Cloud Collaboration

I have finished writing a book chapter titled “Cloud Collaboration: Peer-Production and the Engineering of Cyberspace.” The chapter will appear in an edited volume being put together by Stan Brunn. A pre-publication version can be downloaded here.

The abstract is as follows:

The internet has made possible a pooling of labor from around the world on a scale never before possible in human history. Millions of people now contribute work to cyber-projects like Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google Earth. Unfortunately, distinct demographic biases characterize both the creators and the content of these new projects. Rather than bringing everyone into a global village, the internet instead enables hybrid physical/virtual spaces to be created that can never eliminate the global economic inequalities that characterize the physical world. Many of the free contributions of labor on the internet are based on a hope that a shared, open, transparent, and democratic digital commons is being created. However, new cyberspaces are frequently subject to many of the same power relations that characterize the offline-world, with large profits being made by private companies from freely contributed labor. Hopes for a digital commons built by global workforce of volunteers should not be lightly discarded, but as this chapter demonstrates, there remain myriad forms of bias, control and exploitation that characterize many of the projects being constructed in cyberspace.

The Cultural Wealth of Nations

I just got word that I will be contributing a chapter to a forthcoming book called “The Cultural Wealth of Nations.” The volume (edited by Nina Bandelj and Frederick Wherry) will bring together the work of twelve contributors (most of whom presented papers at a conference organized by the editors in March) in order to address the following question:

How do the symbolic qualities of places shape economic activities? As the summaries from three cases outlined above suggest, symbolic resources affect social, cultural, and economic development. Indeed, the value of being made in America or made in Italy depends not only on the material advantages each place offers but also the symbolic resources embedded in the places of production. While some economists, economic sociologists, and political economists have expanded their inquiries of development to include social networks/social capital, they have done less to account for the symbolic resources that enhance or dampen development efforts.

The abstract for my chapter in the book proposal is as follows:

Mark Graham presents a detailed case study of commodity chains in the Thai silk industry and focuses specifically on attempts to reinvigorate the slowly dying practice of silk production in northeastern Thailand. Producers of Thai silk usually live in poverty, whilst intermediaries are able to capture the bulk of value. As such, development strategies often revolve around eliminating intermediaries on the commodity chains of silk and bringing weavers into a global virtual marketplace. By contrasting chains that have been altered by the internet (e-commerce) with those that have not, this chapter demonstrates that the internet is rarely being used to successfully disintermediate commodity chains. Value within the Thai silk industry is most often created by intermediaries with a detailed knowledge of foreign customer tastes, marketing strategies, and distribution outlets, rather than simple topological alterations to commodity chains. Therefore, for most weavers, it is the detailed knowledge of intermediaries, rather than strategies of distintermediation that will continue to connect them with consumers around the globe.

Information Inequality

I wrote another new post at the floating sheep blog. The post outlines some regional inequalities in geodata uploaded to Google (i.e. placemarks). China offers one of the most interesting examples. Beijing, Shanghai, and the Perl River Delta Region all are characterized by heavy information densities. In other words, a lot of information has been created and uploaded about these places. However, much of the rest of the country has very little cyber-presence within the Google Geoweb. In the map below, the height of each bar is an indicator the number of placemarks in each location. For the full post and more maps, head over here.

Twitter, the Cloud, and the Iranian Election

The New York Times published an interesting article about social networks being used by Iranian opposition groups and protesters. One of the most interesting bits of the article relates to the way that a cloud of information about the protests is being created. This cloud is increasingly difficult, or probably even impossible, to censor because there are so many sources uploading information in so many ways. An ocean of information has been created that can be relatively easily sifted though using tags (such as #IranElection). The tags serve as focal points in the cloud, and blocking them would be an effective means of censorship. However, up until now, organisation in the cloud has remained outside of Teheran's control.

The article can be found here.

Global Placemark Intensity

I just uploaded a new post to the floating sheep blog with a few maps that illustrate global placemark intensity. Below is a sampler map, but for the full post head over here.

Wikichains in the news.

Wikichains has been featured in two Spanish newspapers La Crónica de León (Feb 9th) and Diario de León (the May 31 edition) (scans of the article can be found here and here).

Mark

Wikichains: languages

I forgot to mention in the last post that Wikichains can be edited in eight languages. English and Spanish are the only two with a significant amount of content at the moment. However, we also have French, German, Italian, Portugese, Japanese, and Chinese. If you/anyone you know could translate some of our existing text (or add new text) into any of these languages, please dive into it.

Wikichains

I'll use this first post to introduce a new project that I am starting: Wikichains. 

WikiChains is a website that aims to encourage ethical consumption and transparency in commodity chains. Contemporary capitalism conceals the histories and geographies of most commodities from consumers. Consumers are usually only able to see commodities in the here and now of time and space, and rarely have any opportunities to gaze backwards through the chains of production in order to gain knowledge about the sites of production, transformation, and distribution.

Over the past decades, the production of commodities has been globalized at a staggering pace, and yet our knowledge about the production of those same commodities has shrunk. The aim of WikiChains is therefore to encourage a different type of globalization: a globalization of knowledge that will harness the power of the Internet in order to allow consumers to learn more about the commodities that they buy.

The website will encourage Internet users from around the world to upload text, images, sounds, and videos of any node on any commodity chain. All uploaded information will be licensed under the creative commons framework and made freely available. The hope is that ultimately a large enough body of data will be assembled to allow consumers to find out information about the chains of all mass produced commodities.

WikiChains will not push any particular political, ethical, or environmental perspectives. Rather, it is hoped that by simply facilitating the free flow of information to transcend barriers of time and space, the project will encourage consumers to be able to make informed economic decisions and be more aware of their economic, social, political, and environmental impacts.

I'm happy to receive any feedback, and of course even happier if anyone that has any knowledge about any node of any commodity chain would take a few minutes to upload and share some of what they know. Thanks.