JDsViews

Doctors, Artificial Intelligence, and Creating Competitive Advantage: Reflect on Your Ways of Thinking (Differently)

2012-01-10T18:34:00.008-05:00

When I ran the teaching and learning center at New York University, the NYU Medical Center was engaged in an ambitious development program to improve faculty teaching and student learning. At its core was the recognition that doctors today employ algorithmic thinking.

Put simply, doctors make diagnoses that are more and more precise when they have more and more input, like symptoms or test data, to assess. So if you tell your doctor you have headaches and chest pain, she may list one hundred possible ailments. But if you add another symptom, like tingling in your hands and feet, her list is reduced to 50 possibilities; another symptom, like a strong reaction to salty food, takes her list down further to 15 or 20. With blood or other tests, she ultimately is able to narrow your possible ailments to 2 or 3. The doctor thus analyzes your symptoms and other input in combination, processing them algorithmically to produce the most likely explanation for their occurring at the same time.

This way of thinking in medicine is explored in a fascinating piece by Vinod Khosla that appeared in TechCrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/doctors-or-algorithms/

On its face, the piece approaches medical thinking as a challenge for Artificial Intelligence designers. It asks whether the future will see diagnoses generated through the algorithmic processing of increasingly precise inputs and rendered without the help of doctors as we know them today. What will be the response of medical profession and medical education, Khosla asks, to the potential emergence of Artificial Intelligence that enables more and more precise algorithms for diagnosing ailments? What will they do -- and, by extension, how might their way of thinking change?

While that's certainly a worthwhile question in itself, my reading of Khosla's piece is more general: if doctors indeed practice algorithmic thinking, what other ways of thinking are practiced in other professions? Is there an entrepreneurial way of thinking, for example, that empowers creativity through associating typically dissimilar elements? Or a leaders' way of thinking that reconciles the analysis of complexity in organizations or environments with the emotional sensitivity required to inspire and motivate others? And so on.

The point, of course, is not to put people or professions in simple categories or assume that everyone in a particular category thinks the same way. Rather, the potential advantage of identifying distinct ways of thinking for those in business or other competitive situations is to be able to think differently. Michael Porter, Harvardian guru of competitive strategy, says the "granddaddy of all mistakes" is going down the same path as everyone else and thinking somehow you can achieve better results. One way to forge and follow a different path is to reflect on your current way of thinking and then to try another way of thinking and see what value that can create.

Challenge for the New Year: Innovate Management, Organizational Design, not just Products, Services or Teams

2011-12-30T10:33:00.009-05:00

I'm a great fan of Gary Hamel's work on management innovation. Through his research and writings, especially at Hack 2.0: The Management Innovation eXchange, he goes beyond much of the current thinking and modeling of how to foster innovative ideas, products, and services (www.managementexchange.com).

Instead, though very much relatedly, his emphasis is on innovating management and organizations themselves. In a recent video, he discusses with a VP from Dell how the web and social media are not just tools but increasingly the operating system for our lives. The key lesson for leaders is the need for them to embrace the openness and adaptability of the web and social media in organizational design, operations, and strategy. Not an easy task, particularly with the ceding of centralized command and control it requires, but more and more a necessary one to enable success. The video is under 5 minutes long and very much worth the time.

su.pr/2pqnN0z

What Alan Webber learned from starting Fast Company: A List to Hold onto

2011-12-28T15:47:00.009-05:00

The following list, drawn from Alan Webber's blog, is a keeper. I also tweeted the link to the blog earlier, but the more I think about his lessons and insights for nurturing ideas and building businesses around them, the more inspiring and constructive I believe they are. Here are Webber's ten lessons and insights (the list appears in slightly expanded form at http://bit.ly/sOgz4W).

1. You have to believe in your own idea.
2. You have to be open to others' input on your idea.
3. The world does not need your idea.
4. Who you are and what you've done are often the best arguments for your idea. Your track record counts as much as the merits of your idea.
5. Do you have skin in the game? If you really believe in your own idea, how do you show your commitment?
6. What's your motivation? Love is more powerful than money.
7. It's all an iterative process of learning and doing.
8. If you plan some things you can leave other things looser.
9. Your idea is only as good as the people you attract to work on it with you.
10. Remember Gandhi: The means are the ends in the making. Be the project you want it to be.

How to Invest that Gift Card in a Crucial Relationship

2011-12-27T09:45:00.006-05:00

Building long, trusting, and mutually rewarding relationships with clients and customers has increasingly become an explicit aim of firms across sectors. Financial and investment firms are no exception. Yet the crucial relationship between financial advisor and client has rarely been addressed in accessible but still sophisticated terms that speak to both parties. Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith's Someday Rich: Planning for Sustainable Tomorrows Today (Wiley, 2011) fills that void. Written primarily for advisors, the book can actually be a valuable resource to be read together by advisors and clients who want to work together more closely and knowledgeably on the financial planning journey they share.

http://amzn.to/uclupO

(Full disclosure: Tim Noonan is an old and dear personal friend; his credentials as a successful financial advisor speak for themselves, however, and the insights and Personal Asset Liability Model presented in the book by him and Matt Smith have been proven with clients over more than five decades of combined advisory experience.)

Essential Ideas about Creativity in 2011 (I): Steve Jobs - Perfectionism, Process, and Tweaking

2011-12-25T20:48:00.016-05:00

One of the persistent themes of writing about creativity and creative leadership in 2011 has been that creativity is less about generating new and original notions, product or services and more about tweaking or associating existing ones in unfamiliar ways. That theme isn't entirely new itself, of course, but it runs against a fairly common conception of creativity as primarily being about novelty or originality. More unsettling to some is that the theme undercuts a kind of romance with creativity as the enchanted purview of a select group of individuals using their special gifts to produce momentous, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Instead, the values identified by various commentators and researchers as essential to creative success are keen observation, associational thinking, and dogged persistence in building processes that implement innovation.

This theme rose to prominence in various ways during the past year. In this post, I comment on how perfectionism and the tweaking of processes of innovation were highlighted in writings about Steve Jobs and Apple. In a future post, I'll cite several other recent writings that similarly focus on the promise of more efficient associating, re-working and even copying of existing ideas and products -- creatively.

The news story of the year in creative industries and leadership was the death of Steve Jobs. Yet even before his passing in early October, the practices that he and Apple employed so successfully were being closely parsed by analysts. Among many conclusions, two stand out. The first is evident throughout Walter Isaacson's masterful biography of Jobs, which tracks in often minute detail the CEO's obsessive control over product development even as Apple's ranks swelled over the last decade to tens of thousands of employees, many of them highly and often singularly skilled (http://amzn.to/uAcUVW). But it is even more apparent in Adam Lashinsky's controversial piece on the company's inner workings from the May 23 issue of Fortune, was Jobs' obsessive attention to detail (http://bit.ly/p1ciml).

This perfectionism was often exercised through a nearly dictatorial management style. All major decisions, and many minor ones, were made at Apple by Jobs himself and failures of underlings were greeted by thunderous, even disdainful critique by the CEO. In an era when quick, cheap, and smart failure is championed and the inherent messiness of creativity is recognized across creative industries and beyond, such a style is striking in its incongruousness -- and often left for us to explain away as an unavoidable by-product of Jobs' genius.

For leaders of creative industries, however, it was another journalistic piece, by Malcolm Gladwell, that spoke more directly to Jobs' success as an entrepreneurial virtuouso. Running in the May 16 issue of The New Yorker, "Creation Myth" celebrated Jobs as a second- or even third-mover whose true gift was envisioning how to apply or re-work existing technologies in unprecedented ways (http://nyr.kr/k7FKms). In other words, if one accepts that innovation, to be successful, must begin with ideation and completed with implementation, Jobs was an implementer nonpareil. While this begs the question of whether the associational thinking or insightful flash constituting implementation is itself importantly idea-driven, the argument positions Jobs less as a techno-wizard and more as a transcendant marketer. Citing the key example of the Apple co-founder's popularization of the mouse and graphical user interface following his visit to Xerox PARC, where he first observed prototypes for both, Gladwell ultimately holds "the truth of innovation" as occurring in the rough-and-tumble of business rather than the "messy world of creativity" in the research lab.

Months later, in his review of Isaacson's biography of Jobs that doubled as a obituary, Gladwell would put a finer point on his remarks about innovation by calling Jobs, with admiration, "The Tweaker" (http://nyr.kr/uPvSQQ). "The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution." Gladwell's next sentence makes his point unmistakably: "That is not a lesser task." Almost certainly not, but for many it still seems out of sorts with the romantic, world-changing image of the creative genius re-imagining the new through the power of his will.

Such a characterization of Jobs, both before and after his death, hardly diminished the veneration of the man or celebration of all he accomplished. Yet more interesting, perhaps, is the question of how the emphasis on perfectionism, tweaking, and implementing is relevant to the rest of us and to our understanding of the creative processes and creative leadership beyond Apple. More on that to come.

Rishad Tobaccowala on Strategy

2011-12-20T19:23:00.005-05:00

In case you missed his blogpost from the past weekend, @rishadt offered a characteristically pointed and instructive definition of strategy -- three words, to be exact -- that he then very usefully annotated.

http://rishadt.wordpress.com

(For those who don't know Rishad, he serves as the Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer at VivaKi - which draws together the digital and media assets of the Publicis Groupe - and is among the few who actually deserve the overused title of thought leader in the marketing and creative communication space.)

You know Porter's Five Forces; you should also use his five tests of good strategy

2011-12-17T09:54:00.005-05:00

Deceptively simply -- and challenging -- tests to making good strategic choices: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/jim_collins_meet_michael_porte.html

p.s. The essential guide to Porter's work offered as a link in the post, as well as Jim Collins' latest, Great by Choice, are both excellent and useful reads.

No more social media navel-gazing... A Resolution for 2012?

2011-12-16T18:23:00.010-05:00

I've had the good fortune to travel widely, to more than 100 countries in all, and one of the recurrent experiences I've had in doing so is also one of the most banal: many people who travel widely spend a great deal of time while traveling, particularly in unusual locales, talking about traveling, particularly to unusual locales.... Now I grant this might reflect more on the people I associate with and the places I go, but it comes to mind when reading two recent pieces about social media. The association is that many people who use social media (Twitter, especially comes to mind first here, but also FB, Tumbler, FourSquare, and blogs) do so largely to reflect on their use of social media. I plead guilty to such navel-gazing myself, occasionally, and perhaps we're all justified with being fascinated, exhilarated, frustrated, or just plain curious about new technologies and the routines and interactions they enable. The real issue I'm raising is one of proportion and arises when the majority of tweets, comments, or posts are primarily self-referencing. Only a few insightful folks can really get away with this -- for me, the few like Jeff Jarvis or Seth Godin --and the rest of us are simply adopting a parallel of the proverbial self-conscious tracking of what one is having for breakfast or ordering at Starbucks.

The two pieces that prompted this thought are from Seth Godin and Alexandra Samuel. Godin's piece is about marketers' (mis)use of social media and the noise it creates. While not directly the problem I'm pointing to, I believe it speaks to the same push-pull of fascination and uncertainty around social media that generates endless (and mostly vacuous) reflections. For marketers, indeed, the imperative is to use social media, any social media, to increase their numbers of fans, friends, and followers regardless of content or the reasons why. The underlying rationale Godin seems to identify is, the more tweets, posts, or other words, the more followers -- while the real result, as he says, is actually just more volume, or noise.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/12/the-trap-of-social-media-noise.html

The second piece also speaks to the allure of increasing numbers in social media, though for Alexandra Samuel it is more about personal benchmarking -- again, though, of friends, fans, or followers, in raw numbers or composites like Klout. Her response takes the form of ten commandments for social media sanity in 2012. Threading through the list is a desire to escape the measurement trap and even the resulting dehumanization she sees such benchmarking as possibly contributing to. While that more far-reaching claim deserves a longer discussion than is offered in her post, it does speak to the potential stakes of incessant social media navel-gazing. That all may be worth a resolution, or at least some offline reflections, as the new year approaches.

http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/12/a-social-sanity-manifesto-for.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Call Yourself Creative? (Probably...)

2011-12-13T14:08:00.003-05:00

The Top 10 overused buzzwords in LinkedIn profiles in 2011, in the US and beyond....

http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/12/13/buzzwords-redux/

The Future of Context...and Reading

2011-12-12T18:44:00.005-05:00

Fascinating brief piece from Wired on the changes wrought by mobile devices, particularly tablets. The bulk of the piece lays out details about how "context is now a multivariable function" dependent upon medium, location, time, social networks/position, and identity. This is a worthwhile starting point for a necessary, more expansive discussion about how context is now much more than simply the background to a story - it represents the set of interactions, filters, and mechanisms that the gives the story meaning and dimension.

Perhaps as striking here, and offered more as a preface to the remarks on context, are the opening claims about the transformation of reading currently underway. There's some hyperbole here about the extent of the changes tablets have already made. Yet it seems undeniable for their users that the power of applications like Flipboard, FLUD, and (my own favorite) Zite is in their capability not just to personalize news content but to make tablets and phones alike truly smart mobile readers -- and, presumably, in the process, to begin to profoundly alter our reading routines.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/google-to-flipboard-to-flud/

11 Days That Shaped 2011 As Measured by Social Media - SocialTimes.com

2011-12-10T16:21:00.002-05:00

I haven't posted here in a great long time. I thought it might make sense to come back with a look at what events and news that I (like so many) otherwise interacted with this year. A great infographic from AOL: 11 Days That Shaped 2011 As Measured by Social Media - SocialTimes.com

The Tyranny of Expertise in the Ashcloud Crisis

2010-04-20T07:46:00.006-04:00

Crisis management is, by definition, exceedingly difficult. The continuing aviation crisis in Europe caused by the volcanic ash-cloud from Iceland is no exception. Initial assertions made by airlines following uneventful weekend test flights that the blanket restrictions on air travel were draconian have been followed by less self-interested questions about the basis in science for regulators' decisions.

