Futuresonic festival Manchester

The Futuresonic festival in Manchester in a couple of weeks, looks really interesting and relevant to my current reserach and work. I'm trying to book tickets for the two day technology conference
Futuresonic
Below is the theme for this year festival

Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. Some technologies are more social than others. Social technologies are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can include technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools.

At the same time we see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ. Additionally, 'online communities' are based upon an artificial equivalence between 'users' which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership.

This runs much deeper than online social networking websites alone. When you use your credit card, you are using a social technology. Each time we buy something we let the company know where we are and what we are buying. An electronic profile is created for each one of us and the aggregated information is used to shape services and select the products on the shelves. This in turn shapes the choices available to us, and the society we live in.

The city is also being transformed. In one moment we can be sat on a bench, logged on to a wireless node in the park, and roaming through the virtual space of the internet, chatting intimately to people many thousands of miles away. The nature of the public sphere, as a place where people can congregate and meet, is changing. We need to conceive of new kinds of architecture, where a fleeting experience of city space is entangled with the folksonomies of the web.

Futuresonic plans to pull out the plug in order to take the new social spaces apart, see how they work, and put them together in new ways. It will explore the seam between open source culture and the public sphere in the city, and in a return to the pioneering early days of the internet, people will be able to build their own spaces to meet, hang out and chat.

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