new participation technologies for youth

Web 2.0, smart mobs, mobility, etc…

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Istanbul Bilgi University Turkish Informatics Foundation (TBV)

CIVICWEB PANEL The Internet and new Participation Trends for Young People in Turkey and abroad

20 March 2009santralistanbul, Istanbul Bilgi University

CIVICWEB PANEL The Internet and new Participation Trends for Young People in Turkey and abroad

20 March 2009santralistanbul, Istanbul Bilgi University

Source - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tatianacardeal/36956189/

Youth is no longer a

demographic …it’s a

mindsetmindsetmindsetmindset

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Participation technologies

• Participation enabler tools

• Socio-technological tools

• ICT as an enabler

• Virtual communities

• Smart Mobs

• Usability & interaction

• Read-write web (2.0) and after…

• Information design as an action organizer

• Mobile internet

• Socio-technical networks

• …………..

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Youth as the actor, ICT as the enabler

A demographic analysis might be just enough to understand the significance of the global youth population in the developing world. If one defines youth as those who fall within the age range of 15 to 25 years (following United Nations statistical principles), there are 1.2 billion young people in the world and 724 million youth and children living on less than a $2 a day, a significant number of whom are illiterate, unemployed and living with HIV/AIDS. This youth population is also a fast-growing group, especially in Africa and most countries of the Middle East. While in Asia, young people constitute over 61% of the world’s youth population.

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Youth as the actor, ICT as the enabler

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), are gradually changing this rigid landscape. In this context, ICT is not only a tool, but a medium over which social, political and economic transformations occur. Transformations are now global, meaning that one change in one community resonates in another community, which initiates a process of simultaneous and continuous change. In this context, ICT is so powerful that we can observe a global dimension of analysis of social interactions, in which the medium ends up affecting and even providing meaning to the content. ICT is definitely an enabler of change.

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Growing Up Digital

Today’s students – K through college –

represent the first generation to grow up

with technology. They have spent their

entire lives surrounded by and using

computers, videogames, digital music

players, video cams, cell phones and all

the other toys and tools of the digital

age. ..Computer games, email, the Internet,

cell phones and instant messaging are

integral parts of their lives.”

- Marc Prensky

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Youth Activities Online

• Some 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction – a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others.

• Nearly half (47%) of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least "some of the time.”

• Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.

Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 19, 2007

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

new paradigm arrive...

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

social, economic paradigm shift

• The “network effect” of ICT

• Exploitation of ICT in favor of national interests, development of network economy, transition to knowledge economy, and the transformation to an information society

• “Information literacy”, “knowledge culture” and ‘Information Society’

• Mobility: anywhere, anytime, anyway…

• ICT as a “socio-technical network”

• “Social embeddedness of technology”

����( Mark Warschauer, Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the

Digital Divide, MIT Press)

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

organizational paradigm shift

• Network is, sharing… (the access, sharing and usage of information that creates value)

• The network precludes the very concept of the center

• The network management is based on “horizontal coordination”

• The new organizational paradigm of the “Information Age” is decentralized, multilayered, participatory, shared network governance, i.e. ‘e-governance’

• Social-economic-political value and impact pass through these networks and becomes culture…

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

network particiption

Networks are a social coordination mechanism as an alternative to hierarchical bureaucratic organizations or pure interest based organizations subject to market forces.

The horizontal coordination between network structures facilitates participation of involved parties and increases the social benefit coefficient.

In network-like structures, the realm of social governance based on consensus and in search of a decentralized coordination is usually referred to as the “network governance” or the ‘’e-governance’’.

GENERATION TRENDSGENERATION TRENDSGENERATION TRENDSGENERATION TRENDSGeneration TrendsGeneration TrendsGeneration TrendsGeneration Trends

MOTIVATING FACTORSMOTIVATING FACTORSMOTIVATING FACTORSMOTIVATING FACTORSMotivating FactorsMotivating FactorsMotivating FactorsMotivating Factors

My Media GenerationMy Media GenerationMy Media GenerationMy Media Generation

Source – Yahoo Truly Madly Deeply Engaged Study

COMMUNITYCOMMUNITYCOMMUNITYCOMMUNITY

� While today’s youth want to stand out and express their individuality, they also

strive to feel connected with each other (both locally and globally).

� This community is created by shared experiences and constant communication

(IM, texting, Facebook).

SELFSELFSELFSELF----EXPRESSIONEXPRESSIONEXPRESSIONEXPRESSION

� In the hands of Gen Y, brands get articulated in more ways than the brand itself

could ever imagine. Gen Y doesn’t wait for permission to morph a brand. They

are constantly seeking ways to have their voices heard and put their stamp of

self-expression on products.

