Kaja J. Fietkiewicz

Informational Urbanism. A Conceptual Framework of Smart Cities

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “digital cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities,” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and (tacit as well as explicit) knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” (or “smart city” in a broader sense) is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of informationrelated city research. Informational urbanism is an interdisciplinary endeavor incorporating on the one side computer science and information science as well as on the other side urban studies, city planning, architecture, city economics, and city sociology. In this article, we present both, a conceptual framework for research on smart cities as well as results from our empirical studies on smart cities all over the world. The framework consists of seven building blocks, namely information and knowledge related infrastructures, economy, politics (e-governance) and administration (e-government), spaces (spaces of flows and spaces of places), location factors, the people’s information behavior, and problem areas.

Development of Informational Cities in Japan: A Regional Comparison

This article presents the concept of Informational City-the city of 21st century with its highly developed digital, knowledge or creative infrastructures as well as other important aspects contributing to its informativeness. The authors have selected four Japanese cities as the best candidates for (emerging) Informational Cities and investigated data referring to them in order to determine if they indeed can be labelled as Informational Cities. The authors compared the four cities-Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto, and made a ranking of them in regard to their level of informativeness.

Law Infringements in Social Live Streaming Services

Over the past few years, the popularity of Social Live Streaming Services (SLSSs) like Periscope, Ustream, or YouNow, has been on the rise. The services offer their users the opportunity to interact with the viewers in real time while broadcasting themselves. With this kind of human-computer interaction legal dangers are a possibility. We performed an empirical investigation on law infringements on YouNow, Periscope, and Ustream. To this end, a content analysis of live-streams was applied. We developed a codebook based on literature regarding the usage of social media and on the conducted observations of streams. Based upon the most restrictive law (German law), researchers defined categories on potential law infringements while using SLSSs which were the following: copyright violations regarding music, video and picture, violation of personality rights with an additional focus on data protection and insults, committed road traffic acts, the violations of the sports broadcasting rights, as well as violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. In a time span of four weeks we observed 7,621 streams from SLSSs in Japan, Germany, and the U.S. We further examined if there are differences regarding law infringements between age groups, genders, motivations, contents, countries, and platforms.

Cityness and Informativeness of the Emerging Informational Cities in Japan

Abstract Based on the concept of Informational Cities, which are the highly developed prototypical cities of the 21st century, we conducted a regional comparison of four Japanese cities in terms of their “cityness” and “informativeness”. The purpose of our articles is to specify the theoretical framework for measuring the informativeness and cityness level of any desired city, to quantify the chosen indicators in order to compare the investigated cities, and finally, to conclude what is their advancement level in terms of a modern city of the knowledge society. Our methodology is based on a new approach to measure the position of a city in a national or a global scale, originating from information science and its indicators of the knowledge society. It includes such procedures as desktop research and bibliometrics, ethnographic field study, or grounded theory method. The investigated aspects under the notion of the informativeness level are the distinct labour market and mix of companies located in the city (concerned with creative, knowledge and information economy), as well as the progressive e-governance and advanced e-government. The notion of cityness level oscillates around the concept of space of flows in the city, including the flow of money, power, information, and human capital. In order to make our model practical and grounded on available evidence, we have chosen four Japanese cities to undergo the process. Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto are big and economically significant Japanese metropolises. However, our results show that they differ from each other regarding many important aspects. We were able to quantify their performances and create a ranking. The limitation of our approach appears to be the strict quantification method that makes the cityness and informativeness levels of the cities dependent on other cities’ performances, and that does not precisely reflect the actual dimension of the differences between them. Hence, in the future work we will develop a more flexible and independent approach, enabling us to make more accurate statements on cities’ advancement unregarded the advancement level of the other metropolises.

Students and Graduates

Students and especially graduates make up the workforce of tomorrow. Since Qatar is still in the early stages of its major transition which will go on for some or many more years, the current student body will play a major role in establishing a knowledge society. In Qatar, there are differences between Qatari and expatriate students, female and male students and also between public and private universities.

Evaluating Infrastructures of the 21 st Century City: Informational Cities in Japan as Case Studies

There are many theories and concepts aiming at describing and measuring the modern cities in the 21 st century: digital city, smart city, creative city, knowledge city or global city–each of them with different infrastructure and diverse components. In the present case we combine all these aspects, quantify and measure them under the concept of the informational city. We are using methods of the information science approach on urban studies, including the ethnographic field study, grounded theory method and further research-based proceedings. While looking for informational cities we evaluate as case studies the advancement of four Japanese cities in regard to various aspects and conclude which of them mostly conforms to the expectations of the 21 st century city.

Dreaming of Stardom and Money: Micro-celebrities and Influencers on Live Streaming Services

Social live streaming services (SLSSs) are social media, which combine Live-TV with elements of Social Networking Services (SNSs). In social media and thus also in SLSSs, the so-called influencer and micro-celebrities play an important role, but to what extend are SLSSs’ streamers motivated by fame or financial gain? We conducted a content analysis in order to investigate SLSSs’ streamers (n = 7,667) on Periscope, Ustream and YouNow in respect to their general characteristics and streaming motivation being fame and financial gain. We have developed a research model referring to the platform used by the streamers, their gender, origin, age and streamed content (general characteristics), as well as the motivational aspects. Streamers of Ustream are mostly motivated by financial gain, whereas YouNow broadcasters seek to be famous. Considering the streamers age, older generations (Gen X, Silver Surfers) aspire after financial gain. With progressing age the motivation to become a star decreases. Mostly streamed content by streamers motivated by money is entertainment media. For streamers wanting to become a star chatting and making music are the preferred content categories.

Investigating the Generation- and Gender-Dependent Differences in Social Media Use: A Cross-Cultural Study in Germany, Poland and South Africa

In social media research, there is an ongoing debate about whether and how much cultural and geographical differences impact social media interaction. There has not been reached a consensus yet, which is why we apply an extensive statistic model based on a unique and large dataset of German, Polish, and South African social media users. We aim to answer the following questions: How do different generation use social media? Are there any gender-dependent differences? How do these differences vary between three different countries?

Privacy Protecting Fitness Trackers: An Oxymoron or Soon to Be Reality?

The rapid technological advancements are supposed to simplify our everyday life. They are also increasingly utilized to support an active lifestyle with diverse tracking devices, like fitness trackers or smart watches. However, they do not seem to make the life of legislators and data privacy advocates easier. In contrary, with better and faster technology our (health-related) private data faces more and more threats. To better understand the current status of the intersecting domains of devices like fitness trackers and the data privacy, we have analyzed the development of general data privacy regulations in the EU as well as the data transfer modalities between EU and USA. Afterwards, we reviewed scientific publications on fitness trackers (or smart watches) and data privacy, in order to identify, whether there is interest in this topic among scholars and if so, which aspects do they investigate in particular.

Diversification of Knowledge-Based Industries and Foreign Investment

The state of Qatar is in the minds of the people a wealth country that is able to rely on its oil and gas reserves. Because the reserves shrink little by little, the country faces the task of disengaging from this dependence in the nearest future. First steps were made by developing the tourism and MICE sector in a quite successful way. However, it is still a long way and a huge challenge for the country. The time will tell if they meet this challenge or if they decide for another option: the investment in foreign projects or companies.