Cyrius Media Group
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Services
  • Solutions
  • Portfolio
  • Clients
  • Media
  • Contact
  • Overview
  • Cyrius News
  • In the Press
  • Articles
  • Blog
  • Press Kit

Now, the world really is a stage.

Satellites peer down upon us, as we peer into the screens onto which their images beam.

Every action we take online adds to the story the earth is writing.

The next chapter?

Do you have a project in mind?

Articles

Creative Director Stefan Sojka is one of Australia’s most published freelance writers and commentators on Web business and Internet culture.  He has been a regular monthly columnist for the award-winning NETT magazine for the past three years.  Previous roles included 7 years writing for internet.au magazine and the Australian Net Directory. He continues to contribute to a number of blogs and publications.

Data Visualisation – Globalize – Global Eyes.

Monday, March 02, 2009

By Stefan Sojka

We humans have relatively big brains, but in an age of information overload they are proving to be rather inadequate.  In fact, they’ve probably been inadequate since we left our jungle enclaves and moved to the city.  The infrastructures, their effects and the means of changing those effects has, since the birth of ‘democracy’ and the creation of the viaduct, been completely out of the general public’s realm of understanding.  We let politicians and their tycoon buddies kid us that if we put a tick on a piece of paper and stuff it into a box once every three or four years, they would take care of everything.  Our minds simply couldn’t grasp the enormity of national and global systems, so we gave up.

Now it’s time to wake up.  Our overlords are as incapable as anyone else to fathom the machinations of our reality – after all, they are only human too.  Enter data visualisation!

Finally (and not a moment too soon), we have a new way of seeing.  Amidst the explosion of information, little people with tiny minds, about the size of our own, have created the tools to understand it.  We can now see information – and we can ‘get’ it.  This new perspective is at first stunning, a little mind blowing, and ultimately empowering.  Once we can visualise what is going on, we can change it.  No longer is anything out of sight and out of mind.
www.visualcomplexity.com proves that perhaps we have actually evolved to grasp information in such a way – since it truly is beautiful.  These images connect the dots of our understanding.  I keep returning here to gaze upon these amazing images that help form my version of reality.
You can’t go past Google Earth and in particular Google Earth Outreach – earth.google.com/outreach/showcase.html – to get a grip on what is happening on this ‘pale blue dot’ we call home. It’s sobering – and impossible to ignore, once you’ve seen it.
Much has been done to map the Internet itself, the ultimate beast of complexity.  Go to images.google.com and search “internet map” – cool…
www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches is a large and well-chosen collection of awesome data visualisation samples and resources.  Just following the links on this page will open up your Pandora’s box of wonder.
www.wefeelfine.org focuses on human emotion on a global scale.  Empathy abounds.  Co-creator, Jonathan Harris – www.number27.org – has a seemingly limitless imagination for ways to portray information – single-handedly creating a new art form which mashes up computer science, anthropology, visual art and story-telling.

Now we can see what is going on with our ‘global eyes’, it’s time to engineer the next logical step – real-time data visualisation activism.  Watch it, click it, and watch it change.  A Web 3.0 upgrade, perhaps?  We’ll see…

Hack College
http://www.hackcollege.com/

An interesting initiative to orient students to the new world of open source computing, communication and learning… From their website:

'Lectures are boring and inefficient. Long hours spent studying hand-written notes is very 1994. Anyone graduating today needs to know not how to operate a computer, but when. The fault is both with the students and the teachers. HackCollege is changing education. HackCollege is educating the students of the world about effective, open source software, putting techno-political arguments in everyday language, and creating a cult of “Students 2.0.” If we can change the way 1 percent of college students and faculty in the world view education and technology, we’ve done our job.'

Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink
Trackback Link
http://www.cyrius.com.au/BlogRetrieve.aspx?BlogID=4177&PostID=62397&A=Trackback
Trackbacks
Post has no trackbacks.
Comments
Post has no comments.
Post a Comment




Captcha Image

Previous Next

Recent Posts

  • Think inside the square
  • Details, details
  • The Road Less Clicked
  • Groundhog Day is a Good Day
  • 7 reasons to re-design your Website
  • Prepare Thyself
  • New Year Revolutions
  • A Website is not a thing
  • A day in the life of an SEO spam recipient
  • The 'Not-So-Brief' Brief

