At CNN’s iReport.com, a “citizen journalist” calling himself “Johntw” posted a report that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the ER following a heart attack. Word spread to and beyond Digg, across Twitter. Apple stock dropped quickly, a $9 billion loss based on the rumor. Though iReport posts aren’t vetted, the CNN association probably lent credibility to the report. [Link]
The Jobs incident was the second time in a week that mainstream media organizations have been embarrassed by their online citizen journalism arms – sparking debate about the accuracy of reports from these Web sites and showing how it takes only a few minutes for a scurrilous rumor, placed on a site without sufficient editorial checks, to inflict damage.
So what’s the cure? A dozen years ago Bob Anderson and I were talking about the emerging new media ecology and the question of information authority in that context. We figured media literacy should be taught alongside reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. Support critical thinking, not censorship or authoritarian structures for distributing information.
Education isn’t always enough, sometimes you really do need moderators, hopefully with a light touch. The SFGate story linked above says how sexually explicit photos were posted at CBS’mobile phone application site, after which CBS promised “to redouble its efforts to police content.” A moderator had quickly removed the photos. Some might argue that photos should be screened before they’re posted, and some sites would do it that way, but that’s a daunting task, especially where you may have thousands of posts, and it’s not in the spirit of the many-to-many mediasphere. CNN does have moderators for iReport, but they’re not checking facts… “mostly, it is the job of iReport users themselves to weed out erroneous or inappropriate material.” That’s the social media way – the “vetting” is crowdsourced, and the reader must read critically, never assuming that the “news source” is correct. I would argue that’s always been the case, even with the best journalists. I’ve never been close to a news story that wasn’t wrong in some of the particulars, at least from my perspective. And that’s part of the problem – perspectives and interpretations differ. That’s why I left journalism behind – when I was in journalism school, it seemed pretty clear that it would be hard to tell the truth. Only a few gonzo journalists, a la Hunter Thompson, realized they, and their biases, had to be transparent within the reporting…
Maybe I’m a conservative, after all, because I was listening to Andrew Bacevich earlier today and nodding. Bacevich is a real conservative, not a neocon, and I’m thinking he’s got the right message … I was pretty excited by all he had to say:
The U.S. has become in empire of consumption, not production.
We assume that business must be built on credit, and not on productivity.
Americans (and others) are participating in a de facto Ponzi scheme, borrowing with the underlying assumption that the bills will never come due.
No one in politics seems to offer a politically plausible solution.
Trade imbalances are larger each year. Jimmy Carter was the one president who recognized the challenges awaiting if we refuse to get our house in order &ndash check out his “malaise” speech.
Freedom does not equal, or depend on, materialism. Quite the contrary.
We might have to modify what may be peripheral to preserver the core of the American way of life. Focus on the way we live and order our affairs.
At our best, we have focused on community, harmony, and the future. That last is important: we now think too little of the extent to which we put our children and grandchildren at risk as we squander our resources, which is the same as squandering our freedom.
We’re using military power to conceal the real implications of U.S. profligacy. Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2 all assumed that power can “fix the world” to sustain our dysfunctional system.
We have created an imperial presidency, and congress no longer articulates a visoin of the common good.
The National Security State build around the president doesn’t work – it didn’t predict 9/11 or plan effectively for the war in Iraq.
No one in Washington DC knows what they’re doing.
At least, that’s what I thought I heard him say… and I’m ready to work on solutions. My business partner, David Armistead, and I are already working on something that might be helpful.
Happy Birthday to Sputnik 1, launched 51 years ago today. Those of us who lived and breathed comics and science fiction saw an inevitable first step toward space exploration, and we picked up on the omigod vibe that the Russians beat us to it. Of course we didn’t see the whole picture, which you can get from Nova’s “Sputnik Declassified” – we didn’t get that the space race was about military surveillance, not scienterrific exploration of the cosmos. If you think Reagan’s “star wars” plan, the Strategic Defense Initiative, was new thinking, guess again. Eisenhower was already there.
A bit of political anthropology via Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman and the University of Akron’s John Green at beliefnet: an analysis of “Twelve Tribes” and their positions on presidential candidates. This grouping, more nuanced than “Religious Right vs Everyone Else,” is “inspired by the twelve tribes of Biblical Israel, but formed around similarities in religious beliefs and practice.” Marc Armbinder at TheAtlantic.com notes that “there is no discernable (sic) trend toward a preference for more government intervention. Indeed, trust in government has declined.” (Thanks to Bob Carlton for the pointer.)
