Linkoping: Paying Attention to Digital Media Cultures

In September 2010 I have participated to a conference in Linkoping, Sweden, about Paying Attention: Digital Media Cultures and Generational Responsibility. I have written about the most interesting things I heard at the conference in post titled Paying attention: when a (kind of) hacker meets sociologists. Abstract and slides of my talks are below.

My talk: The crucial role of file formats in building and preserving Digital Media Cultures

Here are the abstract, and the slides:

Digital documents, from Tweets or Facebook status updates to law texts and streaming TV, can make a lot to improve building and preservation of cultures, make social life and education richer, increase citizen civic participation and government transparency.

However, this potential can be achieved only if all these digital documents are always preserved and shared in the smallest possible number of truly open formats. When this doesn’t happen, both individuals and society lose crucial information and have much less possibilities to exchange or correlate digital data in the ways that would have the most positive effects on culture, education and civic participation.