A Networked World

#NetHui Lessig on fire

I've been a huge fan of Larry lessig since I first found the net back in 1995. So when he was booked for NetHui I was a lot more determined to turn up on the Friday than I would otherwise have been.

While I expected most of what he had to say, albeit updated, the last 10 minutes were seriously unexpected.

I never expected to hear a guy with such a huge reputation who comes from the heart of the online world to stand up in Auckland and beg us to help rescue his nation from its evolving disaster driven by systemic corruption. Watch it.

#NetHui and Digital Literacy

At last week's excellent NetHui, run by Internet NZ, I was asked to plug in 5 minutes worth on Digital Literacy. As usual, I tried to give it a bit of a spin. (starts at 41.12 and runs 6 minutes - the cut [poor sync] is Download Nethui_digital-literacy)

Here's the full version that probably takes a bit more than 5 minutes.

As one of the other presenters suggested, Digital Literacy means different things to different people and I want to pick up on some points raised by Mike Dickison and maybe be push them out a little, perhaps just shove them off the cliff.

For me digital literacy includes knowing when to take one of these and stick it in your mouth.

The reason for this is simple; in Miami Beach on Memorial Day this year, a bunch of out-of-control cops pumped over 100 shots into a private car in a public place, killing an unarmed black man inside (now there's a surprise) and wounded some bystanders.

A young man called Narces Benoit saw what was happening and whipped out his cellphone to record the scene. One of the cops noticed what he was doing, broke off his shooting gallery duties and came charging at Benoit, waving his gun and screaming at him to get out of his car and hand over the cellphone, which he did.

The cop them smashed the cellphone under his boot and arrested Benoit. Nevertheless, within a few hours, the video of the event was going viral on Youtube because, when he saw the cop rushing at him, Benoit had the presence of mind to take out of the phone his digital media storage card and put it in his mouth.

The difference between Benoit and the cop is what I call Digital Literacy.

A few months ago in the Australian Navy, a female recruit was having a sexual relationship with another recruit. The guy in question thought it would be terribly cool to capture the "action" with his webcam and broadcast it to his mates. She was not happy and complained to her commander about the breach of trust and privacy. He essentially told her not to be a spoilsport and swept the matter under the rug.

The young woman became even less happy and shared her experience on facebook. Within days her commander and his boss and his boss and HIS boss were all publicly on the mat, caps in hand, staring at their shoes and explaining HOW they were going to solve the problem of their appalling leadership.

The difference between the young woman and the Australian Navy is what I call Digital Literacy.

About the same time, footballer Ryan Giggs was having an affair with model Imogen Thomas and when it was discovered he sought the help of the UK Supreme Court which obligingly issued a "super injunction" forbidding the publication of the facts.

Within hours, over 70,000 Twitter users had turned the super injunction into a legal fiction.

The difference between the Supreme Court and Ryan Giggs fan base is what I call Digital Literacy.

And all over the Middle east and North Africa this year, people have risen up, trying to throw off a generation of oppression, corruption and violence against them. Now we have had revolutions for a long time, but in the past they have needed a core of intellectual, philosophical and operational leadership, surrounded by a cadre of activists willing to take the message into the community.

Those roles are now being taken over by the whole community using social media tools. It is that takeover and the loss of the privileged position of leadership that I call Digital Literacy.

In Christchurch's major earthquakes, at risk of their lives and while their buildings and their city crumbled around them people grabbed their cellphones and videoed the event as a way to record their own experience to share with others and possibly to provide evidence of what happened to them if they didn't make it out.

That too I call Digital Literacy.

Literacy of any kind is not just being able to read and write the words, it is understanding the meaning, the significance and the context of the communication, then knowing how to manipulate them.

The best example I can think of is the advent of film to entertainment. The first films were little more than stage plays with a camera placed in front of them to record the action. But it wasn't long before we saw the appearance of film literacy, using the unique language of the cinema to tell the story in its own way. The language includes backgorund music, closeups, tracking and pan shots, framing and the million other ways to use a camera that are not available to stage plays.

So we cannot expect that Digital Literacy will look in any but the most superficial ways, like hard copy literacy. In fact, by my definition Digital Literacy is happening all around us, all the time, with increasing frequency.

For 20 years we have talked about the ICT Revolution, blithely ignoring the fact that all revolutions break stuff, and the thing they break first and most irreparably, is the status quo, to expect the revolutionaries to restore the powers of the old guard is nonsense.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too often, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Our problem is that digital illiteracy is rife in Government, business, education, health, justice and the NFP sectior, very often among those who are pushing hardest for solutions.

