Technology360

Adoption of Social Media is tough in Public Radio - what about a virus?

Rob Paterson has a continuation post of sorts of one to which I linked earlier this week (If markets are conversations - if media will be conversations - then what will we do?) and to a new report on public radio social media experiments to which I also linked.  Check it out.  Link:  FASTForward Blog.  --Dennis

Is Web 2.0 a Manifesto for Anarchism?

David Jennings has a interesting review of a fascinatingly prescient 1973 book by anarchist Colin Ward.  Anarchists have always been symbolized by the round bomb and seen as short on theory.  But read this sample:

... Anarchy in Action is no call to guerilla direct action to undermine the state apparatus. But it was both radical for its time, and prescient. "Anarchists are people who make a social and political philosophy out of the natural and spontaneous tendency of humans to associate together for their mutual benefit," writes Ward near the start of the book. He goes on: "we have to build networks instead of pyramids." So are we all anarchists now, and what does it mean to be an anarchist in the era of Web 2.0? I read this book because I had a hunch that there was a common thread running through old theories and current practice, and I wanted to see how strong this thread might be. ...

Link:  D J Alchemi.  --Dennis

WKRN's web woes

A lot of us have held up WKRN, Nashville's ABC affiliate, as an example of a station that really got it.  Former GM Mike Sechrist hired the best consultants -- Gordon Borrell, Terry Heaton and Michael Rosenblum -- and put together innovative local news and community-centric web entries.  However, Mike and some of the other architects of this exemplary effort are now out, casting a shadow over these innovations.  Michael Malone has the story.  Link:  Broadcasting & Cable.  --Dennis

David Weinberger: Everything is Miscellaneous

Phil Windley and colleagues have an interview in the Technometria podcast series with David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous.  They describe it as follows:

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines a number of topics to illustrate this change.  He joins Phil, Scott, and Ben to discuss the book.  ¶  He first discusses his background, as well as his previous books (The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined). He assesses the new methods of organization and how they are changing how information is used.  David also reviews how the changes affect the gatekeepers and what the future might hold for them. He shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.

Link: ITConversations.com.

Gorman and Shirky on authority vs. openness

The Britannica Blog has hosted a very interesting exchange of essays between librarian Michael Gorman (ex-Dean of Library Services at California State University, Fresno) and Clay Shirky, teacher (New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program), writer and consultant.  I've been reading Shirky for years.  It's the openness vs. authority argument; Wikipedia vs. Encyclopædia Britannica (though of course, not just that); or, in book length, David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (reviews) vs. Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture (review).

Gorman begins with The Sleep of Reason, Part I (11 June) and Part II (12 June).

To which Shirky responds with "Old Revolutions Good; New Revolutions Bad" (14 June).

Gorman continues with The Siren Song of the Internet, Part I (18 June) and Part II (19 June).

To which Shirky responds with The Siren Song of Luddism (19 June).

Gorman continues again with Jabberwiki: The Educational Response, Part I (25 June) and Part II (26 June).

The Britannica Blog follows up with other responses:  Publisher Roger Kimball (The New Criterion, Encounter Books) also contributes to this debate in Technology, Temptation, and Virtual Reality.  Doctoral candidate (U. C.-Berkeley) danah boyd in Knowledge Access as a Public Good (27 June).  Reference librarian Thomas Mann in Brave New (Digital) World, Part I: Return of the Avant-Garde and Part II: Foolishness 2.0?.

I've not gotten through the essays in the last paragraph yet, but so far it's good reading.  --Dennis

Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain

I'm not big on business books, at least of the airport bookstand variety, but Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and its siblings have been hugely influential on me.  Jean McGregor has an interview with Christensen on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of that book.  Link:  BusinessWeek.  --Dennis

Marc Andreessen's guide to personal productivity

Marc Andreessen has begun blogging and so far it's a remarkable effort.  Of broad interest will be a post about some unorthodox personal productivity practices that he follows.  Link:  blog.pmarca.com.  --Dennis

Building conceptual bridges to a new media world

Jon Udell writes:

When Ryan Sholin’s manifesto on the future of newspapers appeared the other day, the blogosphere cheered loudly. “Great summary,” said one commenter, “Too bad they’re not listening.”  ¶  “They” are the newspaper writers, editors, and journalists — and the J-school teachers — whose attitudes and skills require a major overhaul:

Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing…

…you and Mr. Notebook need to make some new friends, like Mr. Microphone and Mr. Point & Shoot.

