Brian Frank » web

Google+ and the False Sense of Privacy

Brian — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 17:48:05 +0000

I’ll probably use Google+ for sharing photos, but not much else, for now. It seems great for that, giving me enough reason to recommend it. For conversation and news sharing I’ll have to wait and see.

I’ve wanted a way to share family photos, etc., without sharing everything with every acquaintance — not because I don’t like sharing myself but because I’m never sure how comfortable the other people are with it (whether it’s people who’d rather not see themselves and their kids all over the internet, or people who don’t want to see pics of people and kids and pets they don’t know).

Since even the latest adopters I know have Google accounts, it should be pretty easy to start without putting everyone through the nuisance (small as it is, but big enough to be a barrier) of setting up yet another account. Google+ is easier than emailing photos, and every bit as intimate (after all, there’s no guarantee that emails won’t be forwarded around beyond your control), so I’ll be strongly encouraging friends and family to use Google+, even if it’s for this alone.

(And the Hangout feature, which I haven’t tried yet (successfully) should be useful once in a while within those same intimate circles.)

A note about privacy, while I’m happy to use limited sharing for things I might be uncomfortable with if they were 100% public, I still wouldn’t trust Google+ with anything that might actually be damaging.

Not that I’m worried about anything specific, personally, but there are times that call for caution. A few months ago, in the lead-up to this, I remember Google used the example of a closeted gay being outed by pictures of them partying at a bar. Another scenario that comes up is the person on worker’s compensation caught skiing.

But even with limited sharing features, there’s still no absolute safeguard against accidents — nothing to prevent someone from copying a photo and emailing or posting it on another service, or making it their wallpaper. As Jeff Jarvis posted there this morning, it’s still a matter of personal, not technical liability.

Unlike Jarvis, I still like limited sharing. I’m learning to work with the big ambiguous expanse between the two hypothetical extremes: things I want the whole world to see and things I should keep to myself. It’s all about understanding and trying to optimize the risks vs. benefits of sharing. Sometimes accidently exposing something you’re uncomfortable with turns out to be worth it — helping build new relationships or professional leads.

Also, at least making an effort to be discrete sends a signal. It’s one thing to make a mistake or be associated with something others believe is problematic, but it requires a whole other level of poor judgement to willingly draw attention to it.

So I see Circles not as a safeguard for privacy as much as a way to clearly indicate to others how comfortable I am with something, how much risk I’m taking and entrusting with them, and what my expectations are.

Originally posted in Google+.

Update: looks like Gina Trapani was making some of the same points as I wrote this, and Trey Harris (who works at Google, apparently) wrote an excellent response to Jarvis on privacy, secrecy, safety, and signaling.

Also… sorry if you can’t access Google+ to see those posts. You can email me and I’ll try to send an invite.

Design Update: A Dialog

Brian — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 04:19:39 +0000

“You changed your website again?”

“I know, I can’t help it. Once a year I get bored on some Saturday night so I start tweaking stuff and one thing leads to another and 10 hours later I’ve been up all night changing basically everything.”

“Haha — you’re an idiot.” I love her honesty. “I like it! I wish I had the time to make my site look pretty. But you know, I’m one of those people who needs sleep.” :) “Do you actually know what you’re doing when you do your website?”

“Nope,” I said with a proud-guilty grin, “not really.”

She tilted and turned her head, giving me all of her raised right eyebrow.

“I mean, I’m learning as I go. Most of it’s just basic settings and plugins that don’t take much, but sometimes I’ll see something I like on someone else’s site and I’ll search for tutorials and discussions in forums for how to do it. Usually I screw it up — which is why I accidently stay up all night — but I mean it’s kinda good because I like to learn by doing things myself and solving problems.”

“Like what?”

“Uh–”

“Like, what was the hard stuff you did for your site? What did you learn?”

“Oh, uh, probably the hardest part for me was just getting stuff in the header and footer. I guess ‘hard stuff’ is maybe a strong word, I mean it’s relative. It’s more like — people who know what they’re doing probably do it easily — um, like I’ve always just cut-and-pasted things where a tutorial told me and then I just had to go, ‘Ok, this looks like it changes the colour, so what happens if I change this to something else? Nice, it worked. And maybe if I delete this line that weird space will go away,’ and that type of thing: just trial-and-error. But this time I’ve actually been reading up on it so I’m not just trying random things and seeing what happens.”

“Cool, yeah, I should learn more about that too. I noticed you don’t have your blog on your main page anymore. What’s with that?”

“Oh,” I said, “yeah, I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. The problem with the blog, for me, is that I keep posting on very different topics. One week about creativity and psychology, the next week about politics and media, two weeks later about philosophy. I think I should do a post about these design changes but I’ve been thinking of turning it into a creative writing exercise to make it more interesting… Any post by itself could give someone the wrong impression. I used to always feel like I had to write a new post because I thought the last post sucked and I didn’t want it to be the first one people saw. I don’t have the juice or time to keep doing that forever to I made the switch so make sure people saw my About page instead of a bunch of complicated and maybe controversial posts. It’s the same reason why I show Related Posts instead of Recent Posts in the sidebar now.”

“Or you could blog about the same thing all the time.”

“Yeah, no. I tried that and it didn’t happen. I ended up with like five different blogs. Instead — I’m not sure how many people notice — 95% of my posts are pretty focused on recognizing our own fallibility, working with uncertainty and articulating change.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I noticed ‘articulating change’ on your main page. Is that like your slogan now?”

“I’m afraid to use the word slogan anymore, but I guess so. It’s a quick way to describe what I do, and it covers what I do as a freelance writer for clients plus what I do with creative projects, as well as advocacy and activist-type stuff. It’s all about the same thing: making the most of change by knowing how to articulate what’s happening at a given time and place — not relying on abstract theories or old habits.”

“That’s what your book is mostly about.”

“Yes! The book is really — it’s like the operating system for everything else I might write. I think, I hope, if people get that then everything here should seem more coherent. All along I thought of it as an investment — a bit of capital that can do stuff for me instead of like a blog that has to always be updated.”

