I will share my theory first, then comment on the article and after that lean back and hope to get some response other than “Perhaps you should go to bed”.

I believe, we will see a decline in social media within the next couple of years, starting in the low power distance countries first. I have absolutely no reliable source to back it up, but if you find some, please share!

Part of it comes from my personal view, you know… “If I’m getting fed up with it, surely others must feel the same way”, but it is also about pattern recognition. Facebook has become perfect. They finally solved the problems with quizzes and horrible farmwill requests, or maybe I’ve just been online for so long that I’ve somehow managed to block them all. Anyway, it works, that’s the point.

So, now that FB has done more or less all they can do to make it as smooth for the users as possible, they’ve started to focus more on going out to the rest of the world. I can be on facebook from anywhere anytime, and I can spread my profound wisdom and preferences about anything from anywhere and post it on my wall without visiting. It is PERFECT!

But what happens, when something is perfect, is that people become existentialists. Suddenly we have the mental surplus to say: “This is as good as it gets, but is that good enough for me?”
Is facebook fulfilling compared to the amount of attention I give it?

When the future of social media is discussed, the basic thesis (as I perceive it) is usually based on: “How can we engage the users even more?”
But is that really what the users want? Right now, yeah, maybe, but what if we have already reached a climax of engagement?

What if the future of social media is actually about spending as little time as possible on a web based device – and as much time as possible IRL?

I was offline for 3 amazing days and came back to 300+ recent activities on facebook (just klick the button, come on, you know you want to…). That is fairly overwhelming, considering that I like to keep myself updated. This happens, because facebook assumes that I want to spend my whole day on it.

But if I actually only want to spend one day a week on it, the whole structure of FB becomes unappealing to me. I don’t like to feel that I am loosing track of things, even if it is things I don’t know if I wanted to keep track of.

The article I’ve linked to is about how the new technology distracts us in our daily work. However, the really interesting part of it is it says, that it has always been that way. Before computers there was watches and newspapers. The article quotes some of our great philosophers in says it is a human thing. We feel the need to be distracted out of fear of being confronted with real life pain, boredom, anxiety.

So, what will be the next big thing after Facebook?

It has begun…

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.

- Mary Pickford

EntityCube is a research prototype for exploring object-level search technologies, which automatically summarizes the Web for entities (such as people, locations and organizations) with a modest web presence.

The need for collecting and understanding Web information about a real-world entity (such as a person or a product) is mostly collated manually through search engines. However, information about a single entity might appear in thousands of Web pages. Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about an entity, the user would need to sift through all these pages to get a complete view of the entity. EntityCube generates summaries of Web entities from billions of public Web pages that contain information about people, locations, and organizations, and allows for exploration of their relationships. For example, users can use EntityCube to find an automatically generated biography page and social-network graph for a person, and use it to discover a relationship path between two people.

Apple has been developing new technologies, and better ones every once in a while. The Apple II, the Macintosh, the iMac, iPod and iPhone…

All this products change the way we interact with the virtual/electronic/e-world. Changes in the paradigms, changes in the models, making work, life easier. I am not saying that this products are the only good ones, but where pioneers on their fields.

Computers became a powerful tool, that is taking over real life!

But today i saw a video, that is changing my view on computers…

The way we deal with physical objects and “virtual” objects; the gestures, all together in one. With no difference between them.

It is not, on my opinion, augmented reality (which i think is fun, but sometimes pointless), is reality at its best!

So, it sounds cryptic what i just wrote, useless and with no sense of structure… so check this video and you will get amazed as me…

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

That is a change of many paradigms!

I had two topics to write about in my mind when I sat down.  One was to respond in some way to Malene in the previous blog post and the other…well, that is the one I have decided upon.

I have been teaching for many years (exact amount will not be specified!) and I have encountered many students of many different types.  Some stick in my mind for the quality of their work or for some amusing or memorable incident, some have become friends.   At KEA, I think I can say I have met some of the most interesting, lively, intelligent, funny group of students that I have ever worked with.  This is partly due to the size of the school (where I used to work, I was used to lecturing to 200 students and working in a very large Business School), where it is easier to get to know people, and partly due to the creative atmosphere, where there is more interchange and discussion going on. Of course, the Friday Bar helps a bit too….

