In 1893 Sociologist Emile Durkheim posited that small, young societies were mechanical in nature, but as they grew in size they began to become more and more organic [1. Distinction appears in Durkheim's 1893 work The Division of Labour in Society. Mechanical and Organic solidarity are ways in which social solidarity is fostered.]. Industry has changed dramatically since the industrial revolution; it has transformed from the dark and heavy stuff of the great machines to the light materials that are stainless steel and microfiber and carbon nanotube. This trend has allowed products, ideas, to be lighter as well. In reality, they have been lifted so much that they are beginning to resemble organic structures.

The Bloodstream

Highway systems resemble blood vessels, and tiny roads mere capillaries. Trucks carry proteins in and out of the cells of cities, and road teams repair broken road structures. The whole of the human system is becoming increasingly connected and interdependent. With the addition of airplanes and the Internet, society is reaching a mature phase: one of organic development, flow, and function.

What does this mean for the future? Specifically, business, ideas, search engine marketing, travel, employment? It means that differing sorts of humans are beginning to evolve, or specialize. These different sorts of specialists will become so through technology and expertise. The global traveler that is no longer tied to space will be the equivalent of a worker bee flying the best flower, trying to get the best pollen to sustain the world hive. This pollen is idea. On a more populated level, this specialist represents the neural impulse: the fastest and lightest form of actor in this new actor network of technosocial beings.

There is the heavy and the light. These two dichotomies will rule the social darwinism of the future. The companies with too much heaviness in them will fail, because the most successful companies/people/ideas will be able to float above the rest (by floating I mean less clicks to get to action, and decreasing the repetition of similar tasks so that more time is spent on meaningful action, the aggregation of relevant, individualized data) and by the rest I imply the ground layer that is indeterminate mass culture. If advertising was compiled and pasted into 20 languages at a time and broadcast all of the world, it meant that everyone would wear Levi’s and drink Coca-Cola. There is no longer a singular message of consumption.

Supersaturation has nowhere to go except crystallization and overflow. Everything that was mass before has become personal now. Consumers, understanding that they’re not unique snowflakes, want to be unique snowflakes. Consumers, empty of social relations and legitimate social definition points, are seeking what they can in order to differentiate themselves from others.

Those ideas that float are like balloons for undifferentiated sheep consumers, and they will attach to those unique moments for as long as they can, provided they provide something different.

On Traffic

I don’t drive very often, but when I do, I think of traffic as a bloodstream.

On one occurrence, I was driving on Interstate 5 in Denver, Colorado. I was playing Jazz music at the time. It was a sort of impromptu piece that had nothing in it to suggest an unpassionate collective of machines racing in unison down pavement. They were a liquid stream. They were a river. The lifeblood of the city. All moving forward, forward, forward — bringing life to other areas of the ecosystem. Strangely shaped pieces of metal that float by at high speeds, somehow constrained to staying within tiny lines.

But I was not. I was objectively examining how strange it was to be in this rushing stream of vehicles. I was also tired and unused to Denver traffic. Everything was reduced to plain speed, and I wanted to experience reality in an uncompressed space. I was used to walking; used to Portland.

But I knew I had to synch up.

I remembered reading an article on drivers listening to techno music sped up while on the Autobahn, while other music slowed their driving patterns. I realized that I could test it out right then.

So I turned on the music.

Immediately I began to blend in and synch up with the movement of the vehicles around me. My vehicle became just another blood cell in the circulatory system, inching froward with every beat. It was organic and mechanical at once. I lived Durkheim’s mechanical systems analogy through choosing mechanical systems to orient myself into an organic technological flow. It seems the wrong way around. If the traffic were more organic, I could’ve used Jazz.

(Side note: I wanted to provide a groundwork for applying a sociological concept to streaming media online — it is the same as traffic/blood cells, but on a different scale. There will be a post on that later, but I don’t want to give the whole thing away without making one think first).

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Antrhopologist from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

This is the PowerPoint of a lightning talk given by Amber Case (@caseorganic) at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference in Portland, Oregon on Sept 4+5th. NOTE: This was a 10-minute compressed presentation. From Telephone to Tweetup: an Abbreviated History of Technology and Social Exchange.