“I like your blog posts,” she said.

“Thanks!”

“Except the dialog about your design is a little corny.”

So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar…

Brian — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 07:41:16 +0000

So I saw this SEO copywriter joke a bunch of times yesterday. I love it:

“So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor”

(If you don’t know what SEO copywriting is, it means writing with specific keywords in certain orders to help sites rank higher in search engines like Google. Hence writing “bar, grill, pub,” etc. to get into more searches. I’m tempted to demonstrate it here but I don’t know what I’d want to optimize for — other than the joke, the funny joke about the SEO copywriter on Twitter.)

It was weird, because usually we don’t keep seeing the same joke. It kept being attributed to different people in retweets. It wasn’t like @alqaeda’s classic, ”not falling for that one,” and other big hits that keep referring back to the same source.

So I poked around and the earliest “SEO copywriter walks into a bar” I found was by @lahaff, who tweeted it last Thursday. That’s as far back as Twitter’s search would go. He has 47 followers and his tweet has been retweeted and mentioned a grand total of 8 times — only once with the new style:

But then on Friday it was tweeted by @mickjkpg (who cut off “four loko” and the period from the end, making room for a couple of hashtags. Note that was still a few days ago. I never saw it until today, when it blew up.

It’s funny that subsequent users — e.g. @cun and @LAWeekly – copied exactly what @mickjkpg tweeted: same list, same order, in quotation marks, and with no period at the end. It’s clearly cut-and-pasted — so it’s not like any old “walks into a bar” joke you might hear in a bar and and forget where you heard it. The fact that anyone can do a quick search and see it all over Twitter didn’t stop people from effectively taking credit:

Well who’s going to complain… Because it’s been around a lot longer than last week. Someone put it on Reddit back on December 4, adding,

This was stolen from a friend’s Twitter and he might have stolen it from someone else, but I still wanted to post it.

(At least he tried. Speaking of which, thanks @JayFredin for looking that up.)

So who knows? Maybe it is one of those old standard jokes — just one limited to a small, specialized community until now.

Funny how long things can stay unknown until they hit the right nodes and suddenly go fully-blown.

WikiLeaks Reveals! What Happens When Anyone Can Be As Annoying As Michael Moore

Brian — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:29:00 +0000

The WikiLeaks story is really becoming a saga. It’s like a new chapter is added every week, with new characters and new ethical questions raised. The latest one helped me work out at least one big answer to move forward with.

The answer hinges on trust.

It used to be that knowledge was power: it was difficult to acquire, so relatively few people were able to control it. Which meant that people who had it were more likely to be trusted. Because if you’ve invested a lot (in infrastructure, political capital, etc.) gaining access to information, you’re damn well going to make sure what (and how) you eventually communicate is trustworthy.

And there was little risk in being more careful before sharing something, because so few people had access to information, and there was already a considerable process involved in getting it out. If the first print run or broadcast didn’t start for another few hours, you might as well check all the facts again and craft it to make sure you told the same story better than your two or three competitors.

Trust used to be more or less given (but could be lost through mistakes) — owing to the fact that people with information already distinguished themselves and appeared trustworthy simply by having it.

But now knowledge is everywhere (or at least information is everywhere): it’s easier to get and harder to control. It’s also easier to share once you have it. So simply having information isn’t an effective way to distinguish oneself. There isn’t much advantage to having it.

But we’re still working according to old assumptions. We’re still competing as if the best advantages go to whoever simply has information (I’m including blogs and a lot of us who essentially “compete” for attention and reputation through social media). That’s largely why there’s such a race to know something FIRST — for that brief moment of advantage, albeit fleeting — and why fairly minor developments are sensationalized on cable TV news into stories in themselves.

The latter amounts to thinking and saying you know something when there’s really nothing to know. When you can’t compete on access or speed, you can still compete by seeing stories that others don’t see — and embellishing the shit out of them.

Which brings me to Michael Moore.

I’ve just been catching up on the #MooreandMe chapter of WikiLeaks. To simplify a complex and ambiguous story, Moore put up $20,000 of the surety (like bail) on behalf of Julian Assange, who’s facing extradition to Sweden on suspicion of sex offences.* As one might expect, Moore’s using the opportunity to generate attention. The complaint against Moore, led by Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown, is that his rhetoric insinuates that accusations of rape are relatively unimportant, and that he’s enabling (or at the very least turning a blind eye to) some pretty vicious personal attacks against Assange’s accusers — who, as suspected sexual assault victims, i.e. people who’ve gone through a very personally invasive experience, could probably do without the added scrutiny and abuse.

(Best background on the details of the suspected crime is here, and there’s more here.)

One of the accusers has been called “the most hated woman online.” There are allegations that she has CIA ties. Bianca Jagger (who also put up part of Assange’s surety) tweeted a link to a post that identified the accuser and outlined the rationale for suspicions about her motives. The link was retweeted by former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and at least 100 other people.

I looked it up and did a bit of extra Googling and everything I found eventually referred back to the same post by Israel Shamir (not an uncontroversial figure) and Paul Bennett at CounterPunch. The basis of the claims is that the most high profile of Assange’s accusers wrote a couple of “anti-Castro diatribes” that were published in a periodical that’s financed by a group that “is connected” to a Cuban anti-Castro group that’s led by a guy who was alleged to have CIA ties.

Got that?

To put that into perspective, as a writer, apparently I need to be careful not just of the kind of periodicals I might submit to, and not just who’s financing those periodicals, and not just the “connections” of who’s financing them, and not just the individuals running those groups that are connected to the groups that finance the periodicals I might publish in, but also the alleged ties of those individuals running those groups connected to the groups that finance the periodicals I might publish in… lest I be accused of having those same ties myself.

The post also claims she was deported from Cuba for “subversive activities,” and while she was there she allegedly “interacted” with a group called Las damos de blanco (Ladies in White) that apparently receives funding from the US. They’re allegedly “supported by” a group that’s run by a guy who “has ties” to another guy who allegedly has CIA ties.

