Geo-fencing will soon be announcing its new best friend: ‘mobile coupons’. The American retailing company Target introduced the first mobile scannable coupon utility. This opens doors for innovative marketing solutions. Imagine this… It is lunch time and you are getting hungry. Based on time, one might think people are getting hungry and will soon be looking for a lunch room. An app – which is running on your mobile phone in the background and constantly is aware of your location – sends an alert. It mentions that you might want something to eat at the suggested lunch room. Seconds later, you receive a coupon Target style. In the lunch room at the counter you pay the cashier for your sandwich. Once the bar code is scanned you receive a discount and are one satisfied customer!

Concept

Big American media brands massively use Foursquare for their marketing efforts. HBO, Warner Brothers, New York Times, Bravo, History Channel en Metro News have all made commercial deals with Foursquare. This mobile service is aimed at “sharing experiences” when people go out. Users can check in with their smart phone and check at the Foursquare page at which hospitality place they are (cafe, restaurants etc). They can leave comments about these places. Users can also score points by frequently checking in. By this they earn a certain status which is rewarded by badges.

Business model

The service wants to make money with it by sponsoring deals, not with advertisement. The deals made with the big media companies have several services: e.g. Warner Brothers serves Foursquare members with tips for romantic places in their city and remembers the client when a film is starting, TV broadcaster Bravo serves Foursquare members with discount coupons when they check-in at certain places. The American restaurant guide Zagat serves restaurant tips and the New York Times visitor can win a special Vancouver badge. All these services are only delivered via opt-in. The Foursquare member has to give permission for the services.

Foursquare has now 200.000 members and figures are rising quickly. The servers get more then 1 million check-ins per week. Applications are available for Android, i-Phone, Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Foursquare started the service in a couple of cities but is now available worldwide.

So indeed it seems that Locative media and business are finding each other.

Check out this video, which is recorded at TED.

Distribution

The process of traditional newspaper development and distribution is as follows:

• 10 pm, the journalist finishes the story.
• 12 pm, the story gets moderated by an editor and put in a news format.
• 1 am, the content is transferred to the printing press.
• 3 am, the news papers are distributed to thousands of agents.
• 5 pm, the paperboys deliver the papers to the customers.

Due to circumstances in this chain of events, the distribution of newspapers can easily be distorted. Think of: weather, accidents, malfunction in the printing press. In case of a non delivery due to these circumstances the customer contacts customer support and the front office agent subsequently channels the complaint towards the regional distributor. He will, in turn, summon the paper boy to redeliver the newspaper. If the newspaper is out of stock, the customers do not receive the newspaper, but will get a refund.

Future distribution of newspapers could have a model similar to the distribution of internet modems. One applies Locative Media, in this case e-paper (A3 format), on a free-loan base and subscribes to news and other content. This content will be distributed digitally every morning. No more logistical nightmares! No more printing press deadlines, failures, delays and overhead hustle.

The process of future newspaper development and distribution is as follows:

• 10 pm, the journalist or news-enthusiastic amateur covers stories on the fly using social media (blogs, micro blogging).
• 12 pm, the story is moderated instantly by an editor and exported as a file in a proper news format.
• 1 am, a batch file will be uploaded to several news-servers using a distributed network.
• 5 am, e-papers are contacted via a wireless modem (or 3g technology) by several servers using P2P technology and a secure connection.

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Costs

The distribution costs for a news paper corporation is a burden, because it’s raughly 50% of the total expenses. With the above described distribution model cost are decreased dramatically. Obviously, the initial costs of such a model and the investments are significant, but will certainly equal the distribution costs. So, cutting the distribution costs is essential for the news corporations to stay ahead of its digital competition.

Environment

Mechanical reproduction of newspapers will be another thing of the past. On a global level, this conversion will have a significant positive effect on the environment. Ink is very harmful and newspapers are drenched in it. E-papers also make use of ink, but e-papers are not disposable. Today’s distribution of news papers is mostly done by cars or other fossil fuel based transportation. Digital reproduction will make fossil fuel based transportation obsolete, which in turn decreases the CO2-emission. Of course, the development and fabrication of e-papers will not be completely CO2-neutral, but it is a step in the eco-friendly direction.

