WORKSHOP I: ONLINE CULTURE: FROM ANYTHING TO EVERYTHING

The Internet has had a revolutionary impact on the computer and communications world with cultural and socioeconomic ramifications of an unprecedented magnitude and range. This workshop aims to analyze this predominant cultural movement of our time - the online culture. As can be espied by its connotations, culture, in the traditional sense, referred to the tendencies of the elite. Movements arose whenever their interests shifted and rippled through the remainder of the society. With the emergence of the online culture, however, the tide has turned. No longer is culture governed by an oligarchy but has adopted a democratic system in which each and every participant plays an integrated role.

Such a revolution was only possible due to the extraordinary nature of the underlying medium. Online culture blossomed atop the Internet, a worldwide network of computers, which facilitates the publishing and sharing of its resources. Never before was it easier for an individual to express his opinion to the general public, and the location of resources and the location of the pursuers of these resources ceased to function as obstacles. The contents of a resource have become the primary concern among the participants, while the significance of the publishers’ authority has diminished. Unfortunately, such disregard of the identity of the author has incurred legal issues with heated arguments.

As the Internet grew from an interesting current to a tidal wave that swept through every corner of our daily lives, past generations emerged from their shields of denial and have begun to participate. Established scholars of psychology and economics have conducted studies on the behavior of individuals in a virtual environment, and politicians and legislators are attentively listening to the voices of the online community. Furthermore, linguists are analyzing the widespread changes in both written and spoken forms of language brought about by the Internet.

What, then, are the contents at the cornerstones of the online culture? How are these contents expected to evolve? How are the legal issues being addressed, and what are the implications of their resolutions? How are online communities morphing the way in which ideas are shared, represented, and voiced? With the help of specialists from respective fields, these questions will be addressed during individual sessions of the workshop, thereby providing a holistic understanding of the online cultural movement, its technological foundations and its socioeconomic significance.



DAY 1 – July 20, 2005 (KAIST campus, Daejeon, Korea)


Session #1 – Student Discussion

Instructor:
Junho Kim, Workshop Leader, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Session #2 – Socio-Technological Tools and Resources to Counter the “Digital Divide”
In this talk we will introduce a variety of technologies and infrastructure resources that can help set up a highly accessible and affordable information network that can provide suitable platforms for social intercourse. Such technologies include both communication and access channels, such as ubiquitous wireless access and software overlay technologies, such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. We will emphasize the synergy that naturally exists between the technological concepts necessary to build large-scale information systems and human dynamics that lead to the emergence of social networks and diversity in societies. We will argue how such synergy can be exploited to guide policies that can help bridge the digital divide. In particular, we will address the challenging issues of self-governance, security, and authenticity of information transmission in the cyberspace, and how regulatory laws can both hamper and facilitate the emergence of online democratic institutions and communities.

Speaker:
Vwani Roychowdhury, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Session #3 – History of the Internet
The Internet started in the late-1960s as a research network, called ARPANET, and it is becoming a global social infrastructure. This presentation reviews the development of the Internet from the inception of computing in the 1940s to the 2000s.
The Internet went through its conceptual development in the 1960s, followed by its early deployment in the 1970s. The 1980s saw its deployment in many parts of the world, and the 1990s saw the commercialization of the Internet with the invention of the World Wide Web. The Internet is becoming ubiquitous in this decade, and its convergence with telecommunications and broadcasting are being realized.
Youth played a major role throughout the development of the Internet and created a distinctive Internet culture. We anticipate this trend to be sustained for the coming decades.

Speaker:
Kilnam Chon, Professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology



DAY 2 – July 21, 2005 (KAIST campus, Daejeon, Korea)

Session #4 – From Data to its Organizing Structure
I will discuss the use of data collection, data processing methodologies, and data visualization presented simultaneously in interactive installations and the Internet in two projects:
“Pockets Full of Memories” consists of the public contributing data (an image of an object and semantic descriptors) to a database whose data is visually organized by the Kohonen self-organizing mapping algorithm in a 2D dimensional map. The algorithm basically looks at all the data and continuously organizes them in a 2D space so that every object is surrounded by others of similar semantic attributes until order is achieved at the local and global state.
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/pfom2/pfom2.html
“Making Visible the Invisible” is a commission for the new prestigious Seattle Public Library, by the internationally renown architect Rem Koolhaas. The project consists of analyzing and then visually mapping on a daily basis changes in what the public is reading, tracked through the circulation of books going in and out of the library.
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/spl/spl.html

Speaker:
George Legardy, Professor, University of California at Santa Barbara

Session #5 – The Digital Divide
“Digital Divide” has become a popular keyword in describing current and foreseeable inequalities of the online era. Many political and business leaders alike have voiced concern that in the Information Age, old social and economic discontinuities will deepen while unequal access to information technology will create new intra-national and international divisions. In this session we will examine the economic, logistical, and cultural complexities of the problem at hand. This will naturally lead to a discussion of current and future efforts from governments, private sector corporations, and NGOs as well as a discussion on how to strike an appropriate balance between efforts from these different parties.

