The first infographic of computer user types ever created! (circa 1974)

I just bumped into the first known infographic about “computer user types” and wanted to share it with you. That, my friends, is one of the joys of studying computer culture from an archeological point of view.

Click to enlarge

The infographic is featured in Ted Nelson’s 1974 cult classic Computer Lib (South Bend, IN: published by the author). The book was actually a double feature, and it read both forwards (and in this case the title was Computer Lib: You can and must understand computers now) and backwards (as Dream Machines: New freedoms through computer screens—a minority report). Read more

janvier 31, 2012 | Filed Under unclassified | Leave a Comment

Snob.ru : distinction 2.0 ou inégalité en réseau ?

Au hasard de mes explorations en ligne, je découvre Snob.ru, service de réseautage pour « l’élite de la société russe ». Tout comme son homologue international asmallworld.net, ce site créé en 2008 permet à des personnes aisées d’afficher leurs goûts et leurs styles de vie distinctifs dans un cadre valorisant. Sponsorisé par le milliardaire Mikhaïl Prokhorov, le réseau a été souvent présenté dans la presse internationale comme un repaire de nouveaux beaufs, symptôme de la décadence anthropologique de la Russie de Putin.

Mais il est surtout une mine d’or pour tout chercheur travaillant sur les pratiques de consommation actuelles, et surtout une occasion unique pour mettre à jour certaines notions sociologiques, de la consommation ostentatoire de Veblen à la distinction de Bourdieu, de l‘élite du pouvoir de C. Wright-Mills au rôle de la violence symbolique chez Michel Pinçon et Monique Pinçon-Charlot.

janvier 30, 2012 | Filed Under social capital, social networks | Leave a Comment

Antidatamining, or the art of killing financial markets a little every day

All throughout the month of February 2012 the Net artist collective RYBN is in residence at the Gaîté Lyrique, one of the hotbeds of the emerging art & technology scene in Paris. If you are in the French capital, I highly recommend paying them a visit.

I became acquainted with RYBN last year, when I met some of its members at a conference at the French National Library where I was delivering the closing speech, while they had presented their most recent project, Antidatamining VIII. ADMVIII (for short) is a trading bot, i.e. an artificial intelligence making real investments on real stock exchanges, collecting data and impacting financial markets worldwide. The bot monitors and maps data flows to create real-time digital visualizations such as charts, soundscapes, and timelines. It has an online page (where you can see how well it is doing, its net liquidity, the value of its shares, etc.) and a Twitter account providing details about ongoing orders.

Source: Antidataminig – Offshoring map visualization

ADMVIII is not your run-of-the-mill social commentary about market greed and pervasive financial panic in modern life. The goal of the project is to detect economic imbalances and discrepancies introduced by robot trading. As the bot actually executes buy and sell orders online, it represents a détournement of automatic trading technologies. As such it is intended to highlight their social consequences – and their potential disasters.

janvier 29, 2012 | Filed Under unclassified | 2 Comments

Some modest remarks on the role of citizen lobbying in defeating #SOPA

So apparently SOPA is dead, for now. If you’ve been following the recent events surrounding this infamous anti-piracy (and anti-free speech) law, you know that’s good news for a lot of people – me included. The way this thing will go down in history is pretty much that “an iniquitous piece of legislation was to be voted, but a 7 million-strong Google petition, a rally in San Francisco and a massive online campaign (including a spectacular 24-hour blackout) defeated it”. Unfortunately, this means downplaying the role of another important element of this story: lobbying.

If you are not aware of how US lobbying works (or, worse, if you are European), let me break it down for you. Lobbying basically means talking to the right persons and influence them in following a certain political line. Sometimes this line is instantiated by a clear gain in terms of funding for politicians – to be used to be re-elected, to promote new policies, public works programmes, or political activity in general. Government resources are scarse, so this keeps the machine running, although in some cases it borders on buying votes. Telecommunication and electronics companies are among the biggest “buyers”.

Communication and electronics sector displays one of the highest and fastest increasing lobbying spending. Source: Sunlight Foundation

janvier 21, 2012 | Filed Under social capital, social networks | 2 Comments

Slides séminaire de Jérôme Denis : Villes, infrastructures et #opendata (EHESS, 18 janv. 2012)

Dans le cadre de mon séminaire EHESS Étudier les cultures du numérique : approches théoriques et empiriques, j’ai eu le plaisir d’accueillir pour une séance sur ville, infrastructure et données Jérôme Denis, sociologue, enseignant-chercheur à Télécom ParisTech, auteur (avec David Pontille) de l’excellent Petite sociologie de la signalétique (Presses de l’Ecole des mines, 2010) et co-animateur du blog Scriptopolis. Voici les slides de son intervention.

Read more

janvier 10, 2012 | Filed Under space | 1 Comment

One of the greatest comedians of our time: Slavoj Žižek

I’m serious: the marxiste célèbre and #Occupy Wall Street avuncular philosopher Slavoj Žižek is really a funny man. Case in point, this excellent coffee table book containing a collection of the jokes he spices up his impenetrable prose with (complete with references to the original texts).

Žižek employs jokes like Plato resorted to myths as heuristic devices designed to convey a logical meaning. Thus, they are used iteratively — the Marx Brother one-liners about self-identity or refusal of choice, the Rabinovitch anecdote about realism, the skeptical paradox about the fiancée who’s late for a rendez-vous…

Find a selection of the best scanned pages on the publisher’s website, and discover the maieutic value of laughter. (Also discover that this is a project of the Mickey Mouse Club ft. the norwegian artist Audun Mortensen, and that the book is actually printed in a very limited edition of 1…) Read more

janvier 4, 2012 | Filed Under social capital | Leave a Comment

What’s holding back Digital Sociology?

New year, new issue of the online journal Fast Capitalism. This is a special one, with a special section on Academia in the Internet age (one of my topics of choice – as you can see from this recent communication of mine at the Sciences Sociales 2.0 symposium at the ENS Lyon).