State of the Industry conference - Genevieve Bell presentation

Second presentation from from the State of the Industry conference at the University of NSW, hosted by the Cultural Research Network is from Genevieve Bell, who heads the first social science oriented reserach team at Intel, the User Experience group in the Intel Home Group. She was also identified as one of the 50 Most Creative People by Fast Company in 2009, as well as an Adelaide Thinker in Residence for the South Australian government.

Genevieve Bell

• PhD in anthropology at Stanford University after a very diverse and eclectic childhood and upbringing - has struggled to "fit" with either the university or the industry environment;
• Was going to take up an academic post, but was in Palo Alto in 1998 and was offered a job (again, in interesting circumstances) at Intel;

(Hope this is podcast, as its a great talk, in ways that can't quite be captured in a blog).

• Challenge between the very predictable path of academic tenure track employment and jobs that are not defined at Intel;
• She was hired out of the "irrational exuberance" at Intel in 1998, and being "the only woman who didn't cry" at the day-long interview;
• Job was to be in charge of "women" and "Rest of the World";
• Working with people from maths, sciences and IT backgrounds from an arts/humanities background requires disrupting dominant logics within Intel (e.g. everyone wants to be American), but they often relapse (graphic of three generations of white people watching TV together);
• How to mobilise stories about the "messiness of everyday life" to talk back to dominant understandings within Intel - this generates sharp debates, and forces a willingness to stand up for what you know in the face or arguments and scepticism;

Research Questions

1. There is no single trajectory through which technologies are adopted or no single pathway for the Internet - the "feral Internet", which is a very Australian interpretative concept (Internet as undomesticated, like feral animals in the Australian desert);
2. How technologists imagine technologies as being perceived? How to unpack underlying notions of the body, space etc., but privacy is becoming less of a core concern than what can be called reputation - telling other people about every aspect of your identity. Contrast between "messiness' of identities and desire for seamless personas among technology developers - image, authenticity, reputation more than trust, risk;
   
3. Concerns for policing behaviour: what it is devices want and what people need? Devices that work better when "always connected" versus desire of people for discrete moments of engagement/non-engagement;
4. How people talk about their lives as technologically engaged citizens? What are the "overheads" of everyday life in a technological age, and how do people struggle to deal with them? Don't map easily onto existing sociological categories (age, gender etc.) or life stages.;
5. Contributing theory in unexpected places. All kinds of people can do good fieldwork, but the caapcity to make sense of it requires exposure to a rich array of theoretical resources. Sometimes theory is taught to Intel engineers e.g Adrienne Rich on "compulsory heterosexuality" and why engineers should know about this. What seems to be "internal tools in the academy" can be used outside of the academy e.g. Foucault on bodies and power.

There are a lot of people doing work of this nature in various areas of high-tech industry, who are using the intellectual tools learned in the humanities academy for other purposes.

Implications

1. Increasingly complex trajectories for cultural researchers, and thinking about how people with PhDs may move in and out of industry, academy etc. Also how to see work done outside of the academy as rigorous, engaged etc. There are a lot of lacunae in the higher education sector about this, especially in the US academy. Australia can avoid this. They recruit people who do not come out of the Intel industry template model, but you need to know how to talk with them without thinking you have to sacrifice your theoretical training - not "dumbing down" training, but expanding horizons and career possibilities;
   
2. Finding the questions and asking them, and new jobs to be created. Development of a National Broadband Network in Australia will require cultural knowledge that Australia is not good at developing, as well as engineering knowledge which it is good at - how to you concretise the "digital economy" into everyday life? How to get beyond "putting the 'e' in front of everything" to the more complex questions of socio-technical questiosn of citizenship, identity, inclusion etc. The critique from within the academy is important, but so too is the scope to insert ourselves and our own positions into the government agencies, consultancies, companies etc. that are actively engaged in these decisions?
3. How can Australian cultural reserachers be global drivers of theory and analysis of the changing socio-cultural environment? Australia can be an incubator of new ideas, that can then be "talked back" to the rest of the world.
   

The app economy

Interesting discussion in The Guardian about the rise of the app economy, or the revenue shares between Apple, developers and advertisers from the large - and, for Apple, somewhat unexpected - surge in demand for iPhone applications.

Tube Exits is just one of an estimated 100,000 apps that will exist by the end of this year. Apps are mobile applications designed to be used on smartphones such as iPhones or BlackBerrys or devices such as the iPod Touch. Ilja Laurs, chief executive of GetJar, a leading independent application store, told the MobileBeats conference in San Francisco earlier this month that apps could be bigger than the internet by 2020. Some 65,000 apps are currently available for Apple's iPhones from the corporation's App Store, which marked its first anniversary earlier this summer. But in that year, the apps industry has grown exponentially – the total number of Apple's App Store downloads recently passed the 1.5bn mark.

