Jeremy Rifkin is a monster– I don’t mean that in a bad way. He’s a monstrously prolific author and is on our side. I’ve relied on several of his books in the past, and I certainly look forward to reading his new tome, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. I’ve pasted a snip below, but do yourself a favor and read the whole article, which is a summary of the book’s thesis. It strikes me as a bit Utopian, so I’ll need to read more closely his assumptions when the book comes out. But frankly, I’m in need of some Utopian thought right now. Something about the tone and outlook of the piece feels right.

The book’s Website has an online reader that will let you read the whole book.

Jeremy Rifkin: ‘The Empathic Civilization’: Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era:

“Whether in fact we will begin to empathize as a species will depend on how we use the new distributed communication medium. While distributed communications technologies-and, soon, distributed renewable energies – are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. We talk breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What’s sorely missing is an overarching reason that billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end? The only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial exchange and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded in a globalized society. The idea of even billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying purpose, seems a colossal waste of human energy. More important, making global connections without any real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness. But what if our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?”

I just came across this excellent mind map of the “all things open and free” from Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation. Truly amazing.

Via collectivate.net.

In my other life I’m a part-time DIY philosopher. So what follows is a short piece I wrote for Reality Sandwich (based on an earlier one I did for Blog Action Day- see video above) that deals with how think about poverty.

Reality Sandwich | Poverty (Un)Consciousness:

Sufficiency is a spiritual issue. Like the ideology of the capitalist system, are we always aspiring to a better, utopian future rather than being grateful for what we have? This is a core issues for well-being. I once participated in a “prosperity group,” which was a weekly gathering of friends (mostly folks from my yoga class) who wanted to read a “channeled” book, Creating Money, and to do the exercises together (it’s a great book, BTW). I realized rather quickly that most people in the group would never transcend their state of “poverty,” because they were spiritually impoverished. That is, they believed that their lives lacked sufficiency in that moment, and would always be trapped on the treadmill of negative thinking about their present state of being. I don’t mean this in “The Secret” kind of way in which positive thinking is your answer to wealth, but in the sense that we are constantly projecting into the world like a waking dream the innermost challenges at the core of our being. We constantly seek healing, and sometimes we externalize from our inner depths that which cannot be articulated by the egocentric mind.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Such is the lament of the bookish mind as it faces annihilation from the Internet.

Restating my mantra, media constantly go to war with other. They constantly compete for the center of attention by moving in and out of the periphery to the center and back again as new technology changes how we consume and share information. Often the winner incorporates/repurposes/remediates elements of the old into the new (the Internet, for example, uses text, and newspapers use more images, color and article summaries for Web influenced info snackers).

So as the Internet is pushing books to the edge of the mediacological ecosystem, book people are fighting back. The most prominent pugilist recently entering the fray is The Atlantic’s Nicholas Carr, whose article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, revises the persistent argument that new digital media are dumbing us down. The thing I don’t like about this argument is that it assumes there are good kinds of aptitude and bad kinds, the classic-book-deep-thinking being a good kind of intelligence, and the being-in-the-moment of net surfing is bad. We need both.

Carr’s article is actually quite good and outlines how knowledge work is an extensions of Taylorism and the systematizing of work and thinking. Where I fault the piece is how it focuses too much on loss, and not enough on gain. Some of the major benefits of the information economy, which MIT new media guru Henry Jenkins refers to as Convergence Culture, are described by the following characteristics (BTW, I go into this in more detail in my book, Mediacology, ch. 8, “Media Lit’s Mediacological Niche”):

• collective intelligence,
• affective economics,
• transmedia storytelling, and
• participatory culture.

Consequently, Jenkins believes that in order to be fully engaged participants of convergence culture, students (and teachers) need to develop skills that allow for

the ability to pool knowledge with others in a collaborative enterprise (as in Survivor spoiling), the ability to share and compare value systems by evaluating ethical dramas (as occurs in the gossip surrounding reality television), the ability to make connections across scattered pieces of information (as occurs when we consume The Matrix, 1999, or Pokemon, 1998), the ability to express your interpretations and feelings toward popular fictions through your own folk culture (as occurs in Star Wars fan cinema), and the ability to circulate what you create via the Internet so that it can be shared with others (again as in fan cinema) (p. 176).

There is nothing stupid about these kinds of skills. Thus, I think the argument that the Internet makes one more shallow often ignores the other aspects of emerging cultural practices that are greatly needed and are deep in their own way. In particular, I find these latter skills necessary to develop strategies for sustainability, just as much as those cultivated by the isolated mind of the solitary book reader.

Still, I have to admit. I was depressed after reading the article because I felt that there really is too much to do, read, search, and write. The Internet compounds that. Upon reflection I thought some meditation would do the trick, because what I really needed was to clear my mind of books and the Internet. As Skype tells us, just breath.

An exciting new documentary project that highlights an emergent global culture and its core values for change. You can get involved by visiting the site and sharing the video.

Annie Leonard’s brilliant deconstruction of our life with stuff. From extraction to the dump, this is probably the clearest and most concise breakdown of the world that was created for us. It includes an amazing analysis of how media play such a crucial role in the global linear system of production and waste. The animation stresses the importance of reinforcing nonlinear ways of perceiving our relationship with the world. In other words, in order to grasp the importance of the kind of system Annie discusses, we need to learn how to think in a more circular fashion.

You can view the whole thing here, and please spread the word. This is paradigm shattering brilliant.

Technorati Tags: Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff

Thanks Spiro!

I’ve been reading Everything is Miscellaneous, which is a great primer on how all the crazy categorization schemes that we see as natural (alphabetic, numeric), are not only contrived, but are falling apart because of information technology. So I was interested to come across this interview with Prelinger Library librarian Nancy Pearl. Rick Prelinger’s collection is at the root of the Internet Archive, a great “resource of human knowledge,” i.e. copyright free images, movies, lectures, software and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Creating the 21st Century Library — In These Times:

How do you think the digitization of books should effect how libraries manage their print collections?

In the library and document preservation worlds, there exists a concern that the growth of the digital environment will result in the end of print, and that books and newspapers need to be rescued from the digital future. I don’t believe that. Books as artifacts will always have value apart from their digital counterparts.

Yes, the online environment obviously offers mass dispersal into the world and that’s not possible in a print library environment. But part of our library project is about collapsing the polarization between print and digital, and looking toward a third way where a library can be a hybrid analog-digital space. Books are both retained and valued, and where a digital collection exists, maybe it allows more freedom with what the analog collection can do, because you can always do a keyword search of the digital collection. Maybe the benefits of one liberate the other.