community, identity & science / fiction.

Wow – it’s finally official! In just two short weeks, my relationship with Berlin will come to an end.

Or, to make it sound less dramatic: I am going to relocate my physical operating range to… South East Asia, with my future homebase in Jakarta.

CC license by Dennis Lee

Now Jakarta isn’t exactly foreign territory. I was born by a beach just outside of the city and eventually went to school there. The prospect of returning now feels like bumping into a highschool crush: More than a decade later, both grown up and matured, you realize you still have a lot in common. You feel infinitely giddy about all the stories you have to catch up on.

meatspace, mindspace

I suppose “moving” in this connected world isn’t such a big deal. From my twitter stream I get the impression that half the world is constantly on the move, traveling from Europe to the US to Asia and back with the same ease as people on a daily commute from the suburbs into town.

CC license by Shreyans Bhansali

And maybe that’s all it is.

Who cares where someone ‘lives’, as long as their mind is istantly available. Our permanent connectedness has made being physically somewhere else much less frightening and strange.

CC license by Azizul Ameir

Mindspace knows no borders, but the lagging behind of meatspace in this matter is obvious. Visas, languages, timezones, jet lags, incompatible mobile phone carriers. And then the actual meatspace comes crashing in, taking the form of noise, smells, humidity, and the lack or overabundance of certain infrastructures we have grown to take for granted.

CC license by joe71102

Are those just annoying, ridiculous little artefacts of the past in an otherwise seamless rendering of the self?

In perfect mindspace, we live fluid lives, detached from time and surroundings. But I believe that for now, the artefacts of meatspace will impact me, and little by little, I may find myself  changed by my new environment.

choices, branches

Why is it necessary to make choices? Try to imagine the possibility of simply creating an instance of yourself, whenever difficult decisions come up, and simply walking down both paths at once, as is suggested in Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando. Each instance could explore the option, soak up the experience and reunite with the main branch at any point. How would this affect identity construction, I wonder. Instead of being “spoiled by choice” – surely one of the sicknesses common to the generation growing up with endless options and opportunities – living each choice to the fullest. Could possibly drive us even further into insanity.

CC license by sqala

goodbyes

For now, the choice is made, the promise of opportunities weighed one against the other. Who knows where this will lead to, but I’m definitely looking forward to the exciting times ahead!

Thanks to all the nice people who have made my time in Berlin worthwhile. Flatmates, friends, colleagues from work and uni, the twitterverse, random party folk!

I’ll see you all online, with just 5 hours of head start in the summer. I can now spend more time exploring and writing about what interests me in art, technology, and science  from a new Southern-Hemisphere angle.

And I’ll keep you updated about my new job, which is to help the Goethe Institute Jakarta transition its online communication to become more dialogue-oriented and community-driven.

Just had a chat with my flatmate who told me about his sister’s new dog, Kadu. Kadu is a Vizsla, a sporting dog commonly used for hunting, with genetic origins in Hungaria.

Source: WIkipedia

Vizslas are bred to near-perfection for their hunting job: they are well mannered, loyal, extremely intelligent, have extremely good sense of smell and direction and practically thrive on being trained and executing tasks. In Kadu’s case, he will be trained to be a falconer’s dog – and this is where me and my flatmate started to get confused. What exactly is a dog’s role in falconry? Heck, how does falcon hunting work anyway?

point, hover, scare, hit and retrieve

Turns out, falconry is a complex collaboration effort between bird, dog, and human. The dog’s job is to sniff out and locate the prey, typically a pheasant or other fowl. The dog then “points” in the direction of the prey, letting the human know it is time to get the falcon (or hawk, or eagle) ready. The falconer lifts off the falcon’s blindfold and lets the bird soar into the sky. When the bird is in the right position, hovering above the dog, the dog gets the signal from the human to go and scare out the prey. As the prey tries to escape by flying off, the falcon immediately detects it and plunges from the sky to make the kill. Now the falconer summons back the bird (it is conditioned to do so, knowing that it will get fed), and the dog wraps up the job my retrieving the kill carefully and handing it over to the human.

Honestly, how amazing is that? As a born-and-bred big city girl it is hard for me to imagine how such a perfect cooperation between entirely different species could have been thought of, much less achieved through training by making the most of each species’ unique capabilities.

Add a horse into the equation – a human on a horse, travelling long distances, with the dog at the horse’s heels and the falcon on the human’s shoulder. A pretty impressive team.

Now I am not a fan of hunting, but I guess I find it ok that some people care about preserving this tradition of falconry. It seems to me to be more of a sport and interspecies bonding exercise, not a senseless wild chase with the goal of killing a maximum amount of living flesh.

Eagles can kill wolves, too

So while in most falconry the prey is fowl, in Mongolia people have trained golden eagles to hunt wolves. The eagle is released once the wolf is spotted. It drops down onto the wolf from above, grabbing its spine with one claw and the snout with the other, immobilizing it. The hunter then comes to finish the wolf off.

