“I find that when someone’s taking tome to do something right in the present, they’re a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, the’re a master artisan of great foresight”. – xkcd #974

It was interesting to discover that in allegedly ‘technologically-underdeveloped’ Moscow mobile phone work in almost all metro stations (and most often in the trains themselves). In London, for example, it’s not the case, the networks are not functioning underground.

Another interesting difference between Moscow and, say the Netherlands, is a much wider use of e-readers of all sort. They seem to be omnipresent and if not completely unremarkable at the moment, are moving quicker to this stage of ‘just another gadget’.

I was invited to speak at the interesting conference this Thursday, the Future of Money, and to talk about the future – well, not money per se, but rather of the new emerging social and technological realities I foresee. Ironical enough, the last conference on similar topic I was participating in (The Future of Payment Systems, or somethings like that) was hold also in Moscow, in 1998. The year of one of the largest financial crisis in Russia.

I hope my participation this time will not be so devastating.

I am currently in Moscow in a large research project, aimed to better understand the new emerging patterns of communication, triggered and mediated by the plethora of various tools we usually refer as ‘digital’. This include not only the ‘classical’ Internet per se, but also mobile phones from one side, and so called Social Web services. In reality all these new tools and methods inter-tangled and – more importantly – interwoven and with a variety of communication practices of people.

Obviously, this is a very complex topic, and so we try to approach it from different angles – socio-cultural, linguistic, and psychological points of view, among others. It is also a huge topic, so our efforts are bound to be humble, scratching-the- surface an exercise. The nice thing it is a comparative research, and we will have a chance to see if these new practices are different in different countries cultures. To the extend possible, I will cover here at least the key methodologies we use, and perhaps certain insights we will gain.

I’ve just bumped into an interesting project, an intersection of data visualization and social research; it was featured in the Telegraph, although I had a chance to spot it earlier, since its author, Eric Fischer, is among my Flickr contacts. I guess, I missed it because of the holiday and out of my general e-hibernation period lately.

The total set includes more than 20 different cities, and it’s amazing to see how differently arranged the activities of people there (reflected in their corresponding use of the social networks (specifically, Twitter and Flickr). Compare, for example, London

and Tokyo

Different spatial organizations of the two cities does play a role, of course, but these beautiful maps also reflect deep differences in who and how people use social media (and communication technology in general).

Perhaps worth to add that I am writing about this project partly because of my general interest to these topics (map x art x research x people x technology – I perhaps miss the ‘future’ part here as yet), but also because I am currently involved in a study of new patterns of so called ‘digitally mediated communication’ that we see emerging now.

We went to Tilburg’s De Pont Museum last Sunday to basically see this one piece, a huge convex mirror aka an art installation by Anish Kapoor called Vertigo. In the context of my recent obsession with ‘everything mirror’, it was must-see a destination; Kapoor is well-known for his mirror works, including Sky Mirror and a mega-hit Cloud Gate, but I didn’t know about this particular installation. And I made an effort to not learn too much beforehand (which knowingly hinders the experience, at least its ‘first encounter’ stage.

But some expectations had been formed anyway, and were regretfully not met. The point that I expected something ‘bigger’ and more ‘intriguing’ is not the main one here. There are obviously merits in art work of this scale too, and interactions with this mirror (=yourself) and with the environments could be playful and revelational enough. Looking at how people (especially kids) deal with this strange object could be informative and inspiring, too.

An easy target to blame, I know, but it was again the very museum that ruined my experience, with its pesky guards skillfully guarding people from exploring this art work, from gaining experiences, from interacting with each other in any non-standard way. De Pont is not the worst museum in this regard, but on my inner scale they are getting closer and closer to the red zone of ‘never ever go there‘.

The mirror itself.. it’s interesting that itself is plain boring and uninteresting, and start ‘behaving’ in any tempting way only with people around it.

It’s not the object, it’s what people do – if not *with* it (Guards! Guards!) then at least around it.

I usually against all sorts of ‘historic contextualizations’that became fashionable lately among the curator gangs, but in this case it would perhaps be not a bad idea to accompany with a few other example of convex surfaces (both from art and so called ‘real life’. A simple mirror of shaving would work, I guess (provided one *can* touch and play with it).

Quid, Mapping and Analyzing Technology Innovation