Simultaneously blogging is an action of gathering data, in order to make transparent social interactions, it is usually the case that it is not necessarily a sophisticated cultural analysis tool, while ethnographers do use their interactions with informants to discover and create analytical frameworks for understanding and portraying that which is under study. The procedures used in this direct and intimate acquaintance with the emphemeraly and empirical world provide assurance that the data collected are grounded in informants' actual experiences and uploaded live onto the web, hence the term 'Ethno-blogger'.

Thank you all!

Nancy and Goran

These are the issues that characterized the final discussion:

Geert Lovink Mobile devises are editors!

Q. “As it was said earlier today, many design students believe that they will get famous and reach soon after they graduate. How do we make them realize that is not the case? “
• John Chris Jones: “This has always been the key question. There are artists who made a great deal of money, where as others did not. It will always remain the same.”

Q. “Why aren’t there more software programmes to help visually impaired disabled people?”
• Helen Petrie: “They are very expensive, and hard to use. Definitely more effort needs to be put in order to make sure that the web is usable for everyone!”

Q. “Self expression – a special way of being human. I want to be human, but not a copy? Notions of freedom, and expression have been come very bounded up with each other. The connection of freedom and self-expressions was the key term of this conference. How do you feel about that notion?”
• Danny O’Brian: ”You construct, and anonymously contribute to the artistic works, there are vast amount of home pages where people share code.”
• John Chris Jones: “John Cage did not advocate self-expression - he recommended that we let go of our likes and dislikes and wake up to how wonderful the world is once we put our preferences aside... One can lose oneself when discovering or doing something and that is not the same as self-expression...
...to say that self-expression is yuk is a ghastly remark that i regret - i would prefer now to quote what Edwin Schlossberg once wrote in a letter to me:
we are self/other or we are nothing
...and to proceed, in the light of these remarks about freedom, etc. (by several Americans) ready to abandon or modify the idea of self-expression when it comes to sharing, as the internet allows us to, the 'good' powers that are still supposed to be limited to 'creative people' and professions..."
http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk/2.2/webdesign.html

• Michael Indergaard: “I want to stress that culture of individualism is framed under self-expression.”
Q. “What urban infrastructures are we talking about, what’s the role of new media workers? Is it to overlay another layers in a post crash era? In the intersection of technology, urban design and real estate, there are clear dangers in metropolitan centres regarding property booms; workers can't affort to live in the cities. What is the role of new media workers? To sex up the city, feed a property boom? What we need is a cultural council, create branches of govenment inparticular sectors.
• Michael Indergaard: “What the role is going to be? That was my question. That’s one of the emerging questions of new media. Who was going to be controlling and how was that done? The role, we should talk about what‘s idealistically going to be, and what’s most probably going to be. I have no simple optimism about that. They’ll have to act through institutions. Institutional representatives of new media will need to be involved in the politics and policies of new media.”
• Peter Lunenfeld: “This is just emerging at the moment. Intel labs etc are involved in this. I have been thinking that one of the things we need to be aware of is that the web is thought of as a desktop object. You see a transition where some people are looking at it as a mobile object. Messy details of protocol".

Q. “What’s the next dream that will keep us on going? Right now we are out of the ideas what the future should look like. We are all into the past.”
• Max Bruinsma (design theorist): “If there is an inviting prospective, it is web designers at the first place should shift their attention from the screens to what’s happening behind it. Determining the structure is done by the technicians. Structure needs to have bigger focus. Designers can play a very big role there. They can think in terms of what it communicates, what it means. That’s the most utopian perspective for me.”
• Geke van Dijk: “I see your theory, but it’s not fair, it’s extra reality, since many designers are ahead of that for years.”

Q. “This questions concerns usability. How do we tell our managers that we need a usability expert?”
• Geke van Dijk: “It would be surprising at this moment that people who design sites are not informed about the usability and accessibility. There should be awareness. I am not going to say that this rule of usability applies to every situation.”

Q. “The current focus is on the web, computers and mobile devices. All these devices have a limited input structure. I think when I look at the web, it is well capable to get out of the computer, and go out… The focus should be on developing new interfaces. What could be the next stage?”
• Helen Petrie: “Accessibility should be the first one and the usability the next one. It’s still a shaky ground. Disabled people are willing to try anything new, so we should learn something from them. I can’t believe we are still using the keyboards!”
• John Chris Jones: “If you look at history people who make new things are surprised when the innovations go so deep into the society. The cell phones were for elite people, but now they're all over the place.”

