Urban Sensing

Interesting I wonder what the implications of moving from participatory research to a participatory sensing framework are going to be.

Is decentralized sensing an emerging dominant hierarchical structure?

As the authors explain:

Persuading individuals to engage in such constant self-surveillance and then subsequently to
share that data pose nontrivial hurdles entirely independent of the privacy claims raised by third parties. This is so even in the world of JennyCam and YouTube exhibitionism.

In this context, services become mechanical choice making and negotiation devices that become responsible for protecting our privacy. And people say cybernetics is dead?

For these authors, the data commons are also a shift in ideology:

In going beyond science, urban sensing has the potential to generate a “data commons.” By this, we mean a data repository generated through decentralized collection, shared freely, and amenable to distributed sense-making not only for the pursuit of science but also advocacy, art, play, and politics. (…)

Whether we view these new developments as an outgrowth of the open source
movement or of the success of a few participatory models (Wikipedia, YouTube), the applications on the Web today and the way data is structured and shared are fundamentally different than they were a decade ago. We think of the evolution of the data commons as an extension of this movement, offering a host of new applications, new data types, and data
processing tools. As Natalie Jeremijenko contends, every sensor in the environment is a question. The data commons and citizen-initiated sensing will provide answers, pose new questions, and open new opportunities for public discourse.

The data commons resembles what we have previously called a public sphere [7]. In prior work, Kang and Cuff provided a minimalist definition of the public sphere with four principal attributes: the public sphere must be accessible to diverse members; provide opportunity for multiple uses; encourage some sort of (and not always political) exchange among participants
(in the case of a data commons, this implies both the sharing and consumption of information); and be recognizable as such a space. Although these attributes were used to describe physical realms and social practices, they can also be usefully applied to the data commons.

Their views that our political sphere is changing is shared by sociologists who see political consumerism as an emerging activist strategy.

They too see data tagging, indexing as emerging creative forms of engagement.

are data commons the technological evolution of participatory and collaborative practices?

 

Simon Penny: mind-body relationship in a mediated world

Simon Penny’s position in this article reminds me of the transhumanists philosophy positions.

The crisis he articulates when he discussed our cartesian approach to media has lead to the emergence of new ideas pertaining to mediated communication. My research is starting to see the coexistence of multiple philosophies in networks.

The following diagram gives a sense of large categories that coexist.

Simon states:

‘The privileging of ‘mind’ over ‘body’, the abstract over the concrete, is a strong continuous thread in western philosophy, from Christian Neo-Platonism to Descartes and beyond.’
What is occuring in a globalized world is that other type of philosophies are starting to influence western thoughts. Asian philosophies and approaches are finding homes in experience-gaming theories. In these movements aesthetics and narrative structures emerge from the relationship of the entire human to another, let it be another human or mechanical being. All senses become part of meaning making.

Simon Penny also would agree that media represent specific ideological values. But the article shows its age in that contemporary thinking brings the idea of hybrid hierarchies, within a pluralist perspective. Social constructivists tend to argue that we adapt our values to emerging systems and through time create unique forms and systems appropriate to that environment.

Dualism versus pluralist

Penny argues that the dominant streams of that discourse are predicated on dualism and privilege the abstract and transcendent over the embodied and concrete. Looking within education theory, his point is echoed in constructivist learning theories.

Perry created a learning development model that identifies dualist models as the first satge of development within humans.

What is interesting is that the notion of depth in such learning varies from accepted definitions. He argues that the ability to make connections and establish relationships between various belief systems while being grounded in ones’ self is one of the final stages of learning, what he refers to as the commitment within relativism positions. Perry echoes Penny in that they both challenge dualism as a central paradigm. But they differ greatly in that Perry remains within a cartesian model of existence.

I would argue that his model is missing another stage, which is self-awareness within the body. I wonder what asian theorists have to say about that?