Mediacology

I just came across this excellent mind map of the “all things open and free” from Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation. Truly amazing.

Via collectivate.net.

Tracing Wolfang Sach’s idea of the ecological rucksack (the ecological impact carried by any product) could be pretty hard, except now it’s being crowdsourced. Sourcemap.org is a place where users can create maps that show where are stuff comes from.

For a shorter version of this video, click here.

I’m still working out whether or not I agree with Al Gore’s politics in response to global climate catastrophe (see Vandana Shiva’s Soil Not Oil for a critique of “global” (i.e. corporate as opposed to local) solutions being proposed). I question, for example, Gore’s uncritical use of [...]

There is a strong bias against technology and media tools among many ecologists, but this Nature Conservancy’s interactive map shows that mapping is a great systems tool for getting the big picture about complex ideas. I highly encourage you to check out this map to get a feel for how freshwater resources are impacted by [...]

The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives – NYTimes.com:

Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.
With this sort of map it is possible to [...]

Some people don’t see the connection between media and environment, often media is seen as the enemy (as it should be), but not part of the solution. Even the most anti-technology ecologists use maps to articulate their ideas. Maps are one of the earliest and most pervasive kinds of media. Let’s give it up for [...]

Can You Guess a Person’s Politics by Their Personality? Psychologist Team Says Yes | Election 2008 | AlterNet

Earthscape is an interesting application for the iPhone that will allow you to “geobrowse” by zooming in and out of Earth images that change perspective according to how you tilt the phone. I’m a bit fascinated by our ability to view earth via images. McLuhan observed that once we saw Earth from satellites, the planet [...]

La Plaza : Los Angeles Times : Mexico reconquers California? Absolut drinks to that!
It’s rare that ads and maps actually converge so blatantly, but such is the case of a recent Absolute Vodka campaign running in Mexico. In an “absolute world” Mexico would still have the land that was ceded in the Mexican-American war. Though [...]

Media Map – Visualizing Ownership in the Media and Telecom Industries:
The landscape of the media industry is rapidly changing, with increasing consolidation and convergence between companies. Researchers and journalists have a need to track these changes, yet no interactive visualization tool is freely accessible online to enable this.
Check out this very cool tool to visualization [...]

Enrique Chagoya, “Road Map”

As regular readers know, I’m a strong advocate of mapping as a form of media education because it is the clearest example of how visuals can represent perceptions about reality and space. Thus, I was very pleased by the article below, because it links to a variety of interesting resources now available [...]

Maps can serve all kinds of purposes, some for peace, others for commerce, but all function by communicating ideas about land. In this case, I find the Global Incident Map quite disturbing, mainly because of how it filters and defines incidents of “suspicious” activity. It is a very fearful portrait of the world, through the [...]

Image credit: John Nelson / Tropical Forest Trust via Reuter
This post is part of Blog Action Day for the environment.
Pygmies are using GPS to map their land in order to save sacred sites and ecologically sensitive areas. I find it an interesting and novel approach, but I’m a little apprehensive about one thing. Traditionally mapping [...]

Photo caption: Before-and-after satellite images show the site of an apparent military encampment in Burma on 11 November 2000, (top), and again on 13 December 2006 (bottom), when new bamboo fencing can be seen. The human rights group, Free Burma Rangers, reported a major expansion of this camp in 2006, corroborated by the AAAS analysis [...]

Signs of Occupation:
Before / after satellite photos of Saddam’s palace in Baghdad, Iraq. Note the new parking lots, modular housing, restoration of the waterworks, and other interesting markings of new tenants in the emperor’s crib.
Give the Americans credit. They can destroy a country, but sure know how to build parking lots. But as the image [...]