Locative media should be mobile. Apple has mentioned, in a recent keynote at the introduction of the iPad, that their annual revenue for its mobile devices is almost 16 billion US dollars. That makes Apple the number one manufacturer of Locative Media. The iPhone and the Macbook will be accompanied by a tablet, the iPad. It is not a mobile phone, nor a laptop. It’s a hybrid. The iPad is mobile in a sense that one is able to carry it around in a case, but that’s not really mobile, is it? It’s hybrid in a sense that it is in between the high resolution of a static newspaper and LG’s flexible e-paper mentioned before. It’s the Toyota Prius of new media. A step in the right direction, but just not nearly there.

At this moment, we are in a transition of conventional analog identification to digital virtual identification. Hereby, a mutual trust between government and civilians plays an essential role. The lack of a pure form of identification can result in an emergence of many restrictions and legislation based on movement in the physical and virtual space.

In this paper, personal information is defined as “all the information that is possibly available of one person”. This information encompasses things such as: name, address, location, income, expenses, depths and biometrical- en DNA information, but also information like eating habits, sexual orientation, political opinion, religious beliefs and physical appearance. For short, it reveals intimate, private, economic en political issues in the life of a person. All the unique features that can be registered will form the identity of a natural person.

Within social studies, identity is considered a process of becoming. Stuart Hall (1994) makes a distinction between two influences on the production of identity. Firstly, he states that [1994:394] identity is being produced by differences between cultures based on similar histories; like slavery, colonization and migration. Secondly, he states that [1994:394] a cultural identity is formed by a reproduction of the past. Thus, the telling of stories and myths. So, when is stated that “All the unique features that can be registered will form the identity of a natural person.”, we have to keep in mind that the (virtual) identity is never fixed, but rather dynamic: it is continuously becoming (completed by unique elements).

Computers have brought several advantages to cope with these issues. These advantages do not necessarily apply to the privacy of civilians nor to the control of the government. Thanks to technology, the government can enforce tons of complicated legislations upon civilians, which is only possible within a process of fast decision making and calculation power. When somebody is speeding for example, the authority will take notice by means of technology (speed sensors). Which will lead to a punishment (speeding ticket). For the authority it seems impossible to grasp total control, though. Technology works both ways (Spam, internet piracy, hacking).

Due to the lack of control for both civilians and government, they have to cope with the following issues: it has been more difficult to (1) discover what personal information is stored where and by whom and (2) what it is used for. The Dutch legislation on the protection of personal information elaborates on these issues. It states [WBP, 2006], in a nutshell, that personal information can only be used for the purpose the civilian has meant it to be used for. And, if this is the case, it should be accurate and complete. The appearance of a digital virtual identity has a tendency to bring fear upon us. Fear of big brother and anarchy. Based on the impact that exposing your digital identity could potentially unveil. Based on what bad things might happen.

The digital virtual identity can be thought of in terms of a body, which incorporates a collection of personal information. The ‘founder’ of this data body is Steve Kurtz (2006), who is a member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). He writes in Utopian Promises – Net Realities an essay, where a virtual body is considered as one of five utopian promises. Kurtz (2006) states: “The virtual body is a body of great potential. On this body we can reinscribe ourselves using whatever coding system we desire. We can try on new body configurations. We can experiment with immortality by going places and doing things that would be impossible in the physical world.” (Kurtz, 2006) The data body is a ‘fascist sibling’ of the virtual body. “(…) a much more highly developed virtual form, and one that exists in complete service to the corporate and police state.” (Kurtz, 2006) One could define the data body as an embodyment of (personal) information, which is linked to one person.

Haggerty and Ericson (2000) elaborate on a body that is similar to that of the data body. “The observed body is of a distinctively hybrid composition. First it is broken down by being abstracted from its territorial setting. It is then reassembled in different settings through a series of data flows. The result is a de-corporealized body, a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality.” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000:613) They mention the concept of the data body again when they state: “It is not so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body […], but with transforming the body into pure information, such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable.” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000:613)

Figure 1. Evolutionary step

The notion of completeness in relation to data bodies has inspired the idea behind this concept. The data body, which is illustrated in figure 1 has a rather negative image, because its troubled relationship with man, technology and society. Troubled, because man could be seen as the shadow of the data body. The shadow connotes the lack of agency over the data body within the realms of control, surveillance, and discipline. The evolutionary step illustrates the evolution of the data body. As shown, the evolution of the data body starts later. It is therefore less evolved, less sophisticated and less complete than that of man. This unsophisticated (caveman) property could be inconvenient for man, because of its impact on daily life. For example, a data body is corrupt, which is the equilivant of an error in a database. As a consequence, the person who is linked to this database is prohibited to travel across boundaries.