Some Theory Behind the Subject

The invention of the telephone ushered in an era of ‘on-demand’ social connection. These conversations were freeing, but were still limited to location and time. As communication technology matured, telephones became detached from their cords and were allowed to travel with their users.This detachment from location allowed conversation to happen in more times and more places. As the amount of time and space between nodes of connection decreased, the intersection of rapid news methods such as blogging, mobile technology, and chatrooms begin to merge. This convergence allowed dramatic increases in the ability to rapidly convey information to others. Instead of engaging with one person at a time, many are now capable of talking at once. No where is this more prevalent than on Twitter. It has found ways to connect communities, stave off suburban isolation, and warn of earthquakes before medical help can access them. The distance between individual and community will continue to decrease, and those products and services which decrease the amount of time and space it takes to create an action will be the most successful. Actions and devices will become lighter and lighter, and the social will continue to become more and more mobile. The convergence of various technologies will result in rapid learning and communication never imagined before. For details on the original event, look at the SlideShare Link.

Slideshow transcript

Slide 1: Every bullet point in this presentation is less than 140 characters.

Slide 2: This is because the text of these slides will also be broadcasted on Twitter at the time of this speech.

Slide 3: In this way, the speech can live in two places at once.

Slide 4: To one audience here at Inverge.

Slide 5: And also to 600+ followers on Twitter. [@Inverge] [#Inverge]

Slide 6: You can follow @caseorganic to see it in action.

Slide 7: [this is a waiting period because the Internet connection here is probably slow] @caseorganic

Slide 8: Hello.

Slide 9: My Name is Amber Case.

Slide 10: I am a Cyborg Anthropologist.

Slide 11: I study the symbiotic relationship between humans and computers…

Slide 12: And the psychology of space that is created by online environments.

Slide 13: Or, how the online experience is “ experienced” .

Slide 14: In Anthropology, one could call this a Digital Phenomenology

Slide 15: …

Slide 16: We live in a community that increasingly transcends time and space.

Slide 17: It is our relationship with technology that allows us extended capabilities.

Slide 18: Right now, search engines and people are interacting with your social profiles and websites.

Slide 19: While you aren’ t there.

Slide 20: And with social networking sites like Twitter, you can watch many conversations at once.

Slide 21: …

Slide 22: Consider Letter Writing, the first Internet.

Slide 23: The message to response ratio was very slow, but it was social.

Slide 24: Enter the Telephone.

Slide 25: Thus began the era of ‘ On Demand’ social communication.

Slide 26: This made the world very small.

Slide 27: You could stand on one side of the world, whisper something, and be heard on the other.

Slide 28: But to those who had never experienced a telephone, the device was as foreign as the Internet once was in 1993.

Slide 29: The fact that a human could speak into a machine and hear a voice on the other side gave the appearance of schizophrenia.

Slide 30: Over time, the strangeness of the new dissolved into formal society and the landline telephone started to get along with humans.

Slide 31: Those living in suburban communities were less capable of reaching actual members of society on a daily basis.

Slide 32: …and the telephone allowed them an escape from the isolation of industrial modernity.

Slide 33: But the telephone was limited by the length of its cord and its proximity to a phone jack.

Slide 34: So along came the cordless phone.

Slide 35: It was free! {yay!}

Slide 36: …to run around the house…

Slide 37: So then the Cell Phone arrived on the scene. {take that!}

Slide 38: While it was the least rooted to place,

Slide 39: The Cell Phone did not offer information transparency.

Slide 40: It only allowed one conversation at a time (excluding 3-way).

Slide 41: Cell Phone + Text allowed decentralized message access and multiple recipients, but limited message transparency.

Slide 42: Then Twitter happened.

Slide 43: It was not rooted to place and time.

Slide 44: It allowed multiple communication channels and recipients.

Slide 45: Users were praised for contribution and helpfulness to those in their network.

Slide 46: Why does it work?

Slide 47: Twitter is a centralized technosocial hybrid that asks a single question that can never be fully answered.

Slide 48: …

Slide 49: What

Slide 50: Are

Slide 51: You

Slide 52: Doing?

Slide 53: The question is asked by all, to all. Socialization is aided by machine.

Slide 54: The time and space it takes to absorb and disperse information is compressed.

Slide 55: Twitter takes advantage of the 4th Dimensionality of the Internet.

Slide 56: [Analog] [Demonstration]

Slide 57: Lets look at some Architectural Theory

Slide 58: “ Our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 59: “ It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 60: “ Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.”

Slide 61: The General Theory of Relativity

Slide 62: The shape of space makes people more, and people create the shape of space.

Slide 63: The Analog World is full of Friction

Slide 64: The level of Friction in the Digital world has far less.

Slide 65: Online, we are capable of innovating in a frictionless atmosphere.

