Spark

As the pandemic continues to keep a lot of us at home, today we look at access and technology: Social access to each other as we physically isolate. Access to the devices and data that keep us connected.

And securing access to the internet when networks are under strain. Even in your own home, with people working and learning remotely

It's easy to see why we often think of the internet as something intangible. We talk about being 'virtual' and storing things in the cloud.

It's not until something goes wrong that we're reminded the internet actually does have a physical form: routers, cables, wires.

Now that we're in the midst of a global pandemic, how much of a strain is there on that infrastructure? What can we do to keep the internet working well? How can we ensure that everyone who needs access gets it?

+ Mark Wolff is the CTO of CANARIE, which maintains the network that connects Canada's academic and scientific research institutions. He talks about how internet infrastructure is faring under the load presented by the pandemic.

+ Laura Tribe is the executive director of OpenMedia, an organization that advocates for internet freedom. She says the current public health crisis is bringing the digital divide in the country to the forefront. She shares some advice on how to make the most of unlimited internet access in one's household and community now, and what needs to be done to make the internet a basic service in the future.

+ Aimée Morrison researches how people represent themselves online. She explores the delightful, complicated, troubling, and goofy ways we're responding online to physical distance.

This week, Spark is coming to you from five different locations across Toronto, none of which is the CBC building!

Like many people all over the world this week, we're working from home.

Remote work is something we've talked about a lot on Spark over the past decade, but we've never done anything like this!

We recognize that many people aren't able to work remotely, and we'll be addressing that too. But for people who can—and should—be working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're going to explore the best ways to do this, using current technology.

+ Natalie Nagele is the co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, a Philadelphia-based software company, whose employees have been working remotely for 20 years, and which recently switched to a four-day workweek. Natalie explains how this works for Wildbit, and what other managers can learn from her experience.

+ Shawn D. Long, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Communication at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, U.S. He's an expert in organizational communications, and he's studied how office politics plays out in virtual offices.

In an age of digital devices and near constant distractions, many of us feel like our attention spans are shrinking. The good news is: we can get our power of concentration back. So this week on Spark, a handbook on how to concentrate in a distracting world.

+ Stefan Van der Stigchel is a cognitive psychologist and author of Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction. He says that there's no reason to believe our ability to concentrate is being permanently eroded by digital distraction, but concentration is like a muscle you have to work to maintain.

+ As we age we find it more difficult to concentrate. Tarek Amer and fellow researchers found a possible upside: being scattered may help in creative thought. Tarek is also researching whether we can use older folks' distractibility as a way to deliver helpful reminders.Tarek is a Canadian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University.

+ Michael Shammas, a lawyer in New York who decided to unplug his headphones for a week. After spending years tethered to his phone while working at a corporate law firm, Michael decided he needed to shake things up. So he abandoned the comfort of his audio bubble, to see what he could learn by reconnecting with his inner monologue.

For many of us—even without it being much of a conscious choice—buying music has been replaced by subscribing to a music streaming service.

Here in Canada, streaming numbers have long overtaken physical or digital album sales. One study reported over 75 billion streams in 2019, a 30 percent increase from the year before.

Compare that to sales, which have dropped by 25 per cent in the same time period.

As record stores close, streaming platforms continue to crop up. Spotify, Apple Music, CBC Listen, YouTube Music, Tidal - and that's just in North America!

Their offers keep expanding too: just last month, Spotify launched a separate app just for kid-friendly songs.

And it's not just that it's changed how we access music. Listening is becoming more about singles and playlists geared to moods and activities. An endless stream of music, you might say.

Major music events like the Junos usually boost the streaming numbers and sales for winning artists. So with the 2020 Juno Awards coming up on March 15th, we are looking into what we gain and lose when streaming music. And how is that changing the music that we listen to?

+ Liz Pelly is a writer covering music, culture and streaming, and a contributing editor, columnist and event producer at Baffler Magazine. She's also an adjunct instructor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

+ Gary Sinclair, Lecturer in Marketing at Dublin City University, who's studied how our changing habits around music listening affect our sense of music ownership.

+ Miranda Mulholland, musician and owner of Roaring Girl Records, and a musicians' rights advocate. Her album, By Appointment or Chance, is nominated for a JUNO this year in the Traditional Roots Album of the Year category

What if there was an alternative to buildings made from concrete, steel and glass? Many of those materials—especially concrete—are very energy intensive to produce. This week on Spark, we look at some of the ways architects are trying to incorporate living materials into building construction, or create spaces that seem alive in the sense that they interact with us in a fundamental way. Could our future homes be living things?

+ Phil Ayres is an architect in Copenhagen, and he's working with mycelium, the fibrous network that supports mushrooms and other fungi—and is, as it turns out, a great building material!

+ Philip Beesley is a Toronto architect and sculptor who leads the Living Architecture Systems Group, which explores—and pushes—the boundaries of interactive spaces, using both biological and fabricated material.

We've seen an incredible change in the architecture of the internet. Not just how it operates, but how we operate within it.

Think back to the days when YouTube was new, only a handful of people knew what Facebook was, and cell phones were for making phone calls!

Early adopters were making podcasts and writing blogs. Wikipedia was an exciting experiment. The old gatekeepers of media were crumbling and the web seemed open to everyone.

Today, however, we largely experience the internet through apps, ads and proprietary platforms.

There's the decline of the open source software movement, the possibility of a fragmented internet, and the growing popularity of small, closed networks.

But, is it really case-closed on the open web? And if so, why should we care?

+ David Weinberger is a researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He's also the author of, most recently, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility.

+ Takara Small is the technology columnist for CBC Toronto's morning show, Metro Morning. She's also the founder of VentureKids Canada, and host of the Globe and Mail's tech podcast, I'll Go First.

Google Maps. It's turning 15. Fifteen! We're looking back at some of the many stories about maps we've covered on past seasons of Spark.

We'll look back at maps for smells, maps for noises, and even how some people are using Google Street View for birding!

Polarization and social-media filter bubbles are destroying our shared sense of reality. Does this mean society is headed toward a state of psychosis?

After years of Netflix and YouTube dominating streaming video, a raft of new services is arriving, yours for the price of a subscription. What does this mean for the future of how we watch? That, plus exploring the surprising role the pornography industry has played in the technology of streaming.Spark host Nora Young speaks with Patrick Keilty, a professor and archives director of the Sexual Representation Collection in the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto; Ed Finn, the Director of the Centre for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University; Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst with Frost and Sullivan, and JP Larocque, a TV writer and journalist.

If we've learned anything in the tech world over the last decade, it's the folly of not taking the long view. So the start of a new decade seems like a good time to talk "big picture" with Lord Martin Rees, one of the world's most prominent scientists. His most recent book is called "On the Future: Prospects for Humanity." In a full-episode interview, Sir Martin and Nora don't just look decades ahead, but also millions of years into human future.