Two pieces in today's Financial Times sketch out some of the issues:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0821cc00-4bb5-11df-9db6-00144feab49a.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/79fbe12a-4be8-11df-a217-00144feab49a.html

Claims and counter-claims about the appropriate levels of caution and the uncertainty of risk are obviously not easy to resolve. Yet as many have pointed out, the five-day delay in scheduling European transport ministers for a videoconference is less about the complexities of decision-making than a failure of leadership. Even more telling has been the delay in questioning the science, both chemical and mathematical, used to generate risk models. This is not at all to suggest a repudiation of scientific factors in favor of, say, economic ones in deciding when to close or open skies to flight. Rather, it is to suggest that scientific models and explanations be managed critically -- that is, by the standards of evidence and logic of scientific inquiry itself -- before adopting them wholesale as the basis of standards or policy.

One of the great temptations of leadership is to succumb to what my colleague, Doug Guthrie, and I call "the tyranny of expertise" (we both teach at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, where I sit today under brilliantly blue if still otherwise mostly empty German skies). Such tyranny exists when leaders defer uncritically or even unthinkingly to purported experts, including scientists but also economists, lawyers and others with specialized knowledge. In many cases, of course, these experts have much to offer and their insights are crucial. However, effective leadership requires that these insights and expertise serve as a means to an end, as in the case of policy-making, instead of an end in itself. Let us hope that European regulators begin to make more judicious use of the science of aviation and ash-clouds they have available and prove themselves better leaders.

Who Has the Power to Say: You Can Fly Again?

2010-04-19T11:13:00.003-04:00

The question of standards for returning to safe flying, and ultimately which authority governs those standards, is being voiced in travel and business forums.

from Conde Nast Traveler
http://clivealive.truth.travel/2010/04/who-has-the-power-to-say-you-can-fly-again.html

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/world/europe/20ash.html?ref=global-home

Telegraph (UK)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/7607216/Iceland-volcano-air-restrictions-are-excessive-says-European-Commission.html

A knotty set of issues, to be sure, but also one about leadership and the political will to recognize how twenty-first century global air travel can't necessarily be managed through antiquated, territorial and finally nation-based forms of governance.

Comparing Airline and Banking Crisis Regulation

2010-04-19T04:42:00.004-04:00

The Icelandic volcanic ash cloud has caused a global crisis in aviation. I’m currently in northern Europe, where reactions to the continental shutdown of flights have ranged from the whimsical to the anxious to the furious. On a very basic level, the perfectly cloudless sky over Berlin throughout the weekend has led to a sense of bemusement. Not least because of that invisibility of the ash cloud threat, it is difficult not to wonder about what acceptable level of safety, say, of particles in the air, will allow planes to return to normal flight schedules.

The question of standards, or requirements for opening airspace and resuming air travel, is of course the one being raised by carriers who conducted a few test flights without incident over the weekend. While presumably motivated by their financial interest in returning to the air, it would be unfair to allege that this is their only interest; safety remains a central value to their successful operation (if only, for the cynics, for their sustainable financial success). We have all heard about the few tragic or near tragic incidents that have occurred over the last three decades and demonstrated the dangerous potential effect of airborne ash on jet planes. Yet the scientific standards for understanding these potential effects remain largely theoretical and speculative. Despite this lack of more empirical evidence, the response of aviation authorities has been thoroughgoing and unequivocal: airspace has been closed to commercial flights in most European countries.

Compare this to the regulatory response to the banking and fiscal crisis beginning in late 2008 and continuing today, if now mostly in terms of determining what frameworks (if any) should exist within or across nations to govern trading. Obviously there are many, many differences. Among the most obvious is the difference between the physical risk of flying a plane that may crash and the financial risk that may ruin portfolios or lifelong investments but leave individuals alive and physically uninjured.

Yet the question of standards, murky in both cases, has elicited very different responses: in aviation, a shutdown; in banking, even in the darkest days of 2008 or 2009, few constraints, certainly not uniform across borders, were imposed on trading, say of CDOs or derivatives, by large banks. Even more, what also matters here is how governments or regulators are able to intervene in business operations, presumably, in the public interest, seem very different. I’m not necessarily advocating a greater or lesser level of governance or oversight of either industry. But together the two crises should prompt a discussion of how twenty-first century governments and regulators act (or don’t) in the public and corporate interests.

Multi-friending? Social Multi-tasking?

2010-02-06T22:22:00.010-05:00

Just to round out a week in which multitasking unexpectedly emerged as a recurrent issue, a further thought inspired by a piece in the New York Review of Books. Charles Petersen discusses two recent books on Facebook and MySpace. Both recount the histories of the social networking sites and the review focuses on the class-based origins of Facebook at Harvard and the more working-class ethos of MySpace. It's an appropriate approach to social networking and one that Petersen develops with insight. More implicitly, the review underscores the importance of capturing and analyzing the history of digital communities and social interaction, which for many seem utterly ephemeral. It's sobering to realize that the establishment of both MySpace and Facebook (or at least Mark Zuckerberg's initial attempt, Facemash) occurred only in 2003.

Where Petersen ends, though, and ultimately why the review relates to multitasking, is with a question about the nature of "friends" that are made and maintained on these networks. We may have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of "friends," but what is the level of intimacy or sustained interaction we share with them? While the news has recently focused on Facebook's privacy policy, the better question may be how communication on the site allows friends to share or to hide aspects of themselves. "We have turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud," William Deresiewicz is quoted as observing. "Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling." Is the parallel here to the quandary in digital learning of seeking abundance and novelty or avoiding depth and hard work? If so, the consequences of these technologies for society and interpersonal relations go far beyond class and warrant greater consideration from all of us.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23651

Embracing Others - and Change: Leadership Insights from Peter Guber and Jeff Jarvis

2010-02-04T21:48:00.019-05:00

I have the pleasure of working at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership (www.berlin-school.com), an innovative school that offers an Executive MBA to talented creatives preparing for greater management responsibilities in industries like advertising, television, journalism, and new media. While the majority of the program takes place in Germany, we hold separate two-week teaching and learning modules in Asia and the U.S. We just completed the latter module, an intensive fortnight of sessions split between New York and Los Angeles, and I am still digesting the rich and diverse learnings offered in courses, site visits, talks by industry leaders, and just plain interactions with the Berlin School’s own fascinating program participants.

Among our guest speakers in January were two luminaries who at first glance seem completely different. Jeff Jarvis is a career journalist, having created Entertainment Weekly and been Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, who now directs the Interactive Media Program in the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is now known more broadly as a prolific blogger (at www.buzzmachine.com) and the author of What Would Google Do? A tireless advocate of re-thinking the business and conceptual models underlying journalism, Jarvis believes that social and digital technologies have utterly transformed the news (and other industries) into an interactive, collaborative enterprise. His next book, tentatively titled, “Beta,” outlines the power of collective, ongoing revision and re-making. Appropriately, as a work-in-progress itself, the project’s core ideas were the subject of Jarvis’s public President’s Lecture to Berlin School friends and the wider New York creative community on January 20.

Peter Guber is an icon in the entertainment world. Currently the Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, he has thrived for more than three decades as a creative producer and business leader across motion pictures, music, television and multimedia. Guber has held executive positions with Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment. He co-founded Casablanca Record and Film Works, formed Polygram Pictures, and was the co-owner of the Guber-Peters Entertainment Company. His credits as a producer or executive producer include such films as Taxi Driver, Rain Man, Batman, and Philadelphia. As well, Guber holds a professorship and teaches regularly in the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA. On January 27, he spoke to the Berlin School EMBA cohort at UCLA's Entertainment and Media Management Institute about the power of storytelling for leaders and, in doing so, shared several of his own key tenets for leadership.

So what lessons and insights were shared by this odd couple? Much was different, of course, in their respective styles and areas of industry focus. Yet in reflecting on their ideas, I was struck by how many of the core ideas offered separately by Jarvis and Guber dovetailed and seemed to spring from common values and perceptions about organizations, the media and success. Here are a few illustrations:

1. “Technology isn’t the answer; it serves the answer.”
These are Guber’s words, though they resonate with the persistent message from Jarvis that the seachange we’re experiencing in social and digital media has less to do with technology and more to do with mindset and the dynamics of collaboration that are served by that technology. For both men, it is the exchange of ideas and passions between individuals – however that exchange occurs – that is paramount.

2. Leverage the power of collective intelligence
Jarvis is at the forefront of thinking through how the intelligence of collaboration can yield not only richer creative work and better information but also more efficient and innovative business models. Guber speaks more generally about the power of social networks. For him the leveraging their power is ultimately about leveling the playing field on which companies compete. Again, rather than going it alone, both men acknowledge and embrace the wisdom of the crowd.

3. Relinquish control
The turn to collaboration requires that individuals give up some of the control that ego and often institutions insist on. Guber puts it simply, “Accept power and opportunity by surrendering control.” Jarvis’s entire notion of “Beta” seems likewise predicated on a willingness to release ideas or projects that are incomplete – and with them individual control over their future shaping – in order for others to improve them more than any one individual could.

4. “Manage by objective – Not Yours, Theirs”
The emphasis on others is recurrent and defining for both men. Leadership of organizations or communities of ideas comes not from tirelessly driving home one’s own vision or idea but from embracing the visions or ideas of others. This should not suggest passivity, of course, and no one would claim that either Guber or Jarvis shrinks from asserting their own views and priorities. They both insist, though, that individual efforts and specific goals should be regularly and constructively subjected to the wisdom, power, or potential of others – including competitors and challengers.

5. Abandon “the myth of perfection”
This myth is Jarvis’s and central to his analysis of contemporary journalism. The pursuit of perfection by news professionals both insists on the value of finished products (stories, newspapers) rather than works-in-progress and reserves the right for trained professionals and insular institutions rather than wider publics. Interestingly, Guber, too, speaks directly to the negative impact of pursuing an unattainable goal instead of releasing an already strong achievement. Quoting a friend who works at NASA, he notes that “perfect is the enemy of success”; striving to be “good enough” is what enables things to get done and organizations to move forward.

6. Someone else is out there…
Maybe the most intriguing of parallels between the two speakers was their nearly identical invocation of a complete stranger who they believe drives their work. For Jarvis, it is the “student in a dorm room somewhere” who is creating a new network or releasing an idea to a community who will grow it in unprecedented ways. For Guber, it is “someone halfway around the world” developing an idea or technology that will transform the entertainment industry. For both, besides providing motivation to work harder, these strangers embody the greater worlds of knowledge and imagination that even the most talented individual leader or thinker or even single organization recognizes exists beyond them.

For me, the crucial thread running through these shared ideas is a committed openness to change – in industries and institutions, in teams and in individuals, and perhaps most in the romantic ideas we tend to harbor about the individual leader or writer. One might counter that such an attitude toward openness is less possible for others than it is for those like Jarvis or Guber who, as the latter himself remarked, are already observing the world “from 30,000 feet,” well-positioned and successful. I’m quite certain both would disagree. The values of collaboration they espouse, served and supported as they are today by extraordinary media networks and communities of common interests, can breed success and productivity at every level.

More multitasking...in the Digital Nation

2010-02-03T23:12:00.006-05:00

Last night, PBS's Frontline broadcast a 90-minute program called "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier." The website has actually been up and active for months and was Frontline's first multiplatform project. You can watch the entire program online. Frankly, though, it is the website, with its multiple links, fuller-length interviews, stories submitted by the public on YouTube, expert roundtable, and self-guided online workshops, that offers a more impressive introduction to a host of social, cultural and psychological issues related to the proliferation of digital technologies. Much of the attention in the program itself is dedicated to younger generations of users, the digital natives, and how they learn (or don't) as constant users of multiple technologies. With the technologies being so new and the generation being so young, conclusions are hardly clear, but the consensus in the program and research beyond is that multitasking does not generally enable deep learning. (One irony pointed out here is that those who believe themselves most adept at multitasking, even among the natives, are in fact the weakest.)

Focusing on digital natives and their typical exclusion of analog media is a worthy and timely topic. Yet one does get the sense that many of the experts' fascination with the younger generation's distinctiveness stems in part, and not unimportantly, from their own parental curiosity about their children (on the "Digital Nation" homepage is thus a link to a "What is you Digital Parenting Style?" quiz). Whatever the ultimate motivation, by extending that fixation on the digital native, the program and website avoid what is a more complicated and also more widespread set of issues. How is learning or information gathering and processing across generations affected not by a categorical shift to digital technology use but by a mixing of digital and non-digital media? Perhaps this is a question that will be obsolete in only a few decades, but in the meantime, it seems much more pressing for making sense of how anyone over the age of 30 or so relates to diverse media and other people. That is also obviously a relevant question for media companies -- and neglecting it may betray yet again most media industries' characteristic over-emphasis on the tastes and habits of youth demographics.

The Frontline site is a great resource: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

Media multitasking: Seeking abundance or avoiding depth?

