Author, consultant, and acknowledged thought leader focused on social media and the Internet, technology and technoculture, sustainability and "bright green" environmental action.
Automatic Update is a MOMA exhibition featuring late dotcom-era media art.
By the year 2000, this quasi-revolutionary aura had dissipated and media art had settled into the mainstream. Automatic Update features several installations from this later period. They are mature works that ease the somber mood of the times with entertaining presentations. Nevertheless, their humor does not soften their biting commentary on our social milieu. What at one time was Pop art has now become pop life.
Via Geert Lovink through the nettime-l email list. From Geert's report:
As with any vibrant art form, new media finds itself historicized in multiple and evolving ways. Significant attention has been paid to whether the field is alive, dead (date negotiable), or risen from the grave, and to defining its constituent elements. Automatic Update, an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art organized by Barbara London, argues that new forms of media art rose with the swell of the dot-com era and became mainstream in its wake. The five installations included, all drawn from the moment after the bubble burst, speak less to the internet or interactivity and more to a culture saturated with media of all kinds
Money does not make me happy; Being not truthful works against me; Having guts always works out for me; Trying to look good limits my life; Everything I do comes back to me... And some other thirty aphoristic wisdoms of this kind, which the artist threw into his lecture in the National Library. They also appear in his exhibition in the SUPERSPACE gallery on the Danube river.
While I listened to Stefan Sagmeister I had a deja vu, as if somebody threw a net on the top of our dirty loud and aggressive Belgrade which I once loved so much... And I even know why, because Belgrade is not much like Barcelona or Rome or Vienna, or New York or Los Angeles, although Belgrade had all the advantages of wild big dirty cities...
My interview with Randy Jewart, "The Pursuit of Green Happiness," has been published as a feature at Worldchanging.com. [Link]
We have the environmental side that we project to the community as a new thing, and internally, within the art world, we're consciously trying to create a new economic model for artists that's service-oriented instead of object oriented. We're trying to change artists' mind-sets about themselves, so that when we want to engage them to do a project with us, it's like an internship for them, where they come in, and they have their own set ideas about what their career is and what an art object is. I want them to revisit all that by meeting with developers and corporate folks, and environmental groups, who have a need. They have a campaign they're working on , they have an environmental policy that they're trying – not necessarily to promote from a marketing standpoint, but they really believe in it – and they want to make it work. And we're bringing the artist in to say, here's how you can take this idea and turn it into a project, whether it's a physical object or some sort of game, that augments it, that pushes it to another level.
We need more teachers like Clay Burell... or maybe we need more citizens like Clay... [Link]
But I see now that my personal journey to get Beyond School is only now starting to crystallize. It's not about web 2.0 for me anymore (though that is a tool I'll continue using). And it's definitely not about "Classroom 2.0," since I dislike the realities of schools and classrooms as much now, as a teacher, as I did when I was a very miserable high school student.
Putting "what it is about" in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It's about not being "a Nobody doing anything" when my students are looking for "Somebody doing something" about what they care about. It's about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It's about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It's about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It's about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It's about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.
It's about trying to be World-Changing instead of World-Ignoring and World-Ignorant.
That's the best I can do right now. Does anybody out there want to talk about ways to collaborate on "real-world project-based learning" along these lines?
Andrew Keen (author of Cult of the Amateur) thinks "Web 2.0" is a "grand utopian movement," and that it's like Marx's vision of "communist society." His beef: any one of the great unwashed can publish. This trashes the cultural authority of the elite.
Clay Shirky < title="Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites. Many-to-Many:" href="http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/07/09/andrew_keen_rescuing_luddite_from_the_luddites.php">writes that Keen is making a Luddite argument, "one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfit the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys."
An argument is especially Luddite if the discomfort of the newly challenged professionals is presented as a general social crisis, rather than as trouble for a special interest. (“How will we know what to listen to without record store clerks!”) When the music industry suggests that the prices of music should continue to be inflated, to preserve the industry as we have known it, that is a Luddite argument, as is the suggestion that Google pay reparations to newspapers or the phone company’s opposition to VoIP undermining their ability to profit from older ways of making phone calls.
This is what makes Keen’s argument a Luddite one — he doesn’t oppose all uses of technology, just ones that destroy older ways of doing things. In his view, the internet does not need to undermine the primacy of the copy as the anchor for both filtering and profitability.
But Keen is wrong. What the internet does is move data from point A to B, but what it is for is empowerment. Using the internet without putting new capabilities into the hands of its users (who are, by definition, amateurs in most things they can now do) would be like using a mechanical loom and not lowering the cost of buying a coat — possible, but utterly beside the point.
The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.