Although everything on Ryan’s 10-point list is devastatingly true, it’s important to consider all the reasons why “they’re not listening.” ...

Link:  Jon Udell.

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 4 of 4)

Meta

This is the last of four parts of a talk originally scheduled this week at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen.  Links to the others follow this post.

With the rise of mass media, information flow quickly exceeded the attention capacity of humans.  Information has value to many (e.g., American Idol) or to a few (e.g., this weblog), but if you don’t have the attention or the interest or the need for that information, it’s really high-entropy “crud,” not information at all.  So now we have a subjective definition of information.

Only among humans has there been a power curve of information growth such that managing a surplus of information becomes a problem for our species – maybe the central problem.  Or, to quote a popular version of science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s Law, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”  Of course, each of us has a different standard for the useful 10 percent – hence, the secret of Chris Anderson’s long tail meme describing the power law distribution of content popularity.

In response, in the recent human past, we have developed information about information – metadata (e.g., the library card) – and very recently we’ve developed a powerful peered network – the Web.  We’re learning now how to dynamically add metadata to nodes on the Web to make them more valuable with each usage.  These techniques are often subsumed under the Web 2.0 label, but they date at least from the start of Amazon.com.  This is the “meta” epoch of information – the “selfish Web” where each user can find low-entropy value.  And, in contrast to the media epoch, both dissemination and origination are democratized.

Is it our ability to individualize information – to live within multiple communities of interest – that makes us human today?  When this, too, exceeds our attention limits, what will be the next means of extracting value from disorder?

See also part one (intro), part two (myth), and part three (media).  --Dennis

Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta (part 3 of 4)

Media

This is the third of four parts of a talk originally scheduled this week at Reboot 9.0 in Copenhagen.  Links to the others follow this post.

The problem is, “myth” by itself doesn’t scale.  When humans spent most of their time in family or other social groups, this did not matter much.  But as humans began migrating and congregating in larger populations, the transmission of myth became more difficult, and conflicting myths began contending with each other for primacy (e.g., the Crusades).

Writing is a medium and has a long history, but for our purposes I really want to consider the impact of mass media.  And, again for our purposes, I’d like to date that from the mid-15^th century invention of movable type printing in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg (by then it had existed for 400 years in China, but its use with the more limited European alphabet made it successful).  Instead of one copy of the Christian Bible per scribe per year, humans now could reproduce information at some scale.

Not only books but polemics like the Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (1517) got wide distribution.  In only 80-100 years after its European invention, movable type resulted in a flip to Protestant Christianity for much of the continent.  In the modern world, the “power of myth” (to borrow from the title of the classic Bill Moyers PBS series with Joseph Campbell), is the power of the mass media.

Of course, mass media also power other information as well.  Science and democracy have flourished with wide dissemination, but so have totalitarian ideologies and pornography.

Arguably, mass media have enabled content creation on a scale and of a quality not possible without it.  It’s doubtful, for example, that Halldór Laxness would have written his amazing novels (see the reference in part two) if his distribution was initially limited to a single copy on vellum.  But then that’s exactly what his fellow Icelander, Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda and other works did some seven centuries earlier.

If ideas were beginning to bump into each other before the invention of movable type, their conflicts became orders of magnitude greater afterward.  What hadn’t been replaced from pre-media days was the role of the information disseminator – though one-to-a-few became one-to-many.  Distribution was democratized but origination was still in the hands of the few.

Is it our ability to scale information through mass media that makes us human?

More about this in the last post in this series (part one was an introduction, part two covered the role of myth, and part four will conclude with what I’m labeling “meta”).  --Dennis