How many times have you heard or read that sentence?. I’ve googled it, and there are more than 7000 references, counting both globalized and globalised spelling (by the way, which is the correct way of writing it?).

Usually, it acts as a starting point to two different types of arguments. On one side, the catastrophic view: due to globalization cultures and traditions will be lost, the natural environment will be destroyed and we will end up in a uniform, oppressive, orwellian world where difference will not even be remembered. On the other side globalization, serves as a excuse to push unpopular decisions (usually political or economical), like ‘because we live in a globalized world, we need to dismantle the welfare state…’.

These two arguments are based on a typical deterministic view of technology. It is obvious that what we call globalization has been speed up by the advent of new communication and information technologies, and, from a deterministic perspective, those new technologies determine how society is going to evolve; there is no way out, society has to resign to its fate…

There are several pitfalls to these arguments. It is simply not true that globalization is a new thing, there have always been global relations between the different regions of the world. Cultures and societies are not closed entities that have grown up and evolved in total isolation (yes, there is, maybe, the exception of some communities in some out of the way areas, island in the middle of the Pacific, Hymalayan valleys,…, but even in that case those peoples had to come from somewhere…). The idea of an intrinsically pure culture of a community (country, region, people, race…) that can be polluted and must be protected from external influences, is just a myth fed by nationalistic interests.

And, although it is true that new ICTs expedite and facilitate communication, relation, and sharing between different parts of the world, that does not mean that this integration must evolve in the directions we usually (and wrobly?) associate today to the word globalization.

Faster and better communication technologies bring with them more interaction between people and cultures, but that does not necessarily imply reducing the cultural, social and economical diversity of the world, as most of the arguments that start with ‘We live in a globalized world…’ try to suggest.

And what about the photo?

I think this one illustrates cultural diversity in a global world at its best: a Brazilian barber shop in the Chinatown area of NYC, probably frequented by Hispanic customers that also live in that area…

This datum is part of a review of a series of conferences and seminars that have been going on in Barcelona about the topic of The architecture of fear. Terrorism and western urbanism. The central topic of these conferences was the impact that the security concerns, raised specially after the terrorists attacks to New York, Madrid, or London in the last few years, have had on urban design, architecture, and the development and use of security (meaning anti-terrorism) related technology.

In Spain we are currently in the middle of the local elections campaign, and the topic of security has become central in the discourse of some political parties (mostly, but not limited to, right wing parties). Waving the fight against crime/terrorism flag has always been a political resource, and also a way to prioritize certain technological developments, such as automatic (intelligent?) surveillance.

Obviously, as much as you try to upgrade them with the 2.0 version number, social networking is not only about those web sites, but rather an activity quintessential to human nature. Social networking is about linking and relating to other people and how to use those relationships to acquire and share knowledge, to get things done, or just to enjoy them. Technologies and technological artifacts do mediate in social networks (actor-network theorists would say that they are part of the social networks…), but no technology, and specially no trendy name applied to a tecgnology, can change the fact that we maintain links with other people and that we use those social relations tor multiple purposes.

The study of social networking is not something new either: in the early sixties Everett Rogers studied the process of diffusion of innovations and concluded that between adopters plaid a key role in the speed at which innovations were accepted, or rejected, by users; and in the seventies, Mark Granovetter published his seminal paper on the strength of weak ties in social networks, that opened the field of social network analysis.

But although social networking is a natural human activity, its characteristics and effects are completely mediated by specific cultures. In Maximum City, a book about Bombay (Mumbai) writen by an American of Indian origin (an NRI), Suketu Mehta captures very well the difference in importance and meaning attached to social networking in two different cultures: India vs the US (and the UK):

There is very little you can do anonymously as a member of the vast masses. (…)It has to be one person linking with another who knows another and so until you reach your destination; the path your request takes has to go through this network. You cannot jump the chain by going directly to someone who doesn’t know you connected only by the phone line. Then it becomes a buyer and seller transaction rather than a favour. A friend went from Bombay to London and told me she was horrified that she could spend an entire day (…) without ever needing to make a personal connection.

