Giove-A takes GPS out of the hands of the US Military

Giove-A is a test satellite that paves the way for a network of 30 more to be launched in 2006 and beyond. Together they will form Galileo, a £2.3bn global positioning system more reliable and accurate than GPS. The Galileo satellites will be launched into orbit eight at a time. There they will form three rings around the Earth, with the full cluster of 30 due to be in place and working by 2010.
Guardian News Report

Smart Mobs and Riots in Sydney

There has been much discussion as to the prominent role of email and SMS in the recent race riots in Sydney. Below are a couple of interesting reponse's taken from the 'fibreculture' mailing list:

Response
Fire is dangerous! Fire keeps you warm! If I was the first person to
identify those two facts, should I take credit or blame for fireplaces
or theater fires?

People use media to organize collective action, and always have. Some
people do constructive things and some people do destructive things.
Are we better off not talking about it?

We blogged this on smartmobs.com, of course. The riots in Nigeria
around the Miss World pageant two years ago also involved the use of
SMS to summon people. They also use SMS to monitor election fraud in
Africa.

We need a more nuanced vocabulary for discussing the mixture of
benefits and perils that accompany the use of new technologies.

Howard Rheingold
howard@rheingold.com www.rheingold.com www.smartmobs.com

Response
Widespread use of mobile and ubiquitous information and communications
technology by urban dwellers remains in stark contrast to endemic forms
of urban alienation - and the disappearance or non-existence of urban
neighbourhood community identity.

Neighbours may still be part of a resident’s social portfolio, but the
communication devices used to maintain social ties are inherently
place-independent and ephemeral. Getting to know someone in their role
as a neighbour is less likely than getting to know them in their role
as a co-worker or being the friend of a friend.

How can these tacit and soft assets be elicited, connected, networked
and harnessed to become “smart” assets in the service of both social
and economic innovation in metropolitan areas?

Networked communities: an answer to urban alienation?
By Marcus Foth

Remote

Remoteness is either something we yearn for, or something we fear; a form of loneliness. It is associated with its opposite; 'contact', which at its extreme means physical closeness or more generally relates to links through communication. We are no longer distance ourselves from contact with others by the physical inaccessibility of our location. Closeness was once defined by distance, but is now more about accessibility through communication technologies. Below is some discussion of the nature of remoteness;

Inaccessiblity: Physical remoteness no longer creates visual remoteness. Being in an extremely inaccessible part of the world does not guarantee that your presence cannot be traced. For example; Indian army camps in remote desert areas have been exposed by Google Earth. Satellites create a new coverage of view from different perspective.
read more here

Control: also concept of remote as control at distance ; the remote control, enables us to be in contact through wireless technologies. Somewhere the concept of control is inextricably linked with that of remoteness.

Escape: On one side people desire to be in touch, but also a distance; an escape. For example in the German language there is a word 'fernweh' , which translates as the longing to be somewhere distant or the desire to be far away, to be remote.

Stranger: The condition of social remoteness, where one is a 'stranger' or 'unreachable' used to be be defined by physical separation. Now, switching off the mobile (e.g. Aram Bartholl silvercell), the television or the computer are some of the conscious practices required in order to dislocate oneself from technologies of communication. Internet creates a site of meeting for people with no physical proximity or previous social links

Separation: Researchers have found that there is six degrees of separation between any person in the world. This was investigated by asking people to send parcels to completely unknown individuals, and following the trail of the package. A similar project at Notre Dame University, Indiana found 6-10 degrees of separation between email addresses, so actually the links between strangers in email may be greater.
(Albert, R., Jeong, H. and Barabasi, A-L. 1999. "Diameter of the World Wide Web," Nature, Vol. 401, 130-131.)

so what is remoteness in a connected society?
In some ways it is a personal choice, a conscious decision to switch off, or on a larger scale involves literally hiding below the visual surface of the earth (from satellite imagery)