Or maybe, just maybe, her “interactions” with a Cuban group espousing principles of justice and freedom of speech are somehow “connected” to her “interactions” with WikiLeaks — which espouses the same sort of principles.

Why’s it implausible for someone to believe that while we’re demanding transparency from the US we should also demand it from dictatorships?

A stronger case for conspiracy is made by pointing to an apparently disproportionate amount of zeal with which Assange’s offenses are being treated. Naomi Wolf has been especially persuasive:

for all the tens of thousands of women who have been kidnapped and raped, raped at gunpoint, gang-raped, raped with sharp objects, beaten and raped, raped as children, raped by acquaintances — who are still awaiting the least whisper of justice — the highly unusual reaction of Sweden and Britain to this situation is a slap in the face. It seems to send the message to women in the UK and Sweden that if you ever want anyone to take sex crime against you seriously, you had better be sure the man you accuse of wrongdoing has also happened to embarrass the most powerful government on earth.

There’s a compelling argument that Assange’s case is an anomaly even within the Swedish justice system. Wolf made that argument too, pointing to a somewhat damning report by Amnesty International, and Moore added more. There are some scary stats — though I must say, much less scary when I went directly to Amnesty International’s report.

On one hand I find it hard to believe that such a progressive society as Sweden’s would “love” rapists, as Moore put it. There’s an equally compelling argument here that Sweden is very serious about rape, pointing out that positive government measures could be responsible for the statistics:

Sweden has had an active and vocal discussion (can’t really call it a debate) in the last 10-15 years, on getting rape charges higher priority from the police and prosecutors, to getting women to report the crimes more often, and so forth. This includes active campaigning by the government.

So, is it any wonder then that the number of reported rapes has increased?

I’m reminded of scenes in The Wire, in which statistics perversely disincent the police from taking new complaints — especially if they were unlikely to lead to an arrest (say, a crime like rape that often comes down to one person’s word against another’s). The optimist in me hopes that Sweden is fighting against that attitude and working to make it socially acceptable for women to complain about sexual abuse — despite the challenges that creates for authorities and despite how bad those statistics for non-convicted crimes may look.

I can’t really say. There are stats and statements in the Amnesty report and quoted in the above arguments that make me too skeptical to guess either way. And I’ll never say that any country is doing a “good enough” job fighting sexual abuse and rape.

Regardless, I’m not sure why Moore is complaining that Sweden needs to get tougher on sex offenses by way of affiliating himself with a suspected sex offender. If he really wants Sweden to get tough on sex crimes he’s doing it the wrong way. And if Sweden is as bad as he says it is (and even if it’s not), I’m inclined to think the disproportionate attention given to Assange would be the best thing a critic could ask for: that’s a very high profile precedent to use as leverage. Future accusers and activists can say, “but you went after Assange, now you have to do it for the rest.”

As for the likelihood of Sweden cooperating with the US, consider that Sweden may have hidden motives here that are entirely self-serving — nothing to do with pressure they’re imagined to have received from the US.

Sometimes countries make a show of strength just because that’s just what countries do. It helps maximize their bargaining power and autonomy. (Remember Saddam Hussein’s refusal to fully cooperate with weapons inspectors — making it look like he was hiding something even though he wasn’t?) Maybe Sweden is fighting for Assange for the same reason Canada is fighting for a deserted and completely symbolic island: because it’s within a country’s rights to make that claim; rolling over tends to weaken a country’s bargaining power in future negotiations. And they know the world’s watching this one.

(And for all we know it could simply come down to one prosecutor’s careerism: hoping to build a reputation and get promoted by reeling-in a big fish.)

I know “it’s a coincidence” and I know it’s easy to wonder if there’s “American politicial manipulation of a foreign legal system” involved, but the simple fact is that Swedish authorities are following the letter of their law in seeing this through.

Besides, to not see this through would also look like they were bending to foreign pressure — not by American authorities but by celebrity opportunists. There are pros and cons to both sets of optics. Ultimately I’d say they cancel each other out.

The fact that (as far as I know) Swedish prosecutors are doing exactly what their job description dictates they should do seems sufficient to explain why they’re doing it.

And until we see something more substantial to support suspicions that Assange is the victim of a “honeytrap” (his lawyer’s word), a coincidence is nothing more than a coincidence.

Of course it would be nice if we had more access to information that could help us establish the truth one way or the other, and it’s ironic that that’s what Assange and WikiLeaks promote.

So do we need Assange to keep working towards more transparency? I doubt it. If Assange can’t build an organization able to persist without him then I’d rather see it taken apart and rebuilt sooner than later. And the broader movement towards open government is more than robust enough to move forward without either Assange or WikiLeaks. It can and will continue to move forward in the same distributed, incremental, somewhat accidental way that the internet has always developed.

To put it bluntly, open government — which may or may not be Assange’s genuine motive — is precisely the wrong movement for iconoclasts.

Don’t let sensationalizers and ‘isn’t it all a funny coincidence’ status-seeking opportunists like Michael Moore distract us from more important aim: seeing through all artifice and theatricality to find verifiable and useful truth.

The paranoid left and paranoid right enable each other; government institutions and corporations are enablers too. They’re still mainly still competing with knowledge as if it’s scarce, attention as if it’s precious, and control as if it’s still as easy as it once was — while taking trust for granted.

The change won’t happen overnight, but this trend of Tea Parties and DDoS attacks and anti-institutional sentiment keeps going, eventually trust will become so depleted that institutions and people will recognize that trust is more precious than mere information or attention. At some point trust — through the judicious use of knowledge — will be the main source of influence and power, not just knowledge.

