Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Goverment and Social Media, part II

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

In previous text, I discussed mainly on Jyrki Kasvi’s presentation of information society. In this part, I will look closer on group works done. I participated to a group that had a topic of stimulating the dialogue between citizens and administration.

One interesting aspect presented there was change in citizenship: unlike most political scientist discuss{{Usually when this discussion starts, people do mean the conventional participation. This doesn’t mean that the actual participation}}, there might be active and strong civic society coming up and engaging in discussion with politicians and administration. Actually, these new communication tools make taking contacts easier. Actually, some of the recent Finnish social movements like Porkkanamafia and the demonstration against Lex Nokia use these new media to get citizens involved.

Secondly, many representatives from administration agreed that data does exist in the system, but the problem is more what to do with it and how to use it. Actually, administration people said that they don’t want to ask abstract question as they tend to get tricky. The want to keep it simple for all of us to participate – and I fully see why.

Thirdly, they also think opening their data storages here. Not part of administration but still publicly owned, YLE, has been doing this kind of work previously. Some of the participants demonstrated how they already know use provide their data for public use. I of course spoke about open APIs and how important they are to broader the developer base. Let’s hope someone listened…

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Mindtrekking

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I just came back from Mindtrek 2008 conference. The conference is related to new media and it’s usage in different fields, mostly about social media, ubiquitous media and games. So what I actually learned there? Maybe it was the tendency that social interaction is going to push itself to all areas we’re working on.

On the other hand it’s interesting to be in social media event where the use of social media seems to be… exception. I did Jaiku during the event, as did other’s too. But rather many did notes in the old fashion way (nothing against it — I love to work with pen&paper), which seemed strange. Actually this is every now and then happened in other places: for some reason formal settings seem to kill the use of social media tools.

So, I got an CD-rom with all the papers. I need to read the paper Social is the New Pink
 by Damien Marchi, as it might have some new radical views. Then I got some new colleagues and met some old ones.

I spoke of ubiquitous media and political life, trying to argument that this new way we communicate has changed and will change how we do politics. Not allways in the good way but in some way anyhow. To see the presentation, head to Qik and SlideShare.

Updated: Link fixed!

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Social media is dead, long live social media!

Sunday, September 14th, 2008

I had an interesting discussion with Micki Krimmel in Nokia Open Lab 2008-event. While having workshop of the next steps of social media our group started to speak about data interoperability and other things we saw important. Micki just commented that discussion that those things might be important to us “pioneers1” but real people, the ordinary Joes and Janes just use the tools for communications.

I like this mark and think it’s really important one: maybe for the younger (even younger than me) generation there’s not the history of web as we have it: I had my first website out when I was at elementary school and I see the huge difference with the way I write content here: I started with Notepad and now I just write the content without <html>’s and <a href’s. But the fact was that the content hasn’t changed so much: it’s still information of me and some links to other sites and persons.

So, what’s the most interesting thing that Micki pointed out: our chose of wording; social media, might even cause harm. As a political scientist student I know that terms are a way to use power. I’ve also see some people in the academic field defining what social media is and what they refer with that term. But what ordinary people think when we ask about Facebook or Flickr? Do they think that’s something totally different — or do they just see it as a cool and cheap way to communicate. So, as some of us want a special term to this, the question remains if that is a good word for what we do or should the term evolute to show how social media is becoming every day thing2.

Just to elaborate this more: someone asked “What is antisocial media?” while we discussed this. That is a good question — is there any media that is antisocial?

  1. actually, I don’t feel that pioneer in this area; I’ve been blogging for two years now and it became mainstream way before [↩]
  2. This sentence is based on the assumtion that social media is pushing itself to the live of younger generations and thus they see nothing special in there, they just use the best tools available. This sounds like I need more understanding in this… [↩]

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