Not sure how relevant this will be, but it certainly looks interesting….

Anyway, it’s this Friday 9am-4.45pm at the Penn Museum.

In Summer 2009, Evan Ratliff, a journalist for Wired magazine, tried to ‘disappear’ for 25 days. He was caught by some tenacious Wired readers who, through Twitter and IRC channels, pooled their information and tracked him down. It’s a fun read and shows how hard it is to escape surveillance and one’s online identity.

Now Wired is carrying out the experiment again, offering 4 members of the public the chance to win $10,000 by successfully disappearing for a month.

Vint Cerf discusses the problem of cloud computing, remarking that it is the same as the problem networks faced when they couldn’t talk to one another: “We’re at the same point now in 2010 as we were in ‘73 with internet.”

There’s a short article and a 5min video of Cerf talking about this problem.

Bruno Latour’s mapping of Paris to show how networks, connections and interactions form the social. Using ANT (see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: OUP, 2005), the project uses text and collaged images to bring to light the networks which create a city, but which usually remain ‘invisible’.

Not sure if this counts as a network…maybe?

Anyway, it’s fivethirtyeight.com’s analysis of the key terms of Obama’s State of the Union address last night compared to every presidents’ pre-midterm elections SOTU address  from JFK (1962) onwards.

It seemed network-y in terms of the website in general, which liveblogged the SOTU address, and has a twitter box on its front page. Also, the creation of a linguistic network, if that counts, is created by the collation of word usage into tables - particularly the last two tables that show the correlation between presidents (i.e., which speech is most rhetorically similar to another.)

Speech given by H. Clinton last week in which she uses the word ‘network’ 36 times. Nothing groundbreaking here, comparisons of US freedom v rest of the world, but in terms of internet freedom, e.g.

‘Now, pursuing the freedoms I’ve talked about today is, I believe, the right thing to do. But I also believe it’s the smart thing to do. By advancing this agenda, we align our principles, our economic goals, and our strategic priorities. We need to work toward a world in which access to networks and information brings people closer together and expands the definition of the global community.’

‘But make no mistake – some are and will continue to use global information networks for darker purposes. Violent extremists, criminal cartels, sexual predators, and authoritarian governments all seek to exploit these global networks. Just as terrorists have taken advantage of the openness of our societies to carry out their plots, violent extremists use the internet to radicalize and intimidate. As we work to advance freedoms, we must also work against those who use communication networks as tools of disruption and fear.’