Slide 66: There are dangers to this.

Slide 67: Frictionless development becomes cancerous if not restrained.

Slide 68: Too many features/innovations reduce overall value.

Slide 69: LIKE FACEBOOK.

Slide 70: Now, lets talk about highways.

Slide 71: Highways are giant projects requiring high levels of funding and cooperation.

Slide 72: To dig up a highway and move it costs millions of dollars.

Slide 73: But rerouting a path online takes a few minutes with a 301 redirect.

Slide 74: People, when compressed, can do more in less time and less space.

Slide 75: Actions flow to spaces with reduced activation energy and barriers to entry.

Slide 76: Humans and Technology Co-create each other through an Actor/Network of technosocial interaction.

Slide 77: “ In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self…”

Slide 78: “ Someone who is poking around in the fog of his of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that this isolation,

Slide 79: “ This ’solitary-confinement of the ego’ is a mass sentence. [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman’ s Liquid Modernity 2000:37]”

Slide 80: [So Technosocial Interaction is about Transcending the silos of Mental Isolation]

Slide 81: Hello

Slide 82: The key to the semantic web is to always reduce the steps in user action.

Slide 83: Twitter engages the user in ways that do not decay.

Slide 86: See SlideShare for image

Slide 87: See Slideshare for image

Slide 88: Husband on Google Street View

Slide 89: Old map

Slide 90: See Slideshare for image.

Slide 92: @caseorganic On Social Sites Everywhere Thesis: “Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement” Available @:oakhazelnut.com

———-
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthopologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com, or on Twitter @caseorganic.

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.

The speakers and audience will be a mixed industry and academic crowd, and the diverse topics grouped together will give the conference both broad coverage of the new media and entertainment space and deep engagement across industries and disciplinary boundaries. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow.

Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia properties, franchising and world building, comics and commerce, social and spreadable media, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

The conference is on the 21th and 22nd of November at MIT. It works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches. For a sense of what to expect, you can check out the site from last year’s event.

This will be the third conference of this kind.

Confirmed speakers for this year’s conference include: Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman), Alex McDowell (Production Designer, The Watchmen), Kevin Slavin (Area/Code), Donald K Ranvaud (Buena Onda Films), Amber Case (Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant), Mauricio Mota (New Content [Brazil]), Alisa Perren (George State University), Amanda Lotz (University of Michigan), Sharon Ross (Columbia College Chicago), Nancy Baym (University of Kansas), Alice Marwick (New York University), Vu Nguyen (VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com) with more to come.

Thanks to Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium for hooking me up with this excellent opportunity!

Volume Four of Portland’s Pecha Kucha Series was held last Tuesday, August 12th, 2008.

This particular session was located on NW 8th and Couch Street in artists place that was currently under construction. There was a random amalgamation of wooden benches on the floor facing a large presentation screen. The event was free, and so was free wine and beer. Not bad for a Tuesday night of entertainment!

At 6:30Pm the room was already filled to capacity. There is a large oriental carpet in front of the large projection screen, and the audience overflow is sitting on it.

What is Pecha Kucha?

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese word for the sound of conversation, or chit chat.
It is a presentation technique in which the presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds each.
In this way, an audience can absorb a large amount of information very quickly, because interest is kept up by the rapid change of images and speaker engagement. It’s a way to remove the annoyance that a standard Powerpoint presentations often bring to standard meeting experiences.

Pecha Kucha Presentation Summaries

Andrew Brahe

Confluence Project

Brahe received his B.S. in Architecture from Portland State University, and he has a passion for ethical design and strives for a better way to build.

His presentation started with an audience participation exercise. He had the right side of the room begin to snap their fingers, and got the middle of the room to begin rubbing their hands together. He made the left side of the room made slap their thighs. Then he urged everyone to do their part faster and louder, until the place was filled with a great amount of percussive noise.

Then he made everyone stop.

There was dead silence and darkness; then the first slide showed up on the monitor.

The presentation involved architecture. One of the best slides demonstrated a beautifully formed pedestrian bridge that had been built over a freeway near Ft. Vancouver. He said that this bridge would be opened to the public soon.

The image of the land bridge spanning over the highway was intense. It looked as if green grass had grown all over the highway in an organic arch, partially eroding away the concrete. In reality, the bridge was allowing animals and humans a way to cross over previously impervious territory.

There were a number of other architectural projects shown, including a tall bird observation tower in the middle of the forest with a long ramp all the way to the top. Brahe is also employed as a project manager with Maya Lin (the architect behind the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C.) on a multi-sited art and architectural installation.

