No Pressure

humanscalecities:

CAMPO DE LA CEBADA (MADRID)

PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA 2013

GOLDEN NICA DIGITAL COMMUNITIES CATHEGORY

Digital Communities – What are they?

Digital communities – regardless of whether their background is social or artistic – give rise to group action and interaction, engender constructive contexts and social capital, and promote social innovation as well as cultural and environmental sustainability. An essential precondition for this is making the respective relevant technologies and infrastructure more widely accessible or even developing them in the first place. But access to content and information is also a core consideration. A crucial aspect to help digital communities flourish is making relevant technologies and infrastructures more broadly available and/or developing new technological approaches. Digital communities are committed to facilitate the furthering of social development. A key aspect of this effort, then, is to reconfigure the power relations between citizens and political leaders, the state and administrative bureaus as well as between financial and commercial interests. In order to achieve this, digital communities is engaged in increasing participation, strengthening the role of civil society and establishing a framework through which democracy can flourish.

Via Prototyping

theatlanticcities:

“We wrote in late 2011 about some early research suggesting that many Twitter users in fact follow other people located within their same city, evidence, Richard Florida wrote, that the Internet is reinforcing the value of place instead of eliminating it.

But now that Twitter is a few years older – and considerably more global – Leetaru and several colleagues have conducted a massive new analysis of the site that suggests the opposite: ‘In effect,’ Leetrau says, ‘location plays a much lesser role now in terms of who we talk to, what we talk about, and where we get our information.’”

Read: How Twitter is Changing the Geography of Communication

(via humanscalecities)