Animals as tools

Of course rifles and other tools have long surpassed dog, bird and horse in the efficiency to fulfill certain tasks. But still fun to think about what humans have achieved by making animals their tools, breeding for certain traits, training them by gaining knowledge about what the animal wants and how it can be persuaded to do certain tasks while still making sure it stays happy and healthy. Now add a little genetic engineering, more sophisticated training and conditioning methods and who knows we might end up with the next generation of self-replicating super precise power tools…

I’m not exactly a feminist. I’m not even a very political person. But I’m a woman and I suddenly realized I don’t really know that many women and there are definitely more men than women in the group of people I would call my “professional network”. That sucks! Which is why I went and joined  the recent netfeminism meetup here in Berlin. Hopefully, strengthening the ties among each other and making us more visible, in a way, will lead to less male-dominated events and conferences and more and more women being recognized for the good stuff they do, online and offline.

So while I’m on this train of thought, I made a mental list of women that have inspired me lately and which I truly admire. Why not write this down here and repeat the exercise every now and then.

Here we go:

1. Régine Debatty

I don’t know her personally at all, but from the outside it looks as though Régine leads the life of my dreams! She’s the main writer of one of the coolest blogs I know, we make money not art. She reports on cutting edge technology, arts and sciency stuff, right up my alley and she’s always on the move. I can check into WMNA any time of day, any day, and I’ll find a mind boggling story worth exploring. I got in touch with the Open Sailing collective after reading a WMNA article, and though this project is at the moment dormant for me, I’m so glad to have met César. Oh and I have tried to get Régine to speak at Pecha Kucha Berlin during my time there, but unfortunately it never worked out due to scheduling problems. Doesn’t matter – one day I’ll meet you, Régine, and give you a big long hug, hehe.

2. Mercedes Bunz

She founded de:bug. Nuff said. Too bad she’s left Berlin for London but on the other hand good for her. She still writes some incredibly smart stuff.

3. Tina Fey

I was never all that much into 50Rock or knew much about Tina Fey until I heard some podcast with her as a guest. Somehow that intrigued me to find out more and then I got the audiobook version of “bossypants” read by herself and I realized I find her sooo funny that I’m even giving 50Rock another chance. Too bad she’s not on twitter. (Yet? Yet??)

4. Gina Trapani

Gina is my favorite person on this week in google! While the guys are sometimes bragging and repetitive, Gina is always modest, funny, sharp as a knife and always has an interesting perspective to add. She’s a hacker, entrepreneur and what not. Yay!

5. Jane Bussmann

Although I was only at one book reading of hers in Berlin, and that was by accident, the memory of that evening is still fresh in my mind! I mean, who is gutsy enough to go to Uganda – alone – in some sort of investigative journalism mission and turn that whole experience into an extremely funny book? Uhh.. no one? Except Jane Bussmann? Read the book, or go to one of her shows!

6. Dr. Kiki

I listen to Dr. Kiki twice a week, at Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour and This Week in Science! The first is an interview show featuring one guest on one science topic, the other is a weekly roundup of the craziest and most relevant science news which she does together with a (sometimes a little annoyingly self-confident) male co-host. Dr. Kiki definitely holds together both shows. And she’s also a role model for showing how to be a scientist, podcaster and mom all in one. Sometimes her baby cries a little during the recording sessions, but that’s ok.

7. Ela Kagel

A networker and enabler of ideas and events, Berlin wouldn’t be the same without her! She was a curator at transmediale, made tons of events happen, like the workshop series “Free culture incubator“. Can’t wait til her new project space Supermarkt  finlly opens – this will be sometime in November. Will be a reason to make the trip up to Wedding more frequently.

I now realize I probably should have done this post on Ada Lovelace day – like Mercedes Bunz did in this article for the guardian! Next year, then.

So that was it! Yesterday`s panel at Social Media Week Berlin, “Job Title – Community Manager” went really well, at least if you compare it to last years rather confusing chit chat. I think we community managers have matured and got much better at reflecting our jobs and understanding various community models.

Towards the end we were asked for advice: What should someone do if they aspire to be a community manager? What are the skills they need and where should they start? There isn’t any Masters’ program “Community Management” just yet.

community managers of TLGG, Soundcloud, jovoto (me) and Nokia // borrowd from Social Media Week Berlin's photo pool

Join a community and learn to love the internet

It’s pretty obvious of course, but my advice is that you should be or have been an active member of an online community. (I strongly recommend the same  to people who still claim online relationships are “fake” and somehow “not real”.)

For me, this community initiation took place when I was about 15. I was a quiet girl who found it hard to make friends at school. I listened to Grunge and was obsessed with anything regarding Pearl Jam. One day my dad’s colleague, a fat American engineer, introduced my dad, a thin German engineer, to the internet. Dad immediately understood the implications and was geek enough to want to try that at home. I should add that we lived in Jakarta at that time, and this was in 1995. I don’t think many of my German friends had internet at home at that time.