Diane Jacobs and Karen Maurer

Visual Artists

This presentation detailed a future interactive installation at the Disjecta art space in North Portland. The show encourages viewers to “See, feel, open, and act”, and “Find words that begin to transform the present”.

“We abolished slavery, except as a punishment for crime”, the presenter said.

The pieces were about bridging the gaps in multicultural understanding in Portland. One of the most poignant lines: “Don’t let anyone forfeit untapped potential”.

The art show opens Saturday, the 23rd of August from 6-9 pm at the Disjecta. 8371 N Interstate Portland Oregon 97217.
Gallery Hours are Fri-Sun Aug 24-Oct 25 / 12-6 pm, and the Artists Talk is Wednesday, October 1st at 7 pm.

Bill Dieter

Industrial Designer, TERRAZIGN, Inc.

Bill Dieter started Terrazign, Inc., a Portland-based industrial design firm in 1994. The firm works primarily with fabrics and hard woods. His interest is in “integrating the worlds of hard and soft”.

Zippable Plywood Trade Show Booths

One of the first slides demonstrated a trade show booth for a snowboarding company. He was able to integrate zippers into the polished plywood panels to allow the tradeshow display to be zipped together into a study shape and unzipped
into an easily transportable shape once the trade show ended.

“This is the only time I’ve ever gotten splinters from sewing”, he added with a smile.

All Weather Segway Enclosures

He showed off other industrial objects from his firm, including an all-weather enclosure for Segways that made the little personal vehicles look even more ridiculous——>in a good way. Here’s a link to an article (and photos) of the invention on Engadget called Meep Meep.

Backpacks and Military Projects

The next series of slides ranged from inflatable car seats for toddlers (saving time, space, and weight), and Compression backpacks, which do pretty much the same thing while looking awesome at the same time.

He outlined some of the military projects the firm has worked on as well, including a backpack with a hydration frame that made water the structure of the pack.

“This solved the largest issue of military life, which is hydration”. Placing hydration at the center of the bag allowed the soldier the capability to modify what they needed, because the backpack was also modular.

Sparq Training Equipment

Terrazign created a series of collapsible hurdles for Sparq, a training division of Nike. They’re lightweight and foldable, and can withstand and structure serious training.

They also developed weight vests, which were made from monofilament fiber mesh that allows for air flow.

Vertical Treadmills for NASA

Perhaps the most interesting part of Dieter’s presentation involved images of NASA members training for space missions on vertical treadmills. The treadmills were developed by Terrazign to create artificial gravity and the ability to retain bone density while in space. The vertical treadmill is effective because of its capability to simulate gravity equal to body weight.

A group of guys that were playing a series of Mexican folk songs on guitars strode by the event space while we watched a man running on a vertical treadmill on the screen. It was a strange juxtaposition of elements that made the audience consider really what they were looking at.

You can see images of the Vertical Treadmill at the NASA Website.

Severin Villiger

Designer, Teacher

Severin began by telling us that he was going to do a presentation about Italian Airplanes. He was wearing a leather coat, airplane goggles, and a big black biker helmet.

Apparently, he was a Vespa enthusiast. He showed pictures of pinup women riding the bikes, and even had a whole series of them inside the presentation space. The entire presentation was developed with a zany Swiss accent, which made his ability to make the crowd laugh even greater.

Vespa Mania

“Who thinks a Vespa is a toy?” he smiled, “I don’t”.

He showed an image of his group of Vespa riders doing all sorts of interesting activities, and then one of his personal collection of Vespa bikes.

“The best thing about a Vespa scooter?” he stated, “You have four…or ten”.

Want to join the fun? Check out the Portland Vespa Group for more adventures.

Intermission

Matthew Packwood

Radio Producer

“I’m going to do a presentation on Contemporary Classical Music. It’s kind of an oxymoron. Contemporary and classical shouldn’t go together, but they really do”.

“I figured that it is rather difficult to talk about music, so I brought four pieces to share with you, all of which have something to do with Portland”.

He then began to play each piece. Each song had four slides associated with it - a title slide, a picture of what the often complex music looked like, an image of the composer, and an image of what the original cover of the pieces looked like.

These four elements caused a greater understanding of each piece than if simply the music had been played alone. The images of the composers were probably the most compelling of all of the images.

