Busy bee: documentary with me + a BBC one about the Web
Saturday, September 26th, 2009GOOGLE WAVE IS RELEASED THIS WEEK. Here are some videos:
TWAIN LIFE
I’ve been a wee bit busy these last few weeks:
(1.) Putting a trademark application together.
(2.) Sanity checking some guidelines on entrepreneurialism for some friends.
(3.) Sourcing furnishings for a friend’s new apartment.
(4.) Meeting search and advertising people.
(5.) Contributing to the shaping of the BBC’s documentary production on the 20-year history of the Web.
Let’s just say that since my involvement on the BBC project, the production team have clearly put the need to include a wider and deeper demographic of contributors onto their “to interview and source from” list. I’ve been championing these:
* women who are contributing not only to tech companies like Marissa Mayer of Google, but who also have a history of genius and revolutionary code work like Adele Goldberg who along with Alan Kay did amazing innovations with smalltalk => Squeak;
* teenagers who — contrary to absurd neuroscientists’ unnecessary patronization about how the Web is destroying their brains and concentration — are flourishing with these new technologies and some are even US$ million tech entrepreneurs;
* silver surfers who contribute a tremendous amount with their wisdoms and their wit to help us youngsters understand more about Life, open us up new resources (like musicians, authors and sports stars of yore) we should educate ourselves about because it’s fun and good-to-know, and who kindly temper our exuberance when we’re being a wee bit silly; and
* non-Anglo-Saxon contributors, e.g. from South Korea, since the Web is supposed to be a global village online and it’s important to benefit from the insights of others; the WWW is as much the property of Asians, Africans, South Americans, Slavics, etc. as it is of the US of A.
During various conversations I also managed to point these facts out:
(1.) Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergei Brin, Larry Ellison etc have been surfing for DECADES and we haven’t seen any evidence that it affects their concentration or brains in a negative way, have we?
(2.) Chris Anderson’s theory of free is flawed and so is Rupert Murdoch’s one with its paywalls.
Without going into all the economic arguments I presented — I quoted a paper I wrote when I was 20 that included analysis from Alfred Marshall, JK Galbraith and CW Mills about the inclusion of advertising as a cost premium — to essentially decimate any Mickey Mouse economic theories about Moore’s Law pushing down the cost of circuit boards and transistors, essentially resulting in a zero cost scenario.
The “Free Web” is unrealistic, unsustainable and it’s also not capitalism at its optimal but rather communism at its worst because it implies people will contribute their content for free indefinitely and don’t have household bills or their children’s education to pay for.
The “Pay to Play” model is also unrealistic, unsustainable and it’s extreme capitalism because it creates a chasm of digitally entitled and digitally deprived (or as JK Galbraith coined it “the haves and have-nots”) which only serves to exacerbate societal inequalities rather than resolve them.
(3.) The definition of “digital native” as being someone born after about 1990 who hasn’t known a world without technology and ‘digital migrants” as being someone born before 1990 is…….inaccurate since the PC was commercialized around 1974, so there’s an entire generation of people in their 50s and 60s who are digital natives! People like the fathers of the Internet (Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Larry Brilliant, Tim O’Reily et al).
Moreover, by the USC’s definitions, Mark Zuckerberg would also be classified as a “digital migrant” since he was born in 1984 which is a full SIX years before 1990. See? So that’s an example of classifications having plenty of room for error, so we can imagine how it might propagate even with semantic stacks!
TWAIN’S WEB ECONOMY
In my model of how the Web should work, there would be legal requirements as a condition of platform providers being allowed to operate:
(1.) Allocate a % of their online gross revenues towards charitable causes and every company has to commit to a program of sending their employees to work for at least 4 weeks in an NGO/socially deprived area/public service.
(2.) Incentivize and reward content contributors via monthly micropayments — whether it’s a review / recommendation / any comment requiring skill they’ve made which is considered by other users to be of value;
(3.) Innovate new ways to include their communities in the design of products+services which result in companies having smarter inventory systems rather than over-producing and causing climate change issues, then doing hard sell/excessive advertising which doesn’t even result in bottom line sales at the end!
Now those measures, if implemented, would be TRULY DEMOCRATIZING AND WOULD ENGENDER GOOD CAPITALISM wherein each of the participants is conscious of their larger role in the ecosystem of the Web and of society as a whole.
THE WEB NURTURES OUR BRAINS + CONSCIOUSNESS
Personally (and I’m saying this from the experience of someone who’s used technology since pre-teen), I haven’t experienced any reduction in my ability to read, concentrate, contextualize or quote reams of reference sources to substantiate my position simply because I’ve been using the Web for more years than Google’s been around!
This is what I noted in one discussion on the issue of concentration:
“Wrt your comment: “This way of life doesn’t promote vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity,” I have to respectfully disagree. Leveraging tools like Facebook, Twitter, email and IM can facilitate all of those things. It’s a matter of the HOW, not the what.
