trigger the same eager enthusiasm to participate in something, as gamers experience during gameplay. I’ve recently seen 2 talks that explore this phenomenon: Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE 2010, and Jane McGonigal’s talk at TED. Both talks touch upon the same topic, the power of games to change our (real world) behaviour, but take an opposite approach, here’s a short analysis:

Schell talks about the future of game design as it invades the real world. He analyses the immense success of Facebook games such as Farmville and Mafia wars. What do they have in common? (more…)

The Art of Surviving in Simcities

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Here is a post from a chapter that I wrote for the Walled Garden publication released in 2009 by Virtueel Platform as a follow up of the 2008 Walled Garden conference in Amsterdam. The book was edited by Annet Dekker en Annette Wolfsberger. Reading my paper again today, I did not change my mind on the issues of “information exhibitionism” and “privacy as currency for gratis services”, but I would certainly mention the recent discussions that are happening in the GNU Social list, as well as several other efforts to develop social software as a distributed infrastructure.

Introduction

Used and abused by many, the notion of “2.0, 3.0, x.0” is mostly jargon that inherited its vagueness from a desire to inflate technological value and its cultural impact. This is nothing but a commercial attempt to resuscitate the dotcom era by promising a future of connected services and communication. Unfortunately there is nothing new in terms of network infrastructure nor in terms of how people have used the Internet to date. At most, another layer of abstraction has been built on pre-existing technology, and some interoperability has been added in terms of data exchange. It doesn’t matter though, if all this vapour ends up either up in the clouds, or stuck in condensation on some forgotten server. All of us are experiencing how the use of the Internet and the growing dependence on computation has a serious impact on our everyday lives. There is no need to pretend this is a side effect of new web application trends and their social impact. On the contrary, the transition phase we are experiencing now is rather simple to understand: humanity has started its slow shift from total offline activity to complete online and digitally assisted life. (more…)

Plutonian clothing strategy

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

How naked do we want to be on pluto? This is a big question for us planning this game. We wish to explore notions of privacy in a socially networked world, but at the same time we risk hypocrisy if we fail to honor our players with anything more than complete transparency concerning what we are doing with their data.

While privacy and facebook has been a hot topic of debate recently, I’m unclear how much as been discussed about the rights given to facebook applications when you agree to give them access to your data. Depending on your settings, it can use your session id to do anything you can do – access your friend’s data or post on your wall (as most games like to do for advertising).

From my initial reading, the facebook privacy policy is fairly clear and well written concerning your responsibilities as an application developer. Firstly there is a distinction based on where the data comes from: (more…)