I control my data therefor I am

By Kees Winkel on 11 May 2012

Uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existing symbolic order, norms and values and which way out to choose. In ‘Life as a construction box’, Swierstra^[1] et al. begin their publication with the conception of ‘way out’ which, in my ayes is a bit heavy (my connotation of ‘way out’ has to do with escape). But then, the publication is a bout the most relevant, current and rather important issues of our days. Issues like privacy, man and machine, ambient and pervasive technology, health and being unhealthy and, as would like to put it, the makebility of reality, an as fundamental as rather intangible confusion trying to surface through solid ethical questions and controversies. Dutch philosopher Peter Paul Verbeek^{[see Swiestra]} questions whether people have the possibility to withdraw themselves from ambient and pervasive technology. And what about our log-time disputed basic right of privacy?

tagged with: moorian, boyd, verbeek, swiestra, privacy, facebook

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Would Plato’s Cyborg be male?

By Kees Winkel on 30 April 2012

I do this philosophy course at the university of Utrecht. Fascinating (and not in Spock’s connotation). The professors make us compare texts and write no more than approximately three hundred words about it. That is a challenge. Have a look of what I cooked up from the texts of
1. Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Phaedrus (1)
2. Jos de Mul’s chapter 1, part four of Filosofie in Cyberspace (2)  (in Dutch) and
3. Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (3) .
Is there any coomunality in the texts and if so, what is it. If not what is the common difference? Etc. So, after a couple of work-through-the-nights, I came up with my common denominator: would Plato’s Cyborg be male? Make up your own mind!

tagged with: social construtivism, rhetoric, plato, donnan haraway, de mul, cyborg manifesto, benjamin jowett, technological determinism, philosophy

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Frictionless Sharing: a critical view on automated sharing of media texts in social media

By Kees Winkel on 1 April 2012

On Februari 16 of this year, Volkskrant published an article called The future of social media is automated sharing; handy but sometimes a bit embarrassing in which the author Heleen van Lier notes that the future of sharing media texts lies in automated sharing. Central theme in her article stands Frictionless Sharing; a phrase introduced by social medium Facebook a couple of months ago. Representatives of Facebook, Reuters, Nokia and Microsoft debated Frictionless Sharing (FS) during the Social Media Week in London. The debate panel came to the conclusion that FS is here to stay. Use of the technology is simple; after agreeing once, the user starts sharing his data with other in linked media.

tagged with: social constructivism, technological determinism, utopia, frictionless sharing, facebook

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Fascinating

By Kees Winkel on 6 February 2012

Fascinating. I have started following a course at the University of Utrecht. This Monday morning, I found myself in a hugh auditorium with my colleague Jelke de Boer and some 430 other students. Apart from Jelke and me, I recon the average age was somewhere round 20. “Fascinating”, I found myself thinking in a rather Mr. Spock-like fashion as I really tried to make absolute sense of what I was doing there and how it happened of me actually sitting in that big dark hall with assistant professor Mirko Tobias Schäfer explaining the differences between McLuhan and Williams, ergo, the perhaps philosophical or at least academic dispute on issues of Technological Determinism and Social Constructivism. Fascinating.

tagged with: fascinating, teleology, discourse, startrek

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The Battles are on!