That’s what we need to be building. Governments and organizations need to think of how to continually re-earn people’s trust. Playing whack-a-mole with WikiLeaks is counterproductive: it feeds the narrative that governments and organizations are untrustworthy. Likewise for the likes of Michael Moore (who is behaving a lot like his own targets: evasively) and Keith Olbermann (who evaded for a while and came back clumsily). They’ve been focused on criticizing (or merely raising doubts) and getting people riled up against others, but now it’s easy for anyone to do that — which means anyone can do it to them, which is what’s happening with #MooreandMe.

The diminishing returns on attention produced by that cycle can’t go on forever. At some point people will look a little deeper for more sustainable value.

The tougher and ultimately more rewarding thing to do is not to attack but to build — to motivate people for something — and to continually re-earn trust not by smearing other people’s faults but by demonstrating one’s own integrity.

See Who’s Using the Internet to Make Life Less Meaningful

Brian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:59:26 +0000

I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link.

The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing collection of crafted pieces by good writers who don’t get it.

I used to agree with Lanier, for one, but here’s what happened: I stayed open, I was still curious, I kept looking for bright spots, I kept trying things, I adopted the best and rejected the worst, I found ways to make it work for me, I kept learning from mistakes; I cultivated a productive, rewarding and meaningful way of working and living with the internet.

Like everyone else who actually understands it.

What works will be different for everyone. Facebook works for some but not others. Twitter works for some but not others (or not even most). Even within Twitter there are as many different ways to use it as there are users. The people who know the most about the hazards and challenges are the people using this stuff and learning from mistakes.

I went along with the skepticism for a long time and I appreciate ongoing criticism, but these people (Gladwell too) who are standing around outside, watching us instead of jumping in and learning how to swim, fretting, “OH NO, we all might drown!” keep looking more and more ridiculous.

Smith tried Facebook and didn’t like it, so she quit after two months. Well same here. It wasn’t right for me at the time but I’ve changed, Facebook has changed, the world has changed, I went back and approached it differently. It’s working ok for me now.

Don’t just give up if you swallow a big gulp of water the first time you jump in. You can either keep trying or leave it alone. But if you walk away you can’t come back with a diatribe that basically argues what we already know: it isn’t perfect…

These sentences from Smith’s NYBooks piece finally put these fears into perspective for me:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

I think I see where the problem is now.

Have you ever met anyone who has been reduced to data? Do you know anyone who’s had their desires, their fears and messy feelings get swallowed up by Facebook? No. What happens is, when some aspects of our lives become data, we expand — we use that as part of a platform or framework to create new opportunities and objects for new kinds of fears and desires.

In other words, humans will always find new ways to be human.

We’re not just resilient, we’re ingeniously assertive. Our species has been surviving for ages: crawling through deserts, trudging through swamps, climbing over mountains, hacking through jungles, sailing across oceans, careening down rapids, launching into space, clawing in the dirt, driving as deep as we can into any visible challenge, making our mark on the world however we can, fabricating tools with whatever we can find, etc.

After all that and more for thousands of years, do you think Facebook is really so dangerous?

If love and friendship are so delicate that Facebook can undermine them and consequently tear apart the fabric of humanity, would they be worth saving? Or is this just about particular kinds of love and friendship that happen to be near and dear to some people at one particular place and time?

Whatever makes us special is too deeply engrained in our nature to clearly distinguish and articulate. Facebook and Twitter aren’t going to take it away from us — nor, conversely, is it so adjustable that Zadie Smith or Malcolm Gladwell or any philosopher can swoop in and save it.

They’re not against technology being used to objectify and reduce human behaviour; they’re merely against any new kinds of reductivism emerging to surpass their own favourite brand of it.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of people who’ve become “gadgets” — reduced and enslaved by two-hour movies and two-hundred-page books.

Elsewhere people have feared that photography and the written word would steal souls. But instead of reducing the breadth and depth of human experience, technologies keep creating opportunities for expansion and enrichment. I don’t see any reason to assume this time will be any different.

Here’s our choice: moan about the inevitable and miss our chance to grow, or look for the bright spots and make the most of our opportunities. Pretty easy, I think.

Part of me wants to be diplomatic, but another part is getting tired of so many fussy, timid, whiny, precious complaints coming from otherwise intelligent and talented people.

Pushing forward into the unknown, using the internet won’t reduce the meaning in life; it’s in many ways the most meaningful thing we can do.

What’s the Future of Reading & Writing?

Brian — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 06:56:52 +0000

“Books are being replaced by reading,“ to borrow a phrase from Jack Shafer. Digital technology “distances us from the old magic conjured by books” by giving us better ways to get what’s inside them.

Of course the tactile experience is lost, but that’s only a sentimental attachment — not without genuine value, but not without considerable influence from purely subjective historical and sensory biases either.

We seem to be at the same stage of this discussion that we were at about music when the iPod really took off: we’re finally certain that the new hardware will be with us for a while, but not quite ready to let go of the old, and not sure what implications the change in distribution and storage will have on the content itself. I was still buying lots of CDs in 2005 — I “liked the experience” of looking for them in music stores and displaying them at home — but that ended abruptly.

I’m still buying a lot of books (almost all used, for a few bucks each) because I’m poor and haven’t invested in a digital reader yet, but based on my shift in music consumption I have to assume that my book habits might change pretty suddenly, pretty soon — which isn’t to say I’ll completely stop buying them. There are books that are about more than just reading.

For example, a few months ago I stumbled on a used, two volume edition of Plato’s complete works — in inferior translations I struggle with, and with expired copyrights that enable them to be available freely online. But that big old block of atoms pays me back in the form of inspiration, decoration, and meditation, even if it’s an inefficient way to store and find information.

Pertaining to the points of inspiration and meditation, I often find myself pacing around, trying to generate words and ideas; picking up books, physically looking for pieces of information and insight, turning and scanning pages can occupy the conscious mind just long enough to clear the head of whatever’s blocking the way. The manner of interaction in those instances is more important than the content, so I expect I’ll always have books — but then again, I can get rid of 99% of my current library and still enjoy the same tactile benefits with a few essential, personal selections.

