Media activists and forward thinker Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, raps on “imaginary cosmopolitanism,” “wisdom of the flock,” and “human curators.” He shows that despite the global nature of networks, most of us still remain within cultural bubbles and there remains little crossover between users of different cultural environments. The solution? We need more DJing.
Networks
17
Jun 10
World Cup and the anthropological object at play
Two different visions for the World Cup
Living in Italy it’s hard to ignore the World Cup. Everyday at the local market people want to know my opinion about the England-USA match-up on June 6. That’s fine by me. I’ve got the bug too.
What I find fascinating is how a single ball can so inspire the collective imagination, which is brilliantly captured in the above Nike ad (the first embedded video). Taking a page from Lost, the ad flashes sideways into alternate realities based on the results of the play. Aesthetically the ad captures the global zeitgeist of the World Cup’s fever dream.
Speaking of balls…
Using the soccer ball as a point of discussion, a section of Piere Levy’s Becoming Virtual explores the “anthropological object,” which highlights the possibility for using the World Cup’s gameplay as a visualization for a larger project: global ecology.
Building on French philosopher Michel Serres‘ work on “quasi-objects,” Levy draws on the image of a soccer match to concretize how collective intelligence can emerge around the movement of an “anthropological object,” the otherwise unspectacular soccer ball. There are different levels of engagement: the stadium and its spectators, who cannot directly act on the ball, but most certainly can charge the energetic field of the gamespace (as the general debate about the vuvuzelas testifies). On the field, there are the players, of course, who directly engage the ball. Then there are those of us with our nervous systems extending into the gamespace via the cameras that capture the action and transmit it through cyberspace, satellite and broadcast.
With the scene set we can see that though the ball is itself an artifact in its own right, once it goes into play it becomes a point of relations, propelling collective intelligence into action. No single player can pick up the ball and puncture it or run away with it. The ball becomes a tool for which we can think with and respond to in relation to other people. In play it is collectively conceived, a fulcrum for a billion people to relate to and with each other.
Now, imagine if that kind of collective action revolved around the most important ball of all: Earth.
Certainly the commercial, creative and civic energies that go into the World Cup are not currently directed towards our blue ball in space. Yet, as Levy wholeheartedly wants to do with this particular thought exercise, we can humanize/eco-ize the virtuality experiment that we as a global society are engaged in. He suggests that cyberspace can be such an object to think with, one that offers the pedagogical potential for engaging us in building intelligent communities. Obviously at this current moment the BPs of the world are firmly entrenched in the political, military and financial matrix of global power, but they are not poised for the necessary intelligent response to what the ecosphere, and humanity, is calling for. The Greenpeace ad (the second embedded video) is a step in this direction.
Of course, unlike a soccer ball, we don’t need to kick Earth around any more. In Levy’s words:
“Technology virtualizes action and organic functions. Yet the tool, the artifact, are not merely efficient things. Technological objects are passed from hand to hand, body to body, like a baton in a relay. They create shared uses, become vectors of knowledge, messengers of collective memory, catalysts of cooperation.” (p.165)
12
Jun 10
Education wants to be free
The Mitochondrial Vertigo blog is one of the few places I’ve found that is focusing attention on the scary takedown of a.aaaarg.org. In case you missed out, a.aaaarg.org was a grassroots file sharing site for academics (formal and informal), so blokes like myself could post PDFs of important chapters for our students to read (and to share with others) without going through the hassle of copyright clearance, which is increasingly a huge DRM finger up the arse. Not surprisingly, it’s megatextbook publisher McMillian/McGraw-Hill–the Monsanto of academics–who took a page from the music industry to shut down this Temporary Autonomous Zone of exchange. Ironically, every bit of technology and science that enables Macmillan/McGraw-Hill to be a scholastic monopoly was probably developed in open learning environments. No doubt Macmillan/McGraw-Hill would like to run the educational Web like its own plantation, despite the free and open access labor at the foundation of its distribution platform.
(Hear Clay Shirky rhapsodize on the Internet’s “cognitive surplus,” the kind of thing that a.aaaarg.org provided for free thinking folks like us.)
Anyhow, there is a larger drama at play, which is about the war of e-readers and who has the right to read what and under what conditions. As Mitochondrial Vertigo argues, we should pay attention to the battle between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad, both of which I find to be rather scary devices when it come to books and copyright. This is part of a bigger war over the future of the Net, which every concerned citizen should get caught up on by reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (you can download the book for free here).
Here’s a choice quote from Mitochondrial Vertigo:
“The minds of the future lie within the Kindle v iPad wars, the habits of our thinking, our cups of coffee, and our licking of the page turning. The nice thing about technology, it always does MORE, it lets not only the cat, but its fleas and its dreams out of the bag. As Macmillan attacks file sharing in order to secure as much leverage as it can in its battle with Kindle and Amazon, the frayed hem edge of our complexity is showing. We must also reflect upon the fact that ‘We demand more content, faster (cheaper)!’ is what is behind many of our complaints when file-sharing is restricted, a demand worth inspecting.”
