kerry degman is represented by major model management.
here are some of his latest shoot images, i love the whole industrial look.
photographic credit for these images to randall medon.
kerry is the poster child for the all american look.

imagesource | majormodels

ibrahim is represented by red model management.
an extremely astounding physical build & features set him apart.
readers have raved about his lips, so i decided to post more of him here.
photographic credit for these images to michael epps.
the V shaped torso is fuckn death. killn em.

imagesource | rednyc

anthony is represented by major model management.
among the most searched male model favorites of regular readers,
anthony has been noticeably more visible in fashion since he move to major.
definitely a good look; im very glad that he is developing a stronger presence.
in the modeling world, thats all one can ask for.
images shot by adam gardiner.

imagesource | majormen

Angel_F is a young artificial intelligence son of Derrick de Kerckhove and the Biodoll. It ws born from a digitally sexual accident when the Biodoll seduced prof. Derrick de Kerckhove

Angel_F participated to multiple events supporting digital rights, knowledge sharing and the noew forms of identities and sexualities available trough dgital technologies.
A book has been recently published titled “Angel_F, il diario di una intelligenza artificiale”, telling the story of the young artificial intelligence’s first year of life.
Angel_F and its book have been presented at Generative Arts Congress 2009, to a delighted audience. This is the presentation that was used in that occasion.

Other presentations have been made at the Piemonte Share Festival 2009.

more info on:

http://www.angel-f.it/
http://www.artisopensource.net
http://www.generativeart.com/
http://www.toshare.it

lee is represented by major model management.
he appears in this shoot through the lens of rick day.
lee has am impeccable physique & dope hair.
dig his look, another major one on the list.

imagesource | majormen

zack is represented by major model management.
i love his look & find his features very interesting.
i’ve even compared him to a boxer in the past.
these are some updated portfolio images.
photographic credit to cliff watts.

imagesource | majormen

As digital capture of our lives edges ever closer to ubiquity – and that seems to be where we’re heading – what are the consequences for memory and for judgement on both a personal and societal scale? Is it a curse or just a new aspect of the modern age that we’re inevitably making some mistakes in coming to terms with?

That’s the subject of a new book ‘Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting In A Digital Age’, and on 19th November I attended a talk at the RSA given by the author Victor Mayer-Schonberger, director of the information and innovation policy research centre at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, which was ably chaired by Kevin Anderson, Blogs Editor at The Guardian.

It’s a wide ranging topic, and a lot was covered, but the crux was this: the growing tendency to default to digitally documenting and sharing experience is creating a digital legacy that we as individuals are not fully able to control. In many cases this can lead to information being taken out of context, or shared beyond appropriate boundaries, with baleful (and other, still unknown) consequences.

Take a trio of now commonplace examples. The innocent party photo passed through Facebook or stored in Flickr or Google’s image archive means you’re passed over for a promotion or job, or sacked from your current one. The long past relationship is made ever present by related content from that time being accessible at the push of a button and compounded by current two or three-degrees connection to the ex. The holiday or special occasion is experienced less as something we live through intensely in the moment and later recollect at leisure, but is constantly punctuated with recording for posterity and increasingly stylised and calculated for the consumption of a small or not-so-small audience.

The second interlinked thesis is that our slowly evolved patterns of memory, learning and recollection are being distorted and un-bound by reliance on digital recording and storage. Memory reconstructs the past to minimise cognitive dissonance, the author explained. This is more potent and interesting, if an area I’m less familiar with. Normally, we cannot deliberately forget (for the reverse, see Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s fantastic movie Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) and memory naturally both selects, filters and deteriorates over time. But if the default is moving to not physiologically but digitally remembering, is the solution to delete?

Mayer-Schonberger is himself ambivalent about this, but citing a woman known as “AJ” he shared some compelling evidence of studies of human beings who have biological difficulties with forgetting. AJ experiences total recall as a curse. Tethered by an ever more detailed recollection of what has gone before, she is continually haunted by the past; resulting in an inability to live in the present, to generalise and to abstract from experience.

Another worrying consequence touched on by Mayer-Schonberger is our mass participation and compliance in the creation of a temporal Panopticon – in other words our collusion in the ability of institutions to store and always see our actions at any moment in time. My colleague Ian Delaney has written about this more eloquently than I can.

Accelerating referencing of digital content taken out of context – according to Mayer-Schonberger – means we also increasingly deny each other the capacity to change, evolve and grow and as such we are becoming a more unforgiving society. He floated an extreme scenario: what if we disregard our own recollection and instead depend solely on digital memory? Wouldn’t we have lost more than we had gained?

