Time & Again from Jacques Khouri

time & again from jacques khouri on Vimeo.

Web Trend Map

extract from Web Trend Map

1 The Stream of Information represents the entirety of articles and data being publishing online.

2. Individuals actively filter the portion of the stream of information passing in front of them. Acting as Micro-Curators, they selectively publish (to services like Twitter, Facebook, etc) the links they consider having highest value.

3. Webtrendmap.com users create Micro-Aggregates of link publishers by choosing highly selective subsets to place on their Web Trend Maps. These maps become representative of subsets of online communities. The maps are also public facing (unlike most RSS readers) and provide a visual summary of links and trends within that community subset. Both the map creator and passive viewers gain insight into the community.

4. Webtrendmap.com collects, summarizes and publishes all of the trending links on individual maps onto a Macro-Aggregate represented as Top Trending Links.

The filtration process facilitated by Web Trend Map (All Information > Micro-Curation > Micro-Aggregation > Macro-Aggregation) means the data rising to the top is "always high quality" [Web Trend Map, 2010].

Web Trend Map [2010] Timely, trending links curated and filtered by an engaged and active community. [Online] http://webtrendmap.com/about/ [18/07/2010]
iA Inc. (2009) What it is. [Online] http://www.flickr.com/photos/formforce/3409362834/sizes/o/ [18/07/2010]

Reiner Klingholz

...we are still a divided country. Because of the emigration of 1.7 million people - mainly young, qualified, and female - from eastern Germany since the fall of the Iron Curtain, which is more than 10 percent of the former population, as well as the enormous drop in the birthrate. This generation is halved, and if you add the emigration of young families, it is even more than half. This generation born in the 1990s will be in the parent age from 2015 on. We will have halved number of newborns again from 2015 on. Of course, this has an enormous effect on schools, infrastructure, and so on.

Between 2015 and 2020, you will have a number of demographic effects in eastern Germany which will put an enormous stress on the system: 50 percent of potential parents, 50 percent of students, 50 percent of job starters. At the same time, you have the baby boomers being pushed into the pension age. That means less people in the workforce, less buying power, and less taxes for the communities. Plus the end of the Solidarity Pact, which runs out in 2019, will mean less transfer money for eastern Germany. 

We are working on a study on the economic future of Europe where we compare 285 regions. There we find that eastern Germany is the demographic crisis area in Europe. There's no other region - including in Romania and Bulgaria - which is affected to such an extent.

Immigration is one alternative, but you still cannot fill the gaps that began thirty years ago. Why do immigrants come? Because there are jobs. The economic situation in eastern Germany does not cry that much for immigration. The second thing is that the experience with immigration is not that high, so you don't have that many foreigners. Foreigners like to come to places where you already have clusters of Turks, Indians, Pakistanis, and so on. If you don't have the clusters, there's no real attraction for others. 

The third thing is that the openness for foreigners is not very expressed in eastern Germany, so this tolerance is not around. It doesn't make it very attractive for clever Indians to come if they read in the papers that Indian people are beaten up. All this is pretty tough, I would say. (Klingholz, in Wish, 2008) 

An article highlighting the divided society of Germany, still affected by the economic and political systems that created the gap, and continues to influence people's lives today.

Wish, V. (ed.) (2008) Germany Demographic Profile Part 6: "We Are Still a Divided Country". [Online] http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/globalissues/demographic_change/country_profiles/germany_demographic_profile_klingholz.html [18/07/2010] 

Berlin Wall Flies for Guinness Record

"We wanted to show the wall flying. It's a symbol of division, but we wanted to turn it into a symbol of freedom." (Mühlenhof, in Kelsey, 2010)

Pastor, East German human rights activist and a nominee for the president Joachim Gauck made a speech "to mark the wall's safe landing" and signed the Wall - this section will be used in a new open-air exhibition on the observation deck about the history of Potsdamer Platz and present day Berlin (Kelsey, 2010).

Kelsey, E. (2010) Sky-High: Berlin Wall Flies for Guinness Record. [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,706905,00.html#ref=nlint [17/07/2010]

How the East Was Lost

Alexander Neubacher and Michael Sauga
Spiegel Online

July 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the deutsche mark in East Germany in the runup to full reunification. But the economic benefits that West German politicians promised failed to materialize. What went wrong?

