I was all set to write my latest essay, Small Pieces Loosely Swained, when I cam across Michael Wesch's posts discussing something he refers to as the "Digital Database of the Mundane." Loosely defined this database is the aggregation of our movements on the web. (I highly recommend reading his posts on this here and here.) In his posts Wesch talks about the unintentional trail of information we leave behind as we maneuver around the web. And how easy some technologies make it to aggregate this information. Specifically, he mentions radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and two-dimensional (2D) barcodes.
RFIDs are data chips that can be implanted in most anything. Some are active meaning they transmit data, such as the ones shipping companies use to track packages. While others are passive. They do not transmit data but rather are read by something like a scanner. For example, my neighbors had one implanted into their pet boxer, Roxy. If she ever gets lost any vet with a scanner can pull up her contact information. 2D barcodes are barcodes that store information both horizontally and vertically. Thus they are able to contain a lot more detail than uni-dimensional
barcodes. For example, I could have a digital identification card attached to all or selected movements on the web that contains demographic information about me that can easily be transferred and read by other parties. It is technologies like these that make possible the idea of having a 'digital wallet' where all our pertinent information is stored and encrypted to be used for things as mundane as renewing you library books online to purchasing expensive gifts. But that's a topic for another post to come.
Getting back to Wesch, he's an anthropologist at Kansas who along with his students are exploring the digital trails we leave behind in a new and exciting field called digital ethnography. The genesis of this field of study comes from Sandy Pentland and the MIT Media Laboratory. In 2005 Nathan Eagle and Pentland published a study in Reality Mining. Reality Mining is the ability to identify social patterns of individuals and groups by tracking the ways in which they access and use information. Including the context in which they are doing it. Pentland and Eagle used Blue Tooth enabled mobile phones to monitor the activity of about 100 MIT students and professors. From this data they were able to create a model of the research subjects social networks and use the model to predict where the subjects would meet with other members of their network on any given day of the week. Read their paper here.
This has powerful implications for those of us interested in studying the digital neighborhoods of our students to understand how to better connect with them. Digital Neighborhoods, as defined by me, are the personal spaces we create on the web through the aggregation of hyperlinks. Where proximity is determined by each individuals unique and ever-changing interests. The more I am interested in something the 'closer' is will be in relation to me digitally. In other words, if I like something I make it easy for me to access either through bookmarks or links from my own pages. With reality mining I can not only study where we go and how we present ourselves on the web we I can also now see physically where we're doing this and anticipate the outcomes of the interaction. Reality mining adds another layer that we can study further blurring the line between our web selves and our terrestrial selves. In fact it may obliterate it.
RFIDs are data chips that can be implanted in most anything. Some are active meaning they transmit data, such as the ones shipping companies use to track packages. While others are passive. They do not transmit data but rather are read by something like a scanner. For example, my neighbors had one implanted into their pet boxer, Roxy. If she ever gets lost any vet with a scanner can pull up her contact information. 2D barcodes are barcodes that store information both horizontally and vertically. Thus they are able to contain a lot more detail than uni-dimensional
barcodes. For example, I could have a digital identification card attached to all or selected movements on the web that contains demographic information about me that can easily be transferred and read by other parties. It is technologies like these that make possible the idea of having a 'digital wallet' where all our pertinent information is stored and encrypted to be used for things as mundane as renewing you library books online to purchasing expensive gifts. But that's a topic for another post to come.Getting back to Wesch, he's an anthropologist at Kansas who along with his students are exploring the digital trails we leave behind in a new and exciting field called digital ethnography. The genesis of this field of study comes from Sandy Pentland and the MIT Media Laboratory. In 2005 Nathan Eagle and Pentland published a study in Reality Mining. Reality Mining is the ability to identify social patterns of individuals and groups by tracking the ways in which they access and use information. Including the context in which they are doing it. Pentland and Eagle used Blue Tooth enabled mobile phones to monitor the activity of about 100 MIT students and professors. From this data they were able to create a model of the research subjects social networks and use the model to predict where the subjects would meet with other members of their network on any given day of the week. Read their paper here.
This has powerful implications for those of us interested in studying the digital neighborhoods of our students to understand how to better connect with them. Digital Neighborhoods, as defined by me, are the personal spaces we create on the web through the aggregation of hyperlinks. Where proximity is determined by each individuals unique and ever-changing interests. The more I am interested in something the 'closer' is will be in relation to me digitally. In other words, if I like something I make it easy for me to access either through bookmarks or links from my own pages. With reality mining I can not only study where we go and how we present ourselves on the web we I can also now see physically where we're doing this and anticipate the outcomes of the interaction. Reality mining adds another layer that we can study further blurring the line between our web selves and our terrestrial selves. In fact it may obliterate it.
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