Clearly a thought experiment, he added the caveat that as only fragments of our experience are captured digitally, this cannot actually happen in totality. The problems right now – as mentioned with the careers, relationship and holiday examples – come when it happens on a piecemeal, ad hoc or imperceptible basis.

Solutions proposed by Mayer-Schonberger, include:

(1) Reintroduce forgetting by technological means – an expiration date put on information that we are prompted to input when we add time and GPS co-ordinates to data (or more simply, when we save it). The pitfall of this approach is if it’s public it can be copied by others and stored elsewhere.

(2) “Digital rusting” – a closer approximation of the tactile and receeding nature of memory. The issue with this is how we can know at the point of recording how we might feel about the material in the future. This might be a workable model for some public data, but personal information (and creation) has different implications, and personal and public often overlap. Ultimately, I feel current and future historians might beg to differ with this approach.

(3) Go back to forgetting by default. This means either we cease to record and save information (not gonna happen), or that we forget we have done so – which is a much worse nightmare! The key I think is that information, however private or public, somehow needs to be understood and placed in differing temporal and social dimensions.

(4) The dark side of the network – and the downside of the end of silos – is that because social conventions lag behind the increasing openness of information it’s easy to find “personal” information about “impersonal” connections, and once this data is exposed and fed into to impersonal judgements it’s not so easy to get a second chance. The solution? We should promote the exercise of judgement [privately and publicly, I presume], argued Mayer-Schonberger. Guy Parsons shared an optimistic twist on this at Chinwag Live: The Dark Side Of Social Media, an event I organised back in 2007. But not all elements of society will consistently act this way, so the risk remains.

If the wisest survival response is then self-censorship, how far should you go? Even private use of search engines is not immune. Mayer-Schonberger cited AOL’s now infamous search query datastream release c*ck-up in 2006, wherein the supposedly anonymized data of search records was rapidly traced by technologists at the New York Times to some of the individuals who’d created it. What if it you had been one of them? In turn, how much does constant watchfulness really benefit public and personal development? Is it right that privacy is being eroded so much that we need to be so careful?

Nico Macdonald made the point that you can’t code the solutions to social problems. This seemed uncontroversial as I don’t think much store has been put by the “expiry date” solution in responses to the book. We shouldn’t be “subjected” to technology but be more active in shaping it, he inferred. Perhaps that’s what we really need reminded of.

Much was said about search engines and the Internet Archive even got a namecheck. But the cash-strapped Internet Archive is shrinking not growing I’ve noticed. Google is dependent on the trust of its users, and that trust is tantamount to its business model Mayer-Schonberger stressed. But a recent remark by Google’s Eric Schmidt tells us this is changing. Facebook now faces the same issue. Despite their recent announcement about the Open Graph API and their latest privacy settings swerve, most people expect privacy from Facebook. Whether or not that expectation is foolish, Facebook could still be wrong-footed by being too open.

Returning to recall for a moment, timelines are something I’ve always thought that, conversely, digital content could do with more of but their genesis requires some subtlety and serious forethought. Fear of interrogating the past could diminish us as much as it might protect us. Surely it’s a function of human enquiry and maturity to be able to embrace our past, to reflect on and dwell in it on occasion without becoming paralysed like AJ? Why would the digital storage and referencing of past information stop us from being able to interpret it wisely and still live in the present? This is really where Mayer-Schonberger and I part paths.

Flexible and reliable privacy settings are just a feature that should come with such services. The first one I came across was Rememble, which enabled you save and store selected text messages, blogs, tweets, photos and other content in a visual timeline. Creator Gavin O’Carroll likened it in 2007 to a washing line for your digital bits and pieces. It was a narrative-led yet accessible framework for piecing together fragmented content and reconstructing memories, conversations and events at the personal level.

If you’re looking to place stuff in a larger historical context, a landmark project – sadly no longer existent – came in the form of Miomi. It was an exciting melding of content from different sources to create user generated history that I saw demoed at the Minibar start-up event in Brick Lane in 2007. Miomi allowed the user to zoom in and out of particular years and decades over the last century and a half and see relevant content (eg. from Wikipedia and public digital records) relating to that time, and also location, as well as annotating and adding their own. Unsurprisingly the more contemporary part was already very detailed. I’m doubtful it would have scaled well in terms of moderation and accuracy, but its ambition was refreshing. I’m sure it’s next-gen version is being cooked up somewhere.

