Cornerstone

Resources to Explore

Considering the Challenges of Technology

Stories about the Foxconn factories and suicides

Stories about How Technology can Isolate us

Stories of Technology Debasing, Isolating, and Oppressing people

Next-Generation Collaborative Art

With the advent of Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and a whole collection of other social sites, we’ve begun to see the beginnings of an expansion of the arts: the creation of collaborative music, crowd-sourced movies, and socially-augmented informational projects. Some of the new art is truly collaborative: people working across boundaries to create things together. Other art is “asynchronous”: a person might take the various creations of others and reuse them to create a new work. The connectedness that increasingly characterizes our world is also making it possible for us to discover and share creations in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible in an earlier age.

  • Lux Aurumquae – a hymn sung by a virtual choir
  • The Hunt for Gollum – a crowd-sourced fan movie
  • In B-flat – a collection of YouTube clips that can be played in any order to make new music
  • ThruYou – Kutiman’s remix of YouTube clips (featuring “The Mother of All Funk Chords” and “I’m New”)
  • Playing for Change – a project to link people from around the world through music
  • ElQuijote – a collaborative reading of Don Quixote [in Spanish]
  • The 9/11 Memorial – a collection of stories about experiences of the events of 9/11

Sugata Mitra and the Hole in the Wall

Several years ago, Sugata Mitra, an academic currently affiliated with Nottingham University, posed an intriguing question: which is more important, access or education? To answer this question, he began installing networked computers in the walls of slums–the “hole in the wall” that lets people see through to another kind of life. The results were amazing: children began to explore and to teach one another what they were learning, adults established businesses, and the terminals quickly became essential elements in their communities. Mitra’s idea that technological access could be truly democratizing to those on the fringes of society has proven itself again and again, and it’s a brilliant example of the cooperation model at work.

We Feel Fine

“We feel fine” is a site that offers an interesting perspective on the people near us and around the world. Using specialized search algorithms, this site constantly prowls the web searching for people’s expressions of how they’re feeling, and it reports what it finds in graphical, textual, and statistical ways. The site can be limited by gender, age, location, and other factors, and can even account for the impact of weather on how people are feeling. What does such unprecedented insight into how people are feeling offer us as we seek to understand and engage with the world around us?

CellScope

“CellScope” is a project sponsored by Nokia to build microscopes that can attach to regular cellphone cameras, allowing people in developing countries to send high-quality digital medical images from developing countries to labs in established countries to enable diagnosis and treatment. For much of the developing world, the mobile phone is the only informational infrastructure that provides broad access to people.

Growing Connectedness

“The Internet of Things” offers a look at the increasing connectedness of things in our world–not just people, but all kinds of objects and systems that can now communicate with us and with one another. As this connectedness continues to expand, new possibilities and new challenges will face us, and our understanding of the world will likely change in fundamental ways.


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