Tags

  • Archives (90)
  • Blog (3)
  • Business Advice (36)
  • Community (1)
  • Consulting (27)
  • Google (1)
  • Humour (6)
  • Interview (4)
  • Marketing (16)
  • Motivation (27)
  • Music (6)
  • PR & Press (11)
  • SEO (1)
  • Social Media (8)
  • Web Design (5)
  • Web Philosphy (26)
  • Website Reviews (93)
  • Writing (124)

Archive

  • May 2017 (1)
  • April 2017 (1)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • October 2013 (1)
  • August 2013 (1)
  • January 2013 (1)
  • December 2012 (1)
  • September 2012 (1)
  • May 2012 (1)
  • April 2012 (2)
  • November 2011 (1)
  • July 2011 (1)
  • June 2011 (1)
  • April 2011 (1)
  • March 2011 (1)
  • February 2011 (1)
  • January 2011 (1)
  • December 2010 (1)
  • September 2010 (1)
  • August 2010 (1)
  • July 2010 (1)
  • June 2010 (1)
  • May 2010 (1)
  • April 2010 (1)
  • March 2010 (1)
  • February 2010 (1)
  • January 2010 (1)
  • December 2009 (1)
  • November 2009 (1)
  • October 2009 (1)
  • September 2009 (1)
  • August 2009 (1)
  • July 2009 (1)
  • June 2009 (1)
  • May 2009 (1)
  • April 2009 (1)
  • March 2009 (1)
  • February 2009 (1)
  • January 2009 (1)
  • December 2008 (1)
  • November 2008 (1)
  • October 2008 (1)
  • September 2008 (2)
  • August 2008 (1)
  • July 2008 (1)
  • June 2008 (1)
  • September 2004 (1)
  • May 2004 (2)
  • April 2004 (1)
  • March 2004 (1)
  • February 2004 (1)
  • January 2004 (1)
  • December 2003 (1)
  • November 2003 (1)
  • October 2003 (2)
  • September 2003 (1)
  • August 2003 (1)
  • July 2003 (1)
  • June 2003 (1)
  • May 2003 (1)
  • April 2003 (1)
  • March 2003 (1)
  • February 2003 (1)
  • January 2003 (1)
  • December 2002 (1)
  • November 2002 (1)
  • October 2002 (1)
  • September 2002 (1)
  • August 2002 (2)
  • July 2002 (1)
  • June 2002 (1)
  • May 2002 (1)
  • April 2002 (1)
  • March 2002 (1)
  • February 2002 (1)
  • January 2002 (1)
  • December 2001 (1)
  • November 2001 (1)
  • October 2001 (1)
  • September 2001 (1)
  • August 2001 (1)
  • July 2001 (1)
  • June 2001 (2)
  • May 2001 (1)
  • April 2001 (1)
  • March 2001 (1)
  • February 2001 (1)
  • January 2001 (1)
  • December 2000 (1)
  • November 2000 (1)
  • October 2000 (1)
  • September 2000 (1)
  • August 2000 (1)
  • July 2000 (1)
  • June 2000 (2)
  • May 2000 (1)
  • April 2000 (1)
  • March 2000 (1)
  • February 2000 (1)
  • January 2000 (1)
  • December 1999 (3)
  • November 1999 (1)
Membership

Web services

  • Overview
  • Consulting
  • Branding
  • Website Design
  • Web Development
  • Website Repair
  • InDesign
  • SEO
  • Online PR
  • Social Media

More services

  • Domain Names
  • Hosting
  • Custom Programming
  • Audio Production
  • Video Production
  • Photography
  • Multimedia
  • Copy Writing
  • Printing

Internet solutions

  • Overview
  • Business Catalyst
  • BigCommerce
  • WordPress
  • MailChimp
  • Joomla
  • Drupal
  • Volusion
  • More Solutions

Media & other info

  • Overview
  • Cyrius News
  • In the Press
  • Articles
  • Blog
  • Press Kit

Networking

  • Memberships
  • Visit our Facebook
  • View Our Videos
  • Latest Tweets
  •  

Cyrius Media Group Pty Ltd
PO Box 240
North Ryde BC Sydney
NSW 1670 AUSTRALIA

Email: info@cyrius.com.au
Phone: +612 9877 5544
Fax: +612 9877 6644

© Copyright Cyrius Media Group Pty Ltd  | Privacy Sitemap | Home About Us Contact | Cyrius Website Design Sydney