Quoted in the papers

I was interviewed about the politics behind mapping technologies by Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman a few weeks ago. His article, How Google and Apple's digital mapping is mapping us appeared in the paper yesterday. The article made the front cover of the G2 section and generated a good number of online comments. I got a small quote:

"The map is mapping us," says Martin Dodge, a senior lecturer in human geography at Manchester University. "I'm not paranoid, but I am quite suspicious and cynical about products that appear to be innocent and neutral, but that are actually vacuuming up all kinds of behavioural and attitudinal data."

The fact that I claimed not to be paranoid has raised a couple of comments from my colleagues.

Also, my recent book gets a nice name check in an interesting comment piece about the growing power of software algorithms in academia. The article is entitled Leave the thinking to us, in the Times Higher Education. It is by sociologist David Beer and he notes:

"In Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge's book Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (2011), the authors demonstrate the importance of software for the functioning of the social world everywhere from the home to air travel. It would be remiss to think that higher education somehow sits outside these broader social developments. Kitchin and Dodge point out that even mundane technologies such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop come "loaded" with "algorithmic normalities" that "subtly ... direct users to certain solutions". Without thinking too hard, we can immediately see that PowerPoint's algorithmic normalities are likely to be providing us with subtle directions in how to lecture."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Managing Your Online Persona, Part I

by Brandon Giles (republished from his personal blog ) Why Care? It is becoming more important than ever to actively manage your persona on the internet, particularly if you operate in the fields of entrepreneurship, venture capital or marketing. In general, persona management is more crucial in industries where your value and success depends on personal human capital and others perception of that value. However, digital footprints have a material impact on everyone. Beginning back in 2007, an ExecuNet survey  found that 83% of recruiters already used internet searches to evaluate job candidates, with 43% of recruiters eliminating candidates because of what they found. “How-to” Guide As an aspiring entrepreneur I sought to learn more about the tools, platforms and best practices before busting out onto the Blogging scene. I heard from nearly every guest in my Launching Tech Ventures entrepreneurship course at the Harvard Business School (#hbsltv) that blogging was critical to estab...
Read more

Letting it Go

by Anthemos Georgiades There are various lessons I could have discussed here regarding the UX tests I ran for my startup Zumper. But, instead, I am going to focus on one challenge that these tests created for me: my ability – or lack thereof – to let my own opinions and intuitions drop. In the three lean tests that I ran, two of them confirmed something I had suspected. The third one however did not. In my ‘banner’ test, I tested (1) the price users thought a standard bed frame was worth, under three different themes of page banners and then (2) if the user could actually remember the site’s name after use. I found that what I considered to be the most ‘boring’ white and grey banner drove the highest price estimations from users and beat our other two banners hands-down on brand recollection. I had actually only included this ‘boring’ banner in the lean test as a control. My hypothesis had been that our green banner would drive the best engagement given that this was the predominan...
Read more

Creating the “Next Big Thing": How to Inspire Innovation

By Brad Bonnett  How do I apply all my learning’s about lean startups such as finding product market fit with a minimum viable product if I don’t have an initial problem that I am trying to solve?  I know that I want to build something that changes the world but I continue to struggle to find what product or service I want to build.  During our class with Fred Wilson he said that “If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.”  Although I appreciate the simplicity of this view and the experience that Fred brings to the table I am dismayed to think that unless I stumble upon an idea that really sticks with me I am going to be excluded from starting my own company.  Therefore I tried to put together a process that can help inspire innovation for those of us who are lacking an idea to create that “next big thing!” I tried to take the best practices that I have learned from my Managing Innovation class at HBS and ...
Read more