TECHNOBIOPHILIA: THE FUTURE OF CYBERSPACE

At De Montfort University, Hugh Aston Building this evening, for Sue Thomas's Professorial Lecture, The Future of Cyberspace. This is my second visit to Hugh Aston today. I was here this afternoon for the launch of the new PhD internship scheme, jointly offered by De Montfort University and the University of Leicester.

Now, before talking about the lecture itself, I have to start by crediting Prof Sue Thomas as having been one of the biggest influences on my post – though without her intending it, or knowing it. As founder and guiding spirit of Amplified Leicester and CreativeCoffee Club (for the years it was funded by DMU), she's helped create many opportunities to meet, connect with and get to know interesting people, many of whom were interested in me and my work for Leicester Council of Faiths. I've come to rely on many of these people as part of my professional support network. Some are my friends. Sue didn't do this deliberately of course, nor did she do so deliberately for me. Undoubtedly there are many people able to say similar things about how they've benefited from Professor Sue's work. It was largely through situations and networks she established and into which I was welcomed that I came to see how my work (and the institution I work for) could be located within varied, often surprising, strands of the wider cultural life in the city of Leicester - and beyond. Significantly, it was also through these networks that I became aware of the affordances of social media and how I might exploit them in my work. My involvement with CreativeCoffee Club and Amplified Leicester helped set the tone for the last four years and more of my work. For good or ill, faithful reader, you could call Prof Sue Thomas the Godmother of this blog! After all, I'm a big fan of giving credit where it's due.

In the earliest days of my post when I was a bit clueless about how to get off the ground, I attended the second-ever meeting of CreativeCoffee Club, back in the days when it took place at DMU Graduate Bar every other Wednesday morning (handy for me, since I lived only ten minutes walk from there at that time). Some folk wondered what, as an employee of a faith-based organisation, I was doing there. There were times when I wondered that myself! But this was the first such group I was able to tap into - and the beginning of serious networking on my part over the last five years.

I wasn't part of the first, formal iteration of Amplified Leicester (which was essentially a course) though I wish I had been. I reckon I was not only the first person to apply to be on it, but also the first to withdraw my name. I just couldn't make that kind of regular weekly commitment fit my unpredictable work pattern at that time. So I could have been a peripheral figure as far as Amplified Leicester was concerned, but I wasn't content to let that happen either. I still got as much as possible out of that, even if I had to do so as a twelfth man.

Both CreativeCoffee Club and Amplified Leicester feature extensively throughout this blog (see, for example, the post on Amplified Communities of Faith or Belief, a panel presentation that Sue asked me to convene at Phoenix Square Film & Digital Media Centre, Wednesday 23 March 2011).

Well, as far as this evening is concerned: it starts off typically, for a Sue Thomas event, when we're asked to ensure that our phones are turned on, so we can tweet throughout, using the hashtag #technobiophilia. Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace is the title of Sue’s forthcoming book, due out in 2013. Find out more about it here. I'm unable to do much tweeting, as there's no service for O2 in the lecture theatre.

Here's Sue's own synopsis of the main themes of her lecture, taken from her website:

The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first "on" the moon (July), and then "in" cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.

Rather than paraphrase or summarise the whole lecture (succinct as it was, lasting hardly more than 35 minutes), I advise you to follow this link to the slides. I'll pick up on a few things that were of special interest to me though.

It's hardly possible to discuss the future of cyberspace without reviewing its past and considering how it’s come to its present situation. To this end, we kick off with a fascinating video, The Internet of Things. In her review of the past and present of cyberspace (the realm we enter when we connect to the internet), Sue pays special attention to its relationship with nature. As the lecture progresses, this becomes her central concern. There’s long been an assumption that one is opposed to the other, that the virtual world and the natural world are mutually exclusive – an assumption Sue tests out in different ways at various points this evening.

Sue highlights how the metaphors we use to talk about cyberspace (and our experience of it) are so frequently drawn from nature. This is of special interest to me as it connects with Lackoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980) a book that I've long found influential. But natural things don’t naturally belong in cyberspace. We put them there because we want them to be there - and this is a function of biophilia (definition: “The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes” E.O. Wilson, 1984).

Biophilia is not just aesthetically pleasing. It soothes us in cyberspace. Sue extends Wilson's definition to the new term, technobiophilia: “The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in cyberspace.”

Sue leaves us with a vision of the future of cyberspace involving, at the very least, not seeing it as being oppositional to nature. Being connected to one doesn’t necessarily mean being disconnected from the other - indeed the only viable future for both involves reinforcing that relationship, which might take us down some unusual and unpredictable roads. This is illustrated with a weird and wonderful video, Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Ground. This term, hylozoism, is a new one to me: the philosophical point of view that all matter (including the universe as a whole) is in some sense alive. Now there’s food for thought!

PhD INTERNSHIP SCHEME WITH DE MONTFORT & LEICESTER UNIVERSITIES

At De Montfort University, Hugh Aston Building, this lunchtime for the launch of a new PhD internship scheme, jointly offered by De Montfort University and the University of Leicester.