Piece One

Two Celebratory Fanfares (1995)
Composer: David Dzubay (b. 1964)
Performers: John Rommel, trumpet, Edmund Cord, trumpet, Thomas Brown, trumpet, Richard Sandals, trumpet, Amy Schendel, trumpet, Robert White, trumpet, David Dzubay, conductor.

Piece Two

Incidental Music to Corneille’s Cinna (1955-1957) whose cover looked like an old book.
Composer: Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
Performer: Linda Burman-Hall, tack piano.

Piece Three

theater of mineral NADEs [excerpt] (1998)
Composer: Eyvind Kang b. 1971.
Performers: Eyvind Kang

Here, Packwood showed an image of one of Kang’s conceptual sketches. It was as intense as the image of the composer. Extremely detailed and poignant. It told the story of the composer’s mind almost as well as the music.

Piece Four

Open up your Ears. Composer: Bryan Johanson.
Performer: David Starobin, Guitar.

This was an overwhelmingly beautiful piece, and it was a classical piece inspired by a line in the Jimi Hendrix song ‘Can You See Me?’.

Packwood’s presentation was excellent because he chose to let the music speak for him.

If you want to learn more, please check out Packwood’s site Art of the States.

Greg Barton

Designer, Hurricane Katrina Revisited

Greg received architectural training from Tulane University, RISD, and , most recently, the Bartlett in London. He has created exhibits and installations shown in venues from Tyron Creek to AIA Portland Gallery to the recent “PDXplore: Designing Portland” exhibit at PNCA. Before moving to England, Greg worked for Hoist Architecture.

Barton was attending Tulane University in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina displaced his life. The event that caused 81 billion dollars in damages is still affecting the lives of many residents.

He reminded the audience that the hurricane has not finished its toll on the residents of New Orleans. There are 150,000 families still living in FEMA trailers, with an average of three per trailer. Many refugees live in FEMA villages, or “FEMA-villes”.

A far cry from the luxurious representations of trailers from the 1950’s in advertising, there are many health hazards present in trailer life. For instance, Formaldehyde exists in dangerous levels, and there have already been many C02 related deaths.

He then showed how pragmatic restraints began to reshape the public sphere. Some families had placed white picket fences or stone lions in front of their temporary/permament trailers in an attempt to trick their minds into feeling like they had an actual place to live.

Meghan Sinnot and Carl Larson

Advocates, SHIFT - Portland Biking Initiative

Meghan Sinnot came to Portland from Alaska and attended Lewis & Clark college to study Anthropology. Since it was way up on a hill, it was not easy for her to explore the surrounding Portland area without taking a long trek downtown on the college-supplied bus.

Then, Meghan discovered biking. Now she is an part of SHIFT, the Portland bicycle advocacy group.

She began the presentation by taking out a bike and pedaling on it while telling the room about her history.

“Who rode a bike here today?” she asked us. Many hands went up, including mine.

“What we do here at SHIFT is basically an ad-hocracy,” she stated, “but we do have a stash of cash in someone’s basement that they let us get at sometimes”.

She talked about the group’s attempts at serving breakfast to bike commuters on the bridges in the morning. And she talked about Critical Mass, Zoo Bombing, and Pedapalooza—a few of the great Portland bike events that serve the educate and create a nice ground for future bike advocacy.

“In Guadalajara,” she said, “there is one vehicle for every three citizens”.

You can find out more about Portland Bike Culture at shifttobikes.org.

TJ Norris and Chas Bowie

Artists

One of the presenters was masked, and the other unmasked. They talked about the modern condition, asking questions such as, “does the mask control the wearer?” (or does clothing or career control the subject?), and snapshot culture. Click Click Click Click Click Click. Tick tock, Tick tock.

I would write more, but I can’t really describe what they said in the way they did. I was very impressed though, so I am including some links to their work here.

Resources

Read more about TJ Norris, and his show at the New American Art Union. There’s also an article history for Chas Bowie at the Portland Mercury.

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Future Pecha Kucha Portland Events

I highly recommend attending any Pecha Kucha event. If you’d like to learn more about upcoming sessions in Portland or elsewhere, and possibly sign up to present, visit http://www.pechakuchaportland.org/.

For more information regarding ciyscope and upcoming events, please visit www.projectcityscope.org.

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Event Sponsors

W.PA - Works Partnership Architecture, LLC
Architecture Foundation of Oregon
FordGraphics
A to Z Wine Works (Delicious).
Quixote Investments (add this link).
Rogue Brewery
Art Institute of Portland

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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo.

Our first episode will discuss the concepts of Supermodernism, Non-Space and Cyborg Anthropology.

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