This particular semester I have had the joy to be working with some wonderful 4th semester projects, ranging from an iPhone application to a promotional site for a film for teenagers to, and the one I think I am looking forward to seeing completed the most (sorry everyone else), the sock puppet guide to KEA.    What has been so special, is the group support and knowledge sharing that has been going on between students.   It has been such a pleasure and joy for me as a teacher to see this and to be part of this process as an individual.   Moreover, I have had the chance to share breakfasts, homemade cake (thanks Tamsin!) and endless cups of tea and the odd beer as well.

Mars, with the 3rd semester international students,  has also been a pleasure and a joy to work in this semester!  I have been so impressed with the enthusiasm and energy both in Berlin and in these last few days, and look forward to the finished ice-creams, Martian princess and, especially, the polar bears and penguins.

So – this blog is a big thank you to Lucas, Malene, Tamsin, Sune, Kristin, Kristoffer, Borgar, Freyr, Ilena, Jarl, Jim, Mathias, Erik, Chen and all the rest too numerous to name in 4th semester, as well as all the students in Mars, for enriching my life in so many ways.

Eleanor Roosevelt once stated:

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Surely there is many horrible things to say about facebook. Especially in this season for company christmas dinners, where not only your colleagues and boss will be able to see the forever captured image of you dancing on the bar table wearing nothing but a hula skirt and whipped cream to cover your last shred of dignity. It will also be accessible to your friends. That’s not the biggest problem, they know about your inclinations… They’ve seen worse anyway.

But if your facebook friendlist contains more than just your friends and colleagues, you are by now royally screwed. Because your image (or maybe it was a video with a decent sound quality of you singing “my boney is over the ocean” to go with the dance) is also accessible to your mother, your nephew, perhaps your own kids as well. Maybe even your kids friends parents, which means it could be all over your local community within just a few hours… 

It takes balls to have a facebook profile!

In fact, it takes balls to show the world who you really are. That is the really scary part, the part that makes so many people use facebook in the exact opposite way. It is still possible (yet!) to stage yourself on facebook. You have to think carefully about the images you upload, the notes you write and your status updates, of course, but with an extensive amount of energy, you will be able to pull it off. Besides, we all stage ourselves on some level all of the time, right? 

In this hyper complex society, where I wear different masks, play different roles or put on different hats, I still have one core called “me”. I am a mother, I am a student, I am a friend, I have hobbies, I have passions and beliefs. These different roles I play serve a purpose. They allow me to adjust myself to the different subsystems I walk in and out of every day. The core is still ‘me’, but what else ‘me’ might contain is not obvious to the system I walk into. My “mother role” is as obvious to my teacher as my “student role” is to the other parents of my kids friends. 

Showing one role at a time serves a purpose. When you only get to talk to people within a particular subsystem for about 4 minutes a day, you boil yourself down to the essence, the part that is relevant for the system to know about. So when I step into the kindergarden to pick up my son, it is highly irrelevant for the kindergarden to know, that I had a great conversation today with a classmate, or that my latest portrait or blog post went right into the bin. What they need to know about, is my role as a mother of my children. 

Walking through all the subsystems everyday can be quite draining. Playing a role is always draining, because the free expression is moderated, and the moderation itself demands a lot of energy. (…Where was I going with this? )

Facebook allows me to show all of my roles at once, if I allow myself, that is. And that is where the true horror comes in, because man’s greatest fear is the fear of rejection. What if the colleague noticed you weren’t really sick the other day? What if your christmas dinner video went public? What if people could really see who you really are?

THAT is scary!

But it doesn’t have to be avoided anyway. It seems as if the more human we show ourselves to be, the more we are liked by others. I believe it is this search for authenticity, we crave for something real, something in the opposite direction of the glamour and glitter of the women’s magazines. And we can render this authenticity simply by saying: “Yes, that was me in that video – doesn’t that hula skirt make me look slim?” 

It doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to upload images of my dirty dishes so that everyone can see that I haven’t done them in two days. (But of course, the writing about it is an attempt of rendering authenticity. Tell me if it works…) Because not having done the dishes may not be something I am proud of either. And so showing a picture of it might give the impression, that I am, which wouldn’t be an authentic representation of who I am.

My point is this; We are all humans. And we all have something we would rather not show others, simply out of fear of being “rejected”. Even if these roles we play are authentic, they are still just a necessary representation of the whole. By uniting these roles and to dare not staging oneself too much on facebook, it is possible to render a greater authenticity both within oneself and in others. 

And THAT is why I am so obsessed with facebook!