The real digital literacy challenge that we have is to shift the old guard into actual digital literacy so that our organisations, which have real, and vital, work to do, can engage with, communicate with, work with an increasingly digitally literate community; so that they can swim in that literacy instead of drowning in it as they are doing right now.

MY problem is that I   have no idea how the hell we are going to do that.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too oftten, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Towards the new normal

Whenever I'm with Steve barnett, he's usually drinking and I'm the designated driver. Mostly because he and my wife are members of a wine club and when they go on high-class pub crawls (or winery tours) and I of the cardboard palate drive the people mover. When he talks about business he reminds me a lot of Johnnie Moore and Rob Paterson; and me. Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey... confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

[...] I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually, if Steve thinks its only NZ managers, he's dreaming. The managerial class is global, its largely responsible for the problem and will cling to its paycheque till the collapsing businesses they parasitise crumble in their hands.

[...] Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

I think he's optimistic here.

In the new normal, we have so little idea of what will work that the idea of goals and strategies may be a waste of time as well. As our energy and financial resources are decimated we will gain new appreciations of those resources that are left.

I think there might be some new parameters that will have more power in the future.

• We will demand much higher value returns for any of those irrecoverable resources that we expend, especially if we hand them to someone else.
  
• We will increasingly trade time for goods and services. Where we have invested a lot througout my lifetime in "saving time" we will now "spend" or invest, that time ratrher than use a resource like energy.
• Things will slow down in some areas such as travel and material flows
• Information shipping will speed up as we reduce even further the documentary exchanges and rely more on electronics (saving paper, energy etc)
• Discretionary spending will evaporate and the industries based on them will disappear. If we spend more time waiting, travelling or producing things we will have less liesure time and less money to spend in it.
• Energy and material flows at a personal, community and business level will become a critical part if every economic model and activity.
• The idea of waste will disappear, we will be much more conscious that we can't 'afford" it any more. The idea that we should pay for packaging, then pay to have it taken away and pay again in opportunity costs merely to have a wrapper will become laughable, if not criminal
• Product design, durability, ease of use and fitness for purpose will become absolute criteria for everything
• We will all need to try many, small actions that may or may not succeed. We will need to be deadly honest about the outcomes and rethink those that fail while iterating those that seem to succeed.
• We will need to acknowledge that, at a time of paradigm shift, nothing will be reliable for quite a long time; what worked yesterday may not work again tomorrow. That is why small, iterative actions will be the only safe ones, there will be no more going large.
  
• Your turn. What other geenral rules do you think might fit here and does this make any sense at all?

I'm planning some renovations to my house - we have been since we moved in 2 years ago - and the other night I was using Google Sketchup (a brilliant bit of software) to turn the 2D plan into a 3D model so we could try stuff out.

I put in a work bench for building things and a wet area for wine making and a pot still for recovering essential oils from the flowers and herbs and plenty of space for creating stuff and storing it and for tools and consumables like glues and screws and so forth.

And then I stood back and realised that I am making not just a workshop a small artisanal factory that would fit in the 19th century or earlier. I'm doing it because it is the logical outcome of thinking about local production andtrying to close the energy and material flow loops as tightly as possible.

When i build stuff, I use screws not nails so that everything can be dismantled and used again in something else. More rules.

• Low energy dismantle-ability
• Repurposing all manner of manufactures
  
• Building things that can be applied to new uses
• Shared spaces, shared tools, shared skills
  

What else?

On the one hand

This is a brilliant example of the power of Internet tools, creativity and our willingness to act swiftly and decisively when we are committed to something. Vegemite

Who would have thought that tampering (which is how the crowd saw it) with a "low involvement' product such as a salty yeast extract spread could provoke such outrage. Clearly not Kraft, or not initially anyway. The volume of blogs, the venting of spleens and the sheer energy poured into the protest as it spilled out to every corner of the internet should confirm one thing: social media has the power to make or break a brand or product like no other medium.

By yesterday morning a Hitler parody video clip had been viewed 46,000 times, making it the No. 1 comedy clip on YouTube this week, according to analysis by the online risk and reputation consultants SR7, which also logged more than 60 Facebook groups that had been formed expressly for the purpose of getting Kraft to dump the name. One such group, "Australia says no to iSnack 2.0" had more than 2500 members by yesterday morning.

The SR7 director James Griffin goes as far as to label this a "watershed" in marketing. "Regardless of whether or not this is a marketing ploy by Kraft, this is an example of social media determining the outcome of a marketing campaign."

Within five days of announcing a new name, Kraft had done a corporate about-face the likes of which we have not seen in a while...