Technologies (telephone, e-mail, Web2.0,… ) can mediate the formation and maintenance of social networks, expanding its reach and increasing (or diminishing) the strength of certain social links. It is also very probable that the adoption and use of certain technologies will help changing the cultural values and meanings associated to social networks and how they are used. But that does not mean, as it may be inferred from some of the media hype, and as much as some marketing gurus may like it, that social networks are not specific internet sites or features added to web services.

(The worst example I’ve seen of the misappropriation of the social networking concept and term is the title of an article in cnet: Ten reasons social networking doesn’t work. Of course, it talks about some reasons why some of the web sites dubbed as social networking sites do not stand to the expectations created)

What I found more interesting is how the authors do not focus only on what we would call technological infrastructure. Infrastructure is not only about power supply, broadband connections and wi-fi hotspots, but also about space and things that populate it, about the ways we interact with, and the meanings we attach to them.

This conceptualization of infrastructure is aligned with Latour’s view of the agency of objects. Objects play a role in the course of actions, they participate, as actors, in the formation of associations. But these associations are difficult to trace except in specific moments when they are rendered visible: when there are innovations, i.e. new object types or modes of interaction are created; when they are approached by users unfamiliar with them, or when they stop working (due to accidents, breakdowns, strikes…). These are exactly the situations in which infrastructure becomes relevant: when there is some change in it (innovation), when it is approached by somebody not familiar with it, or when simply it is not working any more, at least as the user would expect it to work.

New applications, new technologies, new artifacts, can change the strength of some associations, and maybe create new ones. In that process, part of the underlying infrastructure is going to become visible and relevant again, it is going to evolve and change, as the innovations and the way we associate to them adapt to it, and finally become themselves part of the infrastructure.

As usual, Castells’ comments are thought provoking. I have specially found interesting his position against what could be called technological futurology, that he summarizes in this phrase (translatedd from the Spanish original text): “In reality, what most people calls future is the present, what happens is that they do not know it”.

He shows his point describing how mobile technologies are changing the way the world gets access to communication and services. There has been a lot of talk in the past years about the digital divide and how most part of the world population does not have access to computers and, consequently, data networks and services. There have been lots of initiatives to reduce the digital divide, usually focused on providing some kind of access to computers to the ‘disconnected’ populations (internet kiosks, internet community centers, OLPC…), but what is really giving the possibility to access on-line services to many groups that would, otherwise, remain disconnected are mobile technologies: more than half of the world’s population today has access to a mobile phone.

This concept of future is, precisely, what I want to refer to in the title of the blog. It is not about forecasting what is going to happen, and what the world is going to look like ten years from now. Lots of people have tried to do that with very little success. The possibilities of getting it wrong are much, much higher than guessing what is going to happen, so lets leave predictions to astrologers, chiromantics….

For me, taking about future is talking about what is happening today that is changing the way we do things, communicate, work, live…. Future is the path, not the destination, and when you want to follow a path that you do not know, you need to focus on the curves and slopes, the little changes, rather than trying to figure out what the destination is going to look like.

We have an image of the UK as one of the societies with a high level of concern on the protection of privacy. It is one of the few countries in Europe where there are no identity cards of any form issued by the government, and when, once in a while, an identity card initiative is proposed, it faces so much opposition that it gets dropped by politicians. The proliferation signs warning of CCTVs in operation is, at least superficially, opposite to this image.

Maybe the perception of the abundance of CCTVs was caused by the legal requirement to warn citizens of their existence, making CCTV signs quite ubiquitous in the London city landscape, but it certainly produced some estrange situations, like this CCTV sign besides a big graffiti (or street art?). Usually, the painting of street art such as this is somewhere in the fringes of legality, so the image makes you wonder what was first: the CCTV or the graffiti, and how those symbols of different lifestyles and attitudes ended up side by side in the street.

