I’m on the edge now of being able to keep up with all of updates posted by the people I follow. I suspect that after another doubling in my following list it will be impossible for me to read every update. I use Twitter or a client application almost every day but I don’t check it as often as other people. When I started using Twitter I set the refresh rate for Twitterific as low as I could - every 15 minutes. With almost 100 followees that refresh rate misses items during high usage periods. So I have upped the refresh rate but I still don’t check the stream that often, perhaps 2 or 3 times per hour. Unlike some users I rarely reply to other messages. I’m just not impressed with Twitter as a conversation tool for one-to-one interactions. But I was never an avid IM or text messaging user.
So what does this have to do with empathy?
At this point in time my Twitter stream is a peripheral perception of my diffuse social web (at least the part that is on Twitter). I feel like it’s become part of the background hum of my social world while I’m online. It occasionally surfaces to the front of my attention when I choose to look at it. Then it fades away as my attention shifts to another topic.
Another thing to note is that I turned off all notifications from Twitterific and other clients like Twhirl and Tweetdeck. I do this because the cost of interruptions isn’t worth it. See all the research done on information overload.
I think what is worthwhile about Twitter and other microblogging applications is the background hum. I don’t feel the need to always know what my friends are doing but I take comfort in the fact that I can find out easily when I choose to.
Entering and exiting the Twitterstream is like hovering around a party conversation. I focus for a moment on the people I am directly talking to. Then the conversation ends and I become aware of all the other conversations occurring around me. Even when I’m focused on a single person I’m still aware of others because the noise at a party never completely fades. In fact my sense of conversational focus is really an artifact of the neurological processing performed by the brain on my auditory senses. I hear everything, but pay attention to a part.
So in the online case with Twitter a parallel process is going on but slightly modified. Individual conversations are possible via replies and direct messages. Regular updates become the other conversations at the party. It’s akin to the ‘river of news’ idea popularized by Dave Winer. Updates flow by my perception and I can pay attention or not.
Twitter becomes a empathic experience when I realize that all of these people are living their own individual lives and updating me on a small stream of that activity. They face the same frustrations with software installs, server configurations, and traffic. Sometimes they are out partying, sometimes they get drunk. They get angry. Somewhere, no doubt, someone is falling in love. And soon enough someone will propose marriage to someone else on Twitter, if they haven’t done it already. Twitter puts all this emotional expression into bite sized chunks that speed by on my phosphorescent computer screen. This is “Life on the Screen” a la Turkle.
]]>So connecting this back to Harry Boyte, my ongoing interest in Open Space, and a nascent Citizen Media Camp, I start thinking that Minneapolis needs to have a September project event.
Consider this post a marker for the idea. Now it’s time to start activating the social media engines and see if there’s anyone else I can harness into this idea.
]]>What if the group were to meet at a local retirement community? Surely there is an audience of people who are retired and interested in reading Shakespeare. Perhaps they never had a chance to read it before, or maybe they are just lifelong learning junkies like myself. Shakespeare would be a great choice because there are numerous recordings that offer nice affordances for those who may not be able to read text as well as they used to.
The group could meet for five weeks for an hour each week. This fits perfectly to the Shakespearean five act play and gives people time to fall behind or catch up.
The intergenerational fillip comes from inviting a group of high school students to join the discussion group, either for a single meeting or over the entire five weeks. The possibilities for character discussions seem endless if two such divergent audiences were to get together.
]]>The maximalist position is that we are responsible for everything. When we act, whether consciously or not, something happens in the world. A series of effects propagates outward from our actions, and that series may be endless.
For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost… and on, and on.
We rarely glimpse the long-term, distant outcomes of our actions because our perceptions are limited. My presence at tonight’s Socrates Cafe meeting may lead to another person reading a book I shared with her. That book could change her life but I may never know it.
From the maximalist perspective we arrive at the ideas of globalism and environmentalism. My choice to drive to the library releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and leads to global warming. Everything I do becomes significant.
The other extreme in this debate is the minimalist. We are responsible for our actions and nothing more. Each of us is surrounded by sphere of agency. Sometimes these spheres may touch but they never overlap.
I always have a choice about how to respond to a situation. Someone cuts me off in traffic. Do I become angry? Do I ignore the situation? Do I try to run them off the road?
The emphasis is on freedom and choice. Even under the extremes of distress there is always a choice. It’s an existential view of the world.
]]>The topic of the day was immigration, a sensitive issue to be sure. Some of the initial presentations raised good issues about the immigration policy of America but the discussion was quite different. For a group of amateur futurists there was a remarkable level of certainty about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.