2010-02-02T12:43:00.006-05:00

Not unrelated to my experience of returning to reading newspapers in print, and inevitably comparing them to digital news sources, is some recent research on student learning in the classroom. Summarized nicely in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, one of the key questions boils down to this: Is media multitasking driven by a desire for new information or a wish to avoid hard thinking? While there's predictably no clearcut answer, the implications of that research on attention and distraction, analytical thinking and memory, seem relevant to a range of other settings and information. Perhaps including news.

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/

On Reading a Newspaper (on paper, again)

2010-02-01T23:34:00.008-05:00

I flew back from Los Angeles to New York yesterday and had a novel experience: reading two Sunday papers the old-fashioned way, on paper, section by section. I used to read the New York Times regularly, religiously, on the weekend in paper form, but that ritual ended when a delivery service could not dependably deliver my paper (in a downtown Manhattan apartment building, no less; and much to the incredulous chagrin of the Times circulation office). For the last two years or so, I’ve been reading it at nytimes.com and on my iPhone.

So with substantial but now, with each passing weekend, increasingly receding experience with newspapers on paper, I picked up both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times as I was boarding my flight. The cost was not insignificant, $8.25 for the two, and neither was the weight. I did so in part out of nostalgia but also out of curiosity: I regularly find myself in discussions about the future of newspaper, print and journalism and I realized that I had not immersed myself in print in some time.

While I didn’t read every article or word, I spent most of my five hours on-board with the papers. Along the way, and reflecting afterward, I had various thoughts and reactions. Most are familiar and have even been the subject of careful research (I myself share insights on such matters to the NYT). Yet returning to print personally was, I must say, instructive, for the directness if not freshness of ideas that otherwise have been well-analyzed in the abstract. It was also enjoyable.

Here are some reactions:

1. The feel of the paper
There is a feel of paper in the hands that transcends the experience on the eyes (and the efforts of “e-ink” designers to replicate). There was a tangibility and texture that was different from any screen or device I’ve used. And then there’s the gritty charm of blackened fingers.

2. Having the news organized for you
Online news is also organized, in many cases, into subjects like the sections of print papers. Yet the physical coherence of the paper sections and the contiguity of multiple, related stories on a single or facing broadsheet pages offered a more coherent impression around that subject than I’m used to. The NYT Book Review is a great example of this, with page after page of happy discoveries. If only as an occasional variation, I liked having others do the work of organizing that I otherwise enjoy doing myself through clicks and links. Perhaps like the mix of movies, where one ordinarily gives oneself over to the storyteller, and games or websurfing or mobile apps, where one is in greater control of the narrative journey, print and digital news may offer a pleasing variety.

3. More diversity in what I read
It’s counter-intuitive, but I felt like I was reading more diverse stories in the print papers than I would have on my Mac. This is also somewhat a matter of control and our own filters. Though advantages abound in personalizing our digital news, it’s also a process that excludes much that we either don’t like, care about or agree with. I ordinarily might not read online about extremists in the Russian republic of Dagestan but did so with interest in the front section of the NYT.

4. Fewer perspectives in print
If I read more diverse topics, I nevertheless found fewer perspectives about each individual topic in the print stories. Maybe this is inevitable. The glory of digital news is that it’s unending: on a given topic, the immediate links and then the limitless searching beyond multiplies the viewpoints around the story. Some might say that not all perspectives are equal and that print offers a knowledgeable summary, but ultimately I felt limited while reading stories I couldn’t immediately pursue details of as I wished.

One of the crucially missing perspectives, for me, concerns the press itself. Reading about Davos in the NYT, where the focus was on the lack of trust expressed in institutions expressed at the World Economic Forum, I couldn’t but wonder about the role of media and journalism itself in covering the leaders and pronouncements there. Besides the carefully positioned voice of the Public Editor, a reflexivity around journalistic practice seemed lacking in print that is – sometimes excessively among aggregators and bloggers -- abundant online.

5. Losing myself in the source
Without that reflexivity, and the skepticism it engenders, my print papers impressed me as more authoritative. The consistency of style and voice and presentation all contribute to a kind of intellectual coherence that’s utterly lacking across multiple digital sources. While some say that the web has a flattening effect, for instance, and makes the information on nearly all sites seem similar if not the same, most thoughtful friends of mine are very attentive to the site they’re on and the source of information it represents. (I know there are also claims about generational differences here, with alarmists saying digital natives don’t distinguish their sources, but my experience teaching college undergraduates suggests exactly the opposite.)

6. I wanted analysis not headlines
Despite leaving my hotel before 6am, I had already thoroughly perused the day’s headlines on netvibes, digg, iGoogle, and my Google Reader. By the time, I sat down on the plane, in other words, I already knew most of the major, timely news of the previous night and now early morning. What I didn’t yet have was good analysis, background or context for those stories. I hadn’t clicked through and read more about those headlines that interested me. That meant I was eager, when reading print news, to have deeper analysis and thoughtful mixing of perspectives. Again, with the two papers I was carrying, especially on a Sunday, I was mostly satisfied with longer stories. It’s ironic, though, at the very time print papers are needing to scale back because of advertising and business challenges, that more and better analysis beyond the headlines seemed a worthy differentiator. (Interestingly, this same argument for less time-critical analysis has been raised by some who suggest weekly magazines may fare better in print than daily newspapers.)

7. Reading the articles more closely
Maybe it’s the lack of links, boxes with related content, or even separate windows that can distract from reading news on the web or mobile – grazing for digital news can be fun – but I find myself more concentrated on individual stories. Of course it could also be they were better written or laid our more appealingly. (Or perhaps being on a plane further reduced my usual distractions.) Put another way, while both turning print pages and clicking digital ones are both physical acts required to advance one’s way in reading news, handling the papers and read their stories, with a certain stillness, felt different and allowed me to focus more.

8. I miss the interaction
The saddest section in both the NY Times and the LA Times has to be the letters to the editor. This is not to say they’re unimportant or unintelligent. As a form of interaction, though, they seem like letters lost in the past when compared with the instantaneous opportunities not just for comments and readers’ responses to news stories online but to blogs, Facebook posts, and the whole gamut of possible digital mass information collaboration. More generally, print – and not only because I was on a plane without wireless – offers fewer opportunities, certainly immediate, direct ones, for responding to what’s being read than digital.

9. Loving the local stories
Perhaps it’s my own selection of digital information sources, but I tend not to follow much local news online. It’s there but most of my attention, particularly in the analysis and commentaries about news, tends to focus on larger stages. My focus on the local tends to be more on social an cultural matters and to come through (often localized) social sites like Yelp, Going and Facebook. One of my favorite stories in print was the complicated search for a new animal services manager in Los Angeles in the LA Times. Really interesting issues but probably never would have read it online. Makes me think about hyperlocal services like everyblock.com, outside.in and Patch and all they offer.

10. Print ads are cool
I paid a lot of attention to ads in the print papers. Of course, they’re what papers have fewer and fewer of these days. But they’re also big, many of them are beautiful, and they’re part of the layout. I’m accustomed to ignoring digital ads and rarely click on them. Yet in print, the positioning of ads makes them part of the flow of reading that’s very different from digital banners or sites that are a click away. Even more, the NYT magazine, with its glossy color ads, shows off the lushness of print that wowed me even more than large-screen computer displays of online ads. Of course, video ads are absent (as of now) but for the most part they’re still a click away or unwanted or at least not integral to the layout of the digital realm the way ads are in print.

As most of these suggest, my readings left me appreciating the sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping advantages of both print and digital news. There is a physical feel, a coherent voice, and a most digital news doesn't replicate, despite my own efforts at aggregation and curation. My takeaway was that continuing to read news on multiple platforms, including print (not to mention TV and radio), is valuable precisely it provokes thinking about how we gather and process and filter what we learn and know about the world around us. Yes, business models and public information are important and necessary to consider, but news should also help us to understand who we are individually and as communities. Besides probably returning to print occasionally in the future, my transcontinental experiment made me pause and think about how and what of the stories and sources that I otherwise hungrily consume and process in digital form. It was a good flight.

10 Things to Watch About Comcast-NBCU

2009-12-05T14:00:00.004-05:00

Amidst so much other commentary, and still more possibilities for further claims about the merger's significance for industry, platform and user convergences (and beyond #10 here, synergies), a nicely grounded piece from Ben Grossman at Broadcasting & Cable.

"10 Things to Watch About Comcast-NBCU"

First came the deal, now comes the waiting. As the mega-merger between Comcast and NBCU goes through its process, here are 10 things I'm wondering about.

1 Jeff Zucker's fate. Comcast can appreciate a great cable business as much as anyone, and under Zucker, NBC Universal has grown into one. But the broadcast network's fall under his watch has industry insiders buzzing about whether he will make the cut or not.

2 Jay Leno's fate. Will Comcast share NBC's long-term view of the 10 p.m. experiment and Conan at 11:35, or will they use the ownership change as an excuse to move Leno and his 5 million faithful viewers back to 11:35 and let Conan become a free agent? Either way, you have to admire Leno's sucking up the night before the deal was announced. His guest: E!'s Kim Kardashian.

3 Versus/NBC Sports. Amortizing rights fees over the cable side could give Dick Ebersol a new sling of arrows to fire at some major sports acquisitions. While a deal like the NFL on NBC is a money loser (as are all NFL network deals) having a full-time cable outlet, as well as some regional sports nets, opens up a whole new ballgame. Whether or not they “go after ESPN” is not the point; there is plenty of room for both if Comcast can grab a big-time property or two.

4 The Olympics. Does this deal throw a wrench into the conventional wisdom that Disney will easily outbid everyone for the next Olympics package? Zucker says Comcast-NBCU will look at it “if it makes sense.” Fiscally alone it doesn't, as evidenced by the right fees NBC faced in Beijing and even more so in Vancouver. But it is a major vanity play as well, and if Comcast is serious about getting into sports as it has always planned with Versus, this would be a tough property to lose.

5 The NBC Name. Will it go away? More than one NBC insider has guessed Comcast may want to ditch the name NBC Universal altogether at some point. The guess here is Comcast Entertainment becomes the parent but the NBC network keeps its name.

6 Musical Chairs. Take Jeff Shell, Ted Harbert, Jeff Gaspin, Marc Graboff, Bonnie Hammer and Lauren Zalaznick, to name a few. There's lots of talent in this group. But will there be enough seats for all of them when the regulatory and logistical music stops?

7 Hulu. Last week, the Comcast execs said they could see network programming stay available for free on Hulu, with cable programming living behind an authentication wall to protect cable operators. By the time this deal closes, there will be a pay model for Hulu, so despite what the bigwigs said, it's really not that simple. I'm not sure a Comcast-Hulu marriage will last; at the very least, it should see some Eldrick-Elin-type bumps.

8 Xfinity. Apparently, Comcast is changing the name of OnDemand Online to “Xfinity.” If that doesn't sound like a club in Vegas that guys go to with a stack of $1 bills, I don't know what does. Not that I would know. Anyway, here's hoping the NBC creative types can help Comcast come up with a more appropriate moniker.

9 The Friday Night Lights Model. A while back, Steve Burke told me that if the right opportunity arose, Comcast would look at a similar model to the DirecTV deals, in which the satellite provider gets a first run of a show and picks up a chunk of the production tab, with the second run airing on a network. It'll be interesting to see if Comcast experiments with some reverse-windowing now that it has its own network, or if that model is just dead.

10 Synergies. Obviously, brands like Bravo and Style have crossover to spare, and Joel McHale already traversed the companies with shows on both E! and NBC, but how else will synergies pop up? A Kardashians theme-park ride? Must. Resist. Lewd. Joke.

E-mail comments to ben.grossman@reedbusiness.com

http://mobile.broadcastingcable.com/article/438679-10_Things_to_Watch_About_Comcast_NBCU.php?rssid=20065

Hollywood's Self-Fulfilling Marketing

2009-08-17T01:59:00.010-04:00

Two recent pieces astutely cast light on the Hollywood's stubborn predilection for mainstream filmmaking. A.O. Scott in the New York Times and James Surowiecki in The New Yorker discuss why mega-franchises like Transformers continue to dominate film production. In part, as Scott observes, this is the ritual of questioning summer schlock fare. More tellingly, though, both pieces ask whether there's a failure of nerve by studios in their continuing reliance on action blockbusters aimed at the mythical teen and young adult demographic.

Surowiecki focuses on Kathryn Bigelow's excellent war drama, The Hurt Locker, which received little marketing support for its release in summer blockbuster season. He nails the issue in writing, "Hollywood decided in advance that Americans weren’t going to watch this kind of movie, and then made sure they wouldn’t." This is not just an unwillingness to take risk with a smaller film (on an admittedly uneasy topic, the Iraq War): it's a failure of imagination from an industry that is supposed to be awash in it.

The global economic recession is fairly invoked as cause for contemporary caution by the media conglomerate-held studios. Yet the conservatism driving production and marketing decisions long predated the current crisis. Amidst a much farther-reaching transformation of media and fragmentation of audiences, the immediate-term thinking seems terribly short-sighted. The blockbuster mentality has been around for decades, guiding most studio operations at least since the late 1970s. At a time when diversification is a watchword for success across other troubled and evolving industries, Hollywood might do well to consider adopting it as a strategy for winning the future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/movies/09scot.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/08/the-hurt-locker-what-is-hollywood-thinking.html

Social Media and Change in Moldova

2009-08-01T08:59:00.004-04:00

Moldova has just held another contested election. The small eastern European country, which rose to international headlines after elections in April provoked two weeks of anti-government protests (amplified, it was celebrated, by Twitter and e-mail communications), had another very close vote this week that appeared to produce a victory for opposition parties seeking closer ties to Europe. The electoral closeness emerges in part from the need of these parties to preserve a fragile coalition. Still, one could see progress in challenging the authority of the pro-Russian government by a younger generation able to mobilize in important part with new technologies.