Now I don’t want to float too many predictions but it’s worth reading Kevin Kelly’s description of the sensory experience of his own fresh physical book — exhibiting his proposal that embodiment is a quality that’s “better than free.” I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rise in “collectible” publishing, like the increase in vinyl record sales. Not an original suggestion but there it is anyway.

More interesting to me than buying and reading is the way books will be written.

Kelly developed What Technology Wants over the course of years putting ideas together on his not-quite-a-blog. I’ve noticed Eliezer Yudkowsky deliberately taking the same approach (to very difficult, complex subject matter); I did the same to develop my own book; Seth Godin’s Linchpin was largely composed of advice that first appeared on his blog. David Weinberger is currently taking a slightly different but related approach: not developing the content of his book on a blog, but thinking out loud about the process of writing it.

And it isn’t just the books themselves that are being developed in public, but their readerships — in some cases (e.g. Godin’s) consisting of a core group of fans who buy multiple gift or loaner copies, and are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to hear the author speak in person.

I’m not that kind of fan — at least not of Godin’s — but after following Kevin Kelly’s progress for years I’m intellectually and emotionally invested in his book. It’s as if I watched it grow up: I want to see it do well — and I’d love to own a physical embodiment to display and thumb through from time to time.

I’m not suggesting this is an original line of thought. I’m just trying to probing and re-synthesizing, hoping to turn over an insight…

There’s a lot of brain power going towards figuring this stuff out. Godin notably announced he’d published his last traditional book and would move on to explore new formats. I’m also thinking about bookfuturism, recently described by Tim Carmody as “not just about books as such, but a kind of aesthetic and culture of reading, literacy, history, in connection with (only rarely in opposition to) other kinds of media culture.”

Note that we’re not just developing more formats and distribution channels for books as we know them; we’re reconceiving what we mean when we say “book” — perhaps from something completely static to something more dynamic, or at least from something anticipated and aimed for to something that’s gathered up and left behind as a landmark, like an Inukshuk…

I don’t know.

Unlike a lot of what I write, there’s almost nothing abstract about this for me, or you. We’re both engaged in an experiment by writing and reading this.

We’re into a phase in which every act of writing and reading is affected by uncertainty and speculation.

The sooner we discover opportunities and make all the necessary mistakes, the sooner we can get back to stable traditions — albeit different traditions than we have now.

Culture, Anarchy and the Conceptual Value of Links

Brian — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:34:24 +0000

Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration…

This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of posts, “In Defense of Links.” There was a lot of discussion after Carr proposed that we should stop inserting links within the text; he suggested we could save them all till the end instead — like footnotes, or a list of suggestions for further reading — because they add to our “cognitive load” by making us decide whether to click or not.

I can’t really complain that someone wants to experiment a little with conventions — after all, the Web is a work in progress — as long as the aim is to improve communication and collaboration, i.e. as long as it promotes learning and development across a wider community, rather than reinforcing outmoded practices and mindsets.

There are a few places I sometimes feel links would be unnecessary and unwelcome distractions: long pieces of “lean back” reading that run up to several thousand words which I can read purely for pleasure. I enjoy the long form experience; I practice and promote extended periods of deep, immersive, focused thinking. I’m not sure links would add any value to James Wood or Michael Lewis, and I’m perfectly happy reading an NYBooks review with all of the links at the top.

But those already conform to Carr’s proposal. He was referring to things like this, complaining that every link requires us to make a decision, which becomes distracting.

But it’s good to have strategically placed interruptions (see Jonah Lehrer‘s point: ”focused attention is not always ideal”). We should be making decisions as we go along: when we hesitate to consider whether or not to click, we’re thinking critically, judging for quality and relevance, and using it as an opportunity to reassess the rest of what we already know — i.e. whether we need to learn more or ‘re-place’ some basic assumptions.

Look at science: look at how Darwin “discovered” his theory of evolution. He couldn’t just focus on a single object, he had to arrange a lot of evidence in relation to other evidence — species in relation to other species, fossils in relation to other fossils, offspring in relation to parents and those in relation to their parents and so on — until a story, a synthesis, and a conclusion emerged. Of course a lot of tasks in the scientific process require acute focus, but it’s the opponents of science who stress the importance of comprehending a single text as a self-enclosed source of value, while the way science is communicated is among the most distraction-packed, extraneously referent styles around.

Similarly this style of writing for the Web is as much about organizing links from the ongoing, surrounding discussion as it is about the ideas or opinions expressed in the piece itself (if any, yet). I start with some sources and things I want to share with people and then I try to tie them together into a bit of a story, and then hopefully I can add some kind of conclusion.

This notion of “placing” links in relation to each other is something I’ve adopted from Richard Rorty, the late philosopher-turned-literary critic. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he suggested that critics don’t evaluate things for merit,

rather, they spend their time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. This placing is done in the same way as we place a new friend or enemy in the context of old friends and enemies. In the course of doing so, we revise our opinions of both the old and the new.

To demonstrate I’ve picked James Wood’s review of some recent books relating to Alexis de Tocqueville:

Seen in this stained-glass light, “Democracy in America” is obviously a nineteenth-century book about the fragility of faith, written on the threshold of the age of Darwin and Flaubert and Ernest Renan, a book as much about moral authority as about freedom, and about how to retain the former in an age of the latter—when, as he writes, “all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished,” and “the lights of faith are obscured.” The prestige of royal power has vanished, Tocqueville says, “without being replaced by the majesty of the laws.” Matthew Arnold could not have put it better.

Those names aren’t just being dropped to show off the author’s erudition. “Darwin,” “Flaubert,” “Renan,” and “Arnold” represent specific ideas, and the reader needs to make those associations (i.e. links) to appreciate the meaning of Wood’s review. Comprehension isn’t merely about keeping track of those references, but rather pausing to reflect on, inquire into, and posit the meanings behind them. Matthew Arnold points to Culture and Anarchy and “sweetness and light” meaning beauty and truth — “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” in a process of constant cultural diffusion.