My jaw almost fell out of my head when one of the audience members told everyone that we had to look at the problem from a systems perspective and then, in the very next breath, linked the problem of affordable housing to the poor family culture of non-white people. He argued that housing requires a job, which requires an education, which requires a family structure that values education and therefore we should require all adult immigrants to participate in ESL immersion classes as soon as they arrive in our country.
A real systems perspective emphasizes all the parts of the system when looking for a solution or a point of intervention.
In the systems perspective, once one has identified the system as a separate part of the universe, one is not allowed to progressively decompose the system into isolated parts. Instead, one is obligated to describe the system as a whole. If one uses separation into parts, as part of the description of the system properties, this is only part of a complete description of the behavior of the whole, which must include a description of the relationships between these parts and any additional information needed to describe the behavior of the entire system.
Further, in a systems perspective one should be careful about considering the system in the context of the environment and not as an isolated entity. Thus one should include the interactions and relationships between the system and the environment.
The presenter to the group, Elizabeth Glidden, responded that as an expectant parent she would need to spend a minimum of $200 per week on childcare. The only way for a family to do this and afford housing is for both parents to work.
Our interlocutor from the audience replied that a significant number of people choose homeschooling. (2% to be precise. Does this person really understand the meaning of significant?) Some families “find homeschooling to be a cheaper alternative than the public schools.” Cheaper? In what possible way is homeschooling cheaper than public school or daycare.
When people say something is cheaper they usually mean that it costs less or saves money. So you have a family with two incomes. They spend 30% of their monthly income on housing. Then they have a child and they decide to homeschool. Is this really “cheaper?” At best homeschooling is only cheaper if you consider the labor of the stay-at-home parent to be completely uncompensated. A homeschooling family may indeed be spending less money per month because they don’t pay out money for childcare. But the tradeoff for that is a significantly lower savings rate.
The group dynamic in these situations is really interesting to observe. Most of the people who speak up in this group have been coming for a long time and each of them has a particular ideé fixe into which discussions inevitably bend. People don’t listen to each other because they’ve heard all the arguments before.
The anti-immigration arguments boiled down to three points:
The only interesting argument in this bunch is the second. It’s clear that people in the United States consume much more natural resources and produce more pollution than people in the rest of the world. But to say that immigration is the cause or solution for this problem is a big jump.
All Americans have been living a cadillac lifestyle for many years, even before the legal changes of 1965. For any individual immigrant the marginal increase in resource consumption and pollution is trivial compared to the overconsumption we’ve all been living with. Shutting off immigration to this country isn’t going to solve the environmental problem. It might be part of the solution but it is hardly the end of the discussion.
I called this entry “Sense of Authority” because I was so astounded by the certainty with which all of these people spoke about the future. I’m not even sure if I can call this futurism because it bears so little connection to the complex systems view of futurism that I hold. I think it’s more accurate to say that the tropes of futurism and engineering (systems perspectives, statistics) became cloaks for political positions.
Given the age of most of the participants in this group my experience may be representative of what future studies used to be. If the profession were founded today things might be very different.
There were more silly things said today but they will have to wait for another post.
]]>Jon Gordon from FutureTense started things out with a Q&A about technology and media. Most of the questions surrounded the new NPR API and the social media activity at Minnesota Public Radio. He mentioned the changing attitudes among journalists about social media. Perceptions are shifting slowly from not letting media employees speak online to accepting off-the-record conversations about anything.
This reminded me of how I felt when I read or heard last year about journalists not voting in order to protect their impartiality. I thought then that the idea was stupid. I’d rather have a journalist vote and be upfront about his or her participation than someone who tries to hard to appear above the fray. The question is how much disclosure do we need or want? Does a journalist have a responsibility to tell the audience how she voted? What will happen when media organizations start publishing their raw interviews and material on the web for remixing and analysis?
Paul Saarinen (I would’ve gotten the spelling correct, it’s just like the architect Eero Saarinen, even if I’m not from the range) spoke about the parallels between social media and game playing. I remember first hearing this from Ed Vielmetti in 2005 when he compared Wikipedia to an MMORPG. Just like pornography leads the way in Lively so gaming leads the way in online social interactions. To the hippies who started the WELL and influenced the hacker movement this is probably no surprise.
Meg Canada and Jody Wurl finished the morning off by showing off how hip librarians are to social media and networking. I remember encountering a lot of librarians when I first started to read and write blogs five or six years ago. Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian has been blogging since 2002. Canada and Wurl toured some of the highlights on the social media booksphere LibraryThing and Bookspace. I was surprised at the low number of hands raised when we were asked if anyone was on LibraryThing. I guess I’m spoiled by the high ratio of superpatrons in Ann Arbor.