� Brands can become a badge for what they stand for.

PERSONALIZATIONPERSONALIZATIONPERSONALIZATIONPERSONALIZATION

� Today’s youth demand control. They are used to customizing and personalizing

everything in their lives.

� They demand products and services that suit their moods and want to live in an

on-demand world that they can control.

user revolution

Role Spectator User

Behavior Passive Active

Function Consumer Producer

Location Physical Space Everywhere

Position of Individual Toward Media

Kaynak: New Paradigm Learning Corporation, 1997

Online media play catchup with traditional outlets

July 2006

(cc) Lynette Webb, 2006

of consumers don’t

believe that companies

tell the truth in

advertisements

76%Yankelowich

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

trends: rise of the mobile internet

• Rapid improvements in connectivity & screens

• Mobile to be dominant platform for connecting to net worldwide

• Japan: happened already (mostly surf web through phones)

• Voice calls powered by internet & SMS/Texts -> IM

• Cellphones electronic wallets & banks = main method of payment

• Citizens vote for first time in elections via mobile phones?

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

trends: strides against digital divide

• Developing world joins digital ecosystem via mobile phones

• Also become part of economy via cellphone wallet

• Mobile phones cheap & broadband ubiquitous

• Illiteracy issues overcome by video & audio streams

• Creates new areas of collaboration and education

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

trends: the rise of the virtual universe

• Virtual worlds like Second life go mainstream

• Come to fore as graphic cards & broadband improve

• Potentially a visual alternative to the world wide web

• Standards: different worlds connect to each other seamlessly

• Virtual coup d’etat by SL citizens?

• Linden Labs cedes SL to democratically elected virtual govt

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

trends: information pollution & overload

• Next big challenge is how to manage masses of information

• People will complain about "digital fatigue“ & digital noise

• Focus on developing filters & aggregators

• “Switch-off" holidays regularly prescribed by your doctor

• Rise of anti-digital movements urging “get back to basics”

• In response to clutter, a second world wide web announced

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

trends: decline of the nation state?

• Govt has less influence & control than ever before

• Technologies threaten existing power & economic relationships

• Also: music industry has resisted digital audio and Napster

• But oppressive regimes clamp down on internet

• Some countries regress into dark ages

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Yet then the power shifted

Anytime - Any Place - Any Way

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

200,000,000 blogs

1.5 million residents“The workers

should

appropriate

the means of

production”

>100,000,000 videos(65,000/day)

www.ebay.com 21 Nov 2006

14,463,346 auctions

Almost 4,000,000 articles

(10 languages)

33,347,000 profiles

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

What’s the Result?

“Today’s youth think and process information fundamentally differently than their predecessors.”

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Connecting in the Digital Age

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Communicating in the Digital Age

http://www.employeeevolution.com/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/http://newlycorporate.com/about/ http://www.pursuethepassion.com/

Collaborating in the Digital Age

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Digital Literacy (information + media) Skill set

In addition to being able to read and write youth need :

“ social skills that have to do with collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills and critical analysis skills which should have been part of the school curriculum all the long.”

-David Rheingold

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

digital divide: inequality base

inequality bases:

� Gender

� Age

� Ethnicity

� Social class / status

� Education / Culture

three steps of digital divide:

1. Economic divide

2. Usability divide

3. Competency divide

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Virtual Communities

“The words community and communication have the same root.Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as well.And whenever you take away that network –confiscate it, outlaw it, crash it,raise its price beyond affordability- then you hurt that community.”

B. Strerling, The Hacker Crackdown

Virtual Communities

“When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like well, ‘The Virtual Community,’ even though a more accurate title might be: ‘People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.’””

Howard Rheingold

Virtual Agora

“The most recent incarnation of the agora is neither the shopping mall nor the closed electronic environment, but may just be the Internet itself. The agora does not necessarily provide a sense of place, rather it provides a sense of passage, translation and personal freedom. If the Internet can achieve the right balance of interaction, leisure and commerce it may in time develop into a genuine community space. While it continues to mirror the malls, theme parks and office buildings of the Cartesian world it will never become the mythical ‘place of meeting’ described by Homer in the Iliad.”

Michael Ostwald,

“Virtual Urban Futures”, in The Cyberculture Readers, ed. By David Bell-Barbara M. Kennedy, 2000, p. 673

Smart Mobs

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Howard Rheingold, SmartMobs / The Next Social Revolution, Perseus Publishing, 2002

Smart Mobs

Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle." A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.

Howard Rheingold, SmartMobs / The Next Social Revolution, Perseus Publishing, 2002

Smart Mobs

The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.

