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Although Karim is named on YouTube’s site as a co-founder, Chad and Steve have promoted a highly simplified history of the company’s founding that largely excludes him. In the stripped-down version—repeated in dozens of news accounts—Chad and Steve got the idea in the winter of 2005, after they had trouble sharing videos online that had been shot at a dinner party at Steve’s San Francisco apartment. Karim says the dinner party never happened and that the seed idea of video sharing was his—although he is quick to say its realization in YouTube required “the equal efforts of all three of us.” Chad and Steve both say that the party did occur but that Karim wasn’t there. “Chad and I are pretty modest, and Jawed has tried to seize every opportunity to take credit,” Steve told me. But he also acknowledged that the notion that YouTube was founded after a dinner “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible.

✖ Via TIME: “The Gurus of YouTube” by John Cloud, Dec. 16, 2006

We have no problem understanding how our actions shape representations, narratives, ideas. It’s some time more difficult to understand how those constructs shape us in return. Here’s a good example of a narrative elaborated in order to shape the behavior of future adopters (toward the innovation that is YouTube). As a marketing tool, the story about the party is supposed to give users a basic idea about how to behave with YouTube.

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The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people,” they say.

At first glance this seems somewhat counterintuitive but on reflection it makes perfect sense. Kitsak and co point out that there are various sceanrios in which well connected hubs have little influence over the spread of infromation. “For example, if a hub exists at the end of a branch at the periphery of a network, it will have a minimal impact in the spreading process through the core of the network.”

By contrast, “a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population.”

✖ Via Technology Review: “Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks”, Feb. 02, 2010

Read the original study conducted by Maksim Kitsak, Lazaros K. Gallos, Shlomo Havlin, Fredrik Liljeros, Lev Muchnik, H. Eugene Stanley and Hernan A. Makse : “Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks” (submited to Physics and Society on Jann 28, 2010).

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The critical question of the relationship between technics and time is assuming its place on the public stage, daily, superficially, but in a more and more evident way. Each day brings its technical novelty, as well as the demise of things obsolescent and out of date. Innovation is inevitably accompanied by the obsolescence of existing technologies that have been superseded and the out-of-dateness of social situations that these technologies made possible―men, domains of activity, professions, forms of knowledge, heritage of all kinds that must either adapt or disappear.

✖ Via Technics and Time 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, tr. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins, Standford University Press, [1994]1998, p. 4 [Amazon, Google Books]

About this book:

“What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.” (more)

About Bernard Stiegler:

“Professor Stiegler has a long term engagement with the relation between technology and philosophy, not only in a theoretical sense, but also situating them in industry and society as practices. He is one of the founders of the political group Ars Industrialis based in Paris, which calls for an industrial politics of spirit, by exploring the possibilities of the technology of spirit, to bring forth a new “life of the mind”. He published extensively on the problem of individuation in consumer capitalism, and he is working on the new possibility of an economy of contribution.” (more)

Stiegler came to philosophy while being incarcerated for armed bank robbery (five years at the Prison Saint-Michel). He wrote about it in his book Acting Out.

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technology communication experience ipad apple innovation sense interaction interface intelligence community epistemology extension meida kids reblog

✖ Via I’m Not Actually a Geek : “Apple iPad and the Radical Innovation of Meaning” by Hutch Carpenter, Feb. 2, 2010

“OK, if iPad is innovating meaning even more than it is technology, what meaning might that be? Here’s my best guess:

iPad is tapping into an emerging dynamic of a more interactive, tactile experience with digital technology and information. These interactions make technology less of an interface, and more of an extension of ourselves and our environment.

The tweets above are a couple that show the natural way children engage with technology. Given the iPhone experience, they turn around and want to apply it to other devices. Buttons on devices, our traditional form of interaction, are divorced from the screen. They provide a measure of distance from the digital experience.

Touch, however, represents a new level of intimacy in the digital experience. In technology terms, it’s just an alternative form of interface. Touch, mouse, tab, whatever. But touch is a vital human sense, and a core part of experience. It’s how we interact with others, how we shop, experience textures and so much more.”

About Hutch Carpenter:

“I am the VP of Product for Spigit. Spigit helps companies manage innovation, providing idea management and prediction market software for enterprises. The goal is enable easy capture of ideas by employees, customers and partners, and convert the most promising to innovative initiatives. Spigit recently received a $10 million equity investment from Warburg Pincus.” (more)

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✖ Via MadTV: MadTv’s iPod Parody - iPad (2006)

“All of us use laptops and smartphones now. The question has arisen lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle?

The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, “it has no reason for being.”

Apple’s answer: the iPad.”

“Live Blogging the Apple Product Announcement” by Brad Stone, The New York Times, Jan. 27th, 2010.

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✖ Via Tom Gauld: Reasoned Scientific Debate [click for hi-res]

Previously on Skandalon

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✖ Via Vaseline – Prescribe The Nation: “Who prescribed whom?”

Ad campaign create by Craig Andrew Smith for Vaseline. It’s an interesting illustration of Everett Rogers’ revised theory about the importance of social network for the diffusion process: that is “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed., 1983, p. 5).

Find out more about this ad campaign on Craig Andrew Smith website.

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The contrast in scale between between consumer products we use in the home and the industry that produces them is I think absurd – massive industrial activity devoted to making objects which enable us, the consumer, to toast bread more efficiently. These items betray no trace of their providence.

So are toasters ridiculous? It depends on the scale at which you look. Looking close up, a desire (for toast) and the fulfilment of that desire is totally reasonable. Perhaps the majority of human activity can be reduced to a desire to make life more comfortable for ourselves, and has thus far led to being able to buy a toaster for £3.99 [among other achievements]. But looking at toasters in relation to global industry, at a moment in time when the effects of our industry are no longer trivial compared to the insignificant when our, they seem unreasonable. I think our position is ambiguous - the scale of industry involved in making a toaster [etc.] is ridiculous but at the same time the chain of discoveries and small technological developments that occurred along the way make it entirely reasonable.

✖ Via The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites.

About the artist: “I’m in the final year of the MA Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art.” Check his other projects at his officiel website.

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✖ Via iSteamphone

Exploded iPhone, da Vinci style. By artist Kevin Tong.

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✖ Via Open Atrium

About Open Atrium : “Open Atrium is a team portal starter package. What makes it unique is that it’s extensible and customizable. This means that you - and everyone - can develop new features for it, add other modules, change the skin, totally re-factor the workflow, and do anything else that you can think up to make Open Atrium meet your exact needs. Check out the Developer FAQ to get started.

We open sourced Open Atrium because we see it as a seed for something much larger - a community that makes great team communications tools. And it’s working. Open Atrium is being translated in more than a dozen languages and several hundred people are growing its base of features. Together we can develop the most advanced knowledge management tools.

This is all possible because everyone can access all of the code. Most of Open Atrium’s source code falls under GPL v. 2 b, since it’s built on the open source Drupal framework. All the code that’s not under GPL has a BSD license, which keeps it just as open and gives people even more flexibility.” (Read more)

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