It is possible to conclude summarily that the Twitter Revolution of April has finally succeeded, albeit after a delay of a hundred days and still only gradually. Yet we need to be cautious. If indeed it has happened, the political shift toward a European-leaning coalition and away from the Russian-supported Communists may well be more a reflection of longer-term generational changes and the continuing drift in former Soviet republics and bloc countries away from communist or socialist rule. Did Twitter accelerate this process in Moldova? Perhaps. Better to say now that events – and communication media – in the spring contributed to an array of compelling trends toward change.

However, those trends are both political and economic and finally transcend the familiar East-West reading. On the ground, in the hearts of many Moldovans desperate for greater opportunity and change, they are trends that often converge in ways that contradict distant analyses grounded in pitched oppositions of Russian and EU-supporters. The Financial Times says Moldovans "want it both ways." Quite right. Rather than this being a sign of greed or unreasonableness, though, it is more likely a symptom of wanting and needing to embrace as many possibilities as exist. As the FT piece concluded on Thursday, "Moldova has no interest in choosing between them. It needs them both."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f19164a-7d2c-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html

Bauhaus: Still Teaching after 90 Years

2009-07-28T13:31:00.003-04:00

A fascinating exhibition opened last week in Berlin on the Bauhaus. This innovative school of architecture, design and visual arts was founded 90 years ago at the end of the First World War and was closed in 1933 by the Nazis when they rose to power in Germany. For those 14 years, however, the Bauhaus represented a vibrant interdisciplinary school and community of teachers and practitioners committed at once to re-examining the very roots of Western aesthetics and design concerns and to extending the experimentation and social critique of modernity. The current exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau is the largest exhibition on the Bauhaus in history and comprises more than 1000 objects. More info at http://www.modell-bauhaus.de .

As a laboratory for exploring artistic, educational, and social issues, the Bauhaus rewards exploration from multiple perspectives. For me, as an educator committed to interdisciplinary teaching and learning, the launching of workshops involving talented students and gifted practitioners and thinkers from different fields (Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky among them) is inspiring. That this was accomplished in such a penetrating way at an historical moment of sweeping technological change and social transformation makes it all the more extraordinary. Viewing the show today, as we again confront the changes wrought by technology and a wide-scale reconceptualization of the world, Bauhaus continues to provide lessons in how we might pursue, with rigor and openness and imagination, persistent questions about creativity, what it means to be human, and how to relate to the world around us.

Media Enchantment and the Real World

2009-07-23T07:44:00.005-04:00

I recently received a pair of e-mail announcements from The Economist magazine (I’m a happy subscriber to the print edition). The first message indicated that an electronic version of the magazine was now available for the Kindle e-reader. The second was that the latest in the magazine’s ongoing online debate series, on “Israelis and the Arabs,” was now being launched and could be followed on the e-reader.

What was telling for me was how the messages combined media and real world items. Now, media exists in the real world, I know, and a debate about conditions among Israelis and Arabs or anyone else is not the same as the conditions themselves. But those are more abstract quibbles.

The issue here is that amidst our generally justifiable techno-euphoria today, especially regarding social media, the connection of evolving technologies to what’s happening in the actual world is often neglected or at least downplayed. Our very celebration of the speed, variety, mobility, and accessibility of digital media can easily lead to an emphasis on proliferating and interconnecting technologies themselves and only a superficial or fleeting engagement with whatever information they are ostensibly communicating.

In other words, and perhaps unavoidably updating McLuhan, it’s a reminder that while (new) media are themselves an important message we can dwell over, media technologies also (still) communicate about issues that have meaning for flesh-and-blood human beings and consequences on the ground and in actual lives.

Thanks for the Compliment (about not being simplistically partisan or ideological)

2009-07-12T11:40:00.010-04:00

A few words about a direct message I received on Twitter. It made my day. I just signed on a couple weeks ago and still notice and appreciate new followers. Here's what came in earlier:

I can't figure out if you're a liberal or a conservative. But your tweets are interesting.

I was glad to know at least one person finds my tweets interesting, but even more was pleased to learn my messages didn't betray any simplistic political perspective. I definitely situate myself on one side of that seeming divide, but believe doing so publicly, at least through a one-word label, is counterproductive. I'm convinced that the effect of such simplistic partisan or ideological affiliation has been toxic for our politics over the last two decades (at least). Of many examples, recent events in the New York State legislature, which for weeks were deadlocked in a 31-31 partisan tie, with both Democrats and Republicans wanting to be the majority, come to mind as a ridiculous, adolescent exercise serving no one.

In the echo chamber of contemporary media politics, I've long thought that media and journalistic reports should stop automatically including the party affiliation following a legislator's name (e.g., Peter King (NY-R) or Al Franken (Minnesota-D)). What value is added by those letters? Yes, I recognize that politicians self-identify with parties, rely on them for funding and support, and work in groups or caucuses organized along party lines. With so much information available from so many sources, it's perhaps understandable that having ready hooks on which to hang one's views and build communities of interest makes not only good sense but effective strategy. Perhaps most fundamentally, an R or D, a L or C not only neatly -- too neatly for me -- summarizes re-assures us that we belong to a political tribe. Of course, the price, the loss of genuine nuance and robustness and contrarianness in our social and political discourse, seems much greater.

It's probably naive to think so, but every step that can be taken, by media organizations as well as citizens and social media participants, to acknowledge more fully the complexity of political and social life today should be embraced. So I hope I can keep on being hard to figure out, at least in terms of labels. The best ideas, I'm convinced, are often interesting precisely because they don't simply re-affirm already known positions or platforms but provoke one's thinking beyond.

Social Media Consulting Du Jour

2009-07-09T07:53:00.012-04:00

Great piece today at mediaite.com by Anthony de Rosa about social media consulting (http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-social-media-sommelier). It rightly shines a light on the important and often very lucrative role played by consultants these days as corporations realize the necessity of strong social media connections with customers. The point is that during these transitional days, more traditional corporations without ready audiences through blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the like can rely on individuals who do. Whatever the origin of their audiences and followers, the individuals can profitably leverage those numbers in consulting.

Two comments. First, de Rosa does open the piece noting we are in a transitional moment: "New media clout scoring old media dollars." His piece dwells on the example of the Vaynerchuk brothers, one of whose winelibrary.tv allowed the generation of vast follower lists that he's been able to leverage in social media consulting with corporations from industries far away from the world of wine. The question of relevance is not so directly posed here but it might be: how do the new media, and the consultants shaling them, re-make the old brand and message? Do the new voices offer a healthy and overdue wake-up call to old brands and organizations or will they ultimately prove blips in brand development that will be ultimately irrelevant in the long-term?

Even more, I think of a possible cautionary tale from a decade ago in the university world. In the late 1990s, when technology was promising a quantum leap in distance learning, many schools contracted outside vendors to develop the requisite technologies and services. Other schools or consortia formed for-profit start-ups, believing that technology-supported distance learning would be a sure money-maker. In most cases, particularly following some rather public failures in the latter group (think Fathom), universities quickly moved beyond their initial exuberance and have pursued in-house development of distance and e-learning resources. This more course has still, in many cases, proven quite ambitious -- consider MIT's open course offerings or Yale's webcasting of classes -- but it relies less and less on the outsourcing that relied on individuals who perhaps knew more about fledgling technology than specific institutional cultures or offerings.

A second issue here releates to the so-called Twitter or social media revolutions claimed for Moldova and, more recently and prominently, in Iran. This is not as much of a stretch as it may first appear. With the same regimes against which the partly Twitter-driven protests were organized still firmly in charge in these countires, we should rightly ask two related questions: what did the revolutions (better: protests) actually achieve? And what role did Twitter play in those protests? Both deserve fuller answers than I'll offer here (for a likeminded skeptical take, see Trevor Butterworth at http://www.ourblook.com/Social-Media/Trevor-Butterworth-on-Social-Media.html ). Briefly, though my concern is that the questions, while related, remain importantly distinguished and that the latter one be put in context. If Twitter had a "multiplier" effect in Iran or elsewhere, what did it multiply and why? And further, how will that effect persist over time, particularly as regimes themselves upgrade their own understanding of technology and engage in what David Bandurski of the China Media Project called "Control 2.0"?

While I am not at all suggesting an (economic, symbolic, moral) equivalence between corporate control of branding and governmental control of dissent, I do believe the multiplier effect in play in politics globally is also relevant to the current and dynamic role played by social media in corporate branding. We need not only to develop a better, more nuanced and in ways more data-driven understanding of that effect. We should also appreciate the role of social media consulting in fostering and managing that effect. We likewise should acknowledge how fleeting the phenomenon, at least in its current form, might be. It's not only a matter of co-optation and control but of the inevitable integration of this new, exciting and potentially powerful set of technologies into longstanding patterns of social and organizational behavior.

Imagining Moldova -- and the First Twitter Revolution (Part 1)

2009-07-07T16:12:00.014-04:00

I recently had the opportunity to spend a week in Moldova. I confess I knew little about the place before my plans formed. Most of what I knew (vaguely) derived from the public protests in the capital, Chisinau, as well as the second, city, Balti, that occurred last spring and briefly dominated Twitter.

Protesters took to the streets in early April following Parliamentary elections in which the ruling Communist party won roughly 50% of the seats. They picketed the Election Commission Headquarters and then the President’s residence before temporarily occupying both the Parliament building and the President’s office. Organized largely via Twitter calls under the tag, “#pman" (for the capital’s main square, “Piata Marii Adunari Nationale”), sizeable public gatherings numbering as many as 15,000 continued daily for more than a week claiming election fraud and later illegal arrests and the violation of human right. While the government agreed to a re-count, the election results stood and the Communist party president and parliamentary majority remained in power.

Wanting to know more, I consulted with several Romanian friends and their advice was simpler: the country is poor and stagnant, they responded quickly, but it has great wine and beautiful women. Perusing maps of the region and tourist websites, friends in New York had an even more peremptory assessment: I was heading to an only slightly Europeanized land of Borat -- Kazakhstan with a splash of Romanian charm. Okay. Thanks.

So I sought out more background. There's not a lot out there in terms of books or detailed websites. Wikipedia has a cursory if up-to-date entry. Lonelyplanet.com offered a worthwhile download of pages from a travel guide primarily focused on Romania. The one helpful book available on Amazon was the scholarly if conservatively slanted The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, by Charles King (2000). (Another that I ordered but didn't arrive before departing was Steven Henighan's travelogue about a Canadian teaching English in the country, Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family [2003].)

The broad strokes of what I learned are these. Referred to by some as the poorest country in Europe, with a GDP per person estimated by the IMF at only $2200, Moldova is situated to the far east of the continent, nestled between Romania and Ukraine. The land is arable (to the degree that volumes of its soil were actually shipped to the Soviet Union in past years) but holds few mineral reserves. The geographical position speaks to the complex status of the country’s people, politics, culture, and even language as a meeting ground of east and west, of Romania and Russia, of Europe and Central Asia. As former Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR, Moldova's present-day relation to Russia remains strong, not least in the continuing rule of the Communist party. Complicating politics further are two regions of simmering independence movements. Transdniestr, which declared its autonomy shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and Moldova's own declaration of independence, and Gagauz, an area in the country's south populated by Turkic Orthodox Christians.

Not a bad overview, particularly in the individual strands of historical development. But in pursuing various sources, a serious question arose for me: how does Twitter or any of the vaunted digital information and communication technologies we enjoy actually deepen our understanding of the world to which we seem to have much fuller and more rapid access? Part of this concerns Twitter specifically, with its endless stream of brief information text and its ongoing tracks of trending for certain topics that seem to feed on themselves. While many well-researched sources are only a link away from the tweets, there’s little telling how many are accessed or read (or, particularly for the uninitiated, which are genuinely well-researched and which to be avoided). The result is that Twitter becomes the latest manifestation of a digital source of nearly endless information for which the political (and reading) preferences of the user shape the eventual output.

Put differently, it’s very easy to maintain a thorough familiarity with headlines and the soundbytes of political rhetoric or policy and other debates, but delving beyond that superficial and ephemeral familiarity to a deeper understanding is anything but assured. That seems especially true for geopolitics today, when news cycles and attention economies rely on a dizzying shifting of media focus (yes, trending) from one hot spot or crisis or disaster to another. It is still more an issue with the lack of history that figures into even many of the better accounts of contemporary events. Beyond the disconnected entries offered by Wikipedia and other scattered websites, printed materials and fictional films, the history even of the late twentieth century that unavoidably shapes our lives and world today is increasingly grounded in fragmented digital sources.

I offer all this as prologue to recounting my physical entry to Moldova precisely because my reliance on Twitter and various, mostly web-based accounts of politics and peoples so strongly framed my thinking and expectations of this place about which I knew so little. While similar in ways to what has long been available to travelers in guidebooks, from the nineteenth-century Baedeckers onward, the contemporary mediascape has grown both quantitatively and qualitatively different. The digital world is ultimately smaller, infinitely more accessible, and, particularly as one imagines lesser known places like Moldova, conducive to unprecedentedly superficial and partial understandings.