RU Sirius interviews David Talbot about his book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, in which he chronicles the "the hostility that existed between the Kennedy brothers and their own military, intelligence and enforcement agencies" while JFK was president. Is there any substance to conspiracy theories about the two Kennedy assassinations? Talbot thinks so – and he suggests that there will be tension between any progressive president and the military-industrial complex. [Link]
I think they were trying to sandbag him. They knew he was young and inexperienced. According to the CIA's own internal history of the Bay of Pigs, which was released and de-classified in 2005, they knew that it would fail. They knew that their own motley brigade of Cuban exiles weren't sufficient to defeat Castro, and they thought that Kennedy's hand would be forced to send in the Marines and Air Force once these guys were pinned down on the beaches. But he didn't. He was very loath to widen the war. He knew — as the CIA itself later determined in an intelligence estimate — that if we were to do that, it would end up like what we're seeing today in Iraq. U.S. forces would have quickly swept aside Castro's military, they'd have marched on to Havana and then they would've gotten bogged down in a long and bloody occupation.
Jamais Cascio asked David Brin, Dale Carrico, Siel, Rebecca Blood and I to post about the future fifteen years hence. His three specific questions:
What do you fear we'll likely see in fifteen years?
What do you hope we'll likely see in fifteen years?
What do you think you'll be doing in fifteen years?
Here's my answers:
Fear: I'm concerned that there will be one or more nuclear incidents and global pandemics, in addition to the subtstantial impact of climate change, and that a perfect storm of stresses to global systems will trigger a breakdown far worse than any we've imagined.
Hope: I hope that we'll redefine a "high standard of living" that's completely sustainable and attainable by everyone everywhere.
Doing: Fifteen years from now, I expect to have built built a global network of consultants, and I'll be looking for new and better ways to leverage their collaborative efforts. I'll still be thinking and writing about social aspects and uses of technology, and I'll be active in facilitating online deliberative groups and processes.
A few days ago, David Swedlow and I had a meeting with a PR pro from Business Wire, and we had the blog vs journalism discussion, which is back in the air, nudged along by Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur. Keen argues that the great unwashed shouldn't be allowed to publish, but his arguments are extreme and I'm not really interested. However it's great to talk to someone like our PR friend, who's coming from a reasoned perspective and raises very real issues about the place of the professional journalist in a chaotically evolving media environment, where traditional business models aren't working and traditonal media outlets are struggling for mindshare against an explosion of user-generated content, some of it very good. A journalist is taught standards and practices, the intent of which is to create something like objectivity. No one, of course, is completely objective – but journalists make a professional commitment to objective and accurate reporting, and without the practice of journalism we would lose signal in the noise, and we would lose whatever trusted, authoritative sources still exist.
I don't think that'll happen, but I understand the concern. And I know that it's tough to be a journalist in this environment. Our friend didn't like the term "citizen journalism." If you lack the training, commitment, and infrastructure of the professional, she figures you're not a journalist and shouldn't be so labeled. I get her point, though I don't agree. There are professionals who've embraced citizen journalism – who want to partner with bloggers to extend research and depend on the blogosphere to provide coverage that market-driven publications can't or won't.
From that conversation I felt challenged, productively, to be more than a filter when I'm blogging. My friend said that a journalist's job is to publish new and valuable information, and I realize that it's not enough to simply point to this or that story, originating elsewhere, just because I think it's cool or interesting. It's really only worthwhile to write and publish here what you won't find anywhere else... my original thinking, and views of the world from my own unique perspective. So I'm setting that standard for myself.
One other note: I mentioned the blog vs journalism discussion to David Armistead, and he said we already had a good name for the stuff many bloggers are doing: gonzo.
From eBay, economists are learning interesting lessons about how people spend their money. The results they're seeing are not always rational. [Link]
Most economists assume these kinds of auctions are largely immune to the passions and unpredictabilities of ravenous bidders, she says. Simple bargain hunting, they hope, would bring out our inner homo economicus, someone who acts in their self-interest to get the best deal possible.
No such luck, she says.
Ms. Malmendier tracked 166 auctions offering CashFlow 101, a personal-finance-themed board game. During the seven-month trial, the game's designer sold the box set on his website for $195.
Meanwhile, eBay sellers usually offered an opening price of about $45 and set a one-click, "buy it now" price of about $125. It looked like a great deal for buyers. They could pay less than retail to end the auction immediately or place bids in the hope of fetching an even lower price.
But this is where eBay users fell prey to what Malmendier and her coauthor, Stanford University economist Hanh Lee, call "bidder's curse." Apparently, some bidders grew so enthusiastic about winning the auction that they lost sight of the "buy it now" price, sometimes offering more than $185.
"We found that in 43% of the auctions the bidders ended up paying more than the 'buy it now' price," Malmendier says.
"This is really huge. It's far more than I could have expected."
I ran across this very good review by Thad Ziolkowski of my current-fave television show, John from Cincinnati. Zilokowski, a surfer himself, writes that the show is unusually accurate about surfing. Acknowledging its surreal forays into magical realism, he says that, "But if JFC wants to deepen its surf reality, it's not the supernatural that needs emphasis but the mundane."
The daily reality of surfing is one of checking the waves (at the beach or, these days, on a Web cam), surfing if there are any waves (and often there aren't and if there are, they aren't particularly good), looking at magazine spreads of exceptional surf photographed elsewhere in the world, watching surf videos, and daydreaming.
