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Monday, February 12, 2007
Losing our heads 
| | If we pursue the conflict metaphor here, that "common ground," (the home) Doc thinks we might defend was lost long, long ago. The demarc between the social and the commercial I'm fighting for is a metaphorical "last stand," and it exists in the only place left: Inside our heads. Doc and the Cluetrain followers are trying to eliminate that as well. |
| | While I don't agree with that last line, I gotta say that Dave goes deep with this one. He continues, |
| | But let's consider the "home invasion" for a moment to explain why. |
| | "Technology changes how we do things, it does not change what we do." Sorry, I have to assert that, because evoking it gets too subtle for some people. |
| | Now, we do many things, in many different contexts. Inside the home, homes with children anyway, we entertain children. Our culture, which is the product of social, commercial and political action and legacies, has some practices with regard to the entertainment of children. These practices have evolved as society, commerce and politics evolved. Recall that "natural selection" is the governing principle of evolution. I'm pretty sure "competition" is synonymous with "natural selection," if not technically the same thing. |
| | Before the advent of radio and television, children mostly entertained themselves in play, sometimes with toys either made at home, or made available through commerce. Parents sometimes told stories, or read stories to children. Commerce, our economic life, was once so demanding, that parents put children to work in factories. For many centuries, child labor was an economic fact of life on the family farm. So it's not as though it was totally unprecedented. But the competitive drive that governs commerce makes children an attractive labor force. In our culture, social and political forces united to check the competitive economic drives that placed children in factories; and productivity enhancements brought about through technology, and expanding markets more than made up for the loss of cheap child labor. But commerce wasn't finished with children yet. |
| | Radio and television gave us another medium through which we might tell stories, both to adults and to children, but we're going to focus on the home and children in this discussion. Radio and television receivers became commodity items, easily affordable by most people, and they were rapidly incorporated into most homes. Because of the nature of the radio frequency spectrum, expensive high power transmitting stations came under the regulatory authority of the government, politics, and since politics derives its authority from the consent of the governed, the leading social authorities helped to establish standards of broadcasting which were imposed on commerce. |
| | So the situation within the home with rf (radio frequency) communications was governed by limited choices in terms of broadcast channels, and content that was regulated by government through licensing requirements made necessary by scarce frequency spectrum. One had four or five television channels, and many more radio channels. Television, as a visual medium, commanded more of the attention of children than radio, but radio still had appeal for adolescents as an adjunct to their greater social awareness. "Rock around the clock." |
| | Programming or "content" over the broadcast media was "free" to the consumer, economically paid for through advertising. Though the consumer did "pay," only through their time and attention resources. Nothing is ever truly "free." |
| | As technology advanced, driven by competitive forces, cable television was developed as a commercial technology, wherein many more channels could be offered within the home, because it didn't use any of the public rf spectrum. Because it didn't use scarce spectrum resources, it wasn't subject to the licensing authority of the FCC. As a result, the content of programming could be much different from that which was offered over the air. |
| | To make what is already too long a story shorter, commerce identified children as a means to extract money from their parents, and aggressively marketed to them. Children's television shows went from being sponsored by commercial interests to chiefly being commercials. The shows were nothing more than narratives about products being sold. Children no longer work for commercial interests outside the home for a wage. They work on behalf of commercial interests inside the home, for nothing more than a little diversion and manipulation. |
| | The point is, the home invasion was over long ago, and commerce resides quite comfortably in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, everywhere people place a television. The advent of the internet has only somewhat altered the infection. |
| | This is why two things: 1) Except for the occasional ball game, we don't let our kid watch commercial television (in fact, he hardly watches TV at all, but instead reads about a book a day... coincidence?), and 2) Why I can't stand seeing monopoly carriers insist that their regulated chokehold on Internet access (not to mention TV and telephony) is a "market" effect that should not be interfered with by the likes of Net Neutrality legislation. While I don't want more regulation of carriers (by Net Neutrality or anything else), I don't like seeing a rigged marketplace painted as a free and open one. |
| | I realize that last point is not near the ones Dave brings up, but I want to note it somewhere and don't have the time to put up another post about it. |
| | Doc and I don't share this "common ground" of the home "demarc," because it doesn't exist. But it's more fundamental than that. Doc and I are on different sides. Doc is an advocate of commerce, and I'm not. The way we live today is too far out of balance, and it's only going to grow worse. Doc can afford to exhibit grace and good humor in response to my posts. |
| | Because his side is winning. |
| | I'll grant that we're on different sides, so long as Dave remains opposed to commerce as a whole. To me that's like taking a position against rain or sunlight. But I don't see Dave changing his position, which is fine. |
| | I'm not going to stop trying to change the balance of power within commerce either. |
| | Markets are not conversations, because conversations are a social activity, not a commercial one. But if you tell people markets are conversations, then it stands to reason that conversations are for sale. |
| | Dave's being literal here. "Markets are conversations" was meant metaphorically. Still, even in the literal sense, conversations not for sale can still happen in markets. |
Neoblogasm: beme