In Part 2, I move from my imagined Moldova to the actual, physical country.

Honda's "Power of Dreams" Online Films

2009-07-06T10:50:00.006-04:00

I've been viewing the short films online at Honda's "Power of Dreams" series (http://dreams.honda.com). While very clearly advertisments for Honda, its history and current operations, the films can also be alternatively smart and inspiring, brimming with au courant ideas of management, risk-taking and innovation. (One does wonder, of course, how many of the ideas are actually implemented and practiced in the everyday.) Besides the corporate figures, many of the faces and voices are familiar (Deepak Chopra, Danica Patrick) and some refreshingly unexpected (Christopher Guest, Clive Barker). And the "Mobility 2088" instalment is simply cool. Viewed collectively, these films aspire to be a cross between the groundbreaking BMWfilms.com series of shorts, The Hire, directed by luminaries from John Frankenheimer to John Woo, in 2001-2002 and more recent online salons, from TED to the Aspen Ideas Festival (http://www.ted.com and http://www.aifestival.org). They finally fail to reach that standard, but do offer an excellent summary of how a company, particularly in a challenged industry like automobile manufacturing, reflects on -- and, with polished production values, presents -- itself and its vision of the future.

Andrew Lih, _The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia_ (Hyperion, 2009)

2009-07-04T10:55:00.005-04:00

Opening this account of the history and current reach of the World Wide Web’s phenomenally successful encyclopedia is a foreword by Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales. In it, Wales speaks briefly of some of the values guiding the project: individuals doing good, trusting each other, and using old-fashioned standards of clear writing and reliable references. His most important observation, though, building on these other values and view of beneficent human nature, is that Wikipedia grew as a kind of social software that both fostered and relied upon community.

That basic if imprecise idea guides much of the following account of the early years of technological developments that allowed Wikipedia to emerge. From Linux and Nupedia to WikiWikiWeb and Hypercard, the evolution and linkage of various innovations through the 1990s makes for a fascinating read. The individuals responsible at each step in the process, including Wales but also Ward Cunningham, the father of Wikis, and Larry Sanger, the original Nupedian, and others are also nicely drawn. Throughout, the imperative to create formative connections both between and for a networked community remains consistent.

In the middle of the book is a 50pp chapter that draws together various central issues but also covers a series of incidents and events, policies, and internal practices. It exemplifies the book’s strength and weakness. On the one hand, it delineates clearly the development and coordination of various technologies into a fully viable site for widespread public participation, production and usage. On the other, the recurrent attempts to make sense of these developments in broader social and cultural terms are frustratingly lacking. That sense-making is not necessarily required in an historical account, of course, but the recurrent suggestion here of metaphors and models to interpret the cultural significance of Wikipedia only highlights the failure.

Subsequent chapters are event-driven, showing how Wikipedia continues to be shaped, across languages, in face of different competitors and a changing web and mediascape, and finally how the project is managing growth. The book concludes with questions about the scaling of the project and the persistence of its originary values of community. Will increasing numbers of participants continue to do good and trust each other? Will the result, the “Wiki-ness” of Wikipedia endure? And crucially, how should the stewards of the foundation, like Wale, respond to the shift from being like a village where everyone knows each other to “more of a faceless impersonal metropolis” that is “driving the adoption of hard, cold, binding policies” (176).

As this challenge for the future suggests, the book dwells on the idea that we have come to describe as the wisdom, collaboration and dynamics of crowds. Yet detailing the Wikipedia case hardly settles the matter: did crowds create Wikipedia or did Wikipedia create the relevant crowds? More intriguing, the book seems to question the relationship between the individuals who developed Wikipedia and the crowds so regularly invoked by them as responsible for its growth. Are crowds possible, that is, without individuals orchestrating their collaboration?

Lih makes clear that the answer, at least in terms of the history of “the world’s greatest encyclopedia,” is no: remarkable, innovative leaders were as indispensable as the crowds themselves. In his Foreword, Wales underscores the socializing power wrought by technology and the World Wide Web. But he doesn’t pursue it, possibly because a fuller explanation would involve him directly in ways that run somewhat counter to better publicized tenets of community and collaboration. Perhaps the ultimate lesson here of Wikipedia’s creation and continuing growth is that an essential aspect of celebrating the creation and ongoing growth of global community of contributors remains the recognition of key leaders able to envision the scope and direction of that collaboration.

***

The Wikipedia Revolution also foregrounds another question. Going forward, how will we write – or, more to the point, research – histories of the digital age? The matter of research materials is a major concern: what will be the digital archives of sites and other projects that change and transform themselves so quickly? Again, one answer to this returns us to the issue of individual rather than collective voices. Invaluable to Lih and to us, for example, is Larry Sanger’s 16,000+ word account of the “Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia” from 2005, available at Slashdot.com. At least for the near future, when such individuals remain alive and available to provide their recollections, they will remain vital resources. Beyond that, particularly as access to and preservation of digital projects fades, the matter becomes murkier.

Ruins of the Second Gilded Age

2009-07-03T17:17:00.005-04:00

Amazing photo essay by Edgar Martins from the NYTimes Magazine (July 5, 2009) on the what the US real estate boom has left behind. It's a strangely unsettling group of images, both unavoidably nostalgic for pre-bust days of irrational expansion and eerily still (and depopulated) in their uncertain drift toward the future. Gives pause about how far we have yet to go to undo the work of those heady days. Thanks to David G for calling early attention to this.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/05/magazine/20090705-gilded-slideshow_index.html

A Broadband Plan for Whom?

2009-07-02T14:17:00.013-04:00

Julius Genachowski was finally confirmed last week as the Chairman of the FCC. Today, he presented, "The FCC and Broadband: The Next 230 Days." A bold action plan for expanding broadband across the country? Maybe. Eventually. Right now it looks more like a primer on bureaucracy and abstract project management. (The presentation is available at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-291879A1.pdf)

Two brief thoughts. First, recall the report on global broadband penetration from Strategy Analytics in mid-June. The United States ranked 20th, with 60% household penetration -- just after Estonia and Belgium and just in front of Slovenia. The top three spots went to South Korea, Singapore and the Netherlands with, respectively, 95, 92 and 88% penetration. The report also concluded that U.S. prospects aren't improving: the forecast is that the United States will fall to 23rd by the end of 2009. As if we needed a further reminder that mid-twentieth century American institutions -- the auto industry, medicine, here, technology -- are no longer automatically pre-eminent in the world. (http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=PressReleaseViewer&a0=4748)

Second, at a time when free-market principles are justifiably being questioned in various industries, the priority of the government program appears to encourage private sector development through billions of dollars in stimulus grants and subsidies. A lot of funding, to be sure, at least for the companies being subsidized, but how coordinated will the resulting developing of broadband actually be. One of the mitigating factors in cross-national comparisons of broadband penetration is the size of countries -- expanding technologies in Singapore and the Netherlands is obviously a much lesser order of magnitude than in the U.S. Yet isn't that exactly the reason why there needs to be an overall strategic effort rather than one that's left to a market that has proven itself dysfunctional and unable to grow in a concerted way in the past? I'm not suggesting an entirely top-down government program. What does seem to make sense, though, is a plan that puts the larger public first and the vaunted entrepreneurs and technology companies, who obviously have heretofore not seen an economic motivation in expanding broadband across the country, second.

On Dying Young: _Public Enemies_ and Michael Jackson

2009-07-02T12:17:00.010-04:00

It may be the unavoidable glare of the Michael Jackson media juggernaut, but I saw the new movie about John Dillinger, Public Enemies, and immediately believed it was a fitting release for this exact cultural moment.

Why? The film ends with Dillinger's storied killing by FBI agents outside the Biograph theater in Chicago in 1934. Or very nearly ends. A coda follows in which one of the lawmen responsible for the killing makes a touching visit to the bank robber's love interest to share with her the dying man's whispered last words. That sentimental closing moment underscores how the film presents the Public Enemy #1 to be remembered: as an outlaw with a heart of gold, who genuinely loved a woman and sought to escape with her from the midwestern life of crime.

In a way, this is the male, gangster version of the whore with a heart of gold story. But it's also a story that has changed over time. Manhattan Melodrama, the 1934 film starring Clark Gable as a gangster that Dillinger saw that fateful night at the Biograph, was equally a production of its time. Gable dies in the end in the electric chair but the closing is really about his childhood pal, now the DA, played by William Powell, and the woman they both loved, portrayed by Myrna Loy, affirming their marriage and future together. That sort of affirmative Hollywood ending was mandated in productions of the time, particularly those involving gangsters, and at least tempered the sympathies of viewers for criminals and their misdeeds.

In the current film, director Michael Mann has built our contemporary Dillinger to be a legend -- or rather a larger legend than he was. Played by Johnny Depp with an angular cool, Public Enemies offers little insight about his motivations for the string of action sequences that constitutes it. His lawman nemesis, G-Man Melvin Purvis, is similarly undifferentiated as played by the increasingly ubiquitous Christian Bale. (This lack of dimension becomes all the more conspicuous in a closing title, where we learn Purvis not only quite the FBI a year after Dillinger's demise but then killed himself some two and and half decades later.) That lack of character dimension leaves the action but also allows the broad, even archetypal contours of the outlaw story to be foregrounded.

Outlaws can occupy a special social status between the people and the law or legal institutions and authority. Allowing everyday citizens to keep their money while taking the bank's funds during a robbery is only the most obvious way this status is presented. The recognition of the power of a nascent national media by the manipulative FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, makes clear how those claiming the legitimacy of the state or police must use the press to battle with so-called outlaws for the public's hearts and minds as much as with tommy guns. Especially in hard economic times, when the political and economic system is under duress, that battle for public confidence and the outlawry it facilitates is vital.

If the enduring fascination with Dillinger and his status as a Public Enemy is only burnished by the new film, viewers in July 2009 may exit the theater thinking here was a charismatic outlaw who died too soon at the hands of a legal but not altogether moral order. The coda with his tearful lover is crucial because it emphasizes that he died too soon. For the two of them but also for us.

Dying young has a long history in Anglo-America, from Housman's poetic athlete to the more layered celebrity deaths of the last half-century. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Elvis are among the performers whose early deaths are still cause for commemoration. More to the point, these deaths have enabled our individual and collective memories of these performers to remain fixed on their youth -- its beauty and its rebelliousness. The most common comparison made with Michael Jackson is Elvis, which is appropriate both for the rarefied cultural heights they occupied but also because they were ultimately not so young when they both died (Elvis 42, MJ 50).

Focusing on the past youth of the aging or dead is ultimately an act of wish-fulfillment for present-day onlookers seeking to arrest or even deny the passage of time. Amplified by the echo chamber of popular culture, such an act can also become an important affirmation by the public not only of its existence but its own vitality. That such affirmations so often turn on perceptions of beauty and rebelliousness, of the creative grace and outlawry of those who are gone, is being evidenced yet again today.

Michael Jackson and Media Time

2009-06-27T12:41:00.007-04:00

Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage of Michael Jackson’s death have been frequent observations about his transformative and ongoing influence. A regular assertion has been that Jackson broke the color barrier at the fledgling – and initially all-white -- MTV in the early 1980s. Another observation, both self-evident and self-fulfilling when communicated by global media news outlets today, concerns the performer’s longstanding worldwide popularity during the crucial globalizing years of the 1980s and 1990s.

Less thoughtful attention has been devoted to why this historical significance matters. Breaking down racial barriers and crossing international borders are important, of course. Commentators from Eric Lott to George Lipsitz have written about the centrality of African-American performance and creativity to American culture that, in turn, have gone global with the proliferation of American cultural forms and products. Likewise, our efforts today to make sense of changing technologies and intensified worldwide cultural connections can only benefit from fuller understanding of what occurred a generation ago as new technologies, driven by satellites and cable television, and corporate consolidations enabled a heretofore unprecedented wave of media globalization.

One of the great anxieties of the time involved the homogenization of media content that would inevitably occur around the world. Homogenization here was a code word for Americanization and typically was feared as a parallel on the content side to the industrial consolidation that was taking place in the growth of media conglomerates. While such concerns have persisted, many critiques since have developed more nuanced readings of the media landscape that focus on the complex interplay between global and local forces. Scholars like David Morley, Kevin Robins and Annette Sreberny have adeptly sought to reconceptualize the geographies of media emergent since the 1980s.

Corresponding to this recasting of media space should be a rethinking of media time. The surplus of digital media content, from 24-hour news to nearly limitless audio and video internet downloads, has produced a landscape that is marked by at least three temporal elements: media impressions are constant (we have continuous input from multiple platforms), ephemeral (what crisis is CNN covering today) and less anchored in time (think TiVo). As importantly, understanding media over time – that is, media history – at least from the 1980s until today turns perhaps most dramatically on a fragmentation of attention and consumption across an increasing number of channels and platforms. Michael Jackson, we have been told, was among that last generation of figures to dominate cultural experience before media fragmented (consider John Rash’s piece about the passing of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael at adage.com: http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=137601 ).