So digital permanence was the dish of the day at the RSA. But the opposite view – that digital is an extremely fragile and ephemeral medium for so much of human culture and activity to be engraved and invested in, and that we should make far more effort to selectively and robustly archive it – wasn’t voiced at this event. Paradoxically digital content is both brittle and persistent, transitory and important. There is no black or white answer to seek refuge in.

Finally the context question. In his talk Mayer-Schonberger seemed to side with the view that personal digital content – in the very act of being accessed beyond me and forwards in time – always lacks a contextual ‘je ne sais quoi’. Granted he may say much more than this in the book (I have it on order) but this is where the story both begins and ends.

While I can’t talk with any depth about the brain’s gradually evolved ability to remember and recollect, surely the digital overlay is just a new frontier for the human ability to record and sometimes simultaneously interlace experience with another layer of data?

We’ve done it before. We drew pictures, told stories and wrote books. These things took time to permeate our cultures but they enriched them. In the last century we had social panics about radio, recorded music, film and then television being available to the masses (just as we had panics about women voting and going to work, for instance). More recently, there was somewhat more minor fretting that people listening to walkmans walked this earth as if in a bubble. It’s funny when you look back on it now – because it’s y’know, recorded – and remember…

Now the context is evolving. That’s why creative projects such Britglyph and Open Plaques are intriguing, using the medium as a canvas to help us collectively discover, trace and find new ways to map meaning and think about human activity back and forth in time. This is what Bill Thompson was driving at when he described Britglyph as “a fascinating example of what is possible when you work with the grain of the internet, building something around the things the network makes possible.”

So rather than disgorging personal data to the network, we should always be curating and shaping. That’s the trump card digitally-augmented context – mastered and done well – is bringing to the table.

Are we really so incapable of adapting to and interpreting new contexts that this growing layer of digital information augmenting our lives will render us personally dysfunctional? Or worse still, divided into slaves to “one ring that rules them all” (whether that’s Facebook, Google or your friendly local authorities) on one side, and savvy digital invisibles on the other. Or is this just the messy late-teenage phase of the unfolding web canvas? It seems like it could go either way.

Last words, for now, go to Chris Stein circa 1978.

…watchful lines vibrate soft in brainwave time.
Silver pictures move so slow.
Golden tubes faintly glow.

Electric faces seem to merge.
Hidden voices mock your words.
Fade away and radiate.
Fade away and radiate.

Beams become my dream.
My dream is on the screen.

–

For a reverse panopticon of the event itself   Neil Perkin has provided a good write-up, the event was recorded by the RSA (MP3 download) and Mayer Shoenburg was interviewed by Reuters beforehand.

Apologies and thanks to Stein et al for the title.

Digital identity war: Facebook Connect integrates with Yahoo, Google Friend Connect with Twitter; http://j.mp/8zUBN1

wendell lissimore is represented by red model management. he teamed up with his girlfriend, major model management’s supermodel sessilee lopez, for this shoot. photographed by mark squires, im not sure if this was a simple test shoot or if these images will appear in a publication of sorts. red model management dubs the modelesque duo “the first couple of fashion”. for the modeling industry, representing individuals of color, both wendell & sessilee have broken a number of barriers. sessilee appeared on the cover of the all black italian vogue & is seen everywhere from ad campaigns for the gap to uniqlo & walked for everyone from victoria secret to high end runways in milan, paris & new york. wendell recently landed the hermes catalog & has wrapped his TV show “model city”, which is set to air sometime in 2010 on BET. i think putting them together is an amazing thing, they really represent as individuals in the fashion game & their combined star power & undeniable beauty together are unstoppable.

imagesource | redmodels

An interesting post here on the development of platforms – especially LinkedIn. The drive to tighten the “loose ties” of web 2.0 is interesting and may bring a degree of perspective on the “death of the VLE” debate (see here, for example, and my earlier comments here). There does seem to be a human desire to seek something clear, identifiable and “there” especially in respect of ‘identity’ and where “everything solid melts into air”. In some ways VLE (as a sort of platform) may well last is because they are something identifiable – a corporate brand not just for the supplier/ university but also for the individual student. I am not just an atomised student but rather a student of THIS institution. Similarly, as a professional, identity may come from being in a professional network and so the Personal Learning Network/ Environment is a way of solidifying that (in a digital manner!) – which also moves with the individual (I am an independent professional working for company X but my professional identity is in being part of a professional network which moves with *me*).

A bit rambling but I will try and build on this later (once the workload reduces – a mythical time perhaps!)