Linking is a way to make those associations more vivid and rich. It makes me more careful as a thinker and writer to consider what people might find by clicking through. Of course I should always think about specific references — even in mediums that don’t afford actual links — but in this medium it’s essential: it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses that the affordance to link nudges me to keep my expressions concrete and relevant.

It’s often all that we can do. Information can change so fast and the truth can be so fleeting that our careful judgements and explanations can quickly become worse than no judgements or explanations at all. Better to identify key points of reference — like constellations — we can use to orient ourselves and communicate with our collaborators as we go along, constantly checking our bearings and staying alert for new factors instead of staring down at a book that was written at another time and place.

Skeptics dwell on one or two premises — “in this medium… it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses” — and urge against innovation instead of recognizing that their anxieties are virtually identical to those of so many past generations. As Lionel Trilling wrote:

[Democracy in America] made John Stuart Mill modify is faith in democracy, and Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Scherer, and Arnold himself, foresaw for Europe a wave of Americanism–by which they meant vulgarity, loss of distinction, and above all, that eccentricity of thought which arises when each man, no matter what his training or gifts, may feel that the democratic doctrine of equality allows him to consider his ideas of equal worth with those of his neighbor.

As in Tocqueville’s time, we’re trying to retain a semblance of authority in an age of expanded freedom. And we’re coping not just with Cheeto-eating bloggers but a priesthood of scholars who appeal to their authority to hide (even from themselves) the fact that they’re often wrong, and professional marketers and scam artists (not necessarily in the same category; not necessarily different either) who are adept at influencing people in potentially harmful ways.

Complain if you want but the fact still remains that we’re caught up in that and eventually need to do something about it, beyond fretting and complaining.

Now that the traditional means of establishing authority and trust are increasingly obscure and misleading, the practice of linking (both actually and metaphorically) is the most effective way to earn it. Links in a text aren’t just about connectivity but credibility and readability as well, as Jason Fry argued [update: forgot to mention Scott Berkun's point, essential to the argument for embedding links: "In a glance I can see the link density of a page – too much and I might pass, but none at all, and I might wonder if the writer has thought much about the topic, since they didn’t bother to show they’d found a reference to support or counter their own claims"]. Rosenberg didn’t explicitly go as far as I do but I’ll certainly echo what he wrote in the third part of his series:

The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

So it’s about quality and discipline as much as it’s about quantity, equality and freedom of expression. Above all it’s about getting past the myth of perfection: we learn to assume that value is in the process of questions, corrections, and connections. Ironically, concentrating on the wrong books for too long is ultimately the worst distraction of all. In most cases, we’d be better off if we skimmed.

Even if Carr’s worst fears are realized and the Web destroys people’s capacity to concentrate, I’ll happily say fairwell to extended one-way lectures and screeds foisted on submissive publics (heaven forbid we have to pause to make decisions in the course of learning). I’ll happily welcome conventions that compel readers to take responsibility for finding and filtering the best knowledge, forming their own interpretations, and weaving those ideas into our cultural fabric for others to criticize, correct, or corroborate. (Steven Pinker and Steven Johnson made arguments that complement this.)

It isn’t techno-utopianism. It isn’t quite a compromise either. It’s more like a “third way” forward. And it’s the same old notion that Matthew Arnold advocated in Culture and Anarchy in the 1860s: preserve the best of the Church and the aristocracy but let the static aspects fall away; allow the best democratic values to flourish but exercise discipline against democracy’s excesses:

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality… who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and the learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time…

So but what exactly is “the best knowledge and thought” of our time? Maybe we spend so much time arguing about what the Internet “is doing to us” that we neglect to actually use it (or quietly decline to use it) to generate knowledge and thoughts worth sharing. So let’s get on with it…

The general conclusion of my book (and several years of soul- and truth-seeking) was provided for me by Charles S. Peirce:

… it may truly be said that there is but one thing needful for learning the truth, and that is a hearty and active desire to learn what is true… No matter how erroneous your ideas of the method may be at first, you will be forced at length to correct them so long as your activity is moved by that sincere desire.

If we really care about making our knowledge the best it possibly can be, we’re not going to let links or anything else distract us as long as we have a choice. My choice is to have choices, and to see how much information we can synthesize. It isn’t easy, but with practice a lot of people might be surprised.

How to Make the Web Better by Sharing Selfishly

Brian — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:42:24 +0000

I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least affect them).

Leo Laporte got this stream of thought flowing on Sunday when he complained about Buzz (and the ephemerality of microblogging in general). For two weeks, nobody noticed that his posts weren’t getting through to Twitter. Here’s one of the money quotes (in case you missed it):

I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void… How demoralizing.

I had the same sort of awakening once, about a year ago: looked at my Twitter profile and saw that two weeks of updates were gone. For a second I was like, “Oh God…” until I realized how little was lost. Nothing, really. So I took a break, re-calibrated my centre of gravity and managed to keep a modest balance ever since: taking advantage of Twitter’s benefits without getting yanked into [too m]any hedonic black holes.

This kind of semi-crisis happens (I imagine) to virtually everyone who works and lives this much online. Robert Scoble went through a similar process last year… And here we are again. Paul Carr put it in (what I think are more widely and deeply compelling) terms of giving up too much of our life stories:

… for those of us who have had reason to look back at the past few years – like me writing my book, or Leo having “woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands” – the realisation is slightly terrifying: by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.

Scott Rosenberg reiterated the same concerns, addressing a specific social network that might “know” more about us than we do, and is keeping it that way:

Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web. Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file.

But I wouldn’t say everything is lost. At least nothing worth keeping…

Part of the problem might be our obsession with efficiency, and our innate aversion to loss. The Web turns thoughts and remarks into discrete, measurable objects. We never missed them much till we could pin them down and count them. We see the theoretical capacity — the Internet can store everything — so we’re inclined to feel that it should be used to its fullest. But nature has plenty of redundancies and processes that go on wastefully, or uselessly for long stretches. Plenty that dies too. Evolution wouldn’t work if everything lived forever. Sucks but that’s how it is. Same with creativity…

My own solution is to think about “inter-temporal sharing” as much as I think about social sharing. In other words, I’m filtering the present for the future, rather than insisting every check-in and tweet be saved for posterity. I’m sharing more links through Delicious — which I can export and keep on my own computer — than I do through Twitter.