Yet the coverage of Jackson’s death across channels and platforms today suggests that that fragmentation may not be so complete. Nor do I believe that the recent all-MJ, all-the-time is simply an acknowledgment of a towering figure who pre-dated the diffusion of media. Rather, what the widespread, cross-channel coverage suggests is an interplay between the admittedly fragmented media worlds we variously occupy and participate in and what can still emerge as a more unified, event-driven media landscape. Most often those events are personal tragedies – think Jackson or Princess Diana – or political occurrences, like the Iranian election and its aftermath, but they can also be more benign, like the annual American secular holiday, the Super Bowl. As events, they are indeed fleeting. Much like the interaction between global and local in media space, though, these occasional unifying events balance the ongoing, everyday dispersion of attention and consumption in media time. Their interaction and balance give shape to media time and, in the process, to our sense of shared experience and community in the here and now.

A further take on Pirates and Privateers

2009-06-20T21:41:00.003-04:00

Obviously my extended take on piracy, drawn in contrast to aspects of terrorism like anti-capitalism and mediated visibility, is only one of various possible approaches to the subject. In a fascinating piece of historical sociology, Bryan Mabee of the University of London, focuses on piracy in terms of historical changes in the contexts of war and violence.

"Historical accounts of private violence in international relations are often rather under-theorized and under-contextualized. Overall, private violence historically needs to be seen in the context of the relationship between state-building, political economy and violence, rather than through the narrative of states gradually monopolizing violence. Pirates and privateers in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century Europe were embedded in a broader political economy of violence which needed and actively promoted 'private' violence in a broader pursuit of power. As such, the de-legitimatization of piracy and privateering were the consequence of a number of interlinked political economic trends, such as the development of public protection of merchant shipping (through the growth of centralized navies), the move away from trade monopolies to inter-imperial trade, and the development of capitalism and industrialism. Present forms of private violence also need to be seen as part of a broader historical dynamic of war, violence and political economy."

Abstract for "Pirates, privateers and the political economy of private violence," _Global Change, Peace & Security_, Volume 21, Issue 2 (June 2009), pp. 139-152.

Terrorists versus Pirates

2009-06-20T16:46:00.004-04:00

Introducing a book published four years ago, I acknowledged the quandary of defining terrorists and terrorism. Not only is one man’s terrorist another’s freedom fighter; taking a longer view of which actions or groups should be understood under the label of terrorism and which not tends to cast as much light on those doing the labeling as those committing the acts. As an analyst, I was thus left to choose between two poor choices: plunging into a definition that would seem tendentious and emphasize certain aspects of action or ideology, or sidestepping such emphasis and thereby fail to provide a useful critical frame for the subsequent discussion.

There are patterns, though, that have emerged over time and multiple studies of different violent actions labeled as terrorism. For the sake of orienting my readers, I condensed these to five:
1. The deliberate deployment, or threat of deployment, of violent action against persons or property;
2. The production of anxiety and fear, and the disruption of social routine, by this action;
3. The pursuit of this action by individuals, sub-state groups, or states motivated by criminal, political, or religious reasons including the desire to demonstrate their power;
4. The intimidation of, or impact on, individuals who are neither directly involved in the violent action nor the primary targets of the actors’ motivation; and,
5. The often clandestine or semi-clandestine nature of the action and responsible actors.

While a useful starting point, what’s largely left out of this list is the importance of anti-Capitalist violence to understandings of terrorism, at least in Europe and the U.S. since the late 19th century. From the Haymarket bombings and Italian anarchism to Bolshevism to the Red Army Fraction and ultimately Al Qaeda’s bombing of the World Trade Center, the violent actions mounted against property, especially private property, and the capitalist system it represents offer a continuing if quite varied thread linking so-called terrorists. Like any broad categorization of terrorist groups, of course there are exceptions; the point is that violence or its threat against property and the capitalist-system organized around and protected by nation-states has been a mainstay of the actions labeled as terrorism over the last century and a half.

The other aspect of terrorism worth highlighting is more familiar: the media. My contention has been that the production of anxiety or fear and intimidation of individuals distant from direct involvement in violent action requires mediated communication of information about that action to be effective. In other words, for a violent event to be terrorism, that is, qualitatively different from just another violent event (as traumatic as that may be), requires a certain framing, communication and interpretation of the event to those who did not experience it firsthand. Depending on one’s political leanings, then, parallels might be seen between a capitalist-media-system organized around and protected by nation-states and the resulting labeling of actions or events as terrorism. Put differently, as I did in Terrorism, Media, Liberation, media communication heightens the visibility of violent actions even as the violent groups themselves seek, at least most of the time, to remain invisible.

These two highlighted issues, anti-capitalism and mediated visibility, seem relevant not only for groups designated as terrorists. Both capitalism and media also raise questions about that other spectre of non-state group violence, pirates. Piracy, of course, is millennia old. Indeed, arguably a golden age, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when capitalism was emerging – along with nation-states and global trading systems.

Today, piracy has evolved along several tracks. The Somali pirates in recent headlines have primarily seized ships in the Indian Ocean and held them, and their kidnapped crews or passengers or cargo, for ransom. Elsewhere, in the waters around Southeast Asia, for example, the physical theft of cargo is more common. In both instances, the legal language around piracy entails violence and, tellingly, the use of “war-like acts” of violence or criminality – in other words, acts reserved in the inter-national system for nation-states. The status of “non-state actors” and their violation of the right to employ violence ordinarily the monopoly of states is as critical for the legal characterization of pirates as for terrorists.

(As a sidenote, the fuzzy status of airplane hijacking is intriguing here: there would seem to be a parallel with the seizure of ships at sea for which the term piracy is typically invoked, yet that same term is rarely if ever used for actions against airplanes. This might have to do with the apparent distinction between financial and political motivation for such action. The French use the term, pirate de l’air for the hijacker of a plane, and pirate de la route for the hijacker of a truck or bus.)

Many contemporary pirates are adept at the use of modern technology. But the more compelling connection between technology and piracy involves the illegal infringement of copyright or theft of copyrighted material. Digitalization has enabled the ready manipulation and circulation of such materials, with the internet, in particular, allowing unauthorized sharing. Probably the most famous example of this process was the appearance in the late 1990s of Napster and the illegal downloading and proliferation of audio files in mp3 format. Despite the successful shutdown of Napster by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001, the episode altered the basic business model – and dominance by a handful of longtime corporate players – in the music industry. In the roughly decade since, the film industry has feared similar downloads of its productions, causing, as some see it, a delay in the implementation of widespread internet- or broadband-delivered digital film.

Like piracy on the seas, the piracy of copyrighted material has a longer history. The latter phenomenon dates at least to the early 17th century – again, the time when capitalism and the private property underlying it were assuming what are for us recognizably modern forms. The linkages between these notions of private property and intellectual property remain underdeveloped, however. Moreover, as my friend Martin Roberts has put it to me, both kinds of property speak to the emergence of commodities created and regulated not only by capitalism but the legal orders of nation-states.

Piracy of both kinds also relies on minimizing the visibility of its perpetrators. Terrorism, recall, depends for its success on the ever-increasing visibility of events to influence those not having immediate proximity to events. Pirates, on the other hand, not only employ stealth and invisibility in order to carry out their actions but generally seek advantage by denying visibility or awareness to those beyond immediate events. Anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom and others have referred to the enormity of the “hidden economy” existing outside or on the margins of the official capitalist economy, and many groups identified as pirates are directly involved in its operation. The role of media in increasing or denying visibility thus becomes crucial for the continuing success of pirates.

The juxtaposition of terrorism and piracy turns on this different relation to visibility. Even more important, though, is their shared if still different relationship to capitalism and the nation-state system underlying it. Terrorism, at least of the Al Qaeda strain, is in its attack on and critique of capitalism, in ways a double for that ideology. Piracy is different. As an extreme, violent version of the ever-growing pursuit of self-interest and private control of capital, piracy is finally guided by the same logics of political economy, however exaggerated. It is a shadow of capitalism. In this age of increasing circulation of global capital – not to mention of global media – the renewed prominence of that shadow should be unsurprising.

Are We not Men? _Terminator Salvation_

2009-05-30T21:23:00.010-04:00

*****SPOILER ALERT: The following comments take off from revelations made toward the end of the film that answer questions about character and narrative posed throughout. Readers not wishing to know these before viewing the film should not read further.*****

Near the end of Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthingon), the major new character introduced in the film to the franchise has his role explained to him (and us) by a computer. He is not only a cyborg, a revelation already made dramatically in the course of the narrative, but one whose purpose was to lure Connor to SkyNet where the resistance leader could be killed. This purpose is explained by a computer simulation of Dr. Serena Kogan, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who had fifteen years earlier persuaded Wright to donate his very human body for medical research. Wright’s enraged reaction includes tearing out the SkyNet control chip implanted in his neck and smashing the computer video display. He then comes to the aid of Connor, who is being assailed by the next generation, Schwarzenegger-faced Model 101 Terminator. After dispatching the machine and fleeing the headquarters, Wright offers his human heart to the mortally wounded Connor so that the resistance leader can fight on.

Wright is arguably the central character in Terminator Salvation. (Bale’s stilted acting as John Connor makes this an easier claim to defend, though that’s not my point.) The film begins with Wright on death row in 2003, signing over his soon-to-be-executed body for research to Dr. Kogan. His appearance in 2018, the post-apocalyptic moment of principal action in the film, is not immediately explained and his movement through the narrative parallels, while sometimes crossing, that of John Connor up to the scenes at SkyNet headquarters where the revelations about him and the final conflicts with Connor and the new Model 101 occur. The film’s poster shows only him and Christian Bale’s John Conner, the grown-up resistance fighter whom viewers have come to know over the three earlier films and the current TV series. Reportedly, Bale had even initially been approached by the director, McG, to play the Wright character before convincing the filmmaker that he should be Connor.

That Wright is a cyborg comes as only a minor surprise midway through watching the film. What interests me more, and is finally more telling, is the later revelation that his very purpose was programmed by SkyNet. This explanation is neat and plausible. It makes sense within the narrative and allows for the subsequent closure achieved through Wright’s rescue of Connor from the Terminator and his donating his heart for transplant. It also alludes to the other films – one that comes to mind is the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, where Bennett Marco, Denzel Washington’s character, who serves throughout the film as the viewer’s surrogate and seeming pursuer of villains, is himself revealed in the end to be the brainwashed assassin.

It is also assures that the film remains summer schlock rather than edgier sci-fi (or, to borrow the evocative name of a club is the first film, tech noir) fare.

Why? In the Terminator franchise universe, machines are bad and humans good (some stupid, some mean, most victims, but all, as a species, good in the face of SkyNet’s genocidal evil). After being revealed as a cyborg, the question remaining about Wright, whom we’ve been assured in the prologue was a human, is how did he become a cyborg and for what purpose. The first possibility, that SkyNet made him for the subterfuge, is laid out in the film. The second possibility, the one not taken, has Wright as a cyborg made by men for the purpose of aiding the resistance. This would be akin to the human reprogramming of the Model 101 Terminator sent back to help Sarah and John Conner against the T-1000 in the second film.

Such remaking of a human as part-machine by other humans would also be importantly different from the simple reprogramming of a machine. It would complicate the clear boundaries maintained in the franchise between men and machines. Summer Glau’s female Terminator in the TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, treads on similar ground, occasionally expressing curiosity for human emotion and feeling, particularly for the teenage John Connor. The Model 101 Terminator in the initial sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, also evinces some arguably human traits despite at the end of that film explaining that he can never cry. If the boundary was pushed in the 1991 production, it may be the larger-than-life Schwarzeneggerian exception that proves the franchise rule. On today's film screen, especially, no such blurring occurs.

Even more importantly, the mechanizing of humans by humans avoids any suggestion that men are striving to become more machine-like in ways that parallel how machines, in the continuing evolution of Terminator models, seek to become more like men (at least in appearance). Terminator Salvation therefore avoids any hint of convergence of man and machine, at least from the human side. As a result, the film sidesteps the knottier and ultimately more provocative questions posed by ore thoughtful science fiction, preferring to fill the current production with pyrotechnics of future war.

Blade Runner, particularly in the variations offered through its multiple versions, is the consummate example of a film that plumbs the depths of what convergence of man and machine might mean. It is also probably an unfair basis for comparison. Yet other productions demonstrate how multi-dimensional characters can complicate otherwise clearcut oppositions between man and machine. Consider the first Matrix film (1999), setting aside the sophistication of the guiding conceit of the matrix itself, Cypher, the character played by Joe Pantoliano, who betrays his fellow rebels in hopes of returning to the painless ignorance of simulated reality. Again, this is perhaps another unfair comparison.

My point nevertheless is that reworking even relatively minor elements could interject layers to character and narrative. For a summer action film from an extraordinarily profitable franchise, that may well be a non-issue. But with two more Terminator films in a projected new trilogy set after Judgment Day, that kind of richness could only be for the good.

_Wall-E's_ Debt to D.W. Griffith

2009-02-22T11:57:00.005-05:00

To describe the gentle movements of Wall-E’s eponymous, robot hero, critics have regularly invoked the poetic physicality of Charlie Chaplin and, occasionally, Buster Keaton. This seems particularly apt in the film’s opening thirty minutes, when the robot’s trash compacting movements around a desolate Earth is synchronized with music and proves expressive to the point that dialogue is unnecessary. The parallel continues to be relevant as Wall-E leaves Earth in romantic pursuit of Eve, a vegetation-seeking robot, calling to mind Chaplin’s City Lights, in which the Little Tramp falls for a blind matchgirl. That masterwork, despite appearing in 1931 after the movie sound era begin, was a silent production dependent on character’s visual expression of emotion.