Sto facendo le prime prove con la versione beta di Google Wave, questi i miei riferimenti:

shawn is colorfully represented represented by red model management.
shawn is among the most distinct models for his outstanding features.
here he appears in his latest shoot, styled by fredo montes.
photographic credit to britta leuermann.

imagesource | rednyc

Autumn Park Rflection in Sunglasses

Originally uploaded by www.stockforfood.com

I selected this image to capture my discussion about literacy and identity formation in schools. I think it is symbolic of education’s typical responses to these challenging and complex sets of skills. The glasses represent our tendancy to try and block or filter knowledge – especially web sites and digital media – from our students, rather than face head on the more important work of teaching how to find material, assess and evaluate for accuracy and relevance, how to create their own content that is worth sharing, how to create and manage their own identity and personality in a digital learning, work and social space and above all – to do all of this work as citizens of a digitally connected world with class, integrity, honesty and respect for themselves and others. I think that this is the most important and most left-out piece of the literacy and identity puzzle that is not being adequately addressed right now. We are still hung up on learning how to use the tools, rather than how to relate responsibly within the tools.

In Nov 11th’s Globe and Mail there was an article about protecting your digital identity. This is connected with another article/editorial I saw in this same publication last week from one of their columnists who was talking about how someone had created a Twitter account under her name (and it was not her). She came to realize that not only was this account set up, but that she had been tweeting for almost a year and had created quite a following because of her tweets. This made me wonder about this for my own sake- what would I think and what would I do if this had been done to me by a student or worse case scenario, a parent group looking to get rid of a teacher from a school….. it is scary to think what can be posted under the pretense of it being you, by someone who has created accounts in your name. A similar conversation and sense of wondering was brought to a discussion in a session at my convention last week around this same topic in reference to cyber-bullying. Are kids doing this to each other? What kind of pressure is there to establish a digital presence on the many social networking sites out there before someone takes it upon themselves to do it for you?

I also wonder about this in relation to famous people, politicians, etc tweeting and facebooking…. no one really expects that the actual people are sending out these transmissions and no doubt understand that paid communications experts are taking care of this kind of media exposure. And if this is the case, how much of it is genuine and can be trusted and taken seriously? As professionals, is this something we need to be thinking about more carefully? How much do we have to manage, supervise and protect our digital presence so that we are still taken seriously and maintain our dignity and integrity? I am hoping that I can work through this alongside colleagues and students.

I will be making efforts to remove the temptation to shield students and filter what they see and interact with in schools and will be a voice for teaching how to use it properly, as Dean Shareski and Bud the Teacher’s blog post suggest. Doing so will also require clear “big picture” vision knowing that the temptation is there to replace shields and filters with a rosy-tint of idealism – but I am willing to give it a go. Maybe Elton John has a pair suitable for the task?

Well, I’ve been quiet the last week or so but I’ve been busy.  Between spending large chunks of time at ISU to listen to ILS vendors give us sales pitches and demos of their systems, planning for the IOLUG meeting, and probably a dozen other little things that have popped up in the last week, I have not had much time to blog.  But again, that IS the theme of my blog…doing this, that, and the other thing!  So here is a quick wrap up of the Fall 2009 Indiana Online Users Group (IOLUG) Meeting.  The theme was “Hot or Not: Managing Your Digital Identity” it it was held at the Plainfield Public Library.  The morning Keynote was “Yes, You Are Speaking in Public: the Implications of Building a Personal and Professional Online Presence” by Jenica Rogers, Director of libraries at SUNNY, Potsdam.  This was followed by three breakout sessions 1) Online Public Identities: The Unexpected Dangers, by Jenica Rogers; 2) Tips and Tricks – a)New Friend Requests: Managing Personal and Professional Contacts on Facebook, by Jason Fields, b) Search Engine Optimization by Michael Witt, c) The Website with a Face: Digitally Connecting to People Where They Are, by me, Richard Bernier, and c) Virtual Venues and Collaborations:  Strengthening Your Staff and Services Using Facebook by Misti Shaw; 3) Facebook Basics (workshop) by Daniel Nguyen, Bill Helling, Emily Griffin, and Melissa Hostetler.  The afternoon keynote was “Social Library is People: Strategies for Making Your Online Organization More Human, by Toby Greenwalt, Virtual Services Coordinator for the Skokie Public Library.  The three breakout sessions included the Tips and Tricks and Facebook Basics again along with “Putting It All Together: Monitoring and Participating in Your Online Community without Losing Your Mind, by Toby Greenwalt.  The day was capped off with a Panel on Personal Experiences with Digital Identity.  Panelists were Melissa Kiser, Kayla Gregory, Malissa Hostetler, and Lisa Lobdell.

