entretags/blog

Just got to know a survey released this year by IDC, which attempted to measure and forecast the amounts and types of digital information created and copied in the world - and whether it is generated from individuals or businesses.

In this research the amount of information created and copying was analyzed in order to give a forecast for the entire “digital universe” through the year 2010. Some interesting findings:

IDC predicts that by 2010, while nearly 70% of the digital universe will be created by individuals, organizations (businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, associations, etc.) will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of at least 85% of that same digital universe.

Information security and privacy protection will become a boardroom concern as organizations and their customers become increasingly tied together in real-time. This will require the implementation of new (more…)

In All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation, Scott Rettberg distinguishes three types of participation a contributor might have in a collective narrative project:

Conscious participation: Contributors are fully conscious of explicit constraints, of the nature of the project, and of how their contribution to it might be utilized.

Contributory participation: Contributors may not be aware of how their contribution fits into the overall architecture of the project, or even of the nature of the project itself, but they do take conscious steps to make their contribution available to the project.

Unwitting participation: Information utilized in the collective narrative are gathered by the machine itself, and contributors have no conscious involvement in the process of gathering the material.

These three levels of participation are not mutually exclusive, in the sense that one collective narrative project could utilize contributions on all three levels.

In this article, Rettberg looks into well stablished systems such as Wikipedia and Flickr to extrapolate methodologies for the creation of collective narratives. Individual Flickr users, for example, aren’t consciously thinking about forging connections with others.