If the comparisons to silent film virtuosi resonate in celebrating the gestural subtleties of Pixar’s animation, they lack historical depth. No critics I have read have pursued the parallels they draw with Chaplin or Keaton in contemporary reviews. To a certain degree, that’s fine: the point of mentioning these past giants is to celebrate a technological updating of the timeless capacity of cinema to convey characters’ feeling and emotion through their visual movement alone.

History is important to Wall-E, though. This is true not only when considering the film’s comments, offered from seven hundred years in the future, about our present destruction of the environment. The past also operates more complexly in the ways the film itself tells its story. But neither Chaplin nor Keaton is the key to understanding this history. The key figure here is David Wark Griffith.

D.W. Griffith is best known for having directed The Birth of a Nation, the seminal 1915 film that was at once a momentous step forward for narrative filmmaking and a vile racist account of the Civil War and Reconstruction whose heroes were the Ku Klux Klan. Yet despite this unpardonable offense in visualizing invidious racial politics, Griffith was also a father, indeed a founder, of narrative filmmaking as we have inherited it. A master at consolidating the advances wrought by others and creating his own innovations in visualizing more an more complex stories on screen. The use of parallel editing to build suspense while simultaneously tracking separate dramatic developments and the visual development of complex psychological characters are but two of the legacies of the hundreds of films, mostly shorts, made by Griffith.

While shaping film narrative in the early, formative years of the twentieth century, Griffith was nevertheless an unalterably nineteenth-century man. He had been born in Kentucky in 1875, the son of a former Confederate army officer who had been a hero in the Civil War. Another way to conceive of this connection is to recall that fewer years separated the appearance of The Birth of a Nation and the events it recounted than we in 2009 are separated from the end of World War II. While much else has changed in renderings of the past and shaping of collective memory, of course, the point is that such a defining event still held great sway in the popular imagination. Perhaps more generally important was the sentimental cast on which he relied for constructing coherent stories about the world and especially the historical past.

Returning to Wall-E, the film appears to contain a direct if fleeting nod to Griffith. Midway through, after discovering soil left by our intrepid robotic hero on the Axiom spaceship, the previously inactive human captain requests a computer lecture about the soil and planting. Various images flash before his eyes, and ours, but the very first is recognizable from its place in film history. It shows a single man, bag slung over one shoulder, walking slowly and spreading seeds through a field. The image is drawn from A Corner in Wheat, a 1909 short film made by Griffith.

The short was adapted from Frank Norris’s 1902 novel, The Pit. The titular “corner” is the control that one mogul seeks over the world’s wheat market and the film dwells on the contrast, developed through skillful editing, between the profligate lives of financial speculators and the sufferings of the poor who cannot afford bread when wheat prices are artificially increased. A cautionary tale for the turn-of-the-century progressive era, modern urban excess is critiqued in favor of a more equitable agrarian past. Pictorially, the closing pastoral image of the film that appears in Wall-E is itself a reproduction of Millet’s 1850 painting, The Sower, which idealized a peasant farmer.

Griffith was nostalgic here in the truest sense of that word: he yearned for an imagined past, particularly a past home, that never was. Nostalgia is a timeless impulse, of course, and it is fair to observe that stories tinged with nostalgia are, if not universal, largely unbound by historical era or place. Cinema has always been about nostalgia – some film philosophers claim that the medium’s defining condition is the celebration of the continuity of the world through viewing actors and experiences captured on celluloid (or, now, disk) that we know existed in the past. As a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century invention, however, cinema has most consistently trafficked in nostalgia for a pre-modern, pre-urban, pre-mechanical past that can be juxtaposed with the viewer’s present.

Besides the happy ending to Wall-E and Eve’s romance, the story in the Pixar production concludes with the hopeful return to Earth – to “home,” as the captain repeatedly says – of the previously inactive human occupants of the Axiom. The planet has become habitable again, they believe, based on the successful growth of a single green plant. They excitedly elect to pursue their future by returning hopefully to their past, seeking to re-create home in a world that they can now only imagine, or have imaged for them by technology.

If Wall-E is primarily a sentimental romance in the tradition of City Lights, its background story of societal change extends the tradition of A Corner in Wheat to address the collective need of humans to get back in touch – here, literally – with the physicality of their surroundings, notably the Earth itself. That latter story, also told a century ago by Griffith, remains a quintessentially modern one: our ongoing quest for newer and better technologies must be balanced by an uncertain fascination with the consequences of their use that drives us to embrace the imagined visions and values of the past. With its combination of breathtaking animation and adroit storytelling, Pixar offers, to many, the best of a new generation of technological filmmaking. Yet even as the medium continues to evolve into the twentieth-first century, and even to tell stories about the twenty-eighth, their latest production suggests that cinema remains squarely rooted in its own imagined past of nostalgic returns and hopeful new beginnings.

_What Would Google Do?_ PowerPoint

2009-02-13T08:13:00.006-05:00

I heard Jeff Jarvis give a brief talk last night about What Would Google Do? The book deserves full reading and consideration -- there's much in it both to admire and critique -- but here's a provocative if skeletal summary presentation of some its ideas.

http://www.slideshare.net/jeffjarvis/wwgd-the-powerpoint?type=presentation

A Noble Terrorist?: Thoughts inspired by _Seven Days to Noon_

2009-02-09T09:38:00.011-05:00

If Alfred Hitchcock had made The Naked City in London, and substituted Cold War atomic politics for domestic criminality, the film would have been something like this....

Directed in Britain in 1950 by John and Roy Boulting, Seven Days to Noon tells the story of the pursuit of a scientist who has threatened to explode an atomic bomb unless his government agrees to renounce atomic weaponry. Led by a Superintendent Folland of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, the investigation follows the scientist, Professor Willingdon, from his rural research center to London. Over the seven days stipulated by Willingdon in his ultimatum letter, the film traverses London as his pursuers slowly track him down. The city, eventually evacuated as a precaution, ends up appearing surreally empty. On the seventh day, the police find the scientist, kill him in a moment of confusion, and disarm the bomb.

Like many thrillers, the narrative both follows the Scotland Yard investigation of the plot and functions as an investigation itself. Of what? Visually, of postwar London. Shot on location, at times in overtly documentary style, and occasionally incorporating stock footage of city life and police activity, the film dwells on the diversity of the city’s places and inhabitants. This is conspicuously highlighted in the unorthodox opening credits, the words of which move swiftly across the screen from right to left over a virtual travelogue of the city. If the film’s first third is taken up with the presentation of plot and the initiation of the police investigator’s search for the would-be bomber, the second third is given over to the city as a lead character – both the space controlled by the police who search it thoroughly and an unending array of places in which the would-be bomber can hide. We consequently see hotels, barbershops, bars, gambling halls, and rooming houses; that is, the heart of the people’s city.

In a way, this evokes a grand tradition of using the film camera to penetrate and illuminate the ordinarily unseen, marginal spaces of the modern city. Think of German films of the Weimar period, as Tom Gunning has noted so incisively in writing about Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler, in which the contest between good and evil, or at least official order and criminality, is fought in part over the control of vision of the urban world. Which parts of the city are illuminated and made visible and which are left in darkness and invisible to official eyes and the film camera? To be sure, Seven Days to Noon is not a film on par with Dr. Mabuse. Yet part of what’s fascinating in the Boultings’ production is how exactly it reorients some of the central ideas represented so profoundly by Lang and others in the long cinematic tradition of representing the modern city.

Instead of critiquing the often arbitrary distinction between official and under-worlds by showing their similar motivations and values, Seven Days to Noon dwells on the urban spaces of ordinary people, including, yes, less flattering sites like dance halls and bars. That these spaces enjoy a pride of place and warrant neither parallel nor justification with the physical monuments of official London suggest that what is ultimately at stake in the atomic age is not states or government buildings so much as people and everyday spaces and lives. While hardly audacious, such humanism is refreshing for a genre, the thriller, more often characterized by superficial action, tinny political motivations or fashionable pessimism.

The final third of the film dramatizes the evacuation of the city ordered by the Prime Minister. It is here that the film’s historical moment of production warrants comment. Made in 1950, Seven Days to Noon seeks to evoke the spirit of solidarity and grand purpose of the recent wartime past as still relevant to the new threats of the atomic age. This is most clearly evinced in the willing transport of the citizenry out of town, which almost surely would have appeared as a reassuring reminder to Londoners that they remained capable of responding successfully to the new atomic threat just as they had the earlier one of Nazi attacks. The more visible outcome in the film is a stunningly empty city (imagine a precursor, made a half-century earlier, to the arresting opening visuals of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later).

Again mindful of how the city had so recently been a battleground, the images of uninhabited but mostly rebuilt and intact buildings also serve as a kind of postwar tribute to the resolute British spirit. Ultimately, though, the resulting vision of empty streets suggests a kind of stand-off in the struggle for visual control of the city between the police and the bomb-wielding professor: while the emptiness literally results from a state-administered evacuation, the necessity for that action has been driven by Willingdon. Even more, the scenes are strangely haunting in their suggestion of the potential consequences of the scientist’s threat fulfilled.

It is here that we come to the question of terrorism. In the era of mass media, terrorism can be understood as an attempt, for political ends, to control information, narratives, images, knowledge and feeling through the intimidation and fear of individuals remote from the physical acts being threatened. As I’ve argued elsewhere, such a formulation recognizes the importance and complicated operation of media for communicating distant experience. More interestingly, this model suggests that, if judged by the same standards, mainstream media makers might fall into the same category of provocateurs and intimidators. Consider Hitchcock bringing a ticking bomb onto a loaded city bus: the act drives the narrative of a film about the evil done by those disrupting public order on-screen (the film is Sabotage, from 1936) in order to manipulate the emotions of audience members safely on the other side of that screen but whose viewing of the commercial film tends to set them in a particular political position. So is Hitchcock a terrorist? Or is the Eastern European villain, Verloc (played by Oscar Homolka)?

One answer is, of course not: neither threatens real people with actual violence. Yet recalling the importance to our conception of terrorism of the intimidation of people at a distance from the threat of violence depicted through media, the answer grows murkier. To label an individual a terrorist, or an act terrorism, indeed requires acknowledgment of the role and reach of media. It also demands a sensitivity to the political character of words and behaviors. We tend not to think of mainstream films or other commercial media as political in the same way as the overt propaganda of some zealots or groups. For some, though, commercializing or commodifying media and entertainment is entirely political – socializing and pacifying viewers, feeding the maw of consumers, serving as an opiate for the masses.

Where this potentially leads is to a questioning of one’s perspective and, especially, the consistent privileging of some perspectives over others. How do we approach commercial films, for instance, or even news? As somehow politically neutral or as manifestations of a specific political and economic structure? As means, moreover, for a particular shaping and packaging of information and emphasis on some images and narratives over others? These questions should not be understood as leading to the conclusion that all perspectives are somehow equivalent, morally or otherwise. We need to be able differentiate perspectives and politics and the media practices communicating them without that kind of reductionism.

The same logic of privileging, of making visible versus keeping invisible, pervades individual narratives and the actions and motivations of individuals occupying them. How do we compare the actions of Superintendent Folland and Professor Willingdon? More fundamentally, how do make sense of the contrasting assumptions about atomic weapons held by the British government in Seven Days to Noon (in the characters of Folland and especially the fictional Prime Minister) and by scientist? That the film doesn’t delve into these different understandings and motivations is partly a function of it being a thriller more interested in the chase itself than the background rationale. Yet the very absence of sustained elaboration of the reasons for Willingdon’s actions, of his presumably humanist convictions and beliefs, is illustrative of how media communications rely on partial or fragmentary or even negligible accounts of why individuals behave politically in the way they do.

A frequent critique of commercial media treatments of so-called terrorism is that the details of the perpetrator’s motivations or politics are left undeveloped or written off in broad strokes as irrational, villainous, savage, or simply evil. That approach may heighten dramatic conflict, especially if the conflict is cast as good versus evil, but it ignores the reality that even perpetrators of ghastly violence are people with pasts and thoughts and feelings that presumably have contributed to their complex decision to take extreme actions. Sadly, the neglect of this sociological and psychological complexity is often colored by racism or xenophobia or other biases based in cultural difference.

In the Boulting brothers’ film, Professor Willingdon is a fascinating test case because he embodies the very values that the state itself seems also most to represent or care to defend: he is a loving father and husband, a devoted civil servant, a well-educated producer of knowledge for the greater good. If he is a genius, he’s hardly an evil one. In fact, his motivation in issuing his ultimatum might appear as an expression of the most basic of liberal humanist values, the preservation of self and society. Though he finally comes off as absent-minded and, as a research scientist, naïve about the geopolitical realities of the world, his might be seen as a virtuous, even noble reaction to an increasingly uncertain world.

To speak in such terms of Willingdon’s nobility requires a certain perspective on individual virtue, political action and humanist values. One might imagine, for example, a more militant position in which the professor’s thinking fails utterly to account for the Cold War threats to the survival of Britain and its inhabitants. The humanist values he seems to promote are secondary, even inconsequential, if the society does not adopt a policy of realpolitik and arm itself to counter the enemy’s atomic build-up. Naivete trumps nobility in that view.