For me, this was the most enjoyable and enlightening IOLUG meeting so far.  It could not have come at a better time since I am currently engrossed in Web 2.0, social networking, and their integration into my libraries operations.  I also have two research projects in the works in this area.  I also enjoyed being a speaker.  It has been a while and I enjoyed it a great deal.  The highlights of the program for me included Jenica Roger’s Keynote, and learning more about the permission controls of Facebook by Jason Fields.  I am now reconsidering my decision to use a second Facebook account for professional uses and I may just make friends with my coworkers after all.  Actually, I will need to do so one way or another if I am going to launch and promote our Library’s Facebook page.  In my next posting, I will discuss the topic I spoke about in further detail.

Our Spring program will be on mobile computing and the integration of library services, or something like that.

ralph is colorfully represented by red model management.
he appears here in this test shoot photographed by william lords.
you’ve seen ralph a few times here before.
a hood look is a good look.

imagesource | redmodels

though not yet officially represented, aaron wright had a recent test shoot with joseph bleu. the images you see here are from that test shoot. when agencies are interested in signing models, they test shoot- depending on the results of that shoot, depending on how well the model photographs from there the model is placed with an agency or will have to continue to seek representation. i like his look, he’s ethnically ambiguous & he shows a sense of innocence &  softness. do you think he has the chops to make it in the big league?

imagesource | josephbleu

i always say that miguel isnt as popular as he should be.
he’s among the most searched male models here amongst readers.
in addition to his elevated search statistics he’s one of my favorites as well.
yet, quality images are either hard to find or far & few between.
he is represented by ford model management.

imagesource | modelhommes

angela lindvall is represented by IMG model management.
she gives you winter essentials via allure magazine’s november issue.
she’s a classic beauty & she never dissapoints – i love model chicks who deliver.
photographic credit to regan cameron.

imagesource | iconic

wendell is colorfully represented by red model management.
these updated digital images have come straight from his agency.
aside from landing the hermès catalog, wendell continues to fill his portfolio.
keep an eye out for him editorially & commercially as well.

imagesource | redmodels

dominique is represented by red model management.
he appears here colorfully wardrober in images shot by jason mickle.
a male model to keep your eye on in the modeling world.

imagesource | redmodels

Who am I? This might sound like an overwhelming philosophical question but as we increasingly tweet, blog, post cringeworthy photos of ourselves online (maybe all of these don’t apply to you!) etc. we are continually having to negotiate questions of identity.

Who do we want seeing that drunken night out? Do we want our employers to know who we associate with? Should we befriend our colleagues on Facebook? Which ‘me’ we share with others in cyberspace is starting to get rather messy, as the boundaries become increasingly blurred over what constitutes ‘real life’.

I know myself that I suffer from an online multiple personality disorder reserving different rules of engagement for different social networking sites. However I have found the more prolific I become with my ‘online’ activities the more difficult it is to disassociate  between these sites and the life I live outside of cyberspace. Hence I thought it about time for my digital identity to come out especially for those who know my alter ego rainycitytales – now you can put 2 and 2 together and hopefully get B.

Putting yourself out there though can come with its pitfalls. What happens to privacy at a time when we are led to believe the net is crawling with cyberstalkers? Despite letting it all hang out with the blogging and the tweeting I still consider myself to be a private person. Although not everything maybe under my control I have choices I can make about what to share. As well as enough digital literacy to set appropriate privacy settings – unfortunately not everyone is as aware and whether the Facebooks, mySpaces, Bebos make things clear enough for the uninitiated is a question for another time.

Despite being cautious about my digital identity, when it comes to social networking, there is a trail of information left about who I am through my Google searches, buying patterns and so on. Should we be concerned about being monitored in this way? After all CCTV and the Tesco Clubcard to name just two examples have been keeping a check on us for sometime now, is this not just the next evolution?

Image c/o margaperez licensed under Creative Commons.

Vascellaro: The reign of eMail is over; http://j.mp/35YAIe vs. Engst: eMail remains the king; http://j.mp/bemf7

garrett is represented by DNA model management.
garrett is one of the few male supermodels in the fashion game.
here he was shot by milan vukmirovic for l’officiel hommes.
i love the blue tones in contrast with his tan.
a wet sweater never looked so chic.

imagesource | yvymag

congratulations to one of the illest black male models in the game, wendell lissimore. represented by red model management, wendell snatched an hermès catalog set shot by nathaniel goldberg. i have posted these images previously but the reformatting of the images with illustrious logo seals the deal. if you arent, get on wendell’s hype- he’s be in the game for a minute & his star is getting deserved recognition. killn you hoes!