On this last point (demanding more faster and cheaper), it may be the case we want all our information/entertainment to be free and that has depended on a trade-off to allow ad creep into the vestibules of our lives. The alternative, DRM, makes pimping my eyeballs the better deal. Selling out screenspace to advertising is most certainly a Faustian pact, and it’s naive to assume that everything should be free just because we want it to be that way. On the other hand, as an old school punk, I feel like a barter economy keeps our culture honest. I’m never going to make money on my books anyways. What’s important is performance–what Radiohead and other rock bands have finally figured out as they watched their corporate overlords sue fans to recoup discretionary cocaine funds.
The money thing will have to be worked out, one way or another. Meanwhile, as long as I can show up and teach, and at the end of the day go home to eat a fresh meal and sleep in a warm bed, I’m happy. But for that we need public education–another seemingly lost cause these days. Quite honestly, my own profession is collapsing like all others, and it’s hard for me to foresee who will pay for education when growing food will increasingly become a priority. As a brown thumb, I wonder if being an intellectual will be relevant in the future. I can only hope.
4
Jun 10
Empathic media
Call it TED meets Story of Stuff.
The above clip contradicts a bit my previous missive about the Net. Indeed, this clip represents all that is good about the Internet: it combines sharable oral communication with visual storytelling and the intellectual rigor of print. In this most excellent visualization of Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’s adds to its excellent series of Web-illustrated talks (follow this link to see other like-minded illustrated talks). Yummy.
25
Apr 10
Open vs. closed text
Steven Johnson does a good job of simplifying complex theory. Here he makes a nice connection between biological and text ecosystems:
stevenberlinjohnson.com: The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book:
“Ecologists talk about the ‘productivity’ of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system…. The overall increase in textual productivity may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth over the past fifteen years.”
He then goes onto demonstrate how on the iPad you cannot copy or paste text, even from texts that are in the public domain!
“… we have two potential futures ahead of us, where digital text is concerned, or that the future is going to involve a battle between two contradictory impulses. We can try to put a protective layer of glass [over] the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don’t want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad’s beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.”
He concludes by stating that, “The reason the web works as wonderfully as it does is because the medium leads us, sometimes against our will, into common places, not glass boxes. It’s our job—as journalists, as educators, as publishers, as software developers, and maybe most importantly, as readers—to keep those connections alive.”
If you enjoyed reading about Johnson’s argument here, then you are seeing his point in action. In a closed system, it would be far more difficult to share his words, and we would be worse for it.
7
Feb 10
Searching for a (novel) climate solution
How’s this for media ecology: Ecosia is a green search engine that restores rain forests. Watch the above video to see how. According to them, if 1% of Internet users search on Ecosia, an area of rainforest the size of Switzerland will be saved every year. On the surface this seems like a preposterous solution (that is, pretend that something more drastic is not necessary). Yet, why not? I’ll give it a try.
For more background, read this.
11
Jan 10
Everything open and free
I just came across this excellent mind map of the “all things open and free” from Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation. Truly amazing.
1
Jun 09
DIY tribes
This Seth Godin TED video has been making the Internet rounds, but it took me a while to view it. I’m sure glad I did, because he simplifies the process for changing the world. His inspirational talk reminds me of the old punk dictum: here’s a chord, here’s another, now go start your own band. Godin would say, here’s how tribes are formed around innovative ideas, now go start your own revolution. Please do!
30
Apr 09
Google’s anti-trust
Google’s ethic is, “don’t be evil.” Well, some feel that its book archiving project threatens to monopolize and control access to a vast digital library of out of print books, thereby changing preexisting copyright law. Democracy Now! reports.
28
Apr 09
Inside Google’s brain
The nuts and bolts of searching. Kind of reminds me of the Matrix, but less sexy.
16
Apr 09
In praise of pancake people!
Don’t get me wrong, I think Nicholas Carr is doing us a great service by raising the alarm of how the Internet is ruining our minds. I don’t agree with him 100%, though, and the quote below from a recent interview explains why. The lament is that we cannot contain civilization in our heads anymore. This is a complaint of a book culture that privileges information over relationships. In a book world, ideas are self-contained objects, and we are isolated individuals, which correlates directly with our disconnection with nature.
Instead, we are networks and processes coming into being. Even one of the latest management books from Harvard Business School acknowledges that our minds are open loops. That is, we synchronize via emotional intelligence with other people in the same way that groups of women who live together start having their periods simultaneously. I don’t want to have the whole of civilization contained within me– if that’s the case I would probably nuke myself. The problem with me is that I have civilization as my reality filter, and it often makes me a sad, lonely person. To paraphrase Gandhi, when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “It would be a good idea!”
The Sun Magazine | Computing The Cost:
Cooper: You’ve quoted Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, who says we are turning into “pancake people.”
Carr: We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Foreman suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people,” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.
16
Apr 09
Twittering danger
Twitter is the fad of the day, so we’re bombarded with news of twitter, making me increasingly numb to it as an interesting story. But what if news on twitter has an equally numbing psychological impact?
Scientists warn of Twitter dangers – CNN.com:
(CNN) — Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.
New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s “moral compass” to process and could harm young people’s emotional development.
Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern California study.
And then, how do you weather a twitter shitsorm?
How to Weather a Twitterstorm – Advertising Age – Digital:
“Credibility is the currency of the ‘new normal,’” said Steve Cody, managing partner and co-founder of Peppercom. “Tell me what happened yourself. Don’t allow me to hear it from others. If I do, I’ll lose my faith and trust in you. And, in an era when faith and trust has been tested to the breaking points, brands like Amazon and Domino’s need to be a whole lot smarter and a whole lot swifter.”
Here, six tips for if — or when — it happens to your brand.
26
Feb 09
Candy is not community: more marketing anthropology
This slide show is definitely worth giving this presentation a whirl (press the green button to hear the narrative). It’s interesting how marketers and media theorists read the same books, but the difference is what people do with the information. In this presentation by John V Willshire at PHD Media, he breaks down the major media revolutions described in Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, but comes up with some bizarre (but not surprising) conclusions.
For example, I don’t agree with Willshire’s definition of community. It is very mechanistic. Communities are not just people who communicate with each other, they are people who have shared meaning and symbols. Talking about a product is not shared meaning. However, I do think there are some good ideas here, particularly about attracting people through engagement and giving them something useful (for free) as a way of drawing people into the kind of services you offer. I just hope it is something more meaningful than a candy bar.
15
Jan 09
The three Cs
A short history of marketing from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.
There is something a little ironic about this video. On the one hand it paints a pretty good picture of the transition from one to many to many to many media, and how that has created a problem for advertisers. But it implicitly assumes that people care about little more than brands, despite the admission that consumers are increasingly skeptical. This is all by way of making an important point that systems theorist Ervin Laszlo makes in Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, in which he argues that the previous historical epic was dominated by three Cs:
Conquest, colonization and Consumption.
Advertising, PR and propaganda were the necessary tools to facilitate policy and technology for those goals. We are now shifting into a new set of Cs:
Connection, communication and consciousness.
I think this is the complaint and challenge of the videomaker, without being conscious of the real choice, which is about intention, not products. If we stick to the old model the human species will become extinct fairly soon.
14
Jan 09
FYI: Google’s carbon footprint
Googling Is Not the (Environmental) Problem | Wired Science from Wired.com:
As for the carbon footprint, Google says each search is only responsible for 0.2 grams of CO2, not the 7 grams that the Harvard researcher claims, but the dispute misses the larger point. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are estimated at 16.9 billion kilograms of CO2-equivalent per day. Again assuming 5 billion daily searches, Google would be responsible for either 0.2 or 0.006 percent of the nation’s carbon footprint, depending on whose number you choose.
When it comes the world’s energy system, Google is not the problem. They are, however, embedded in the energy-intensive infrastructure that we’ve been building ever since we figured out how to tap the earth’s fossil fuel resources.
10
Jan 09
Converging Jenkins
An entertaining mash-up of Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture. If you haven’t read the book, I suggest you do as Capitão Nascimento says, or else!
Thanks Peter!
27
Dec 08
Stupid human tricks
It’s that time of year for lists. Here’s a link to Feed’s Top 10 Viral Video Ads of 2008.
Two questions:
1) Can you guess the magic formula to make your video viral? Hint: see this post’s header.
2) Can you guess which ones are selling a product?
7
Dec 08
Downloading the public domain
James Boyle has a written an important book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, which you can also download for free from his site. He has the following intriguing proposition:
In the tradition of the environmental movement, which first invented and then sought to protect something called “the environment,” Boyle hopes that we can first understand and then protect the public domain – the ecological center of the “information environment.”
I’m in the process of trying to link network media practices with the environment. In other words, is there an ecological architecture behind new media practices that can be made more evident in order to encourage new business practices? Part of which means open systems and sharing. As the following snip from his Website attests, Boyle believes you can give something away and sell it simultaneously. True enough. I often prefer a book as opposed to a PDF, so usually after reviewing a PDF of a book, and I like it, I’ll buy it. Also, as a college professor (wow, it sounds weird saying that), I find copyright restrictions an unbearably difficult barrier for exposing students to a lot of material that, if forced to make them buy, I usually won’t, especially considering the onerous pricing of textbooks.
You might wonder why I didn’t go this route with my own book. It was my sincere desire to publish with a the Creative Commons license, but the publisher didn’t understand the concept (it was hard enough to get the copyright in my name as opposed to the publisher). In the future, I hope to publish using Creative Commons. Boyle argues the benefits below.
Questions from Authors.. | The Public Domain |:
[For] an academic who wants to write a book that isn’t directly aimed at the mass market, (The Particle Physics Diet, How to Use the Secrets of Behavioral Economics to Improve your Golf Game, Secret Dating Strategies of Accountants etc.) but which has substantial potential reach in lots of different types of audience — academic and lay — the CC license might well be the best strategy in terms of sales. There the key thing is reaching your potential readers when you don’t know exactly who or where they are. And free (potentially viral) distribution does that extremely well. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is a nice example of this phenomenon. It turns out that many more people than one would imagine are fascinated by the economic characteristics of networks, peer production and so on.