The larger point is that characterizing intentions as noble, virtuous, or otherwise marked by good principles is largely left to the eye of the beholder. Like the idea of terrorism itself, which has been elastically deployed by many governments over more than two centuries to describe all manner of enemies and villains (recall how Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was once on the U.S. terrorist list), nobility means different things from different perspectives. At least most, if not all individuals labeled by others as terrorists themselves have motivations that they consider good or noble. They want to remake society according to their own vision, do god’s work as they see it, destroy the world in order to save it. From outside that perspective, such intentions may seem irrational or non-sensical but internally they cohere and accord meaning to destructive behavior.

Again, this is not to defend violent action or justify any random vision for employing violence or its threat to change the world. Bloodshed needs to be condemned roundly. However, as the issues surrounding Professor Willingdon’s ultimatum make plain, dismissive labeling of destructive behavior or its threat as simplistically irrational or hateful or evil is neither accurate nor useful. More helpful is a cultivated sensitivity to the complexity of motivations driving these actions and the play of perspectives shaping mediated communications about them. While not a great film, Seven Days to Noon presses us to acknowledge that multiple perspectives in media productions necessarily shape the way we approach both good or noble intentions and the political use or threatened use of violence. Oftentimes, as the film demonstrates in its memorable depictions of postwar London, those perspectives turn on which spaces or persons or experiences are made visible and which are kept invisible -- that is, how some perspectives are privileged over and at the expense of others.

Remaking the FCC?

2009-02-03T13:58:00.007-05:00

The current economic crisis has driven ongoing comparisons between the present day and the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Besides Lincoln, FDR has been the leader most often cited as a possible model for President Obama as he faces today''s many economic and domestic challenges. Roosevelt’s first hundred days, the fifteen major pieces of legislation he signed during them, and the effective creation of the modern U.S. government as we have come to know it make such parallels instructive if also cautionary tales for our time.

Amidst all the commentary and critique, and in an era of globalizing media and technology, it’s perhaps telling that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has not been included in most debates about the legacy of that earlier era. To be sure, the FCC was not part of the institutional broadside launched by Roosevelt against the economic collapse. The commission was established by the Communications Act of 1934, which built, in turn, on many of the provisions of the Radio Act of 1927. Then, like now, radio and communications media more generally are not readily conceived to fall within the government’s purview for supporting social and economic well-being. Media in America have tended, instead, to be understood a realm of free speech outside of government control.

In practice, that has meant media are left less to the people and more to corporations. As media historian Robert McChesney has persuasively argued, government regulation of radio emerged at a time of public fascination with the medium and foreclosed an immense range of public and political uses of the new technology in favor of consolidated corporate interests. In the process, the early Congress effectively gave over the “public airwaves” to commercial broadcasters like General Electric with the FCC providing oversight. (McChesney’s Telecommunications, Mass Media, and the Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 is an exceptionally well-researched and revealing account.) It was a defining moment for the convergence of free speech and free markets.

Like many of his other appointees, Julius Genachowski, Obama’s choice to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has drawn praise. A former Harvard Law classmate of the President’s, Genachowski served as a legal adviser to the FCC in the 1990s before working for various dot-com’s (like expedia.com and hotel.com) and serving as a board member to major media companies (including General Electric and USA Networks). He later counseled Obama during his campaign on media and communications issues. Expectations are that Genachowski will shift the FCC’s priority away from telecommunications providers and toward some combination of enabling technology innovation and supporting increased media user access and possibly rights. One possibility, as The Economist and others have reported, is the creation of subsidies for the promotion of high-speed broadband, particularly wireless broadband.

That’s encouraging news after eight years of FCC myopia focusing on loosening cross-media ownership restrictions and moral micro-oversight of broadcasting. Unlike the former chairman, Kevin Martin, who was a lobbyist and eager at every turn to enable industries to expand freely, Genachowski will likely push back against the media consolidation enabled by its Bush-era predecessors and encourage diversity in media ownership. The effects should both be in the public interest and ultimately valuable to the marketplace.

Yet one wonders what more might be possible were Genachowski, with Obama’s and Congress’s support, to re-conceive of the FCC as the lead agency in a coordinated effort to upgrade our media and communications landscape. If, as the President has rightly said, our transportation infrastructure needs serious improvement and renewal, what about our digital infrastructure? Again, both regulatory precedent and the public value of unrestricted free speech make such wider-ranging reform unlikely. Even more compelling is the fear of free marketers that their opportunity will be usurped by an expanded government role. These are undoubtedly important concerns. But it is also necessary to remember that the digital revolution through which we’re living will have historical consequences even greater than the economic downturn we’re currently suffering. What might be worth considering in response is a fuller partnership between government and industry that would coordinate media and technological development in more efficient and concerted ways. Especially considering its history at the nexus of government, commercial and citizen concerns over the most appropriate operation of communications in American society, the FCC would be a very good place for that conversation to start.

Ari Adut, _On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art_ (Cambridge UP, 2008) [brief review]

2009-01-29T23:57:00.005-05:00

Scandal is moral conflict made public. Among history’s most famous examples, casting light not only on the provocation of homosexuality but the shifting boundaries of public and private life in Victorian England, was the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde. Other cases discussed in this new book by sociologist Ari Adut include the American Presidency, reaching from the mid-1800s through Watergate, and the judicial investigations of high-ranking French officials in the 1980s. These events revealed, in various though clearly shared ways, how the changing status of elites and political office were publicly negotiated. Disruptive of everyday life, profane in its violation of accepted standards of behavior and expression, scandal entails a reckoning with a society’s guiding values.

Crucially, whether based in an actual, apparent, or alleged transgression, the scandalous episode is sustained by publicity. Even more, besides having consequences for the individual artists or politicians around whom the conflict swirls, scandal reveals through widespread contestation how society is organized in a given place and time and which politics best define it. On Scandal thus seeks both to develop its thesis by tracking the circumstances around individual cases and to explore their deeper import (sometimes realized in the moment, other times not) for morality and public life.

Probably the consummate (and most familiar) example here is the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998, which led to the impeachment of a U.S. President. A volatile mix of sexual wrongdoing and Constitutional crisis, the scandal’s eruption forced attention on the moral ambiguities of the nation’s cultural politics and the degradation of political authority. Moreover, at a time of expanding digital media, the episode foregrounded questions about the appropriate politicization of the personal and the personalization of the political.

What finally distinguishes the events recounted here from a wider litany of social controversies (think, recently, of Bush v. Gore or the Madoff pyramid scheme) is public provocation grounded in private attitudes or behaviors. Often meaning a preoccupation with sexuality or nudity or the matter of who in society is able to indulge them, it is the moral stakes for individuals constituting the public that lend scandals their weight. That assertion helps Adut to offer a more cohesive and manageable thesis but ultimately prevents his model from making fuller sense of the surplus of apparently scandalous - if certainly publicly provocative and morally contentious - events generated and amplified through the echo chambers of contemporary media.

The Biggest Names in Sex?

2009-01-23T17:33:00.007-05:00

Playboy magazine recently published its list of the "55 Most Important People in Sex" over the last 55 years to celebrate the magazine's anniversary. (The list isn't available without subscription on the Playboy site, but has been re-printed elsewhere, such as http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-13/the-biggest-names-in-sex-1/3/ .) It's unavoidably provocative and underscores how intertwined the histories of politics, culture, and social and psychological analysis of the past half-century-plus have been with sexuality. It also raises issues about a mainstream -- largely white and heteronormative -- view of sex in America that has fragmented inexorably over those five decades. While I wrote a lengthy letter to the editor in reaction, because of the apparent volume of other such responses, only a few lines were eventually accepted for publication on Playboy's blog. The full letter follows.

Dear Playboy,

If your list of the 55 most important people in sex proves anything, it is that sex is complex -- here, it embraces cause and symptom of cultural change, human right and moral wrong, physiological puzzle and social provocation, and finally overarching symbol of who we are or at least imagine ourselves to be at a give moment (past and present). Sorting through such happy complexity, a few thoughts.

The approach to media's contribution on the list is fairly free-form. Inventors mix with marketers/popularizers, directors and producers and editors, as well as performers (who are included variously for their public and private actions). The internet might be the greatest platform for sexual expression, community and marketing in human history, but does Tim Berners-Lee (#8) really merit that credit on the list? Ditto: Charles Ginsburg (#12) on video magnetic recording tape. Don't get me wrong, I know Danni Ashe (#49) is on the list and I'm not advocating for someone like Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame. My question is partly about intentions -- while Hef and the Stones (#3 & 7) understood their challenging of sexual taboos, at least to an extent, presumably Sir Tim did not when he proposed a global hypertext project in 1989. It's also about looking back at history: there's a stark difference between ground-shaking provocations that rock their sexual or social moment and those whose influence builds, often beyond the originator's control or even wild imagining, over time.

The towering backroom media figure missing from the list is Jack Valenti, who steered a middle way for sexual content in the movies as the longtime (1966-2005) president of the Motion Picture Association of America. After establishing the film ratings system, Valenti weather the eruption of mainstream pornographic films in the early 1970s, guided the incorporation of novel cinematic delivery technologies from the VCR to the internet, and managed cinematic cause celebres from Blow-up to Basic Instinct to Eyes Wide Shut. He's not as sexy as Mike Nichols (#42; with whom he sparred about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? upon arriving to the MPAA) or Bernardo Bertolluci (#53) -- much less Brigitte Bardot (#18), Bo Derek (#20), and other more obviously alluring figures from the big screen. Yet Valenti's moral compass arguably set the direction of sex in Hollywood more than any other individual of the last 55 years.

Almost entirely absent from the list are racial concerns. yes, like Nancy Friday (#31), who wrote in 1973 of white women's "Black-man fantasy," some of the important authors listed do discuss race. But the other representatives of that recurring American preoccupation are omitted (as are those involving other races). Think of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, the interracial couple at the center of the groundbreaking 1967 Supreme Court case, Loving v. virginia, which struck down any race-based restrictions on marriage. Or, also on the legal front, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. Or, from entertainment, Hollywood's first African-American sex symbol, Dorothy Dandridge, or Motown's sexual healer, Marvin Gaye.

On a very different note, ranking Monica Lewinsky so highly (#6) is fanciful. Ask Al Gore to explain his election loss in 2000 and my guess is that Bill's favorite intern would emerge only after a dozen other reasons. While an undeniably influential sex scandal that marked the 1990s (or at least shared the decade's sullied political stage with Justice Thomas and, in a stretch, O.J.), does it really rank in the middle of the top ten?

Lastly, and among the many worthy persons who couldn't break onto this list but deserve mention, here's another idea to lead the second 55. While condoms have been around for centuries, the "condom revolution" of the 1990s, brought about by the introduction of polyurethane models, the development of various new sizes and shapes (including for women), and the increased global use driven by the HIV/AIDS pandemic), warrants attention representation here. For that position, who better than Dr. A.V.K. Reddy, whom The New York Times called the "Leonardo de Vinci" of condoms?

Happy 55th.

Of Obama's race and generation

2009-01-19T12:55:00.000-05:00

What an extraordinary moment of change and hope. One of the critical comments that astutely conveys the scope of the change taking place with Barack Obama's ascendance to the White House involves the change it represents to the Black political landscape in the US. Different characterizations of a shift away from the "civil rights establishment" capture a crucial generational shift in Black America and, even, more the country's racial landscape. Patricia Williams, the insightful Columbia University law professor, sees this as an evolutionary step. Moving beyond the Civil Rights model of politics practiced by Al Sharpton, Charlie Rangel, Bobby Rush, and, more notably for his off-handed, derisive remarks during the Presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson, she sees a new Affirmative Action model of politics being ushered in by Obama.

Aptness of labels aside, this seems accurately to summarize some of the momentous shift underway. Yet at the same time as the justified parsing of the racial implications of Obama's inauguration continues, we can't neglect the broader generational consequences of the change for those of all races. I say this, full disclosure, as a white man. But underlying the spirit of hope and change is precisely a shift to a new generation that may or may not be post-racial but is genuinely a break from "greatest" and baby-boomer generations that have long held sway in politics and public life. This is not to dwell on Dubya as a baby boomer who created a mess that needs cleaning up (though clearly that's some of what's in play now). It is, instead, to speak to the need of the country to move beyond the cultural and political imagination of the baby boomers. That generation has achieved so much, not least their remaking of the possibilities for continuing engagement as they grow older in the political and institutional life of the country and, indeed, the world.

In other words, even as extended commentary is dedicated to hope for the future framed in racial terms, very little attention is being given to the larger generational shift taking place. With individuals living longer and the baby boomers having re-cast our thinking about the meaning and potential of growing older and remaining active in public and professional life, we haven't faced a greatly altered generational landscape -- until, possibly, now. How will different generations with often competing and even contradictory visions of society and their roles in it co-exist? What will this mean for the leadership and conduct of our political institutions? Our cultural and educational organizations? Our lives as businesspersons, producers, and consumers? And yes, the place of race in our lives? Generational change, and give-and-take, are obviously constants as history progresses. We're nevertheless asked at certain moments more than others to take stock of that change and actively consider our values.

My assumption is not that a national conversation would advantage or disadvantage any generation. The agenda would not be to justify the exit of one group or defer the entry to power of another. (Indeed, any conversation would quickly move beyond the simplistic categorizing I’m using here to affirm the complexity of age and groupings constructed around it in society.) The point, rather, would be to acknowledge that in a country where laws and policies are so crucial to the provision of rights, resources, and opportunities, we occasionally need to address, together and deliberately, the values and principles that enable us to craft appropriate and consistent laws and policies. This seems such a moment for that honest discussion of our multi-generational future.