At last, however, the more prudent began to see that this folly could not last for ever. Rich people no longer bought the flowers to keep them in their gardens, but to sell them again at cent. per cent. profit. It was seen that somebody must lose fearfully in the end. As this conviction spread, prices fell, and never rose again. Confidence was destroyed, and a universal panic seized upon the dealers. A had agreed to purchase ten Sempers Augustines from B, at four thousand florins each, at six weeks after the signing of the contract. B was ready with the flowers at the appointed time; but the price had fallen to three or four hundred florins, and A refused either to pay the difference or receive the tulips. Defaulters were announced day after day in all the towns of Holland. Hundreds who, a few months previously, had begun to doubt that there was such a thing as poverty in the land, suddenly found themselves the possessors of a few bulbs, which nobody would buy, even though they offered them at one quarter of the sums they had paid for them. The cry of distress resounded everywhere, and each man accused his neighbour. The few who had contrived to enrich themselves hid their wealth from the knowledge of their fellow-citizens, and invested it in the English or other funds. Many who, for a brief season, had emerged from the humbler walks of life, were cast back into their original obscurity. Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption.
According to Wikipedia, “economists have debunked many aspects of [Mackay’s] account,” primarily whether “tulipmania” was actually a “bubble.”
While Mackay’s account held that a wide array of society was involved in the tulip trade, Goldgar’s study of archived contracts found that even at its peak the trade in tulips was conducted almost exclusively by merchants and skilled craftsmen who were wealthy, but not members of the nobility. Any economic fallout from the bubble was very limited. Goldgar, who identified many prominent buyers and sellers in the market, found fewer than half a dozen who experienced financial troubles in the time period, and even of these cases it is not clear that tulips were to blame.
Where today’s economic crisis is concerned, I’ve wondered to whether it’s catastrophic for the middle (and lower) income classes as compared to the wealthy, who have more to lose. Whatever the case, we’re on the edge of a volatile transformation. David Armistead and I (among others) have been talking for many months now about the inevitable evolution of a “sustainability economy,” shifting from assumptions of resource abundance driving seemingly unlimited consumption to a prevailing assumption that resources are inherently limited (not so much an assumption as a given). (Thomas Friedman suggests that we “green the bailout.”) In the new economy, we’ll shift from resource extraction to resource efficiency, from drilling for oil to drilling for knowledge. Our tulip farms will be organic, and we’ll return to the soil what we take.
Tom Brown shot videos of concerned Austin citizens protesting the potential bank bailout in downtown Austin. Ironically I saw ’em on my way to the Tech Crunch party (“like it’s 1997!”) We’re clearly on a rough road.
Kevin Koym can’t sleep. Is wifi keeping him awake? [Link]
Research that has been sponsored and published in Europe has shown that adults that use their cell phones close to bedtime might get to sleep fast, but sometimes don’t enter into the most restful phases of sleep for an extra hour. I posited in my own case that my insomnia was possibly caused by working too late- yet it was not untill I started limiting my wireless internet usage that I started noticing that wifi might have something to do with this as well.
Plenty Magazine has a remembrance of the Whole Earth Catalog with comments by several who were involved or influenced. Whole Earth certainly influenced my evolution, in fact determined my career path.
The Plenty intro is inaccurate in that it mentions only on the Catalog’s “four year run,” but if Whole Earth had gone away after four years, the influence wouldn’t have been the same. Whole Earth’s life was extended many more years through the publication of Coevolution Quarterly, later renamed Whole Earth Review, then Whole Earth Magazine – now sadly defunct.
