Moore’s observed exponential miniaturization of chip technology, known as Moore’s Law. This has been popularly translated into something like ‘computers will double in performance every 18 months’ by colleague of Moore. The chip industry has been racing to fulfil this prophesy year after year, but because the observation is of a physical nature it has a natural upper bound. In other words: transistors can not be smaller than the stuff they are made off.

To keep up with Moore’s Law we eventually have to do something different (see also Jörgen’s predictions.) Research is conducted in many different areas. Nanotechnology, biological computing, quantum computing, etc. One area of research has been in parallelism, performing as much operations as possible at the same time. Parallelism is difficult to program, and creating a Grid to run your applications is very expensive. Perhaps not if we replace our CPU with a GPU, according to NASA. And what will happen then?

Identity can be seen as the construction of ’self’, in which people give direction, meaning, value and purpose to their life. Through identity people relate to the world, to other people and to themselves. Identity is mediated through language, artifacts, social institutions and culture. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s contribution to the study of human identity is situated in his analysis of the role of the story in the experience and construction of ‘identity’. Ricoeur states that ’story’ is the most important form of mediation. He calls this the “narrative identity theory”. He finds that a story is not only a fruitful metaphor to describe the personal identity, but people also construct their identity through the use of (life)stories… (read more)

As I’ve mentioned last week we did an interview with Benjamin Barber about his new book. The political theorist talked about his perspective on the schizophrenic society, that Ad Verbrugge talked about before. They’re talking about it from a slightly different perspective, which makes it even more interesting. Whereas Verbrugge views it from a societal perspective, Barber took the view from the consumer. In his view we are all split personalities as we are both consumers and citizens…at least in the Western world. View part of his interview here…

Last week professor Jos de Haan was appointed to the chair of ‘ICT, culture and knowledge society’ at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In his acceptance lecture he talked about the decreasing interest of young people in cultural historical traditions and about the effect the internet has had on the lack of this interest. Yes, when I was researching this generation for our latest study I realized how much technology was part of the daily lives of this generation. But I doubt whether the use of the internet is causing the digital generation to loose its heritage. Isn’t that something of all ages?

Quite a while back we interviewed Dutch philosopher Ad Verbrugge (in Dutch). This week I’ve been editing his interview (check the section ‘Our inspiration‘ soon, to view part of our talk), and once again I was intrigued by his insights. Verbrugge sees the alienation of the virtual space with our physical space, something that he calls the schizophrenic society, as the main reason for the polarization of communities. Quite an interesting thought: does the internet undermine our freedom?

We have talked about trust before! One of our discussions was about trust and distrust. I am always amazed about the polarity of the different perspectives in these conversations. Are people naturally distrustful? Innocent until proven guilty is the cornerstone of our (modern) civilization. But in trust we are almost all to be distrusted until proven worthy.

Wikipedia is one of the success stories of a trust model not based on distrust, but on trust. It has seen it’s attacks, and recently the WikiScanner revealed what we have always known. Unarguably successful but malignancy increasingly incurs a heavy burden on maintaining the integrity of the encyclopaedia. With Wikipedia 2.0 they hope to battle these problems, but they propose to completely reverse their standpoint. They intend to stop trusting you!

The first time I read about Steve Mann (see our Board of Inspiration) him I had to think of gargoyles, from the novel of William Gibson, Neuromancer. In a state of permanent connectivity a gargoyle was perceived as a walking library and a broker of information. This novel was written in 1986, a time where information technology was envisioned. With industrialisation as one of the driving forces of societal changes.

Now we think the next big thing will come from nano, neuro and/or biotechnology. Perhaps we can find some inspiration in contemporary science fiction!!

I was triggered by a Dutch talk show last week (”Rondom 10 8/9/7″ in Dutch) about anonymity on the net. There is a famous Dutch blog called ‘GeenStijl‘. They are well known for their radical new way of journalism: that is in the form they present their ‘facts’ and have others interact with it. To some of the guests on the show the anonymity that is being provided by the blog enhances the hatred among the users whereas other guests propagated the anonymity because they believed it was part of their right on free speech. The topic didn’t really trigger me that much, but the complete ignorance of some of the people present about how and why people use the internet was shocking. Was this an example of a clash of generations?

This week we have Gary Carter ( CCO FremantleMedia) as a research-guest in Amsterdam. We discussed about television (the box, the content, the industry) in general and his experiences (and fascinating experiments) in alternative ways of producing (not for television) entertainment. These days I got to see television from a different perspective: “TV is here to stay, for a long long time, but how entertainment can be created/ shaped/ emerged/ envisioned on different platforms is not so evident.” Gary argues ‘new media’ is about many ’small’ audiences. And the only way to reach small audiences (economically viable) is through collaboration, in it’s broadest definition. I find this breathtakingly interesting. Especially the way he explores this from within ‘the system’. In thinking about television there was one realisation that I could not easily understand. In science fiction literature television as a technology and as a cultural phenomenon is rarely researched. Why would that be?