On VOIP and Skype

I've just begun to use Skype. It is the VOIP (Voice over the Internet Protocol) software company that was recently taken over by E-bay. See Wikipedia for a definition of VOIP. It is basically a system that allows you to have PGC to PC telephone calls with other Skype users across the Internet, for no cost

Skype seems to becoming the market leader in VOIP, largely because it has achieved a critical mass and now has the weight of E-bay behind it, but other companies are fighting for the market. Google have launched Google Talk. Microsoft seems slow to enter the market, but are planning to do so.

Anyway, I got round to trying out Skype when my son who is working in London wanted to save on his phone calls. Setting up the software was very easy and since then we have been using Skype regularly. More recently I have found that you can use a webcam with it too. You just need to download and install a plug in from Dialcom called Spontania at http://www.video4im.com/

Again very easy to install. I fond an old webcam I hadn't used for ages. What held me up was finding software on the web for that, as I had lost the original CD software. So now I have the whole thing working. If any of you doing sociology of cyberspace want to try contacting me, ny Skype address is BTLeach

I have only got it working at hme at the moment, but will try it at work soon. One of my colleagues informs me that American friends of hers sometimes have to be available for conference calls at their universities if they are working from home. Not so sure about that, but good if all someone is just coming in for is one meeting which instead they could happily engage with from home

Bernard

Mitchell and "Unassigned Space"

Cyborg city

William J Mitchell

James Harkin interview

Saturday November 26, 2005, Guardian

Good stuff in the Guardian today William Mitchell, the author of "City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn" (1996) and "Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City"(2004). Whilst much of the inteview is a fairly predictable look at the impact of wireless networks, I do like his notion of the importance of 'unassigned space'. Particularlly relevant for us in the sociology department at MMU as we are looking for new ways of using our buildings to go beyond the simple notions of lectures and seminars, to make more use of 'in -between spaces' - pc drop in centres, the libararies (where a ban on talking has recently been lifted), coffee bars etc

"...Mitchell tells me ...how the new wireless technologies are making much office space in cities redundant. If you go into corporate offices today, he says, the private offices are closed and dark; the workers are out in hotel rooms or on the move. The wireless laptop culture, he says, is increasing the value of sit-down space just like this.

"Unassigned space, what used to be thought of as non-productive space, is actually where all the real action happens." Like this coffee bar, he suggests, above the sound of Frank Sinatra and the whirring of coffee machines.

Mitchell's theory is that the city has always been moulding us into technology-dependent cyborgs, but that the new communications technologies have made all this more vivid by overlaying on the urban landscape a kind of central nervous system that plugs us deep into the wireless ether. Mobile phones, for example, have become so intimately a part of ourselves that they are a kind of umbilical cord, anchoring us into the information society's digital infrastructure. A whole ragbag of new gadgets and wireless technologies hold up the promise of navigating our way through cities in exciting new ways. "


full interview at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5342429-103677,00.html

Communities of fate v communities of choice.

Article from the Guardian. Extracts below. Relevant in the discussions about notions of community

The chosen
Stuart Jeffries

Our friendships have become a rare constant in a dislocated world

The Guardian 26th Nov 2005

Read the whole article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5342223-103390,00.html

.....Fifty years ago, Vernon points out, people relied on their local neighbourhood. Now our ties are looser and we can roam colleges, jobs, cyberspace, lovers, rather than being tied to what have been called communities of fate. Now we live in communities of choice, where we can not only select our closest spiritual partners, but negotiate how close or how distant our relationships should be. We live in looser, more creative and as a result happier times. Or so goes the argument


.....
Pahl, whose research will appear shortly in a book called Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, is trying to map the complicated terrain of modern friendship. He suggests seven types of friendship, four more than Aristotle. But then modern Britain is a more complex place than ancient Greece. They are:

1 A friend-like community, where a person depends more on friends than family, with close friends at the centre of the network, and more casual ones and relatives further way.

2 A friend-enveloped community, with close relatives (spouse and offspring) at the centre, and a larger group of friends around the family.