Almost everyone at the meeting was on Twitter during the meeting. A twitter search for smbmsp gives a good trace. To test the geek quotient of all those people I think we should setup an IRC channel next time and see how many people know what we are talking about.
]]>Shelby started things off by recapping an anecdote about his third grade teacher from the forward to the book. He speculated about Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg address - especially the emphasis on the famous phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Did Lincoln emphasize the noun or the prepositions? Is it about the people or the functions of people?
Boyte stood up to tell us about his book and work. He’s seen all of the stories and complaints about the contemporary American loss of citizenship: Bellah, et.al. Habits of the Heart, Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the claims that we are being siloed into partisan and information niches (True Enough by Manjoo), that there has been a decline in mutual trust. (Some of those references are mine.) The Civic Health Index, produced by the National Conference on Citizenship showed an uptick in charitable giving after 9-11 but since then has noticed declines in trust in other people and charity.
Boyte believes there is another story to be told in parallel to the declension narrative. This is the story of self-organized citizens working together to create civic agency, working together to create something outside of, or beyond, predetermined solutions. It’s an emergent phenomenon of people coming together to accomplish something.
Amir Pinnix concluded with his story of becoming a citizen athlete. He spoke about growing up as an only child with his mother in Newark, New Jersey. When he moved to the University of Minnesota he felt that something was missing on campus so he and a friend started SCOPE, Student Committee on Public Engagement. He told us to never give up and never stop trying to improve the world. I particularly liked two quotes “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and “you can’t lead folks unless you love folks, you can’t save folks unless you serve folks” (from Cornel West). Pinnix was an impressive speaker so I expect he’ll go far in the future. Google suggest this Star Tribune profile for further reading.
After this we broke into small group discussions at our tables. There were about 8 or 9 tables of 5-10 people. At the tables a staff member or student from the Humphrey Institute posed three question to us.
The discussion at my table focused on local community building, reaching out to our neighbors both in person and via technology, trying to create an environment in which we can be open to the possibilities inside ourselves and others.
I was impressed by a story from one my tablemates about her experience moving to a new community. She was initially wary of some of her neighbors asking question about her life. But she realized later that they were the local leaders of the community neighborhood and were asking so they could include her in the community. I thought this summed up the risk and fear that we all face when acting as a citizen? It’s hard to reveal ourselves to others and discouraging when our revelations are met with silence.
I didn’t get to pose my final question to the larger group because time ran out. But I wanted to ask Harry Boyte what if we act and nothing happens, then what?
]]>Via Dean Baker I read that America is abandoning the twenty-five year dream of the free market.
Through this uniquely American lens, saving businesses from collapse was the sort of thing that happened on other shores, where sentimental commitments to social welfare trumped sharp-edged competition. Weak-kneed European and Asian leaders were too frightened to endure the animal instincts of a real market, the story went. So they intervened time and again, using government largess to lift inefficient firms to safety, sparing jobs and limiting pain but keeping their economies from reaching full potential.
There have been recent interventions in America, of course — the taxpayer-backed bailout of Chrysler in 1979, and the savings and loan rescue of 1989. But the first happened under Jimmy Carter, a year before Americans embraced Ronald Reagan and his passion for unfettered markets. And the second was under George H. W. Bush, who did not share that passion.
So it made for a strange spectacle last weekend as the current Bush administration, which does cast itself in the Reagan mold, hastily prepared a bailout package to offer the government-sponsored mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The reasoning behind this rescue effort — like the reasoning behind the government-induced takeover of Bear Stearns by J. P. Morgan Chase just a month before — sounded no different from that offered in defense of many a bailout in Japan and Europe:
The mortgage giants were too big to be allowed to fail.
I could go through all the nostrums - corporate welfare, class warfare, middle class aspirations - and I could go through all of the evidence - that markets fail as often as they succeed, that no one has ever lived in a completely free market society, that 20% of the population thinks it’s in the top 1% of the income distribution - but what’s the point.
The evidence I see is different from the evidence that others perceive. I read part of “True Enough” by Farhad Manjoo last week and it reaffirmed my bias that bias will never be overcome.
]]>Back in February Dan Gillmor stopped by Minnesota Public Radio to talk about the future of journalism. The setup was standard interview fare - two people at microphones in front of a crowd sitting in an auditorium. The reaction to the event was immediately negative - people complained about the lack of interaction with the audience and the back channel chat on Twitter was devastating.