There is a theoretical solution to fear of the impact that data bodies could have. The completion of the data body. How? There should be a mutual trust between government and citizens. On the one hand, should the government agree to full transparency towards the aggregation and recording of personal information. On the other hand, should the citizen agree to partly give up his/her privacy. Technology should be the key for making sure the data body is complete and in that way sophisticated enough to resemble man.

References:

• Haggerty, K.D., Ericson, R. V. (2000). The Surveillance Assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51,(4),(pp. 605-622).
• Hall, Stuart (1994). Cultural Identity and Diaspora in Colonial Discourse and Post Colonial Theory. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Eds). Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf. (pp. 394).
• Kurtz, S. (2006). Essay: Utopian Promises – Net Realities (http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/utopiancrit.html), 14 mei
• WBP, Wet Bescherming Persoonsgegevens. (Dutch Privacy Act of personal data) (2006).http://www.cbpweb.nl/downloads_wetten/WBP.PDF?refer=true&theme=purple

Latent control on the distributon of music

(Engels)

In the early days, photography was solely predestined for the Photographer. This skilled worker governed both the analogue camera as the development of its negatives. The dawn of the digitale age introduced a less labor intensive way to produce a photograph. Anyone who could handle a digital camera, computer and a printer is able to be a photographer and reproduce art.

The conventional developing process is replaced by a digital one and the barriers of the complex analogue process are gone. Digitalizing infrastructures and universalizing protocols will result in the fact that numerous devices can communicate with one another. An universal language which is based on binary code. This has advantages for distribution, speed and the amount of information send, but has also implications. A reduction of an analogue to binary code will influence form, purpose and content of the archetype. From 2003 to 2008, Sony BMG had to deal with different lawsuits regarding a policy to secretly implement rootkit software for customers of their content to prohibit its reproduction. Secretly implementing information which alters its manifested purpose is related to what I have coined: ‘latent remixability’. Issues that I am going to scrutinize in my thesis are the layers behind latent remixability. How does latent remixability fit into contemporary society? Which roles do new cultural forms play? What does copyright and original content actually mean within the era of endless reproductivity and endless remixability? How does this fit into a Foucauldian or Deleuzian perspective, or both, and where does Alexander Galloway come in?

Download here my paper on the topic of latent remixability. (still in Dutch)

“When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements ‘down to zero’. If 99.4 percent is not good enough, then this is a war on file-sharing technologies, not a war on copyright infringement.” (Lessig, p.74)

What is the percentage of identified infringing material on the Pirate bay? The discourse whether This portal is illegal or not shouldn’t be that complex. Free Culture, to me, is very important. We have should take the distribution of creativity very seriously! Creativity is the catalyst for inspiration, which in its place, is responsible for the social, political, and commercial development of our cultural identity. P2P – as an infrastructure – is a substantial contribution to the development of our cultural identity. The Pirate Bay (what’s in the name) facilitates this contribution as well! but, this has its influence on the revenue of honest creators. If we accept and normalize an amount of distributed infringing material, then, on the basis of the ratio between illegal and legal distribution, we could determine whether a facilitator operates illegal.

A few questions pop up… What really is illegal, when we accept a system that is old and based upon ‘property’ in a virtual world of endless re-productivity? Does a maximum compressed movie-file, which doesn’t comes near the original quality, is eligible for copyright infringement? Or, why should we prohibit or normalize illegal downloading when we technologically could enforce zero tolerance? Why isn’t the government being held responsible when a car driver is speeding and distrusting cocaine? P2P is held responsible in the same way! In my opinion, if the Pirate bay is excessively violating the norm (not 99.4%) then they should be punished! But what is the norm? Maybe we should be focusing on that!