3 A family-like community in which family members outnumber friends.

4 Family-dependent - family outnumber friends.

5 Partner-focused, in which a couple keep friends and relatives at a distance.

6 Neighbourhood-focused, often formed by older people in close neighbourhood communities.

7 Professional-dependent, again often formed by older people whose most important friends are carers or social workers.

Across these types the average number of friends is 18. The survey by Pahl and his co-author, Liz Spencer, indicates family structures and neighbourhood ties may not be eroding quite so fast as some have suggested. Communities of fate have not yet been replaced by communities of choice. It also indicates that we might be members of different friendship communities at different times of our lives.

The survey suggests friendly solidarity has not been completely destroyed by selfish consumerism. Friendship has mutated rather than died, and become more instrumental than our utopian thinkers imagined it to be at best.

social exclusion and technology - any comments folks?

Dear Bernard Leach,

Hello! I'm doing a sociology doctorate, but I'm actually getting in
touch regarding the part of my life that pays the bills, which is
researching stuff for the BBC2 progrmme The Daily Politics.
I'm looking into a piece on social exclusion and technology for
tomorrow's show, specifically the recent ODPM report. The approach will
probably be along the lines of "broadband for the homeless - it sounds
mad, but the reasons why it's not are all interesting".

I saw that this was one of your interests when Technorati brought me to
your course blog; I was wondering if you had a comment to make on the
report? Jamie McCoy, the homeless blogger I'm sure you're familiar with,
has shared some thoughts here:

http://jamiesbigvoice.blogspot.com/2005/11/answer-to-alan-conner.html

Apologies for getting in touch unsolicited and at short notice, but I
thought it might be something that was up your street.
best
Alan Connor


--
Alan Connor
Broadcast Journalist
BBC Live Political Programmes
4 Millbank
London SW1P 3JA
e: alan.connor@bbc.co.uk

Murdoch on Blogs & the end of newspapers

From the Economist, "Yesterday's papers", Apr 21st 2005

Is Rupert Murdoch right to predict the end of newspapers as we now know them?

“I BELIEVE too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers,” Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world's largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week. No wonder that people, and in particular the young, are ditching their newspapers. Today's teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings “don't want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what's important,” Mr Murdoch said, “and they certainly don't want news presented as gospel.” And yet, he went on, “as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent.”

The speech—astonishing not so much for what it said as for who said it—may go down in history as the day that the stodgy newspaper business officially woke up to the new realities of the internet age. Talking at times more like a pony-tailed, new-age technophile than a septuagenarian old-media god-like figure, Mr Murdoch said that news “providers” such as his own organisation had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, “become places for conversation” and “destinations” where “bloggers” and “podcasters” congregate to “engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions.” He also criticised editors and reporters who often “think their readers are stupid”.

Mr Murdoch's argument begins with the fact that newspapers worldwide have been—and seem destined to keep on—losing readers, and with them advertising revenue. In 1995-2003, says the World Association of Newspapers, circulation fell by 5% in America, 3% in Europe and 2% in Japan. In the 1960s, four out of five Americans read a paper every day; today only half do so. Philip Meyer, author of “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age” (University of Missouri Press), says that if the trend continues, the last newspaper reader will recycle his final paper copy in April 2040.

Gotcha!
The decline of newspapers predates the internet. But the second—broadband—generation of the internet is not only accelerating it but is also changing the business in a way that the previous rivals to newspapers—radio and TV—never did. Older people, whom Mr Murdoch calls “digital immigrants”, may not have noticed, but young “digital natives” increasingly get their news from web portals such as Yahoo! or Google, and from newer web media such as blogs. Short for “web logs”, these are online journal entries of thoughts and web links that anybody can post. Whereas 56% of Americans haven't heard of blogs, and only 3% read them daily, among the young they are standard fare, with 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, according to a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup.

Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools that the internet makes available. Wikis are collaborative web pages that allow readers to edit and contribute. This, to digital immigrants, may sound like a recipe for anarchic chaos, until they visit, for instance, wikipedia.org, an online encyclopaedia that is growing dramatically richer by the day through exactly this spontaneous (and surprisingly orderly) collaboration among strangers. Photoblogs are becoming common; videoblogs are just starting. Podcasting (a conjunction of iPod, Apple's iconic audio player, and broadcasting) lets both professionals and amateurs produce audio files that people can download and listen to.

It is tempting, but wrong, for the traditional mainstream media (which includes The Economist) to belittle this sort of thing. It is true, for instance, that the vast majority of blogs are not worth reading and, in fact, are not read (although the same is true of much in traditional newspapers). On the other hand, bloggers play an increasingly prominent part in the wider media drama—witness their role in America's presidential election last year. The most popular bloggers now get as much traffic individually as the opinion pages of most newspapers. Many bloggers are windbags, but some are world experts in their field. Matthew Hindman, a political scientist at Arizona State University, found that the top bloggers are more likely than top newspaper columnists to have gone to a top university, and far more likely to have an advanced degree, such as a doctorate.

Another dangerous cliché is to consider bloggers intrinsically parasitic on (and thus, ultimately, no threat to) the traditional news business. True, many thrive on debunking, contradicting or analysing stories that originate in the old media. In this sense, the blogosphere is, so far, mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But there is nothing to suggest that bloggers cannot also do original reporting. Glenn Reynolds, whose political blog, Instapundit.com, counts 250,000 readers on a good day, often includes eyewitness accounts from people in Afghanistan or Shanghai, whom he considers “correspondents” in the original sense of the word.

“The basic notion is that if people have the tools to create their own content, they will do that, and that this will result in an emerging global conversation,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media in San Francisco, and the author of “We the Media” (O'Reilly, 2004), a book about, well, grassroots journalism. Take, for instance, OhmyNews in South Korea. Its “main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,” says Oh Yeon Ho, the boss and founder. Five years old, OhmyNews already has 2m readers and over 33,000 “citizen reporters”, all of them volunteers who contribute stories that are edited and fact-checked by some 50 permanent staff.
With so many new kinds of journalists joining the old kinds, it is also likely that new business models will arise to challenge existing ones. Some bloggers are allowing Google to place advertising links next to their postings, and thus get paid every time a reader of their blog clicks on them. Other bloggers, just like existing providers of specialist content, may ask for subscriptions to all, or part, of their content. Tip-jar systems, where readers click to make small payments to their favourite writers, are catching on. In one case last year, an OhmyNews article attacking an unpopular court verdict reaped $30,000 in tips from readers, though most of the site's revenues come from advertising.

The tone in these new media is radically different. For today's digital natives, says Mr Gillmor, it is anathema to be lectured at. Instead, they expect to be informed as part of an online dialogue. They are at once less likely to write a traditional letter to the editor, and more likely to post a response on the web—and then to carry on the discussion. A letters page pre-selected by an editor makes no sense to them; spotting the best responses using the spontaneous voting systems of the internet does.

Even if established media groups—such as Mr Murdoch's—start to respond better to these changes, can they profit from them? Mr Murdoch says that some media firms, at least, will be able to navigate the transition as advertising revenue switches from print-based to electronic media. Indeed, this is one area where news providers can use technology to their advantage, by providing more targeted audiences for advertisers, both by interest group and location. He also thinks that video clips, which his firm can conveniently provide, will be crucial ingredients of online news.

But it remains uncertain what mix of advertising revenue, tips and subscriptions will fund the news providers of the future, and how large a role today's providers will have. What is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself. Newspapers, Mr Murdoch implies, must learn to understand their role as providers of news independent of the old medium of distribution, the paper.

Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies

Interesting new report by the UK Government's Social Exclusion Unit:

"Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies"

You can download it (PDF, 2330kb) at:

http://www.socialexclusionunit.gov.uk/page.asp?id=583

"The new report, Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies, explores the potential that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have to improve service delivery and quality of life for the most excluded groups, and argues that effective use of ICT is key to addressing exclusion and meeting complex needs...."