The App Store's success is reportedly a surprise to Apple, but presumably an even bigger and nastier one to competitors such as Research in Motion (who make BlackBerrys) and Nokia (the world's biggest mobile phone maker). The App Store's staggering success has led nearly every maker of a smartphone operating system to mimic Apple's business model: make it very easy for smartphone users to buy or freely download software created by from third-party developers.

At the moment Apple has something of a stranglehold on apps: Tube Exits is typical in that it can only be used on Apple mobile hardware (ie iPhones and iPod Touches). Apple has even won, if unwittingly, the battle of nomenclature: apps could have just as easily been called programmes or software but instead they are called apps, echoing the corporation's first syllable and thus stressing their seemingly umbilical link to one particular supplier of smartphone hardware.

What are apps? Some are games (such as Who Has The Biggest Brain?, which was played by 25 million people on the internet before being launched as an iPhone app, and its rival The Moron Test), some are silly (one allows you to download the image of a fan on to the screen of your iPhone, the aim being to make you feel cooler), some are edifying (one app consists of an audiobook of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History, whose text scrolls on the phone's screen as you hear it read aloud). Among the most popular is a now venerable one called iBeer, which transforms your iPhone into the simulation of a beer glass. Tilt it to your mouth and you seem to be drinking beer. There is even a way of seeming to pour virtual beer from one iPhone to another. And they say technology is all about progress.

Full article here.

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

Bruce Sterling in WIRED online projects on the difficulties faced for literature and book publishing today. Below are what he sees as eighteen challenges for contemporary literature:

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

African mobiles from Chungking: Low-end Globalization

One of the world's fastest growing mobile phone markets is sub-Saharan Africa. But apparently 15% of mobiles that find their way to the continent pass through the Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong.

Anyone who has been to Kowloon knows the foreboding, chaotic presence of Chungking on the Nathan Road. May a backpacker has stayed there - the cheapest, and seediest, accommodation on Hong Kong. And the 1994 classic Chungking Express was of course a worldwide film hit.

This facinating global "grey market" for phones made in China going to Africa has even been tracked by an anthropologist. Professor Gordon Matthews of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has looked at this phenomenon as a case study in what he terms "low-end globalization".

This work can be checked out at:

2008 “Chungking Mansions: A Center of ‘Low-End Globalization.’” Ethnology XLVI (2): 169-183.

(Apologies for lack of a link. Journal web site not up to date at time of posting).

1.5 billion Internet users

It is now estimated that worldwide there are 1.5 billion Internet users, accounting for 22.43% of the world's population.

http://www.50x15.com/en%2Dus/

It is also estimated that there are 4 billion mobile phone users worldwide.

Half the world has a mobile

This is from news.com.au. The story has appeared in several places, but the full report does not as yet appear to be on the Web site of the International Telecommunications Union.

THE number of mobile phone users world soared to over 3.3 billion by the end of 2007, equivalent to a penetration rate of 49 per cent, according to a report by the International Telecommunications Union.

Africa showed the strongest gains over the past two years and more than two thirds of all mobile subscribers were from developing countries by the end of 2007, the ITU said.

This is "a positive trend that suggests that developing countries are catching up," the report said.

Mobile subscription growth stood at 39 per cent annually in Africa between 2005-2007, and 28 per cent in Asia over the same period.

India and China added 154 million and 143 million new subscribers respectively.

The global annual average growth rate stood at 22 per cent, the ITU said.

Mobile phones are eclipsing traditional fixed lines and in Africa they account for nearly 90 per cent of all telephone subscribers, the report said.

"The continued growth in the mobile sector is matched by no-growth in the fixed-line sector. Fixed telephone penetration has been stagnating at just under 20 per cent globally for the last years and growth has been below one per cent between 2005 and 2007," it said.

While developing countries have made great strides in mobile growth, a significant "digital divide" remains for internet use and particularly the availability of broadband connections, it noted.

High-income countries account for 66 per cent of all fixed broadband subscribers although they only represent 16 per cent of the world's population, while developing countries have just 1 per cent of fixed broadband users but 38 per cent of the global population.

"Low-income countries, where broadband access remains very low, risk falling behind in an area that is particularly important in delivering innovative applications and services," the ITU warned.

Some countries have made progress and the ITU highlighted Chile, Senegal and Turkey as states where almost all internet subscribers have now gone high speed.

"For more people to benefit from the potential of broadband and the applications that it can deliver, governments need to do their share to ensure that high-speed technologies become more accessible as well as more affordable," the ITU urged.