For six weeks in the summer of 2011, Leicester Council of Faiths had the services of a graduate intern provided by De Montfort University. Rahat Ahmed gave a lot to our organisation in that short time and on the basis of that experience we'd back this kind of scheme. We hope we can take advantage of this new internship scheme, either through the Council of Faiths or through the Regional Equality and Diversity Partnership (REDP's Researcher, Carolyn Pascoe, is here with me). We're the only ones representing the Voluntary and Community Sector as potential employers. There are nine other organisations represented at this launch, from the private and public sectors. 

PhD students are recruited from the best quality graduates and spend three or more years researching into a specific area, analysing their findings and generating solutions. They are self-motivated and disciplined individuals who are accustomed to working alone to come up with solutions to problems.  Because of this quality, they will require minimal supervision throughout the project. Although some PhD students subsequently carry on into an academic career, over 50% of doctoral graduates leave university to enter business or public service. In recognition of this, all research students receive extensive key-skills training in areas such as communication, project-management, information technology, etc. The PhD Internship scheme is intended to give research students an opportunity to gain first-hand experience in the workplace, using their skills to address critical issues of commercial or social importance. PhD interns may bring directly relevant knowledge and skills to the area of work, or they may be able to apply portable skills that are relevant and useful across a variety of disciplines and topics.  

Between them the two universities have over 2,000 PhD students. This new PhD internship scheme will have a relatively low-key start, with six internships in the first year, doubling in number in the following year. Any internships starting this year should be completed by 31 December 2012.

The cost to an organisation taking on a PhD student as an intern is £600, which covers 20 days of the PhD intern’s time.  This money will be used to pay travel expenses for the student and any other incidental costs associated with the project as well as the University’s administration costs. The 20 working days can be spread over a period not exceeding six months as agreed between the organisation and the intern.

Seven PhD students who'll be taking part in the internship scheme attended the launch today. They're all in the photo above. Back row, left to right: 

Valasia Sawvidou, University of Leicester, Department of Politics & International Relations. PhD title: The immigration issue and the effect it has on voting in national and European Parliament elections

Joba Akinjo, University of Leicester, Department of Toxicology. PhD title: Side effects of chemicals on male reproductive system

Gemma Mitchell, University of Leicester, Department of Sociology. PhD title: How experts navigate and translate risk knowledges in the "risk society": a case study of social workers

Shujaul Khan, Leicester University, Department of Biology. PhD title: Plant communities classification and vegetation ecosystem services of the Western Himalayas

Front row, left to right:

Eleanor MacKillop, De Montfort University, Department of Politics & Local Government. PhD title: Change in local government understanding of commissioning

Mohamed Maricar, De Montfort University, Department of Electronic Engineering. PhD title: Design of circuit to enhance the performance of high frequency Planar Gunn diode

Ammar Abdulwahab Noorwali, De Montfort University, Faculty of Technology. PhD title: Reducing variability levels in food processing industry

This is the first of two visits to Hugh Aston today. I'll be back later for Sue Thomas's Professorial Lecture, The Future of Cyberspace.

WHAT IS AMPLIFIED LEICESTER?

Thanks to John Ager, for allowing me to copy and paste this from his blog. It's actually a guest post on John's blog, by Sue Thomas (photo above), Professor of New Media at De Montfort University in Leicester. I'm a big supporter of Amplified Leicester, as you'll have seen, faithful reader, but I particularly wanted to circulate this post because it promotes the panel I'm convening for the next session later this month.

In today’s networked world, many skills which we may already have but not recognise as special are coming to the fore. The Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, have identified a skill set which they call ‘amplified’. It features qualities such as "Cooperation Radar" – the ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task, and "High Ping Quotient" – responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; propensity to reach out to others in a network. You can read all ten of them here. The language may be very Californian, but the skills are ones we would all recognise. And social media is helping us to do them even better.

In 2009 I ran a project called "Amplified Leicester" which brought together 30 very different Leicester people and helped them develop their ‘amplified skills’. That project is now over but this year we’ve been hosting a series of talks and panels at Phoenix Sqaure where we look at ‘amplified’ approaches and discuss how they can be used in specific contexts. So far we’ve looked at politics, police, and crafts, and this month we’re considering faith (or not) in a panel discussion convened by George Ballentyne of the Council of Faiths and called Amplified Communities of Faith or Belief.

George’s guests are a very varied group – Sughra Ahmed of the Islamic Foundation, Richard Hopper of Leicester Secular Society, and Matthew Hughes of Samworth Enterprise Academy, a Church of England school. It takes place at 7.00 pm Wednesday 23 March 2011 at Phoenix Square. Do come along to hear what they have to say and join us in the Screen Lounge afterwards to continue the discussion. It’s free and open to all. Book online here and join the Amplified Leicester community here. We look forward to seeing you! The Twitter hashtag is #ampleic for all Amplified Leicester related tweets.