Watching the watchers: mapping Google mapping

Mapping California by lidar
Originally uploaded by marypcb.

A German group called the Free Art and Technology group put a GPS tracker on a Google Street View car: they pranked the driver, and, in one case, filmed him urinating against a streetlamp (this link NSFW if you dislike four-letter words).

It immediately made me think of taking this photo as we passed a mapping car near Davis, California; the driver looked at me as I took the snap and I wondered 'is it an intrusion of privacy to photograph a camera car?"

Danah Boyd on surfing streams of content

Very much after the fact, I found a link to Danah Boyd's talk at Web 2.0 last year in New York about the tension between the stream (flood?) of content online vs the fixed amount of attention any of us have. The really interesting commetns for me are about the second-order issues that result.

"With Facebook, you can turn your closest friends into celebrities, characters you gawk at and obsess over without actually gaining the benefits of social intimacy and bonding."
I call this Friendship Lite (or Friendship 2.0); yes, online support and connection can be hugely valuable but it can also supplant real connection and engagement.

"Finally, we need to rethink our business plans. I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models... But when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption. Figuring out how to monetize sociality is a problem. And not one new to the Internet. Think about how we monetize sociality in physical spaces. Typically, it involves second-order consumption of calories. Venues provide a space for social interaction to occur and we are expected to consume to pay rent. Restaurants, bars, cafes… they all survive on this model. But we have yet to find the digital equivalent of alcohol."

EDIT
link - http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html
restatement
I call this Friendship Lite (or Friendship 2.0); yes, online support and connection can be hugely valuable but it can also supplant real connection and engagement if it's broad and shallow interactions rather than actual conversations through whatever medium. If I can find out details about what matters to you simply by browsing rather than learning them through a conversation that requires both of us to invest time and thought and attention, do I actually know you as well? I'd say no.