Berlin is somehow the city of my fantasies. Ever since hearing the 1966 broadway cast recording of “Cabaret” as a child (that’s the one with Lotte Lenya – an authentic voice of Berlin, and Jill Haworth in the role eventually usurped – and in my view, spoiled – by Liza Minnelli) I have been fascinated by the idea of a city I never visited until last week. I must say that I had so many contradictory expectations that I expected nothing in particular – except that German would be spoken. I wasn’t wrong about that, at least.

Further food for my fantasies came from dozens of art history lectures, where especially the work of “Neue Sachlikeit” artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix presented a brutal and often darkly funny illustration of the years leading to the rise of the third Reich, and a grotesque wit which I also found in the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Anyone who says the Germans have no sense of humour has evidently never seen John Heartfield’s collages, watched a Brecht play, or even reflected on the nationality of Billy Wilder, director of the enormously succesful Hollywood comedies “The Seven Year Itch” and “Some Like it Hot”.

Through most of the cold war, Berlin was the most highly-charged setting for what Winston Churchill memorably called the “iron curtain” – which in that city had become a physical, rather than merely symbolic barrier between two monstrous ideologies involved in a ‘zero-sum’ game: There was never a ‘win-win’ option on the table. That should have been evidence in itself that both sides were somehow ‘wrong’.

I did get a large dose of modernist painting in Berlin, at Neue Nationalgalerie, where obscure works by famous surrealist and abstract expressionist painters, from the private collection of Herr and Frau Pietzsch spoke less of ideological certainty, and more of the role of chance and random factors. Life is messy and muddled, and any realistic ideology needs to accomodate one basic truth – that both the mathematical and physical universe tends inevitably towards ‘entropy’ (noisy disorder). Order is not something which comes by itself, rather it comes about because of restraints of one sort or another. The ‘free market’, for example, is neither truly free, nor fully under anyone’s control, so we might as well be honest about which restraints are in place.

A highlight of the trip for me, was the Pergamon museum, where I and a group of second semester international students got to see the Ishtar gate from Babylon. We had already discussed one of the lion reliefs from this extraordinary structure in a session on representational techniques in computer games. In particular I wanted to impress upon the students that allowing process to influence expression is no bad thing. It doesn’t matter if the ‘foliage’ in your game is represented by mostly square ’tiles’, even if real foliage has a different shape. These kinds of designs tell us something about process; something about pragmatism, and also – in as far as our imperfect illusions are good enough – that the quest for perfection is often overrated.

The ancient Greeks might have made their marble columns and friezes as beautiful and seamless as possible – going to great lengths to conceal joins, edges and supports – but some special information is carried by evidence of process. In the gates of Babylon, we are in no doubt that every single blue-glazed brick is made by hand, seperately, and presumably by many pairs of hands – evidence of the vast and organised human population of the walled city state, of which Babylon was the first example in history.

In the Jewish tradition, Babylon was a symbol of the folly of tyranny and pride, with its ‘unfinished’ tower, in reality a vast artificially-irrigated ‘rock garden’, hung with lush plants to please the wife of King Nebuchadnezzar II, who was homesick for her mountain homeland. (The hanging gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world). Berlin too has its tower – just as much a symbol of the folly of tyranny and pride. And indeed Berlin’s western part was for many years also a walled city, conceived to keep the decadent barbarians contained rather than excluded.

For all those that take a tour of Berlin’s Jewish museum, or leave the ruins of Berlin’s wall saying “never again!”, I invite you to make a quick investigation of the details of the ‘security barrier‘ being erected inside and across Palestine (by Jews – how ironic!), or indeed the wall being built on the border between India and Bangladesh.

I fear that we will see many more of these ghastly constructions, especially as the climate and food crises develop; In addition, many of the minorities persecuted by the nazis and communists are also persecuted today. The latest news about the treatment of the Romany people - or even homosexuals - in eastern Europe show that some variant of totalitarianism is alive and well, and ready to emerge as soon as the right man appears.

All of this is strong evidence that the sickness called ‘dualism’ still holds sway, and ‘them and us’ remains a powerfully persuasive propaganda strategy, regardless of the ideologies involved. Aren’t we wiser than this?

So what was most significantly ‘reflected in Berlin’ for a 39 year-old Englander? What evidence of process caught his attention? Like any big city, it bears the evidence of its past in the present. On our first morning – a guided bus tour of the city, ably voiced by the highly-qualified and surprisingly charming Jens Møller – we learned that the trams are a relic of East Berlin, whereas the buses were from the time of West Berlin.

