Delighted… at Hide & Seek’s Wonderlab
I was invited by Margaret Robertson, Head of Development at the magnificently creative Hide and Seek pervasive play group, to deliver a five minute talk on something that delighted me to the participants of Wonderlab, their three day game design workshop. Not being as familiar with the oeuvre of computer and videogames as I once was, and being all too aware that the eminent people in the room knew just as much about the delightful and playful technologies that currently populate the more interesting corners of the World Wide Web, I chose instead to cram in three offline experiences I’ve recently had that all revel in the glorious and delicious moment of anticipation just before something wonderful and expectedly unexpected happens.
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Aleks Krotoski
is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. Her PhD thesis in Social Psychology (University of Surrey, 2009) examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. Read up on her academic and research interests here.
She recently completed the 4-part, prime time BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution, about the social history of the World Wide Web. She blogged for the project here, outlining her manifestos about the social, political, economic and psychological impact of the 20 years of the Web.
Aleks writes for The Guardian and Observer newspapers, and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology podcast. Her writing also appears on BBC Technology, New Statesman, MIT Technology Review and The Telegraph. Check out her words here.
Finally, she’s the New Media Sector Champion for UKTI, the government department that promotes British businesses around the world. Find out more here.
You can find Aleks all over the Web.
[Media] Cognitive surplus, the soma of television and being on Newsnight with Clay Shirky
For the next week, you can catch my appearance on last night’s BBC’s current affairs programme Newsnight with author Clay Shirky, debating the social implications of new technology. It was a great discussion that was overwhelmingly positive about the Web and what it offers, but there were a few sticking points where Clay and I disagreed. I’ll expand on the key one here.
[Academic] Missing out on meat-space: Ubiquitous computing and the human experience of 'being online'
I gave the after-dinner talk at the recent Horizon Doctoral Training Centre’s Summer School at the University of Nottingham to a roomful of extraordinarily inspirational PhD students who are doing their research in the field of Ubiquitous Computing and the Digital Economy. In it, I focus on what it is that computing cannot (currently?) capture about the human experience when online (accurate readings of friendship, social capital, trust, reputation and identity), but how applications like Twitter are helping populate the empty spaces that binary digits are unable to represent.
This is a first stab at the synthesis of these topics based on my research and reading in this area with the aim of turning it into a chapter/chapters in a book, and I was pleased to receive feedback and comments from the audience. For example, is it possible to quantify social capital in some way and then use that as the basis of a game to influence attitudes and behaviours? When I re-posed this question on Twitter, Matt Locke at Channel 4 Education (a publishing hero that has an award-winning stable of games for change) was adamant that, “games may create social capital, but it’s not a game in itself… It’s dangerous to think of social capital as an asset that can be measured or created… social capital is a story, not data.” I’d love your take on it too.
The Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast with Aleks Krotoski
We run the rule over net neutrality and privacy – two of the web’s hottest topics, plus we find out why RIM could face a ban on BlackBerry devices
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