I never was a surfer but I was always interested in that world, in the way surfer's establish and intimate relationship with nature with the wave as an interface. That's powerful, and one thing I get from the "John" series is an ironic sense of the intersection of the absolute and zen-sense perfect with the more degraded aspects of human nature - the sense of the divine mixing with the fallen. The theme song is "Johnny Appleseed," by the late great Joe Strummer:
Lord, there goes a Buick forty-nine
Black sheep of the angels riding, riding down the line
We think there is a soul, we don't know
That soul is hard to find
Jakob Neilsen says one should write articles, not blog postings, not far from a conclusion I was, ahem, blogging a few days ago. Like so much of his writing, this latest from Nielsen has some useful info, makes some good points, but (like most pronouncements from consultants) comes across as inauthentic. I think Michael Heilemann has his number:
The problem with Jakob Nielsen–or perhaps rather his audience as it were–is that his articles, top 10’s and ‘usability tests’ are outdated, largely irrelevant and when applicable, made up of nothing but easily thought up logical conclusions aimed at the dull gray ‘we want to be hip with the youngsters, yo’ corporate market, from which he makes his money.
So if you’re hip, down with the beat and ‘happenin’, save yourself the headache, use your brain, not useit.com, and the rest should come easily.
As a blog strategist, I would never tell my clients to write a particular length or depth. The first rule is to be authentic, write what you know, write from the heart.
Digg has been experimenting with interfaces that use data visualization. [Link]
Digg is a community of users, and the data produced is real-time information about that community's behavior. As the tools hold a mirror to the community's actions, Rodenbeck says, they may already be influencing the way the community acts, like a biofeedback machine. As the tools become more interactive, this effect is likely to increase and become easier to measure.
"There's definitely a change in behavior when you make that behavior visible, and you can see it," Rodenbeck says. "If a community can see itself and recognize itself as a community, that's a very powerful thing."
Jasmina has written a very personal account of global warming's impact on Serbia. Personal, I say – this piece helps me realize that global warming is really a set of personal stories played out against dramatic climate shifts and personal attempts at mitigation (or defiance). In the end, no matter who we are, how rich or poor, how loved or unloved, we're naked and small against the forces of nature.
If there is any justice in this injustice, is that global warming has no borders or nationality, and yet it has guilty and victims. Guilty: all of us who ignored inconvenient truths and sacrificed the ecological conscience for other more or less legitimate priorities. Victims: everyone yet to be born on our damaged planet; when crops wilt and forests burn down to black stumps, does it matter if that wasteland is called Kosovo or Serbia?
A few months ago, James Spader's character Alan Shore on Boston Legal have a stirring speech asking when the American people will have had enough... puppetgov.com captured the speech and put it online with a few enhancement...
Facebook has famously opened its platform to application developers; since then, the "social operating system" has picked up more than 2,000 apps for a target audience that "is, by its nature, viral and active." The various apps are so popular that Facebook has limited invitations you can send to ten a day to prevent the perception that the system's becoming a spamorama. Interesting to consider where this will lead.
Dave Morin, Facebook Platform's marketing manager, says that as the development of applications for Facebook matures, he hopes to see applications that are more deeply integrated with Facebook and provide mechanisms for deep and surprising forms of social interaction. Many applications, he says, forget to take full advantage of Facebook's News Feed--a system that notifies people about what their friends are doing. A concert application, for example, could post an item in News Feed telling a user, "Ten of your friends are going to the Smashing Pumpkins concert. Do you want to go too?"
At Polycot, Bill Anderson and I are the Facebook enthusiasts; we figure we'll incorporate it into our toolkit as an essential support for peering and social network development for consultants and small companies. LinkedIn is more focused on business, but Facebook is sufficiently robust to accommodate business and personal uses. I noted that one of my clients stopped emailing me recently in favor of Facebook messaging.
I've been reading a Scientific American article on "The Traveler's Dilemma", and I really don't understand why it's such a quandary for the author, Kaushik Basu, and various researchers who've studied this scenario. Here's how it goes:
Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.
Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty--the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44.
According to the article, game theory assuming backward induction predicts that each player will select "2." Studies show that nobody makes the predicted choice, which is supposedly the most rational, and this seems to puzzle researchers. However it seems obvious to me: if I was playing the game, my selection of a number would be driven by an assumption that an antique would have a value greater than the very low end of the set of choices. In reading the scenario, I assumed that the actual value would be closer to the high end of the range presented. I wouldn't have imagined making a selection based solely on logic with no consideration of actual value. I find myself wondering why the researchers miss this? When I got to the paragraph that says "game theorists analyze games without all the trappings of the colorful narratives by studying each one's so-called payoff matrix...," I thought the article was going to be about real-world choices vs abstract predictive logic, but it really wasn't. The article's conclusion sort of acknowledges that there are paths to rational choice in this context:
If I were to play this game, I would say to myself: "Forget game-theoretic logic. I will play a large number (perhaps 95), and I know my opponent will play something similar and both of us will ignore the rational argument that the next smaller number would be better than whatever number we choose. What is interesting is that this rejection of formal rationality and logic has a kind of meta-rationality attached to it. If both players follow this meta-rational course, both will do well. The idea of behavior generated by rationally rejecting rational behavior is a hard one to formalize.
However, there's never any mention of actual value as a driver for the game-player's decision.