| | Tom Hayes shapes the meaning (and the meme-ing) of beme, a term he coined. He also makes a testable claim (and recruits yours truly, among others, to the task): |
| | ...a beme moves a billion times faster than a meme ever could. That's the power of citizen-driven media networks. Do the math. There are nearly 60 million blogs, 600 million email users and many millions of social media citizens. Because we all can be bemerz, powerful enough to spread any idea to anyone, a beme today can be created, promulgated and soldered into social conscioussness in a fraction of the time it took memes to spread 30 years ago when Professor Dawkins first made the observation. |
In some ways it's 0.2
| | Just put up some photos from the Newspaper 2.0 workshop on Saturday at UCSB in Santa Barbara. It was a small informal gathering, modest in scale but ambitious in scope. The purpose was to gather locals and share thinking about what to do with newspapers in an online world, and to move forward projects toward that end. The Santa Barbara setting was opportune, given the meltdown at the city's daily paper. (Here's the latest about the News-Press from the LA Times: a story that weighs in at about a thousand words — or 145 more than Craig Smith counted among all the local news stories in the Sunday News-Press.) While a few folks from the News-Press diaspora were there, the crowd (which peaked at 35) was a nice cross-section of journalists, academics and interested citizens. (Among them was Ralph L. Thomas, a Brazil-born Canadian journalist and filmmaker who — in addition to being a source of experience and wisdom — had interesting stories of working with Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall.) The only non-locals were Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica, who were kind enough to show up and lend their assistance to the discussions. |
| | The workshop began back in September in a lunch conversation with Bill Macfadyen and Bob Di Laurentis, who were teaming up with some other folks to launch what will eventually become Noozle.net. Not long after that I had coffee with Scott Hadly and Jerry Roberts, both News-Press veterans looking to get something new going. So I came up with the idea of convening a meeting of these folks, plus others doing similar things already (such as Peter Sklar of Edhat), under the auspices of CITS at UCSB, where I was then a recently minted Research Fellow. We first planned to meet in October, then November, then December, before settling on the February date. Somewhere along the way we decided to make it a workshop on the open space model, but to keep it small and local. To my surprise Dan and J.D., both of whom I had talked to a while back about coming, were still interested. Early on I also approached Dave Winer, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Chris Nolan and others whom I wish I had done a better job of rounding up and bringing in. My apologies to each of them for not being more on the ball about that. |
| | We opened with a conversation between Dan, J.D. and the rest of the group, then devoted the rest of the day to discussions of topics chosen and posted on the wall by participants. The conversations were convivial, energetic and (I trust) productive. |
| | There were many take-aways. The most vivid one for me is the financial challenge facing anybody attempting to blaze new business trails for newspapers online. Right now there's still little money to be made — yet — in online-only local and regional newspaper equivalents. (When we talk about "scaling" on the Net, it's usually with a sky's-the-limit worldwide ceiling. Not so with a geographically and demographically limited endeavor like a newspaper.) In one discussion Scott Hadly shared research he had done in the last few months. Among other things, he found that advertisers still prefer to spend a lot more money in local print than in local online journals (circulation and other values being equal). We do call these things newspapers for a reason. |
| | My fave line is in notes Jerry Roberts took, quoting another participant, Patricia Stark: "Can we use the smut to subsidize the good stuff"? |
| | The idea from the beginning was to move things forward. So it will be interesting to see what happens. I look at workshops like this as an exercise in fire-setting. Either stuff catches fire or it goes out. If it catches fire, watch for progress on the wiki. |
| | Many thanks to CITS and Transliteracies for sponsoring the workshop, to Rob Patton for getting the wiki going, making the wifi work and other good deeds, to Jennifer Earl for her leadership and patience with my own absent organizational skills, and to Jan Searls for taking the RSVPs and helping make things work from a continent away. Also to everybody who took time off on a Santa Barbara Saturday to participate in this thing. |
Seeking a lost drive
| | Anybody know where United and other airlines send their unclaimed lost & found items? Back in mid-January the portable external hard drive I use to store photos and other files overflowing from my laptops disappeared after an unusually thorough TSA search of the carry-on bag in which I tote my electronics. This was at the United security portal at SFO. The TSA tells me that all lost items there go to United's lost & found, which is only open from 10-3 weekdays and relates to requests for help only through tiny forms you fill out at a baggage claim counter or through requests left at a call-in number that features the most discouraging instructions I have ever heard from a recorded voice. It offers no convincing assurance that the airline will make more than sub-minimal efforts to look for your lost items, and promises only to not to call back if it doesn't find anything. |
| | Anyway, I just looked through my backup drives and gathered that the lost drive contains four months, or one third, of all the photos I took in 2006. Among other things. I would like to exert extraordinary effort to recover it, if it is recoverable at all. But I don't know what those efforts should be. |
| | Somebody told me United sends unclaimed lost and found items to some auction site in Alabama or something. Anybody know where that is? Or if that's even true? I've come up dry in my effort to get anybody at United to tell me where that might be. Never mind that I'm in their top caste ("1K") of frequent flyers. The message is "You're SOL, buddy", basically. So I'm hoping somebody out there in the long tail has a short tale of facts about What Happens To This Stuff. |
Saving off those old cassettes
| | Over in IT Garage, Tape in, bits out visits the question of how to save old open-reel and cassette tapes into digital forms. |
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