ShiftSpace

While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web is undergoing a transformation whose promise is user empowerment—but who controls the terms of this new read/write web? The web has followed the physical movement of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall.ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.


By pressing the [Shift] + [Space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions – which we call Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools we’re working to develop – which we call Spaces. Some are utilitarian (like Notes) and some are more experimental / interventionist (like ImageSwap and SourceShift). In the near future users will be invited to map these shifts into Trails. These trails can be used for collaborative research, for curating netart exhibitions or as a platform to facilitate a context-based public debate.

More at www.shiftspace.org/what-is-shiftspace

Border Conflict – a personal statement by Mushon Zer-Aviv

To grow up in Israel means to be always aware of borders. There were national borders, which changed often, and defined where you could and where you could not go. Within Israel there were borders between communities—religious and secular, North African and Eastern European, Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, rich and poor. I have had to be aware from birth of those visible and invisible lines that separate us one from the other. Everyone had to learn this: to be safe, you must be aware of borders and stay within them. To go beyond, to not be mindful of them, is dangerous. I learned the lesson of course, but it seemed to me like there had to be a better way to live.

That may explain why I was so drawn to the Internet. It appeared to me to be a place without borders. A world where I could explore freely, meet people who were not in my specific geographic or cultural communities, and express myself without being labeled in advance. It seemed to put into practice one of the greatest lessons of the Jewish diaspora… how to stay together culturally while separated physically. In some ways, I believe, the Jewish Diaspora was the first example of a post-national society. This model failed with both the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. I hoped for the web to provide a more successful model.

In Israel I was a graphic designer and focused on web design. I grew optimistic about the possibility of a world in which there was wider understanding, dialog, cultural curiosity and openness. It may have been naive, but I was inspired and worked to bring others to this vision of a kind of utopia of information and understanding through the web.
Perhaps because of my lifelong conditioning, the more I work on the web, the more aware I become of the borders—often invisible, often subtle—that exist online. And the more I am drawn to cross them. Again it seems to me like there has got to be a better way.

I am very influenced by the Situationist movement. Like me they were constantly aware of invisible borders, but this awareness was not meant to keep the borders, but to expose, cross and break them. The concept of Dérive as described by Guy Debord is a critical method to decipher the social and political constraints of urban space. It is the principal method for exploration of our own ‘psychogeography' - how our urban environment affects our self-perception. Today we live not only in geographical space, but also in information spaces that define our self perception.

I am interested in extending the idea of the dérive to explore the geography of information. Critical exploration can reveal the true nature of our information spaces and allow us to question their design. With my work I attempt to encourage people to challenge and renegotiate the borders of information and to challenge the way they shape our world.

ShiftSpace is not the first meta-web application. Third Voice was an early attempt to allow site-specific annotations, but it was not open source and allowed only one form of modification. The company went out of business in 2001. Greasemonkey is a plug-in environment that allows hackers to inject code into websites, but it is not user friendly and does not have a social network of users or an aggregation interface. ShiftSpace uses Greasemonkey's architecture (as the underlying platform) and adds on it to create a compelling meta-web platform.

Theory Books & Essays:
Jürgen Habermas, 'The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article'
Stuart Hall, 'Encoding/decoding'
Vannevar Bush, 'As We May Think'
Guy Debbord, 'Society of the Spectacle'
Lasn Kalle, 'Culture Jam'
Adam Curtis, 'Century of the Self' [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151]


Net Art Inspiration:
Mark Napier, 'Shredder' & 'Riot' [potatoland.com]
Christophe Bruno, 'The Google Adwords Happening' [www.iterature.com/adwords]
Michael Mandiberg, 'Oil Standards' [turbulence.org/Works/oilstandard]

Community building and Social Software Inspiration/Research:
Upgrade International [www.theUpgrade.net]
Hoodwink'd [hoodwinkd.hobix.com]
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]


Technology Inspiration/Research:
Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox [greasemonkey.mozdev.org]
Third Voice [discontinued pioneering metaweb application]
Book Burro plugin for Firefox [bookburro.org]
Google News [news.google.com]
The Freehaven Project - P2P technology [www.freehaven.net]

social software users, students, professors, developers, hachers, activists, artists, poets...

Dan Phiffer and I are developing ShiftSpace, a plug-in for the Firefox browser. When a webpage is requested by the browser, ShiftSpace manipulates the code of the page to allow special applications to work within it. These applications for ShiftSpace are called Spaces and the bits of content generated by its users are called Shifts.

One such Space is Notes which allows ShiftSpace users to leave annotations on websites that resemble post-it notes. Another Space is ImageSwap which allows users to grab any image on the web and swap it in place of any another image.

When a user gets to a modified ('Shifted') webpage, the small ShiftSpace icon (§) pops up in the bottom left side of the screen to let the user know that there are Shifts on the page. The user can then press the keyboard keys + to launch the ShiftSpace console.

The console allows the user to browse through the Shifts (modifications) and to use any installed Space (tool) to create her own Shifts. A social networking system built into the console will allow the user to define ShiftSpace friends and choose to see Shifts in four ways: her own authored shifts, her friends Shifts, her friends' friends Shifts, and those of the rest of the user community. The system allows users to rate Shifts, giving them a 'Shift-Up' (good) or 'Shift-Down' (bad), or if necessary flagging them as Spam.

Other spaces under development are: Write Between The Lines—a tool for doing just that Collabrowsers—turns every webpage into a chat room, Netraset—a tool to create graphic collages over websites and several new approaches to interactive storytelling—that use the site specific legacy of performance and public art.

ShiftSpace is a Firefox plug-in built on the architecture of the Greasemonkey plug-in and based extensively on Javascript. The back-end is build in PHP.