I wasn’t much into computers and technology until Whole Earth announced in 1985 that it was launching a BBS called the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) which was accessible from anywhere by modem. I bought a computer and modem and dialed in via long distance to Sausalito, and that was my first adoption of social technology. Via the WELL I connected with Whole Earth, met then-editor Howard Rheingold and past editor Kevin Kelly, established a relationship with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and got involved in the formation of EFF-Austin, became an associate editor of bOING bOING the ‘zine and book review editor for Factsheet Five, was involved in a private discussion with a group of people who were starting a magazine called Wired, connected with Wired’s HotWired online service and started the Electronic Frontiers Forum there, met Paco Nathan and formed FringeWare, Inc., found writers for Fringe Ware Review (which was incidentally modeled on Whole Earth Review), became part of Howard Rheingold’s Electric Minds, worked with Bruce Sterling on the Mirrorshades conference and later on Viridian Design, and became an early blogger, initially publishing via the public_html directory of my WELL account. Having met the Whole Earth crew, I did some writing for Whole Earth Review, including my global warming piece in the Sterling-edited last issue. I was editor of the Consciousness Subdomain of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog – sort of a dream come true – and coordinated a Whole Earth party in Austin while the team was here (with Wavy Gravy along for the ride) for their publisher’s annual meeting. My bOING bOING colleague Mark Frauenfelder turned me onto blogger, and there was early back and forth with Mark and Cory Doctorow as the bOING bOING blog was evolving – and we were all using the Whole Earth format in blogging, where there was a review of something followed by quoted excerpts. Many bloggers adopted this format, probably because they used the popular bOING bOING blog as a model.
I’m pretty sure the Internet wouldn’t be what it is today if Whole Earth and the WELL had never existed. The influence was way more than a blog format. Those of us who read the Whole Earth publications were inspired to be eclectic and creative in our thinking, and to question everything, especially our own assumptions.
There’s more I could say, but I’ve run out of time. I wish Whole Earth Magazine was still around. The last issue, edited by Alex Steffen as a precursor to Worldchanging, was never published due to a lack of funds. Attempts to raise enough money to revive the publication failed, and it went away.
Time for a revival? Some things cycle out and can’t be revived, but Whole Earth could rise again, I think, with the right set of instigators.
What was your experience of the Whole Earth Catalog?
That’s a photo of David Foster Wallace shot by Steve Rhodes. I can’t find the review of Infinite Jest that I wrote for Wired Magazine’s web site Hotwired, and I haven’t read Wallace (or much fiction, other than my unfinished but in-progress marathon read of Pynchon’s Against the Day, but I’m affected by his suicide, by the sense that that amazing aggregation of words and ideas and hot synapses could suddenly be still, just like that, and we’ll hear nothing more from him. Authors are smart and sensitive and vulnerable. The best think about everything and try to find, and tell, the truth. I wanted to be one of those but didn’t follow the discipline, and I clearly wasn’t prepared to suffer for my art, and it hadn’t sunk in that the suffering is there anyway, a condition of life. That’s not meant to be fatalistic, but I’m acknowledging the Buddhist sense of suffering as attachment. I’m not a great Buddhist, but I practice enough to have a sense of that attachment, what it means, why the Buddha connected attachment to suffering in expressing his Noble Truths. The attachment is as much as anything a grasping at words and ideas and concepts and supposed-but-not-really truths, all churning forth from some emptiness within. I can imagine any author, surfing the terrible waves of consciousness and trying to hold a vertical position against the forces of the universe, frustrated by grasping, unable to go with the flow, and ultimately considering that death might bring peace. That’s a terrible tragedy.
My editor at Hotwired wondered that I hadn’t mentioned the tennis in the book. The thousand plus pages has threads about tennis and about drug rehab. I recall that I as more interested in addiction than tennis at the time, but I suppose they could be the same thing (and related to the titular samizdat). I was sinking into the long lucid passages and losing their connection to the whole sometimes.
I knew I needed to go back and read it again with no rush against deadline, and I wanted to read Wallace’s other works. One of those things you put off. The books are still there to read, but I’ll never have a conversation with Wallace… it’s like finding out that Bill Hicks died after saying for so long that I’ll have to catch him sometime.
Speaking of comedy, Frank Bruni wrote of Wallace, in the New York Times Magazine in 1996, “Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.”
