The essay Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China, recently published on The China Beat blog, is based on the script of a talk that Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York Ying Zhu gave at Google’s New York offices on February 12, 2010. In her talk, Zhu focused on Google’s precarious relationship with China, but also on the reception of James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ in Chinese theaters in order to investigate the concept of China’s emerging “critical masses” as constitutive of a quasi-public sphere invested with people power. Announcing Zhu’s talk in early February, the China Beat states:

No longer isolated, nameless masses, today’s Chinese audiences and social media users are critical masses: “critical” to the tenure of a one-party state that is no longer in a position to easily put down a popular rebellion; “critical” in the sense that they identify problems and demand, and indeed shape, state action; and “critical” in the sense that they constitute ready networks of audience members and information consumers with the potential to be moved to collective action by a catalyzing event or issue that transforms passive association into active participation in a critical mass of like-minded citizens expressing their passion in forums ranging from online debates to street-level demonstrations or even extended political or cultural campaigns. Zhu argues that media-centered critical masses are a central dynamic of China’s changing state-society relationship. Additionally, she suggests that this emerging dynamic is not limited to China, and identifies points of convergence between China and the West in politics and political participation. She proposes that the electoral politics of established democracies and the regime-sustaining politics of authoritarian states alike are trending toward a quasi-democratic “politics with globalized characteristics,” with important prospects and problems in common.

In addition to Zhu’s talk at Google, the follow-up essay features added sections by Ying Zhu and Bruce Robinson meant to tease out the issues that were left without further elaboration due to time constraints.

Suchen, Spielen, Lernen (to search, play and learn) is a recent essay by by Konrad Becker, director of World-Information.org and co-editor of the upcoming Deep Search ll symposium in Vienna as well as the upcoming volume Critical Strategies in Art and Media (Autonomedia, 2010). The essay is available (in German) at the Berliner Gazette: http://berlinergazette.de/suchen-spielen-lernen/.

The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) is an organisation aiming to enrich the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. After being nominated for the Transmediale Award 2010, F.A.T. Lab members met up in Berlin in the first week of February and produced a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE. In addition to producing free software, browser addons, live streams, communiques and on-site workshops, F.A.T. Lab built a fake Google Street View car they took to the streets to see what it’s like to be Google. A PDF with building instructions and a list of needed materials has been made available on the F.A.T. website, along with a host of video material. Read about all the week’s projects here.

The Berlin Transmediale event Ideologies and Futures of the Internet that took place on Saturday, 6 February featured a keynote lecture by Conrad Wolfram, Director of Strategic and International Development at the well-known software company Wolfram Research Inc., founded by his brother Stephen. At transmediale.10 Conrad Wolfram talked about the knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha and his vision of the future of knowledge and the Web.

The video of his lecture, entitled ‘Wolfram Alpha: Information, Computation and the New Era of Knowledge’, is available here.

In May 2009, Wolfram|Alpha launched to worldwide excitement. It introduced the new concept of “computational knowledge engine” — working out specific answers to queries made rather than picking out existing information like a traditional search engine.

Yet this is just one window into the Wolfram|Alpha project and its vision for all systematic knowledge: of curating, making computable and democratizing high-level use.

Which technologies make this feasible now? Can we democratize computational expertise as successfully as the web and search have democratized information retrieval? How will this affect the Knowledge Economy—business and government information, R&D and technical education?

Conrad Wolfram addressed these questions as well as explain the concept, workings, and progress of Wolfram|Alpha and its underlying Mathematica technology—built up over 23 years—that has made it possible.

Conrad Wolfram, physicist and mathematician, is strategic director of Wolfram Research as well as European managing director. Founded by his brother Stephen, Wolfram Research is the maker of Mathematica software and spin-off Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine. A recurring theme for Conrad Wolfram has been the democratisation of computation through automation and interactivity. He argues that this direction will be increasingly important for technical jobs and everyday living; and that in turn this changes how we should teach mathematics and related subjects. He has led the effort to move the use of Mathematica from pure computation system to development and deployment engine, instigating technology such as the Mathematica Player family and webMathematica. He serves on the Computer science committee Advisory Board at Kings College London and was on the founding committee of the IMS conferences.

On monday March 1, Dutch newspaper NRC Next devoted two pages to articles on Google. One article by Peter Teffer, ”Maakt het internet ons dommer?” (does the Internet dumb us down?) features an interview with Geert Lovink. The other article is an experiment by two NRC reporters, Teffer and Pfauth, who attempted to live and work without the use of any Google service for a week. The article and report (both in Dutch) are online here.

In the last week of January, an NYU graduate class conducted a similar experiment, see an earlier blog post on it here.

Internet board game from box.net

NYU professor Mushon Zer Aviv and his graduate class in (new) Media (networked) Culture and (distributed) Communication met quite a challenge this past week as the class assignment was to live and work for a full week without using any Google service. Read about the assignment, the rules and the outcomes on http://cultureandcommunication.org/tdm/s10/admin/a-week-without-google/, and be sure to check the comments.

The automatic classification of data, its indexing, and its evaluation are at the heart of new communication environments. What lies beneath is not just a drive to organize the world’s information, but also to classify human relations: from the management of the modern workplace and consumers in mass societies, to the bio-political management of the network society. Sociometric algorithms quantify all areas of life in order to mathematically model and predict human behavior. In today’s booming world of data mining, algorithmic methods based on large digital datasets are routinely used for determining political influence and analyzing social dispositions or contagious trends. Digital transactions provide huge amounts of private and semi-private data on personal preferences that are harvested to customize and transform everyday experiences.