Kraft is now faced with a very pumped up and aggravated bunch of Aussies who have already brought it to heel and will be watching the company's next move. Any hints that the entire exercise was a conspiracy could sink the new product and damage the Vegemite brand itself.

On the other hand, we are surrounded by pollution, dangerous ignorance, corruption, financial criminality, abuse, exploitation, slavery, intergenerational theft and a panoply of human-created catastrophes and failures that need exactly this level of attention and our response is what?

Re-naming the friggin vegemite.

Some days I despair.

Rich media - poor media, advertising crosses the line

Way back in 1995 when I first encountered the net my immediate reaction was "goodbye traditional media" - given that I was working in radio at the time, it meant I had to make some adjustments to my "career path".

Still, its taken 15 years to cross the line, but it looks like we are there. Ad Spending: Internet Tops TV in UK

In the United Kingdom, however, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is reporting that online advertising has overtaken television. According to Reuters, advertising spend on the Internet grew 4.6% to a total of 23.5% of the total market.

On the flip side, television advertising spend plummeted 17% and dropped to second place, accounting for 21.9% of the total. That means, for the first time ever, the web is the leading medium for advertising in the UK.

Haven't seen the comparison yet for NZ, but in the current economy, TV here is taking a real hiding - TVNZ profits plunge 90pc to $2.1m

IAB chief executive, Guy Phillipson says, “This is a significant milestone…This is the first major market where online has overtaken television to become the biggest single medium.” The IAB report, conducted twice a year, found that online ad spend now accounts for 1.75 billion pounds, which is roughly $2.7 billion. Reuters reports that the increase in online ad spend is a result of economic conditions that are forcing advertisers to move to the web

That last bit is perhap the most interesting part of all. The days of scattershot advertising where is someone is in the room they are deemed to have "received" the message, are over. Now we can track exactly who has clicked on the link attached to the ad and whether they became a client and the role of the marketing people has been made orders of magnitude harder.

But there's a meta here, Internet access and regular use is for those with discretionary income, the number of poor people with Internet access is still way behind; in NZ we have 100,000 families with school aged kids who don't have home access and that doesn't count the poor elderly, the poor disabled and the poor who don't have school-aged kids.

But they all have TV because once you have the device, the content is essentially free. But when advertisers realise that TV is mostly reaching those people who don't have any money, what exactly do we think they are going to do?

Exactly. Next question, have we reached the moment when the power laws governing media viability really kick in? Stay logged in, because staying tuned may not be available much longer.

THIS is a goldmine

Just read the whole thing Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

I get so fed up with people trying desperately to demean and undemrine the greatest invention in human communication. All the bogus crap about how it undermines "real" relationships, make us all sad loners with no social skills yadda yadda.

And instead it may be creating the most literate, most communicative, most effective generation yet. No wonder it scares the bejesus out of those who have lived by controlling the message and its distribution.

Sod 'em all.

And Jon turns up with the rest of the motivation for us old farts.

Disingenuous but very cool phone app

This is another one of those things we mean by open governance. Dodgy restaurants exposed in new iPhone app

A new iPhone app will tell you if a nearby restaurant has been fined for breach of food safety standards.

The application, FoodWatch NSW, brings the Food Authority's name-and-shame list to your fingertips by using the iPhone's GPS to show you a list of restaurants near your location that have been added to the list.

The software was developed by mogeneration and sources the data from the NSW Food Authority list on its website.

Chief executive officer of mogeneration Keith Ahern said that, when members of the company saw the list on the website, they thought the information provided was really valuable and useful.

"While I think a lot of restaurants aren't happy about it [the list], you can see the information and make your own decision," he said.

Clearly aware of the potential controversy FoodWatch can create, Ahern points out that the application merely presents freely available information in a more readily accessible way.

"We're not making any editorial decisions on the data, we're really just publicising what is freely available. It's not going to victimise any businesses disproportionately," he said.

The tool gives the user the ability to view the list any time, wherever the user is.

Public information publicly accessible.  cool.

But Ahern is being disingenuous about the effect of the app. If I'm looking for an eatery and I have a choice, I will go to the ones that have NOT been fined for non-compliance.

In the past, these businesses have relied on the protection of the herd, somewhere there IS a list and yes they ARE on it and you COULD, theoretically, find it and read it but they are not required to put that information inside a skull and crossbones sign on their front door.

The problem has always been in getting the right information at the right time and place. Along with FOAF reviews of restaurants in your neigbourhood, their compliance with health codes will make a difference to their business if enough people get access to the tools.

And it WILL be discriminatory, if you are on the list, expect to see your business take a hit.