Howard Rheingold, SmartMobs / The Next Social Revolution, Perseus Publishing, 2002

Social Networks

types of internet users

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

positioning of social networks

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

social network types

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Web 2.0

• Read/Write, two-way, anyone can be a publisher

• Social Web

• The term “Web 2.0” defines an era; like “Dot Com”

• Search (Google, Alternative Search Engines)

• Social Networks (MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial)

• Online Media (YouTube, Last.fm)

• Content Aggregation / Syndication (Bloglines, Google Reader, Techmeme, Topix)

• Mashups (Google Maps, Flickr, YouTube)

Image credit: catspyjamasnz

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Services, tools and resources of Web 2.0

• This new tool is being chosen to use the sharing of information and knowledge as a way to strengthen the networks formed by people with common interests andsimilar needs. The possibilities offered by Web 2.0 have encouraged the important and crucial participation of many people who are now able to express their opinions, to make their own remarks, to criticize or even make suggestions concerning significant issues at the national level.

• Web 2.0 has not only enlarged the possibilities for the citizens to act and participate but it has also created new trends in the design of Web tools and applications. Applications are now simple, user friendly, specific and result inmuch more dynamic pages.

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

2008 Avenue , Razorfish Digital Outlook Report

where we go?

• Web 2.0 � Web3.0, 4.0, etc.

• MARC � MARCML (or Memo � MemoML)

• Search engine� Semantic Web

• Descritives� FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRBRoo ), Ontologies

• User accounts� Avatars• 217 millions users on neopet > Myspace;

• Habbo users > Facebook;

• There are more videos on CyWorld than YouTube;

• “Target” is always “younger”…

Source : FredCavazza : http://www.fredcavazza.net/2007/11/07/l%e2%80%99invasion-des-nouvelles-plateformes-sociales/

and after…

Web 3.0?

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

What’s Next? (Web 3.0)

• Web Sites Become Web Services– “Unstructured information will give way

to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing.”(Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb, Mar 07)

– Examples: Amazon E-Commerce API, del.icio.us API, Twitter API, Dapper, Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes (scraping technologies)

– Pages not center of Web now, Data & Services are

– 90% of Twitter activity happens through its API

• Intelligent Web = data is getting smarter (ref: Nova Spivack, Twine, Oct 07)

– Semantic Web

– Filters / recommendations

– Personalization

• Beyond PC - mobile, IPTV, physical world integration

two way of thinking

“The fact is that a few of us saw what was happening and we wrestled the power of LSD away from CIA, and now the power of computers away from IBM, just as we rescued psychology away from the doctors and analysts.”

Timothy Leary

“We are still enthusiastic about the Net, the way Walt Whitman was about trains and the telegraph. He thought they would unite us, make us all a community. He couldn’t predict the trains would go to concentration camps.”

Andrei Codresku

paradox: use and be used

and.. a little about Turkey…

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Turkey

208

137

88

60

49

43

38

34

31

29

25

24

22

19

16

15

14

11

11

10

10

26

United States

China

Japan

India

Germany

Brazil

United Kingdom

South Korea

France

Italy

Turkey

Russia

Canada

Mexico

Spain

Indonesia

Australia

Taiw an

Poland

Netherlands

Malaysia

Argentina

users

world’s 11st internet

population

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

66,2

27,2

17,5

14,4

14,4

14,3

9,3

8,1

7,5

5,5

4,8

4,7

3,0

2,6

2,5

2,3

1,9

1,6

1,5

1,5

1,4

7,5

US

Japan

Germany

South Korea

UK

France

Italy

Canada

Turkey

Spain

Netherlands

Mexico

Australia

Poland

Sw eden

Belgium

Sw itzerland

Denmark

Portugal

Austria

Finland

Norw ay

broadband use

average brodband speed

1Mbit/sec

Turkey

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

45,03%

32,09%

14,12%

6,80%

1,55% 0,39%

16-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74

� 66% male, 34% female

� average age (total) 26

� 22% university

� 68% unmarried

� 45% works, 37% student

� 39% english speaking

� 52% own PC

� 91% own mobile phone

� 84% watch TV regularly (average 3hs)

� 63% listen radio regularly (average 2hs)

� Connected Internet daily average 2,5 hs.

� Connected average 22 times to the Internet.

Turkey

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

• 69.6% actively use Internet

• 39.2% blogger

• 66% own his/her profile on social networks

• 48.4% share photos

• 41.2% share videos

• 93.4% watch video online

Turkey

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

• Turkish young people, they particapate, or not?

• Turkish young people interested in participation, or not?

• Turkish young people has access to participate, or not?

• Can Internet be an alternative medium to participate for Turkish young people?

Turkey: some questions

Dr. Özgür Uçkan

Thank you!