I have lived in London for four years. It’s in no way the best organised European capital, but still, the public transport infrastructure hangs together in some kind of logical way, even after privatisation.

In Berlin, I learned that trams are marked on the map as M in a circle, whereas the buses are marked as M in a square. M is short for metro (obviously), which in itself is also an abbreviation for that old Greek favorite “metropolis”. On top of that we have U-bahn (which Danes and Frenchmen would call the ‘Metro’) and good old fashioned city railways (which Danes and Germans call ‘S’, perhaps short for suburban, but not literally under the city, except sometimes). In the interests of simplicity, I will ignore taxis and pedestrian wanderings. Are you with me so far?

Most public transport maps in Berlin show some, but not all of the public transport networks. Those that purport to show all seem to favour one or two of those networks in full colour, with the ‘less favoured’ networks represented in very pale grey. Each ‘complete’ map chooses a different colour scheme. At any station, whether it be U-bahn, tram, S-train or bus, there is no indication given of compass directions. (I always thought North, South, East and West were kind of international, even if the words were different), so if you can find yourself on the platform of the right transport line, you have still a 50/50 chance of climbing aboard a vehicle travelling in the right direction.

Finally we have the issue of ‘public works’ – i.e. some of the lines not operating as they appear on the map, and require extra changes to exotic alternative vehicles – usually some kind of bus – because some-or-other building is being torn down or built up, or some stretch of railway is being renovated. All of the most acutely important information about these anomalies is presented in German only, in this most international of cities. Quite simply, getting about town can be harder than solving Rubik’s cube, because unlike the cube, you rarely have all the state variables in your hands at the same time.

Special mention should be made of the automated ticket machines, which appear to have been designed by engineers (oh dear) who were satisfied that it was at least mathematically possible to order all kinds of tickets to any destination, provided that the human operator adopted the correct attitude. Usability? We’ve heard of it.

I thought the Copenhagen Metro ticket machines were bad, telling you to re-insert your card to be re-read after previously asking you to take it out, but these machines from Berlin were a baroque triumph of dehumanizing cybernetics. Every group ticket was just twenty clicks away. The finger stabs the touch-screen while the trains come and go. You are one with the machine. There is even a language button, which sometimes, but not always, leads to a ‘language chooser’ screen. It sometimes works, but always resets itself to German without delay after each ticket purchase. Oh, were there more non-German speakers in your group? Sorry.

Don’t get me wrong. Unlike most of my fellow countrymen, I think the German language is extremely beautiful, but there is this issue with tourists not being able to understand it, and still wanting to find their way about the big cities. Are there not some clever information designers in Berlin that could help out? I don’t just mean providing a cheap compass with every tourist map (although that would be a huge help!), but rather that every station or bus stop should indicate which direction the trains, trams or buses would be travelling in, and where one might change to another network. There is a need to indicate not just an end station, but a compass direction. I did see a little icon indicating ‘clockwise’ and ‘anticlockwise’ on one of the ring networks, which was a good start. And what about having some kind of standard map color scheme. How hard can it be?

All in all, I saw only a tiny fraction of the city, which should perhaps best be experienced indoors. Therefore, the only way to experience Berlin properly is to keep coming back or even (gasp) to live there. I hope to do at least one of these in future.

I again discovered him as an amateur photographer taking pictures around us in any event or occasion like creativity night, party in chill out etc.

In the mean time I got a chance to be very close to him when he came as a part of our Tutor team. We became friends, we talked, we had lunch in an Indian Restaurant (where I work) with tandoori chicken as he told me, he likes that very much. We became so close, but shame on me, I couldn’t discover his real talent.

Few days before he sent me an invitation of a photography exhibition. Day before the exhibition I saw him replacing pictures on the wall with new pictures behind our class room. I was busy, just looked at them, but not deeply and commented “nice picture”. I came to know, the exhibition is on the pictures he took. That’s nice! Great effort!

On the day of exhibition, I saw some of the pictures and discovered him as a real talent photographer. My friend, Lucas Wxyz is that brilliant photographer, I never knew before. I am feeling proud to be his friend. I promised to be there on opening, but couldn’t for group work.

I would like to thank our school, teachers and staff for their kind cooperation to flourish his talent and uncover to all. Otherwise we never knew that KEA got a brilliant photographer.

Lucas, just carry on.

I am requesting the school to expand those activities further on in future to discover the hidden talents among us who knows.

Lucas Wxyz