Speaker:
Junhao Hong, Associate Professor, State University of New York at Buffalo



DAY 3 – July 22, 2005 (KAIST campus, Seoul, Korea)

Session #6 – Online Communities-A Personal Resource Planner is Coming
An ERP is optimally sharing and spreading an enterprise’s various resources. Personal resource planner (PRP) is optimally sharing and spreading a person’s various resources. One’s experience (movie appraisal, book or food review, hospital or lawyer review, reputation information about contacts), results of activities (photo, movie, knowledge, know-how, works), results of buyings (digital camera, computer, car, house) are all those representing personal resource. Versatility and numbers of those depends on person’s peculiar circumstances, region, sex, hobby, interested and occupation. PRP is a concept cyworld.com had used for its service architecture. But cyworld.com is a somewhat casual service, not an indispensable one like a cell phone. Personal Resoure Planner is not an ERP yet. Intuit’s Quickens was once a sort of PRP software for helping to optimize personal expense. MS Money also attacked Quicken only to fail. Outlook of MS Office can be one of PRP software. But it needs to be developed to be networked by many contacts and teams or organization level. But now, the world is fighting for those kinds of markets. Skype, plaxo, kukubox, bluetie.com, groove.net’s virtual office, Siemens’s openscape collaboration and total communication tool..etc. The power of those kinds of solutions or service will be super doubled by the expanding speed of participation of social nodes (users). Personal nodes and organizational nodes are all important in social network ,because team member can be regarded as trusting person as general contacts like alumni, friends, and family, even if the kind of trust is different. (thesquare.com, Stanford’s Nexus)

Speaker:
Young Hyoung, Founder & Former CEO, Cyworld

Session #7 – Internet Economics and E-commerce Models in the Online Era
It would be an understatement to say that the Internet has created frantic investment and hype over the last 10 years. Some characterized it as "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." Although the honeymoon seems to be over for many e-businesses, there are no movements to abandon the millions of web sites created.
Perhaps stability has emerged. Firms with PE ratios in the hundreds are now at more conventional levels. Strategies are maturing, and it seems that a compromise between the online and physical world is likely to be effective; the usefulness of incorporating bricks with clicks emerged about a few years ago. Customer relationship and supply chain management serve to handle the input and output streams, and back end processes tie them together.
Riches have been reaped by a few firms, but it seems that not everyone is so lucky. Several firms are faltering, and the future is very uncertain. Many news reports describe spectacular successes (other than stock price successes) and failures in attempting to go on-line, and give advice to the wannabes. While pure dot com players were faltering, many brick-and-mortar firms have successfully harnessed the potentials of e-Business technology into their traditional business model so that they could sharpen their competitive advantages. In this session, we review the importance of the Internet in Business, how it have innovated business models, and still why doubt is till high. We will try to find some root causes of eBusiness success so that young creative thinkers may prepare better for more radical changes to be emerged in the future.

Speaker:
Byungtae Lee, Associate Professor, KAIST Graduate School of Management

Session #8 – Control over Information Access, and Use: Debates over Intellectual Property and Privacy Protection in an Online Environment
The appropriate goals and modes of protecting intellectual property (IP) and individual privacy are only two issues among the many arising on the online environment, but two that have posed serious challenges for policy makers in numerous countries. This presentation focuses on developments in the United States, but raises questions of relevance for different countries as we try to shape our part of online culture. Both IP and privacy questions are about the control of information and communication: who should control information, how it should be exchanged and communicated, and what the terms and conditions for its use should be. Claims about the benefits of IP protections are examined, as are the difficulties of managing IP rights given widespread examples of the debated and unauthorized uses of digital content and technologies. What modes of IP claims and protections best serve the public interest, whether in the open exchange of ideas, in promoting advances in scientific and technology, or in economic and social development? The differing claims about the value of individual privacy are also explored, as are the specters of new threats to privacy emerging from the uses of database and web tools by governments, by corporations and firms, and by the behavior of less organized users. What about privacy is worth protecting? Do we need to reformulate privacy ideals? How do expectations vary from country to country? What limits to the uses and benefits of online technologies are we willing to make to protect and enhance privacy?

Speaker:
Stephen McDowell, Associate Professor, Florida State University



DAY 4 – July 23, 2005 (KAIST campus, Seoul, Korea)

Presentation Session
The online culture is evolving even at this moment. Personal media, which was not preconceived a decade ago, often threatens the original form of the media nowadays and sometimes even introduces a new type of online community to our daily lives. Until now, you’ve always been the user of the culture. Yet, let’s look further. What type of online culture are you dreaming of? In this presentation, you are to devise a completely novel type of an internet culture, online society, and virtual games that you, or your descendants, will enjoy in the future. Explore your imagination!