Last Saturday a smaller group of people met in the same location for Public Radio Camp. The setup was completely different. Butcher-block paper on the walls, ubiquitous wi-fi, tables, movable chairs, and about thirty people who were interested in improving media not just talking about it.
So which one of these events was more successful? As usual it depends on your goals, audience, and perspective.
I felt the Gillmor event covered material I already knew. There was minimal interaction with the audience in a conversation that was ostensibly about how the audience is becoming more powerful than journalists. The journalists in the audience seemed to mostly be fearful about the future of their profession.
At Public Radio Camp everything was turned around. People were enthusiastic about public radio and the information they hoped to get from it. They were interested in expanding participation and bringing more people into the conversation. Finally the format was based on open space and left people alone long enough to let them self-organize.
]]>There was a lot of synergy between the two groups working on user-generated content and Nuevo Radio. So what I’d like to see next is another event like today’s. But instead of just brainstorming ideas we should get together to produce a news story.
Here’s how I think it could work.
Everyone arrives in the morning and things are setup as they were today, a bunch of white boards or paper on the walls, a few tables, and chairs. There’s a brief introduction where we explain what we’re going to do - create a news story in a day. For the first hour everyone brainstorms story ideas: who can we interview, what media do we want to use, how do we research the idea?
Then we divide the tasks up into teams and go out and do it.
This would work really well for a significant event, like the upcoming Republican National Convention. The drawback is that everyone else is going to be covering the convention. I don’t know if there is much more that an ad hoc group of citizen journalists will add to the cacophony.
An even better event might be the opening of the state legislative session in January.
Once we’ve pulled off a couple of citizen media camps then we can start looking for a permanent place to produce new media.
]]>both from Wikipedia
How does the historical enclosure movement relate to current issues?
Both of these actors continue to play a large role in modern commons. States and governments have often been called upon to protect common resources, especially the environment. Private corporations continue to enclose the commons for their benefit. Some examples from intellectual property law are: copyright extensions, patent extension and litigation, etc.
How are the distinctions between rivalrous and non-rivalrous / excludable and non-excludable goods worked out in practice?
Case study: food policy and markets. Wikipedia treats food as a private good. Could there be a situation where food is a public or commons based good? Our default position in modern society is to analyze goods through the lens of markets. For food to be a public or commons good society would have to be structured very differently than it is now. Perhaps food was a common good in hunter-gatherer societies in the past. It may also have been treated as a gift by other cultures. But the transition to sedentary agriculture probably ended any food commons that might have existed in the past. The crucial factor may be the transition between abundance and scarcity. In a world of abundance it is easy to treat a good as held in common, but when scarcity arises then people are likely to start hoarding and or attempting to privatize the good themselves. An example of this comes from a case study in “Making the Commons Work.”
]]>This chaos will not be ended,
The red and the blue house blended,
Not ended, never and never ended,
The weak man mended,
The man that is poor at night
Attended
Like the man that is rich and right.
The great men will not be blended...
I am the poorest of all.
I know that I can not be mended,
Out of the clouds, pomp of the air,
By which at least I am befriended.
The meeting began with two introductory presentations about the problem of affordable housing. The message is pretty simple to state: the current median home price in Minnesota and the nation is significantly higher than the 30% of income that is the threshold for affordability. Anyone working in a service job - nurse, teacher, retail clerk, janitor, food services - makes, on average, less than needed to afford a home or, in some cases, an apartment rental. The only way for a contemporary family to continue to afford housing is for them to have dual incomes, and even then it’s not easy. No wonder so many people feel harried by work and the constant struggle to achieve that modern euphemism of work/life balance.
After the presentations we broke for 30-minutes of small-group discussion. I was at a table with a couple of city staffers, a woman who works for a local land trust, and two people from Isaiah.
I listened to the discussion and was struck by how it wondered in circles around the “complexity” of the problem. Someone would throw out a potential solution to the problem and then another person would say that it’s all more complicated than that. The person who proposed the solution would agree that it really is complicated and then move onto another thread in the discussion.
I tried to steer the question to ask what the barriers to action were. The responses were simple: people’s attitude, money, recalcitrant contractors, and lack of political will. Again the specter of “complexity” was raised.
As a sometimes complexity scholar I have to wonder whether this is really a true description of the problem or a subtle cop-out. To me the problem doesn’t seem that complex at all. The market fails to provide housing. Local governments can act to alleviate this by altering their building codes and requirements. We can all agree on the nature of the problem and the most likely solution. So what is the real problem here?
One suggestions was money. At a deeper level I agree, greed is always a problem in a market economy. But the requirements for affordable housing that set the model across the nation are not onerous. They’re only onerous to those who have been brainwashed to believe that all government action is bad. If you believe that the government can intervene for a collective benefit then the argument should be practically won.
