summ( )n

I was invited to speak at the interesting conference this coming Thursday, The Future of Money, and to talk about the future – well, not of money per se, but rather of the new emerging social and technological realities I foresee. Ironical enough, the last conference on similar topic I participated in (it was called The Future of Payment Systems, or somethings like that) was also hold in Moscow, in 1999. The year of one of the largest financial crisis in Russia.

I hope my participation this time will not be so devastating.

I am currently in Moscow in a large research project, aimed to better understand the new emerging patterns of communication, triggered and mediated by the plethora of various tools we usually refer as ‘digital’. This include not only the ‘classical’ Internet per se, but also mobile phones from one side, and so called Social Web services. In reality all these new tools and methods inter-tangled and – more importantly – interwoven and with a variety of communication practices of people.

Obviously, this is a very complex topic, and so we try to approach it from different angles – socio-cultural, linguistic, and psychological points of view, among others. It is also a huge topic, so our efforts are bound to be humble, scratching-the- surface an exercise. The nice thing it is a comparative research, and we will have a chance to see if these new practices are different in different countries cultures. To the extend possible, I will cover here at least the key methodologies we use, and perhaps certain insights we will gain.

I’ve just bumped into an interesting project, an intersection of data visualization and social research; it was featured in the Telegraph, although I had a chance to spot it earlier, since its author, Eric Fischer, is among my Flickr contacts. I guess, I missed it because of the holiday and out of my general e-hibernation period lately.

The total set includes more than 20 different cities, and it’s amazing to see how differently arranged the activities of people in different places (as reflected in their corresponding use of the social networks (specifically, Twitter and Flickr). Compare, for example, London (orange dots are locations of Flickr pictures, blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets and white dots are locations that have been posted to both.)

and Tokyo

Different spatial organizations of the two cities does play a role, of course, but these beautiful maps also reflect the deep differences in who and how people use social media (and communication technology in general). Comparisons with other cities can be even more striking.

Perhaps it’s worth to add that I am writing about this project partly because of my general interest to these topics (map x art x research x people x technology – I perhaps miss the ‘future’ part here as yet), but also because I am currently involved in a study of the new patterns of so called ‘digitally mediated communication’ that we see emerging now. Which in turn signals that Summ()n is up and running again, and even expands its scope which now includes the studies of people and technologies.