Q. “Media Art uses different things with the Web, different surroundings and interactive. I think media is going into the public space. Web design after 10 years has a social responsibility, web to democracy, we need transparency, to know whom you are dealing with. People put their info everywhere, and they have no idea where is goes to!.”
• Max Bruinsma: “Nielson Jakob said a year after the net was created that we needed rules.”

Q. “How do we make sure we don’t loose everything? And what about the notion of original? How do you track where things started?
• Franziska Nori: “I am not able to give an institutional answer, but you can not store everything. The question is about writing history and about people writing history. We are all entitled to contribute. History is writing itself, it’s just we are not able to evaluate it. We need at least 5 yrs, and see what’s left of the relevant issue. We are all aware that in the digital world, everything is retrievable. Arts has already proved that original is important, but originals need to be redefined. Under the economical terms, the original is not such an issue any more. However it is a very interesting question."

Q. “When you talked about changing interfaces – I think bomb exploded in my head. You said to model the user is the first thing, but isn’t he modelled already? This particular issue of changing interface being confusing is a characteristic to older generations. Younger generations move to Linux since you can make interfaces of your own. It is very important for systems to offer personalization of the interface. It is important for people to be able to change interfaces to their taste. When interfaces changes, it is either time to stop what you are doing, or start training yourself on the daily basis! People who do design have to be educated, since they need to learn all the time. If they are not willing to learn, they shouldn’t be doing design. I have got several expensive books on some software, but they are useless now, since they changed so much. I think people who make interface should allow users to change them.

Authenticity plays a much important role than the original, up to a certin extent. Single originals needs to be redefined, and appreciated there is of course relevance on cultural terms.

I was surprised about the intellegent people that are on the web but then I realised it's obvious, if you dont want to learn then you are not in there!"

Peter Luining's has been making autonomous work on the net since 1996. At first doing net based installations. In these minimal web-based abstracted experiences, he works intuitively with interactivity of the net and flash grid based sequencers. He remixes the code of the filter, vector pixels via vector graphics, plug ins, source codes, browser page translated into tones and visuals.

In October 1998 macromedia gave away the definition of FLASH in response to competitive formats, allowing a watershed for all kinds of small flash programmes to come on the market and flourish.

Peter gave some great examples of interesting flash animations of the web and demonstrated a bit of flash hacking.

Geke researches in the field of commercial web design. In her presentation she looks back at the past 10 years to realize what has past.
Aim: To understand where we are now and where are we going to be soon.

She defines the decade as a pond, where each thrown stone made a difference and contributed to the web as the whole.

Technology period (1995) – sites were feature driven, and programmers were opinion leaders. web design as a profession didn’t exist as yet. Users were interested in technology, and the user research was minimal. Users had to adopt to the technology.

Usability period (1998) – sites were still techonology driven but with changes. They were visually attractive and usable. Web design began to be acknowledged as a profession. The audience got wider, and designers were opinion leaders. There was awareness of necessity of creative design. User research was visible, and importance was give to the guidance through the site.

User experience period (2001) – it was about the user’s experience. The ultimate goal was to create pleasure for users, and the element of fun was assigned to the web. Good design meant it had many hits online. Design matured into several specialisms (audio, functional etc). Marketers were the opinion leaders, and the user research became a profession. At this period, online panels were introduced.

User value period (2004) – it is still very much in progress, and the focus is on the balance btw technology and people. Sites are being chosen more strategically, meaning it is more about what the site is for. By now, general audience is online, and the power consumers are opinion leaders (‘spread the word’ method).

Web is integrated in our daily lives, day-to-day reality. The users of the web are very active and sophisticated, but they are also unpredictable and erratic. Statistics tell us that people use the web to do research, not so much for shopping. That doesn’t depend on the design, but on the mood. It is messy and very dynamic, and we shouldn’t over focus that designers can force anyone to use sites due to good design. Users will always move in and out.

Helen Petrie's presentation stresses to us how access to information for disabled people is really poor- reminding us that they want to do the weird things on the web too!

Web-sites are considered a service so you might be even liable under the law in some cases if your web-site is not accessible. Regarding the history in accessibility - before the web you could take ascii string and convert it into synthetic speech dos, with unix, ascii text based command line systems.