In 2005, he gave a commencement address at Kenyon Collegein Ohio, saying that it “is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.” He went on to say that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
I’m not exactly a maker – I don’t spend a lot of time building or deconstructing devices or hacking what I’ve bought. I’m not a regular reader of Make Magazine, though it’s edited by my friend and former bOING bOING colleague Mark Frauenfelder, and I’ve always appreciated his world view… Mark’s a mashup of wide-eyed innocent and wise sage, and his head’s all full of fascinating cartoons and futuristic visions. When I curated a digital convergence track for SXSW Interactive in 2006, I included a session on DIY and convergence and contacted Mark, who suggested Phil Torrone, who signed on and suggested Limor Fried and someone from Make’s sister magazine, Craft. It was a great session; the next year Phil and Limor keynoted to a packed room at the conference. I realized there was a huge DIY movement emerging and they were channeling those energies. Consider that the world of the future may not be a slick, standardized manufactured environment but a world of personal reconfigurable environments, highly individualized; a world where everyone’s expected to have gadget literacy and everything in our environment has an open, hackable architecture.
A couple of years ago, after the first Maker Faire in California, I emailed Mark and suggested they try it in Austin. They did, and as a result I found myself working an installation on the DIY Home of the Future based on Derek Woodgate’s research and Dave Demaris’s hard work, along with Bon Davis and several others. (Our Plutopia collective and annual party emerged from this endeavor – long story.) I wrote a couple of DIY home pieces for Worldchanging at the time, posted here and here. Derek had done a lot of thinking about the future of personal built environments, again highly reconfigurable by “the user.” This assumes a couple of things: 1) that we evolve the gadget literacy I mentioned earlier, and we see that in the DIY/Maker movement as early adopters on the today’s fringes, and 2) homes and gadgets and devices will be increasingly open, hackable, and reconfigurable. To that end, Make has published a Maker’s Bill of Rights, and Jeremy Faludi at Worldchanging riffs on the concept, discussing design for hackability as green design. Note that the Bill of Rights page at Make has a link to the Leatherman Squirt, aka “Warranty Voider.”
“The Future of Affinity: Living Networks with Social Software” was a presentation delivered by Jon Lebkowsky to the CenTex Chapter of the World Future Society in November 2004.
Thanks for inviting me. This is a huge subject, and I’ve tried to prepare an overview with some history, a sense of what’s happening now, and thoughts about trends.
There are thousands of people thinking about and working on social software and they’re all very smart, so every day brings new thoughts and new developments. This talk should give you at least a sense of what’s happening.
The Internet is a social phenomenon. It’s a communications environment that flows in many directions at once. The character of tools and applications built for use online is that they are interactive. Those of you who have computers that have persistent, always-on connection to the Internet: think how your experience and use of your computer differs from the experience and use of a standalone computer in the past, one that was not connected to others. Think how your relationships have changed since you got that persistent connection.
The killer apps for the Internet have all been about talking and sharing. We share artifacts that are formed from data, and those artifacts are exactly replicable and can be fixed in various media – a new reality that has rendered our concept of intellectual property obsolete. It’s also changed the way we think about social relationships.
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, p. 15: “The Internet was deliberately designed by hackers to be an innovation commons , a laboratory for collaboratively creating better technologies. They knew that some community of hackers in the future would know more about networks than the original creators, so the designers of the Internet took care to avoid technical obstacles to future innovation. The creation of the Internet was a community enterprise, and the media that the original hackers created were meant to support communities of creators. To this end, several of the most essential software programs that make the Internet possible are not owned by any commercial enterprise – a hybrid of intellectual property and public good, invented by hackers.”
Rheingold emphasizes the collaborative and community aspects of the early development of the Internet because that had a lot to do with decisions about its structure. It was built for collaboration, for community. Since then, more than anything, the Internet has been a tool for community and for social engagement.
A few key technologies have evolved to make today’s Internet what it is:
The Internet itself, which we call a network, but that’s wrong: it’s a network of networks, where they can form new kinds of relationships to each other, and as Michael Schrage has said, New kinds of relationships between networks create new kinds of relationships between people.
Email – the first killer app, it was a defining technology, especially when email distribution lists found common usage.
File Transfer Protocol – the original file sharing, though how would you know where the files were located?
WAIS (Wide Area Information System) – an early way to find documents on the Internet.
Archie – search system for files available via FTP
Gopher – menu-driven system for document retrieval.
Veronica – search system for gopher
Usenet – distributed newsgroups that became public conversations
Online forums – asynchronous interactive discussions similar to bbs systems
Chat – realtime interactive discussions
Instant messaging – applications that support one-to-one realtime messaging; some IM software supports chat sessions for a limited number of users. IM was originally just social, but is finding more an more business use.