By Kees Winkel on 3 February 2012

Only two days to go and the Museum Battle and Media Battle are being kicked off, this time in Enschede. An odd 150 – 160 students from Utrecht’s and Enschede’s Universities of Applied Sciences will pressure cook a concept for their real-time assignors. The briefings will be given in Enschede and our Utrecht students will then work three days in Utrecht to finally pitch in Enschede again on Friday. As I am partially back in the classroom myself as a university student, I wont be able to join ‘my’ guys and girls in Enschede. But I will most certainly help them out during the three days in the creative boot camp at Hal16 in Utrecht.
Although in Dutch, I recommend the Media Battle’s website. The battle has been going on twice a year for a while now and I must say, the results are pretty spectacular. Early September I participated in the previous battle with five groups of students attending the minor Mobile Business Design. The Media Battle was a starter for a half year of intensive mobile business designing of what started as a creative idea during the battle. And I must say, the assignments were really tough.
There was Hoog Caterijne, asking a solution to guide people through the busiest shopping street/complex in Holland during a long-term refurbishment. There was a group of entrepreneurs looking for ways of attracting new commercial settlers in their shopping street, not far fro m the historical center of Utrecht. There was the Harbor Museum of Rotterdam – one of the world’s largest harbors – asking for a solution to guide visitors through their open air and free of charge museum. And there was the City of Utrecht’s Archive asking for a mobile application to help people wandering through Utrecht, taking them back three hundred years ago when the Treaty of Utrecht was negotiated and finally signed; a great diversity of stunningly complex questions that need answers from our students.
SO, as of Monday, my 8 teams in the course eBusiness & Marketing and many other students will crack their brains over new assignments that need to be pressure-cooked. I really am enjoying my livelihood.

tagged with: saxxion, hu, utrecht, museum battle, media battle

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Stats

By Kees Winkel on 16 December 2011

Normally, I’m not really that much into statistics but today, as I stumbled upon my old post of 2 January 2011 ‘More than 7 trillion SMS messages will be sent in 2011', I decide to check if that is actually the case. So, trying to find any information on the issue, I ran into these stats that are pretty nice, at least for me. Please don’t bug me with any remarks on reliability in general and the stats in particular. They are just indicators, not religion.

tagged with: merry christmas, smartphone, phone, stats, 2011, mobile

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Trends in Mobile according (self-proclaimed) experts

By Kees Winkel on 29 November 2011

So, what are the trends in Mobile? here are an odd fifty experts expressing their wisdom. What do you think? (Source: http://www.slideshare.net/rudydw/mobile-trends-2020)

tagged with: trend, future, mobile

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What’s Augmented Reality?

By Kees Winkel on 31 October 2011

In daily educational humbug, we’re almost halfway with our Mobile Business Design ‘minor’ (a free-of-choice-half-year-course to enhance the bachelor level). And while the students did their first written exam in this context, it struck me that we are talking a lot about locative or Location Based Services but not a lot more about Augmented Reality.
Sure, three of the five teams use Layer or likewise as a technological solution to their heavyweight assignments. But nobody uses the word Augmented Reality anymore. That’s strange. So, in retrospect, what is Augmented Reality?

tagged with: reality, ar, augmented reality

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Welcome back

By Kees Winkel on 5 September 2011

As the academic year has kicked off in all its traditions a particular good custom, that is to write and post blogs, now commences for our readership Crossmedia Business. Of course, writing activity has not been down to a total zero during summer. For instance Dennis Ringersma took up the role of ‘our man in Africa’ with a number of posts on exotic places like Malawi, South Africa and what have we down there in the south of that hugh continent. And Rogier Brussee and Harry van Vliet also contributed once or twice. But now the members of the readership have committed themselves to a tight publication schedule. And as it happens to be, I am numero uno to respect that schedule.

tagged with: futurecase, thueringen, social object, engstrom, ahtisaari, email, malawi, crossmedialab

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The paradox in iCloud

By Kees Winkel on 9 June 2011

I’ve been sort of following WWDC, You know: what the sentiment was, what the novelties were and, obviously, what Steve Jobs oracled that fine day at the West Coast. Steve Jobs was, could it be any different, the ultimate keynote speaker and his brilliant master stroke that day was: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device, we're going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud." With this bright future claim, Jobs introduced, what Apple refers to as iCloud. And this is how it works: iCloud is integrated across Apple desktops and Apple mobile devices to ensure that all of your Apple computers can synchronize contacts, calendars, email, apps, music, photos, and more. Most likely, iCloud can be integrated not just in Apple machines but in machines that run on any given OS. So Apple is offering a fully integrated service while at the same time other companies offer parts of the service (i.e. Amazon's latest music service, Google's Gmail inbox, Youtube, Dropbox, Wiggio, Flickr) no one combines it all into one seamless service that also works across a set of hardware devices. And it's free. Now, isn’t that nice?

tagged with: interdependency, hq, icloud, media, paradox, apple

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