In 1995 the first major screen reader for windows based on speech was called 'JAWS' which still has 80% of market in screen reading software.

What is an accessible web-site? What do people have to do to make it accessible for people with print disabilities or image disabilities? First of all starry back grounds are hopeless for visually impaired! (they don't have to be bland, vanillia or text only) put in skip navigation link, use mark-up for lists, headers and paragraphs, DESCRIBE the images! Visually impaired people want to learn about colours and distance, what is the image doing.

Provide meaningful, distinct links and good organisation of pages and sites
Get disabled people involved in testing your web-site, go and do this on the web-site and see what happens, then you will learn what a good user experience and an understandable web site for a print disabled person is.

In order to tackle design accessibility for users, we need a repository for excellent accessible web-design and more designers to be involved with this research.

www.bentoweb.org/surveys
BenToWeb is a project within the Web Accessibility Benchmarking (WAB) Cluster aimed to support the European public and private sector to implement the recommendations of the eEurope 2005 Action Plan by providing new software modules and methodologies that satisfy some of the accessibility recommendations of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which are not analysed by existing tools due to their inherent complexity.

How do we give visibility to projects that valorise the creative, relational and affective side of labour and different paths of liberation with and through technologies that are not a utopian lie about the human condition?

Too many people are ardently wedded to a myth of themselves, their aspirations are inside a closed feedback loop. Web-design students think that they will be rich and famous in 7 years! 'Fame' is an interesting area that is changing at the moment because of new media. The hype of self exploitation is vivid and the utopia of becoming eventually what we hope for is a lie.

There is an elimination of certain discourses, where there are many parallels with the art world and also with conventional old media e/g. patterns of deregulation, work contracted out and lots of freelance workers.

In regard to racial and gender issues there is general blindness, many women are using pregnancy as excuse to stop working. How can we see the reality of this? An example could be to show alternatives to corporate production such as networks of collective and shared production of knowledge and information, forms of organisation inspired by the free/open source-software model, co-operative and creative work that demand basic social income.

...serving lovely lunch snacks.

Computer levitation ?

One of his projects “Everyone hates attachments” is a complaint site! Dot com crush was a huge emailing time for NTK.

He introduces the notion of Principia Discordia, explaining the people who created the first Macintosh were discordians.

1994 – an explosion of self expression. If you were tall and interested in design and self expression, you would be unemployed and you would be working on a small media project.

They were very used to the idea of self expression and not being moderated by anyone. The appeal of web solved the problem of distribution, a freedom to advertise your artistic works to the whole world.

First entries were the most important thing in 1994. All first website were done during the stolen time of their work time. While being on a site, you didn’t know whether it was done by one employee or by a big corporation. Hotwires was one of the first professionally designed sites.

As examples of first entries, Danny O'Brien presents two sites:

Suck.com was a site done by ppl who worked at hotwires and thought it sucked. The suck guys became heros! Stole the time of hotwires to create the site where they could trash hotwires.

Fucked company became a business since it had so many hits. The irony of the guy doing his project is that all companies are fucked. The job that leaves you alone with the technology, you spend hours there, but just a small fraction of time was used to do the work in the company.

To confront the crucial transformations occurring in life and work within the contemporary information economy she tells the stories and results of studies about socially precarious workers, flex-workers, autonomous and atypical worker conflicts. Ungodly hours and night shifts - which previously only involved a small percentage of the workforce - has now expanded and increased. New media workers have a clear role in social production, but don't yet have representation of it's collective needs - needs of social aggregation, access to standards of sociability, housing, union and bargaining rights all around the table.

Via Gill's empirical research we learn how it is to work in new media, we enter a landscape of precarious labour and the related social struggles over the last ten years : part-timers struggles throughout the world, analysis of labour exploitation, call-centres, the commercial chains, the web-economy, information sector and media-entertainment.

There is a serious digital divide in regard to access to information and media infrastructure - namley due to class, race and gender blindess.

The Post Feminist Issue regards the serious concern for woman, labour and communication and the cultural, political and social implications of technologies on gender and identity. Many woman today are working in the field of visual production and communication. We are used to seeing images of women on advertising bill-boards: women on the beach with cameras, relaxed and happy while they film themselves. Often they lie back in a bikini with a computer in their hands. But the reality is very different, Women are again tied to the home, often exploited, paid less than men for the same job, exposed to work without a contract, in jobs like help-desks without any valorization of their real technological knowledge.