It’s like this: those tools are a fishing rod. If we hook an old boot or a minnow instead of sweet, giant salmon it’s not the fault of the fishing rod. It’s the fisherperson’s lack of knowhow and skill. It’s their inability to read the terrain, factor in weather conditions and position themselves in a spot to concentrate and catch the salmon. It’s also their inability to seek the wisdom of others who may have fished before (and in that spot). The fishing rod can’t read their minds. They control it, not vice versa.
Now, I’ve worked directly with CEOs on strategies so let me also share this. Some of the CEOs of the 1950s to 1970s generation are technologically illiterate. They can’t (and so don’t) navigate their ways around email systems; they have their 20-something PAs print materials off for them. They delegate the management of their time and their attentions to those PAs. They read reports long-hand rather than as 140 character tweets. They’re also not on their own corporate networks or IM channels. They have few of the so-called “sources of distraction”.
Yet some of them are incapable of vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity, those sorely needed skills you noted — as is evident in the global financial crisis or any Chapter 11 bankruptcy and corporate failures. They also suffer from information overload from those stockpiles of longhand printed out reports, books and even short 2-page executive summaries.
Likewise, the Anthony Edens, Joseph Stalins, Robert Mugabes and (some would say George W. Bushes) did not have the Web or technology to distract them and look what they achieved. Vision? Planning? Long-term strategizing? Inflation in Zimbabwe surged past 230 MILLION PERCENT by October 2008. Eden triggered the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Stalin is said to be responsible for the deaths of upwards of 10 million, predominantly in Ukraine caused by the famine conditions his policies produced. In China, of course, we have Pu Yi the Last Emperor of China who had no technology distractions; however unlike his illustrious predecessors like Liu Bang (who in 206BC created the Han Dynasty, the first one to embrace Confucianism, strategy and educational and technological innovation), Pu Yi had no vision.
Reaching even further back, Rome and other ancient civilizations fell not because they were distracted by technologies. They fell either because of natural disasters or man-made causes stemming from arrogance, complacency, conceit, narcissism and hubris — the very same hubris that’s said to have infected the banking sector in recent years.
What it all boils down to are not the tools, the education or the experience alone, but the JUDGMENT. Judgment derived from rationale, ego and emotion.
There are technical whizz’s who can have 6 Bloomberg screens flashing constantly at them, a messy desk and they still make a spot-on stock call (every single time). Then there are others who have clean desks, get distracted and lose millions. Meanwhile, there’s another set who can sometimes tune in and out of their attention spans; sometimes tidy up their desks, sometimes call it right, sometimes are grossly wrong.
In a previous thread, I asked the question of whether it’s possible to isolate the Web and its tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as the originating source of distraction or whether the inability to concentrate is also attributable to a priori Web changes in education systems, the proliferation of media (print billboards as much as online spam), the migration to magazines and snappy articles, television and fast-editing and also the advent of mobile technologies. Even the lack of conversation around a family dinner table can affect our abilities to concentrate. Fewer and fewer families sit down for an hour over dinner and simply converse and care.
How is that affecting our abilities to sit still, contemplate and concentrate?
Let’s also make this anecdotal observation and ask the scientists to source and analyze the empirical evidence. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Michael Bloomberg, the Google founders are all long-term technically “plugged in” to this “living in two dimensions,” and must get more emails, IMs and so-called “sources of distraction” than most. Yet they managed to remain focused and to increase the value of their companies and the knowledge repositories of their staff.
In my own case, I don’t treat tech tools as distractions. I take my fishing rod and aim for the sweet, giant Salmon of Wisdom (bradán feasa).
:*).
Hopefully, I’m not going to lose concentration or consciousness any time soon since there’s a lot I’d like to contribute.
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*********************************************************************************************In case anyone’s unfamiliar with the salmon mythology, please refer to ‘The Boyhood Deeds of Finn MacCumhal’:
• http://www.luminarium.org/mythology/ireland/finnboyhood.htm
Friends who read this blog will know that I learnt the story about the Salmon of Wisdom / Knowledge when cuil launched since that’s the story they regaled the tech sector with. Obviously, I applied it in a completely different way from the cuil team — LOL!
DOCUMENTARY WITH ME: QUOTES
The documentary in which I appear will be shown this coming week on a movie screen. Some of the quotes from the film used to market it are:
“Consciousness is a space we have been invited to participate in” says sculptor Antony Gormley, “But a subject neuroscience has “sidestepped”.”
“Consciousness is just a post-hoc narrative we tell ourselves” says perceptual neuroscientist Beau Lotto.
“We are bombarded by numbers, 16,000 numbers a day, 6 million in a lifetime. They get into our consciousness and affect it in ways that we don’t fully understand,” says cognitive neuroscientist Brian Butterworth.
“We are looking for consciousness with possibly the wrong tools. We have the quant-based tools but we need to develop the more qualitative tools,” says internet enterpreneur Twain Luu.
