Video and final stab at social networks and cities

Nlab
Readers of this blog or attendees at Nesta’s recent events will have heard me, or others talk about the theme of ‘social networks as the new cities’.

I don’t intend restart this discussion again in detail but for anybody who is interested, find here a video of a talk I gave earlier in the summer at the NLab conference in Leicester, on this topic.

It’s something of a stream of consciousness exploration of the subject but hopefully gives a flavour of my point of view. Namely that cities arn’t just simply analogous to social networks, but rather some of the functions that cities provide (proximity, economies of scale, random interaction etc) are now increasingly being provided by social networks.

And most importantly, we are only just beginning to see the impact on our cities and places which will be profoundly impacted by the web, just as they have been historically by other disruptive technologies.

Anyway, enough on that, but as always I’d be interested in any thoughts and feedback as ever.

PS. Thanks again to Sue Thomas for curating the event and inviting me to attend.

Comments

  1. NLabs social networks conferenceNLab is a lab developed by the Faculty of the Humanities of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK to connect creative businesses with writers and generate pioneering partnerships.
    In June they organised a very interesting one-day conference on so…

  2. NLab conference videos now onlineVideos of the 2008 NLab conference are now online at Vimeo. Enjoy! PS: within hours of the site going live, Experientia sorted out the assets and presented them very tidily here. Thanks Experientia – very impressive! PPS: And Roland Harwood

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