A key nexus is provided by search engines, multi-purpose tools present in many dimensions of life, and the increasingly comprehensive environments of services offered by search engine providers. Understanding search-based societies does not only require an analysis of the deep history of the storing and indexing of information, but also the study of complex new forms of retrieval and data analysis. This includes the new position of search engines in a top-down control matrix as well as “bottom-up” recommendation systems, “push-search”, folksonomies and the presumed wisdom of crowds. Search can only be understood if the still evolving redistribution of power in digital networks is addressed in both its centralizing and de-centralizing dimensions.

The conference Deep Search II focuses on key issues in this fast and dynamic field. First, we want to highlight the historical dimensions of our attempts to organize information and people. Second, we want to investigate the politics of search, conflict and dimensions of power, and, finally, future classification schemes beyond search, tracking and social recommendation systems, including new forms of pattern recognition in large data sets.

Organized by the World-Information Institute
In cooperation with IRFS 2010

Reports of Deep Search l can be found here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Data Management as a signifying practice
David Gugerli, ETH Zurich
November 13, 2009, Amsterdam

Edited by: Baruch Gottlieb

Databases are operationally essential to the search society. Since the 1960’s, they have been developed, installed, and maintained by software engineers in view of a particular future user, and they have been applied and adapted by different user communities for the production of their own futures. Database systems, which, since their inception, offer powerful means for shaping and managing society, have since developed into the primary resource for search-centered signifying practice. The paper will present insights into the genesis of a society which depends on the possibility to search, find, (re-)arrange and (re-)interpret of vast amounts of data.

Download here the full lecture of David Gugerli given during the Society of the Query conference on Friday the 13th of November 2009.

The term Googlization, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, is the process of being processed, rendered, and represented by Google.

Vaidhyanathan’s upcoming book The Googlization of Everything investigates the actions and intentions behind the Google corporation. This afternoon at The Society of the Query Vaidhyanathan choose one issue from his book: the politics and implications of Google Maps’ Street View.

According to EU law: there cannot be any identifiable information about a person in Google Street View. Google’ s standard defense up till now has been that they respect privacy by scrambling faces and license plates, to which Vaidhyanathan commented,

In my former neighborhood in New York there were probably 50 illegal gambling institutions around. Now, imagine an image of me on Google Street View taken in proximity to one of these illegal places. I’m more than two meters tall and I’m a very heavy man. You could blur my face forever, I’m still bald. In New York, usually I was walking around my neighborhood with a white dog with brown spots, everyone in the neighborhood knew that dog. So you could blur my face and it still wouldn’t matter – it’s me, I’m obviously me. Anonymization isn’t an effective measure, as we’ve already found out with data. (most likely referring to the AOL case of user #4417749)

Just this morning Swiss authorities made a statement that they plan on bringing a lawsuit against Google in the Federal Administrative Tribunal because Google isn’t meeting the country’s demands for tighter privacy protection with Google Street View. Vaidhyanathan commenting on the news said, “Google Street View has been entering so many areas of friction and resistance – this brings it to our attention that the game is over for Google.”

Vaidhyanathan’s criticism of Google Street View continued with Google’s trouble in Tokyo. “The strongest reaction against Google Street View has been in Japan,” he said, “Google will scrap all of their data from Japan and re-shoot the entire country. Google mismeasured how the Japanese deal with public space. In the older sections of Tokyo the street in front of one’s house is considered the person’s responsibility, it is seen as an extension of their house. Thus, Google Street View is actually invading someone’s private space.”

Earlier this year Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the following remark about the international appeal of Google,

The most common question I get about Google is ‘how is it different everywhere else?’ and I am sorry to tell you that it’s not. People still care about Britney Spears in these other countries. It’s really very disturbing.

Vaidhyanathan explained this as being a part of Google’s protocol imperialism,

Google isn’t particularly American, nor is it particularly American / Western European. It’s important to remember that Google is much more a factor of daily life in Europe. In the United States it is just barely 70% of the search market, in Western Europe it is around 90% and in places like Portugal it is 96% and I don’t know why.

For Vaidhyanathan the biggest problem with Google is that as it expands into more parts of the world that are less proficient, and less digitally inclined, there will be more examples of friction and harm because more people are going to lack the awareness to cleanse their record.

It’s important to note that Google does offer services for protecting and managing user data:

• Google Street View allows you to report objectionable content
• Google dashboard shows a summary of all the data Google stores about you.
• An engineering team within Google that refer to themselves as The Data Liberation Front is working to make it easier for users to control the data they store in Google’s products.

Vaidhyanathan didn’t specifically mention these options, but briefly acknowledged the existence of such tools before quickly moving onto the strongest part of his argument, “We in this room are not likely to be harmed by Google because all of us in this room are part of a techno-cosmopolitan elite. Only the elite and proficient get to opt out.”

In closing, Vaidhyanathan exemplified the problem with a photograph of a man caught on the side of a U.S. highway and commented, “This man doesn’t know that he is in Google Street View so we get to laugh at him. Not knowing is going to be the key to being a victim in this system.”

More information about Siva Vaidhyanathan and his criticism of Google can be found on his website, and in this lively Google debate at IQ2 and New York Times article from last year.