World Wide Web – a system for publishing online including support for text and graphics as well as page description
Content management systems – sophisticated systems for publishing web pages
Search engines – increasingly sophisticated systems for finding data on the web.
Weblogs – simple content management systems for personal (and sometimes professional) online publishing.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – machine-readable format for syndicating weblog and other content for aggregation by web sites and “news reader” applications
Wikis – text-based collaborative workspaces
P2p systems – decentralized systems for sharing files
BitTorrent – a system that supports the efficient sharing of very large files, e.g. music and video files.
If you look at the prevailing trends in the evolution of Internet technology, they’re not ecommerce or publishing, though both are important if not necessarily as profitable as we expected during the madness er, the 90s.
The prevailing trends are what I mentioned earlier: more talking and more sharing. Ultimately it’s about relationships, and those relationships can be represented conceptually as networks: social networks, where people are nodes in the networks and their relationships are the connecting links.
Earlier today I ran across quotes from Michael Schrage, in “The Relationship Revolution” (for Merrill Lynch), where he makes an excellent point about the social uses of technology:
“To say that the Internet is about ‘information’ is a bit like saying that ‘cooking’ is about oven temperatures; it’s technically accurate but fundamentally untrue.”
“A dispassionate assessment of the impact of digital technologies on popular culture, financial markets, health care, telecommunications, transportation and organizational management yields a simple observation: The biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations.”
The traditional economics and established markets for human relationships are yielding to new cost/benefit equations enabled by new media. The coin to this new realm isn’t data and information; it’s the value and priority that people place on the quantity and quality of their relationships.”
What are the latest trends relevant to social software?
The growing presence and impact of weblogs (blogs), and the evolution of the weblog from a tool for publishing to a platform for conversation and knowledge-sharing. (Trackback)
The appearance of sites like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn that give visibility into social networks, your own and others’. These sites can support ad hoc group-forming and collaboration. Expect to see this kind of technology integrated with other technologies for targeted niches. That’s where they really belong. (Brazilians on Orkut)
Sites for sharing home-grown multimedia: sounds, images, and video. E.g. flickr.
More and better technologies for conveying and evaluating reputation (called reputation management). Examples: Slashdot, Ebay. When you’re building tools to support affinity relationships, trust is key. Reputation management helps establish trust before you know much about the other person.
Standards for conveying personal information, like FOAF, a protocol that allows you to store and selectively share your personal data. Ideally you should own and control data that’s about you.
Combinations of modular tools like weblogs, Wikis, chats, conference calls or voice over IP to get sophisticated environments for meetings as well as for sustained communication. These will have a relatively light footprint, as opposed to heavier ‘one size fits all’ tools.
There’s also the impact of wireless, which brings the possibility of increasing mobility into the mix. Wireless Future project for IC2: If we consider that the web puts the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, then wireless devices that access the web put all that knowledge in the palm of our hand, and we can take it wherever we go. More relevant: It puts the visibility and management of our relationships in the palm of our hand, and supports our ability to sustain computer-mediated collaboration wherever we go.
There is a trend away from proprietary applications, toward Open Source solutions. It’s important to understand the meaning of this trend: it’s about transparency. Proprietary solutions are “black boxes,” and you have no choice but to run them as they were built. There is an increasing demand by knowledgeable users to know how software is built, and to have access to modify the code that controls what the software does. And Open Source is generally supported by communities of programmers in collaborative relationships, like the early developers of the Internet Rheingold mentions in that quote from Smart Mobs. To that extent open source is always social software, because it is a product of social process.
We hear a lot about “knowledge management,” where the idea is to manage, retrieve, and make sense of knowledge stored in documents. Is that really knowledge? I think knowledge is not just information, but information plus process – and if knowledge is dynamic, its management has to address more than its static form. I think some of the tools we’ve discussed tonight will point toward ways to share an manage knowledge in dynamic computer-mediated environments. Challenging, but promising.
So I’ve given you an overview of social software, and how it supports various forms of affinity relationships. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot, for instance we could spend another whole evening talking about political applications of social technology. Thanks again for having me, and I’d be glad to take questions now.
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