I had an Apple IIvi (That same American colleague introduced my family to the Mac, for which I am eternally grateful) in my room, and now it had a dial up modem. I think I must have been surfing with Opera or Netscape Navigator, although I can’t quite remember. My favorite search engine, before google, was Lycos. And sure enough I must have typed the words ‘Pearl Jam’ into the search box.

Macintosh IIvi // From Wikimedia Commons

From then on, the internet was the world. I had somehow discovered a Pearl Jam related chat forum. I don’t know how or in which parts of the internet I was actually clicking myself through. I never questioned or  tried to understand the technology itself, I simply expected it to work and do wonderful magic for me.

Ok – so technically a chat is not a community, at least not in the sense we understand it today. There certainly wasn’t a community manager, and there was no “profile activation link”. You chose a nickname and you were on.

I don’t remember my first words, or in fact anything about how I started out in that chat. All I know is that by a couple of weeks, I knew almost everyone that logged on, I knew who to expect at what time of day (or night) and I started having crushes on some people I was chatting with who I was sure had to be extremely cute guys (probably 40year old housewives in reality).

We pulled pranks on each other, introducing fake new nicknames and waiting how long it would take for someone to find out that XYZ was really YXW. Newbies were first regarded suspiciously, until they said something cool about a cool band or were otherwise funny. After a few months, I knew everybody’s real names, knew who was friends with who in real life and where they lived. We even wrote each other “letters” because that was what you did to show someone you really cared.

The Pearl Jam chat was with me until I graduated from school and left Jakarta. Then, I somehow lost touch, and the internet had changed. I literally couldn’t find the door to that secret world anymore. But I think I experienced what it can be like to be part of an online community.

Uh, so what’s the point here?

Yes, I was a teenager who needed to learn to be comfortable in her own skin, and to play with identities and opinions in the safety of the “anonymous” internet. But I think that is still true for grown ups. In an online community (whether it is based around co-creation and problem solving, like at jovoto, around being a mom, or loving tennis) part of the fascination will be about building identity, about building a reputation and having this extended playing field of who you can be and who you can talk to.

The personal component, at least in my experience as a community manager, is one of the strongest motivators for people to stick around a community for a long time. If you’ve experienced that warm community fuzzy feeling from within, you will be much better at managing one from the outside.

So sign up for a community of your choice (attention: not a social network, a community!) and do not just lurk, but involve yourself. Write comments, try to figure out who the opinion leaders and regulars are. Bring in your own thoughts and content. Try it with a new and rather small community, because it will be easier to find your way around. Write feedback messages and observe how and where the community interacts with each other and the moderators / managers. See you in a couple of years!

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day, triangulation, and this episode’s interviewee was neuro scientist Miguel Nicolelis.

One of the topics they touched was invasive brain surgery an implants. As the technology gets smarter, the risk connected to invasive brain surgery reduces, yet a risk remains. And people simply don’t like the idea of having nodes inserted into their brains.

What happens when part of our body is suddenly exchanged or enhanced by something artificial? I recall the story by ennomane who describes in detail the process of how he received a Cochlear hearing implant and had to relearn the process of hearing and differentiating between noise and patterns in this noise. One of his posts he entitles: The Cyborg hears.

Cochlear implant, image from WIkimedia Commons

Cyborg, indeed! In a way, Cyborgs are already among us. I am one of them too! I was born with a difficult heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. In my life, I have had various heart surgeries. Each time, the doctors replaced one of my defect valves with an implant and patched up the leaky spots with foreign tissue. My first valve implant contained tissue from a pig, my second was a homograft, meaning that it came from a human. I think I remember I was told it was from a man from the UK. The implant in me now is a melody valve: part stainless steel mesh, part valve of a cow’s heart. Heck, I’m not only Cyborg but even trans-species! The valve works beautifully, and I do feel gratitude towards the cow that produced this marvelous peace of cell tissue.

Tetralogy of Fallot, image from Wikimedia Commons

If you think about all the people already running around out there with their pace makers and implanted defillibrators (this will probably be the case for me too, in a couple of years) – then you realize that science, medicine, technology and man cannot be distinguished from one another.

I think it’s exiting and awesome to see what humans have achieved to repair and enhance broken bodies. And since a couple of years, there seems to be a new aesthetic regarding ‘weird’ and augmented bodies; a sort of flirt with the idea of pushing humanity past the borders of what is considered normal appearance. Of course, Aimee Mullins comes to mind and who knows, maybe the youth fashion of having an extra knee Cory Doctorow describes in Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom is not science fiction, but around the corner. My favorite implant would definitely be a superpower eye that can see in the dark and at long distances, and never gets tired or out of focus.

From top left clockwise - Aimee Mullins posing for a photoshoot, Aimee Mullings in her famous role as the Cheetah Woman in Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, custom made prosthetic leg by industrial designers bespoke innovation, french artist Marion Laval-Jeantet in a performance in which she wears stilts formed like horse legs (no "real" prosthetic)