Beyond the curious image there is a whole reflection on how surveillance technology can change our habits and attitudes about the public space. Up to which extent do you change your behaviour when you know that CCTV is operating in a certain public space?, is the proliferation of surveillance warning signs going to trivialize it or, on the contrary, is it going to act to create social reaction to the technology?. And, of course, what happens when there is the possibility that some kind of surveillance is being done without any information signs?…

Panopticon or 1984, the fact is that surveillance based distopias are, today, part of our collective imaginary, so this is going to be an area of friction between technology capabilities and social expectations and concerns…

That evolution is specially visible in technologies related to consumer products (how many people who look at the L2Cache size spec for microprocessors has an idea, beyond bigger number is better, about the meaning of that spec?). But in certain circumstances this jargon evolution can also happen in other technologies not so consumer oriented.

In Bangalore, the major center of the software export industry in India, in an environment with a very high IT employment demand, IT and programming related skills becomes a very valuable asset. The consequence is that the programming jargon is becoming part of the regular language. Small signs advertising training in very specific programming technologies abound, and, in certain situations, it is quite easy to start a conversation with an stranger about specific programming languages, platforms, and techniques.

Reading certain news and hearing some people talk, it seems that we are back in time to 1999, but with tagging and social networking substituting portal and e-commerce as the bright ideas that will change the world, and make (some of) us very rich. Web2.0 has its new heroes (the googles, the flickrs,…) and villains (guess who…). And obviously, there are the pundits that talk a lot about it and create all the hype, and in some cases make a lot of money out of it.

But, we cannot say that we did not learn our lessons: the Web2.0 bubble may explode as the .com bubble did a few years ago, so it is better that we have a new concept ready when this happens: an the term is, obviously, Web3.0.

Web3.0 is just a fancy name for a concept that has been lying around for a few years: the semantic web. I guess that the term semantic web sounds too geeky to attract venture capital, so somebody came up with the fancier Web3.0, and then, publications such as the MIT Technology Review have picked it up, so it is becoming mainstream in the internet and technology related circles. According to Nova Spivack, blogger and founder of one startup using semantic web technologies, there is even a Web4.0 waiting somewhere in the future…

But besides all the naming fireworks, there is a more subtle issue around the concept itself of an intelligent (as in artificial intelligence) network. I’ve already talked about the goods and bads of the collective intelligence that some of the new internet based technologies enable. The underlying question is how much intelligence are you ready to outsource to somebody else, be it some artificial intelligence search engine, be it the collective seating somewhere in cyberspace or, most probably, a combination of both.

It is obvious that any technology, and Web *.0 is not an exception, embodies in its design lots of cognitive and social assumptions and when adopting those technological artifacts we are, up to a certain extent, adopting those assumptions. And that is fine if you are aware of what are those underlying assumptions and what do they mean for you.

An example with serach engines: although Google’s page ranking algorithm is kept as the company’s major trade secret, it is well known that it is somehow based on the number of pages that link to a certain page, so, when I’m using Google as a search engine, I know that I’m actually looking, more or less, for the most popular pages about something, and hope that the most popular are also the best. But of course, that is not always the case, so it is nice to have other search engines that are based on other criteria and even a different search space (some of them provided by Google itself, like Google Scholar for research papers).

At the end, I end up using different search engines for different things, and I guess that the Web3.0 response to it would be building some kind of intelligent agent that can embody part of the criteria I use to select between the different criteria embodied in the different search engine options. The only problem I see is that somewhere in this chain of building intelligence on top of intelligence there must be some place left to personal, private, options and criteria.

I have to admit that I have not digged deep enough in the semantic web theories and technologies to understand how personal option and individual difference can be implemented in a way that is also easy to understand and use. But it is also true that I have not seen this issue addressed by any of the Web3.0 visions and predictions I have seen so far. So, at least for the time being, I will remain in the skeptic side about Web3.0 and I’ll be, at least, a little reluctant to outsource the small portion of intelligence I have left to some unknown agent…

That is why I find this video interesting. It is well done, goes straight to the point and it is thought provoking. It does not try to define what Web2.0 is (I don’t think anybody really knows what it is…) but points out some of the changes that new web based technologies may bring and the controversies that they generate.