You might say that’s more like “saving” than “sharing,” but isn’t saving essentially like sharing something with your future self?

[If you're interested in the theory side of this, read your Harold Innis on temporal and spatial biases. Note: I use "spatial bias" in a completely different way, more consistent with psychology than medium theory. Hat tip to Edward Comor at UWO for re-acquainting me with Innis's ideas. Also see #9 on Tim Carmody's excellent piece on 10 Reading Revolutions.]

Last year I wrote about this in response to some fears about “digital sharecropping“; I advocated thinking of it as an ongoing education and actively taking ownership of it:

Most obviously, there are opportunities for artists, writers, musicians, social entrepreneurs, etc., to nurture projects and enterprises that support our offline endeavours…

Of more universal value is our emerging ability to take responsibility for our own continuing education, and in the process — unlike in the past when “self-teaching” meant being socially isolated, with little to show for one’s labour — we can cultivate relationships and representations (i.e. measurable accomplishments) that allow us to actually use what we’ve learned.

Instead of asking how a link or remark will be received by your friends and followers within the next hour, ask yourself how it will be received by you in the future: Is it likely to be signal or noise?

To do that you need to have a sense of purpose and a mindset aimed at building something, which I think is good in itself, not merely a technique for improving the quality of the content you share. After a while this investment starts to pay off: it becomes the future, and when you’re feeling like you’re not getting enough value from the ephemeral web you can find meaning and relevance in the stocks you’ve been investing in and refining, “sharing with yourself” and turning into enduring objects over time.

Ideally, it won’t be entirely selfish. See the interesting discussion at the Lifestream Blog about changing value propositions and approaches to sharing our “likes.”

Instead of damning or resenting the mob and its whims, understand that we’re each partly responsible for those whims, and if we make an extra effort to exercise better judgement and think about investing our attention over the long term, we should find that we’re building things with our friends instead of helping each other spin the treadmill so fast that people have to jump off.

P.S. Any suggestions for tools? I use Instapaper and I’ve tried Evernote but it never quite clicked with me. My main “tool” is blogging about things and starting to tell stories while they’re still fresh…

Cee-Lo Green: Quality vs. Hype

Brian — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:57:29 +0000

Bob Lefsetz wonders whether Cee-Lo’s “F**k You” is going to be another here-today-gone-tomorrow novelty. He uses the song as a jump-off to appeal for music with more staying-power and quality.

His point of comparison is the popular series of TED talks:

These TED talkers didn’t start yesterday, most have spent years dedicated to their field, to the point where they could be selected for a TED speech. That’s the new paradigm. Don’t ask how you can accomplish world domination right away, but keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

It’s the right sentiment but I think he picked the wrong analogy.

We can’t compare “F**k You” to the whole series of TED talks; we have to compare “F**k You” to one TED talk — and there have been a few instant sensations, if memory serves. I saw more links in my Twitter stream when Jamie Oliver’s talk came out then I’ve seen of Cee-Lo’s song so far.

In fact people make the same complaints about TED that Lefsetz makes about “F**k You.” Nassim Taleb comes to mind (most recently: “I am starting to get uncontrollably angry when I encounter TED-style phony humanitarians.”)

Photo by Scootie

And isn’t Cee-Lo Green’s career a model of this advice?

… keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

He started releasing critically acclaimed music in 1995 with Goodie Mob (a group known to me for years mainly as ”that other group from Atlanta,” being close with OutKast). There was some attention and maybe some minor hits (“Closet Freak“?) but it took more than a decade for him to find the mainstream with Gnarls Barkley and “Crazy” in 2006 — the same year he released a greatest hits album!

Now I know Lefsetz probably knows all of this, and he doesn’t explicitly say Cee-Lo exemplifies shallowness, and I agree with his overall sentiment, so I’m not going after him. I’m trying to develop something here.

I think what we ought to take away from this is that we don’t have to be the same artist or the same creative person/group/organization all the time. We can accomplish different things with different projects: we can use some projects to cultivate enduring quality and then we can use others to, you know, pay the bills and get people’s attention so we can keep making quality stuff.

There’s nothing wrong with silliness and hype. Getting excited about things once in a while is good, even if the excitement doesn’t last.

It’s only a problem for people who can only generate hype.

But contrary to a lot of fears, I don’t think the Internet is going to make things worse. I don’t think it will diminish long-term quality. I don’t think it will increase the volume of “mere hype.” Counterintuitively, it’s the proliferation of mere hype that’s going to eventually kill it.

At some point (if we aren’t there already) it’s going to be too costly to keep up with constant turnover: it’s too chaotic; it’s fatiguing. Once we cross that threshold, people who know how to develop long-term value will be the ones getting and holding people’s attention. I think we already see this with emphasis being placed on reputations and relationships online, rather than merely focusing on the last thing someone did.

We ought to let ourselves love the last thing someone did without fixating on it — without sitting there waiting for more hype to fall in front of us. We can use the rare successes as opportunities actively get into what they did before and explore the stuff they like and so on…

And so now speaking of which — this f**king song is awesome:

Digital Natives

Brian — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 06:31:44 +0000

There’s an astonishingly bad article at Spiegel Online citing some research that has got a lot of discussion, arguing that notions like “digital natives“ and “the Net Generation” have been wrong because young people say that the Internet isn’t important to them.

But the evidence all seems to confirm the ideas behind the “digital native” metaphor:

Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking about. It seems that the excitement about cyberspace was a phenomenon peculiar to their predecessors, the technology-obsessed first generation of Web users.

For a brief transition period, the Web seemed to be tremendously new and different, a kind of revolutionary power that could do and reshape everything. Young people don’t feel that way. They hardly even use the word “Internet,” talking about “Google”, “YouTube” and “Facebook” instead. And they certainly no longer understand it when older generations speak of “going online.”