The linearity problem

Yet another great link from Johnnie that triggers something. No straight lines

I enjoyed Alan Moore's slideshare from Reboot Britain, No Straight Lines. It's worth taking a good look.

Al kicks off with a very funny story about a train journey and an iPod that I won't spoil by summarising. And goes into a passionate diatribe against the limits of linear thinking.

Its not just the lack of linearity that we need to accept, its the lack of sequence. Also not wanting to screw up the joke.

But we almost never learn anything in a stepwise, linear fashion. We grab bits of it passing by, and fiddle with our understanding of them, and sometimes for a long time we "just don't get it" because even when we have all the bits they are like a jigsaw puzzle in a bag, the picture is there but we can't 'see" it.

And some people never do. Especially, paradoxically, those who are best at stuff like computer programming where sequence and excruciating detail is critical. Then one day, apparently without any relevant input, we "get" it.

And I suspect that is where, god help me, real innovation occurs. Someone has most of the bits, but can't make them fit so they create a bit, a new bit that didn't exist before but which connects the thing in an entirely different way

And because the world is NOT a jigsaw puzzle, what happens is that the new bit makes all the old bits fit together in different ways as well. Which is why change can be so disorienting.

We recognise that many of the old bits are there but they are somehow distorted in ways we don't understand. So the response of those who were comfortable with the old ways things worked try to pretend that the old bits still work in the old ways, that its just their perception that is wonky; because to accept that the whole world is wonky is just too much of a challenge.

We are, in effect, betrayed by the proximity to familiarity that wouldn't happen if we, say, suddenly moved to Tanzania and had to learn Swahili to survive. When we shift our entire domain we recognise its foreignness, but when that shift happens around us it takes time to adjust to that suspiciously familiar but actually completely different reality.

That seems to me the problem with peak Oil, with Climate change, with the end of western financial capitalism, it all still LOOKS the same, or closely enough to fool us into believing that we don't have to change anything to deal with the problem.

Wrong.

And one more point about non-linearity, it entails outputs that are grossly inconsistent with the inputs and apparently disconnected from them.

Doc Searls still on the cutting edge

With the 10th anniversary edition of  Cluetrain coming out, Doc is trying to keep up with postings that mention it. Trainfeed spotting

But the meat of the post is this bit.

... my son Allen came up with the “Live Web” line way back in 2003, and correctly observed that the Web of sites was essentially a static one, and that the World Live Web would branch off of it.

The language alone is a give-away. The Static Web is full of real estate language: sites, domains and locations that you architect, design and build. While the Live Web is one with feeds where you write, post, update, syndicate and now also tweet and re-tweet. To me the differences between static and live are much clearer than those between ______ (find a word) and real time.

Here's a word, history. Ossified, fixed, outdated are pretty good too.

But I love the idea of the World Live Web which, I think we'll see, is a function of bandwidth. In dialup days web p[ages needed to be relatively fixed because the constant chatter between server and client would be too much for the bandwidth to manage.

Grow that bandwidth and suddenly the conversation becomes possible and whenever we can converse, we will.

And the control freaks, freak.

Good

The best search engine is meatware

Euan puts a better suit on something I've been saying since I found out what end-to-end meant. That the ends in question are not devices but their users and that connecting people is what this stuff is all about. Social networks are all about finding stuff

A question from Dave Snowden on Twitter about what I thought the best semantic search tool was and my rather facetious response "the meatware" reminded me of something I am more and more convinced of. Social networks are about finding stuff. Finding documents, finding people, even finding human contact.

[...]  Twitter is making this ubiquitous access to an outboard brain more obvious to more people and there has even been talk of it replacing Google for some. The point is you can only do this if you have a high quality network of people doing the filtering and collective noticing for you. Building up these networks, and building "credit" by helping others, will become key skills and the people who invest the effort will find the better stuff faster.

Exactly. And as Geoff Brown suggests in the comments, there is no best practise or other CYA you can call upon, there is no technological solution to it, you have to get out there and make contacts, some of which turn into connections and associates and colleagues and eventually friends. And you have to filter them into a network of trusted people whose judgement you accept and whose values you share.

You do that through conversation, but you also do it through FOAF, both explicitly ("I think you'd get on well with XX") and implicitly because someone you trust relies on someone you don't know.

They problem for many "networkers" is that you can't do it by going to a conference and splashing your business card about and having 3-minute dates. You get there by persistence, shared resources, gifts of knowledge or help. There are no shortcuts, it requires consistency, contact and communication and very often the benefits are paid forward from people you don't know which just keeps opening out the net of the meatware search engine. Those with good engines will work quickly and effectively, those without will struggle, those who think in terms of silver bullets and best practise wont even be in the game.