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, 56, is from Bonn, deep in the west of Germany, but his memories of the days between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990 are those of an East German.

Lothar de Maizière, the first and last democratically elected prime minister of East Germany, had asked his cousin whether he wanted a job. Thomas de Maizière agreed, moved into an office on Klosterstrasse in East Berlin and, from then on, sat on the side of the table reserved for East Germans at the negotiations on German reunification.

Thomas de Maizière has often asked himself what went wrong at the time. "Objectively speaking, we didn't have enough time. We were under a great deal of pressure," he says. He compares it to a "sudden political birth."

The emergency delivery happened exactly 20 years ago. Today, as the federal government's commissioner for the "new German states" (as the former East Germany is known), de Maizière's job is to promote the development of eastern Germany. He is the first interior minister and the first West German in a long time to hold the position, but de Maizière downplays his role.

The minister remains reserved in interviews on the subject. And when he does say something, it doesn't sound like what his predecessors said.

He has an aversion to official phrases like "harmonization of living conditions in the east and west." Nor is he keen on the term "Aufbau Ost" ("development of the east"), which German governments have used as shorthand for efforts to promote economic development in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany was officially known. "When people from western Germany come to Potsdam, Dresden or Stralsund," he says, referring to three relatively prosperous eastern German cities, "their first impressions prompt them to ask: 'What still needs to be developed here?'"

Overnight Change

It was 20 years ago that then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl made a lonely decision. The Berlin Wall had come down, and thousands of East German citizens were moving to the West every week. Kohl offered Hans Modrow, the interim communist leader of East Germany at the time, a monetary union for the two Germanys. Experts were annoyed by the proposal, and Karl Otto Pöhl, the then-head of West Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, warned against it. But Kohl had his way. Money transporters began rolling eastward overnight. The West German deutsche mark was named East Germany's currency on July 1, 1990.

Politically speaking, the monetary union was a success. The people were delighted, because they no longer had to travel to the west to get deutsche marks. But the move had a devastating effect on the economy. Overnight, all pensions, wages and savings of up to 6,000 East German marks were exchanged on a one-to-one basis. This was beneficial for East German citizens but not for businesses, many of which went under when they suddenly found themselves having to compete with the highly modern West German economy.

"Although there was no reasonable political alternative to the fixed exchange rate, it was a bad move economically," says de Maizière. "Instead of one to one, the exchange rate should have been one to three or one to four, to reflect the economic reality, but this would have had the devastating political consequence of further migration."

Lagging Behind the West

Today, the eastern German economy is still in a sorry state, and there are no indications that the situation will change. An estimated €1.3 trillion ($1.6 trillion) have flowed from the former West Germany to the former East Germany over the last 20 years. But what has that money achieved? Historic neighborhoods have been restored, new autobahns built and the telephone network brought up to date, but most of the money was spent on social benefits such as welfare payments. The anticipated economic upswing failed to materialize.

Some eastern cities, like Leipzig, Dresden, Jena and Erfurt, have experienced economic development. The state of Thuringia has a relatively robust auto industry, and there are successful high-tech companies in Saxony. Research institutes and universities are doing well, thanks in part to generous government subsidies.

But the success stories are rare. Most of eastern Germany has turned into an economically depressed region that lags behind the west in all respects:

The per capita economic output in the east is only at 71 percent of the western level, with a disproportionately high share of economic output attributable to the public sector. The economic output generated by the private economy is only at 66 percent of the western level.

To close the gap, the eastern German economy would have to grow more rapidly than in western Germany, but precisely the opposite is the case. Germany's leading economic research institutes expect the economy in eastern Germany to grow by 1.1 percent this year, compared with 1.5 percent in the west.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the population of eastern Germany has declined by almost 2 million people, a trend that is continuing unabated.

The proportion of household income derived from welfare payments is 20 percent higher in the east than in the west.

Of Germany's 100 largest industrial companies and 100 largest service providers, not one has its headquarters in eastern Germany.