So what stops us from acting?
I am a strong proponent of complexity. A lot of major problems and issues in the world are complex. But this isn’t one of them. It’s pretty simple and straightforward microeconomics. Give builders an incentive, through regulation, and they will build affordable housing. Builders are already regulated so this shouldn’t be hard. We just have to actually do it.
]]>The commons is a new way to express a very old idea—that some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good and all.
The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come. The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as shared social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research and creative works.
e.g. * biopiracy * cap and dividend * common assets * commons movement * copyleft * corporation * enclosure * externality * gift economy - blood and organ donation, open source, wikis * inalienability * land trusts * open source software * public goods - non-rival, non-excludable: lighthouses, city parks, broadcast programming, global atmosphere * public space * public trust doctrine * tragedy of the commons * trust or stakeholder trust * value
FM - two examples of the commons
K - environmental studies. Garret Hardin’s classic essay on the “Tragedy of the Commons” is required reading in multiple classes. The environment presents lots of challenges for the commons.
Some more examples - the atmosphere, City of Lakes land trust, senior housing in S Minneapolis, common areas for use in apartments or other living spaces, ExCo as a commons, the public domain vs. copyright extension, the Internet.
Possible traits -
From geography - the converging influence of site and situation. Both need to be conducive for a commons to arise. Thus a small group can protect a small space, like Nicollet Island, and reach across multiple generations. For a larger site, like the atmosphere, the situation may be more difficult or require different participants. e.g. the Kyoto treaty or other international agreements (CFCs)
Other ideas that need development - gift economy, work around restrictions/barriers, Native American spirtuality and ethics.
So why are commons threatened? Because people are “as dumb as rocks,” see the Nicollet Island whirlpool. Another mill run seemed like a good idea at the time but proved disasterous. Greed and stupidity make people do things that destroy the commons. Lack of belief in the commons, lack of awareness about the commons, or too encultured to see the commons. Need to design solutions that emphasize the commons and make people part of the experience.
]]>What’s your personal experience with Open Courseware?
Open courseware is a growing phenomenon among colleges and universities throughout the world. Itunes U, MIT OpenCourseware, the Open Courseware Consortium, and a bunch of other institutions show the growth of the this movement over the last few years. Have you taken a free course online through one of the open courseware portals? What was it like? How well did it work? What would you do differently next time?
I got five responses over a week and here’s a summary of the responses.
Sheila mentioned the knowledge benefit to those who want to learn but don’t need the degree. I’m intrigued by the “don’t need the degree” quote. Are the people accessing Open Courseware really in a position to choose whether to get a degree or not? From outside the U.S. it’s less likely a matter of not needing the degree than being unable to get the degree, even if a desire for the degree exists. Sheila added that OCW gives peope the opportunity to “brush up on courses” before returning to school.
Gerry used the MIT courses as an aid to learning theory, but the labs were lacking. This is where the difference between distance learning and in-the-classroom experience becomes critical. New technology, especially easy video production, may alleviate some of these problems in the future. I should look up some studies on the successes and failure of distance learning over the past 30 years. I know we’ve met this problem before but I don’t know if there is anything we’ve learned from the experience.
Freek observed the disparity in course quality at the MIT site. Some courses have extensive material online — syllabi, recorded lectures, readings, slide presentations, and videos — other courses are bare bones, a syllabi and not much else. I wonder if there is a difference among subject areas. Are the humanities less likely to have online materials because there are fewer labs or experiments and more classroom discussion? This might make an interesting research project.
I wonder just how useful is it to have a recording of a classroom discussion that you didn’t personally attend? I’ve listened to a few examples from Chris Lydon on his radio program Open Source. His interviews are often recorded in classroom audiences at Brown and followed by questions from students. The questions are often very good but only take up 10% of the total program. Lydon’s experience is in radio so he brings a different flavor to a classroom presentation than most teachers. The benefit of his radio experience is in the production values - the audio quality is good, everyone can be heard during the discussion period, there isn’t any annoying background noise. For this to work well in an education session there either needs to be a support staff that records and produces the audio or else teachers need to learn yet another skill.
Manu confirmed the opinion that the courses at MIT still need time to mature in order to be really useful for remote learners.
Christine said she used the courses at Itunes U as benchmarks for comparison with her own courses. I like this hybrid approach that combines the best of OCW with the local knowledge of instructors. This model seems like an ideal target market for the OCW people; don’t claim to replace instructors, instead become a supplement to what they are already doing.
]]>