Politicians across the political spectrum tend to sugarcoat the meager economic results of reunification. Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is fond of saying that "a great deal has been achieved" in the development of the east. Former Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), who is also a former commissioner in charge of developing eastern Germany, says jubilantly: "We have successfully made it three-quarters of the way."

"We are firmly convinced that the creative forces of the people that have now been unleashed will lead to a new Wirtschaftswunder," then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl proclaimed on June 5, 1990, referring to the "economic miracle" of postwar West Germany. But anyone who travels through eastern Germany today, 20 years later, will encounter failed mega-projects, depopulated downtown areas and many people who haven't had a regular job in two decades.

Neubacher, A. & Sauga, M. (2010) Germany's Disappointing Reunification: How the East Was Lost. [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,703802,00.html#ref=nlint [16/07/2010]

Germany, the Island

"Germany, the island, is 1,400 meters (or less than a mile) long, and 800 meters wide. It has no vegetation. But it's covered in tire marks and inhabited by bulldozers, cranes and other construction equipment." (Smoltczyk, 2010)

Smoltczyk, A. (2010) Islands in the Gulf: His Own Private 'Germany'. [Online] 

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-57231.html [17/07/2010]

Apple geotagging users

Apple now plans to target its smartphone users with geo-targeted advertising based on GPS or WiFi data provided by the device, and is "in the process of becoming an omnipresent and omniscient data leviathan" (Brauck et al, 2010). More concerns over geo-tagging.

In the past few days, every Apple customer who has attempted to buy something in the iTunes Music Store or the App Store has been confronted with a window in which he is asked to read and agree to new terms and conditions. In the text, the global corporation requests the customer's consent to Apple knowing where he -- and his iPhone, iPad or MacBook -- happens to be at any given time, and to Apple processing the information and even disclosing it to third parties.

In legal jargon, the message reads: Effective immediately, "Apple and our partners and licensees" may "collect, use and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device." Apple claims that this geographical data is "collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you." But the company does not specify exactly how it intends to ensure that this will be the case.

The move was met with outrage. It was the Los Angeles Times that seized upon the questionable passage, thereby bringing Apple, after Google and Facebook, its first real data privacy scandal. US bloggers promptly dubbed the program "iSpy," and the blog "The Consumerist" has characterized the company's thirst for data as "creepy."

Oddly enough, Apple has already used similar wording in its terms of use in the past, with the iPhone, for example. But as is often the case with such legalese, hardly anyone reads the fine print and realizes exactly what rights he is relinquishing to the company by checking a box and impatiently clicking on the "I accept" button.

As belated as all the fuss may be, it is nevertheless justified. The one thing that is clear is that the data Apple is gathering and storing is extremely sensitive. Someone who knows a person's exact whereabouts can reach surprisingly precise conclusions about his life. Apple, for its part, might as well forget about its anti-Orwellian image of itself.

To make matters worse, for the first time the company is trying to sell this information on a large scale to advertising customers.

Ironically, it was only in early June that the Apple CEO insisted that his company was very concerned about privacy. Jobs claims the company is particularly worried about the use of geographical location data obtained from smartphones. He even claimed that when it comes to privacy issues, Apple might seem old-fashioned, because of its wary view of things.

Now, as a problem that is not entirely new is finally being recognized, German politicians -- who have been very vocal in their criticism of the privacy policies of Google and Facebook -- are also expressing concern. Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a member of the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), says that Apple must "immediately disclose" what data it captures, how long the data is stored and how it is used.

"It must be clear to the users of iPhones and other GPS-enabled devices what information about them is being gathered," says the minister, adding that it would be "inconceivable" if Apple were in fact to create personality or even mobility profiles of its users. "In this case, I feel that it is Apple's obligation to actually implement the transparency so often invoked by Steve Jobs." And then she added: "I expect Apple to provide German privacy groups with access to its databases."

Till Steffen, a Green Party politician and minister of justice for the city-state of Hamburg, also takes a critical view of the issue: "The providers' unclear data privacy rules show, once again, that privacy laws are lagging behind Internet technologies."

 Brauck, M., Hülsen, I. & Rosenbach, M. (trans. Sultan, C.) (2010) Apple Under Fire over Privacy in Germany. [Online] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,703409,00.html [17/07/2010]