Reminds me of this little parable, by way of David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Self-reports on all kinds of questions are notoriously untrustworthy. I don’t think high schoolers can assess the effects the Internet has on them any more than they can assess the effects of — well, anything. I hardly see how kids’ indifference about the Internet is a damning indictment of the “digital natives” argument. They’re indifferent about almost everything, except their friends (as Paul Sham noted on Twitter). Teens still love music, for example, but I don’t expect them to be any more enthusiastic about iTunes than previous generations were about HMV. What matters has always been the experience, the content, the relationships, and their own sense of self within all that…

In fact, I read these findings as verification.

My understanding is that this is exactly what being a digital native means. It isn’t that the Internet has gone out of style; they don’t waste time thinking about the Internet because using the Internet is normal to them.

Here’s more:

Occasionally the teacher will ask his students big-picture questions about the medium they take for granted. Questions like: Where did the Internet come from? “I’ll get replies like, ‘What do you mean? It’s just there!’” Scheppler says. “Unless they’re prompted to do so, they never address those sorts of questions. For them it’s like a car: All that matters is that it works.”

Exactly!

HT @rtraction

Beyond Entrepreneurship

Brian — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:22:56 +0000

A few years ago I started developing what I call the “open conceptual enterprise.” The idea is that we need to rethink our basic assumptions about business not just in the context of different kinds of businesses but in the context of all types of human enterprise.

By “enterprise” I mean the general impulse to go out into the proverbial wilderness, to go on a quest and take risks, hoping to come back with something of value: Exploration is enterprise. Invention is enterprise. Science is enterprise. Art is enterprise. Social missions can be enterprises. And of course commerce is enterprise. It’s been fairly hypothetical, but the way the Internet is opening everything and mixing up the old categories, I’m getting a better sense of how to explain this stuff in more concrete terms.

Look at Google’s recent failure with Wave. (For the record, I was a fan.) The Google narrative has corresponded with the attitude that failure is good (or at least useful — or at least unavoidable) but with more and more episodes like Wave and Buzz, that story is moving into a new chapter.

Jeff Jarvis captured it pretty well here, I think:

The reason these efforts were busts is because Google didn’t think them through, didn’t have the corporate discipline to find and execute on clear-eyed strategy. I’m all for beta — I learned that lesson from Google — but you can’t just spend your life throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. Eventually, you’re knee-deep in shit. But you can do that for a long time — if you have lots of money. A poor startup uses betas to learn precious lessons because they can’t afford to fail. This rich company is using betas, I fear, rather than making hard decisions up front — because it can afford to. So Wave may have ended up dead anyway but if it were run by entrepreneurs it would have struggled long and hard before taking its last breath.

And he goes on to express “worry that Google isn’t an entrepreneurial company anymore… it may be too big for its own good.”

Here’s where we need to think more generally about what it is about entrepreneurism that is so essential for sustained success. Entrepreneurship is about innovation and autonomy. The innovation aspect is about maintaining the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” without which organizations tend to accumulate a lot of dead weight, making them susceptible to total destruction.

More importantly, the human spirit needs adventure, i.e. enterprise. We need to feel like we’re going somewhere, and we need at least some sense of uncertainty in the outcome — or at least the journey there — and we need to feel like our presence matters. The latter can be accomplished in different ways: we can experience it through self-determination or by belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Optimally, for sustainable enterprise, I think we ought to strive for a combination of both, as they’re not mutually exclusive. As long as we have a sense of autonomy (i.e. we haven’t been coerced or subjected against our wills), and we’re recognized and treated as the unique persons we believe we are (i.e. our uniqueness is appreciated and we’re compensated appropriately), and we’re able to have a visible, positive effect through our actions.

There are ditches on both sides of that road: two extremes at which the spirit of enterprise can be lost. If a culture is too conformist, then everyone gives lip service to their shared purpose but since everyone is shallowly feeding each others’ egos, people realize the ego reinforcement they’re receiving is pretty much meaningless. But conversely, if a culture is too individualistic (the way in which entrepreneurship leans), then everyone is too busy doing their own thing to provide recognition and feedback for each other.

I get the impression that Google may be slipping into the former latter (I speculate here reluctantly, with no first-hand knowledge): people are free to develop their own ideas [in their "20% time"] but a lot of employees feel like nobody’s listening [again, speculating], as indicated by the high-profile defections of some of their biggest former stars.

So counterintuitively, if they moved away from their divergent, entrepreneur-minded culture, they might actually gain more motivation and momentum as an enterprise by emphasizing the company’s core purpose, articulating the path towards it, and reinforcing employees’ efforts that are convergent with that – something more along the lines of science and social enterprise. (I owe the recent OpenIDEO launch for some of this inspiration.) With this change of mindset, the “shit” they’re standing in looks less like refuse and more like fertilizer and soil they need to cultivate sustainable growth.

For example, Google could, as a whole company, focus on the problem of how they can make this shift, as a kind of “moon-shot,” to use the cliché. What tools can they build [or refine] to facilitate more focused, company-wide collaboration?

Remember this is exactly the problem which the Web was invented to solve: to connect the vast expertise among thousands of researchers and engineers across an awkwardly large organization. I know Google already does this to some extent, but clearly, judging by all the gaps and redundancies across their mind-boggling array of apparently-could-be-terminated-at-any-moment projects, whatever they’re doing isn’t working... or not as well as it could, at least.

So my challenge to Google is: instead of just asking what email would be if it was invented today, as they did with Wave, ask what a corporation could be if it was invented today… combining the best features of all the old categories into a powerful new platform.

Our Sense of Awe in Perspective

Brian — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:59:02 +0000

Lately I’ve been missing the old sense of wonder and enthusiasm I once had for the future. It seems to be a natural development in the life cycle: it was easier to get excited “when I didn’t know any better,” or hadn’t “seen it all before.”

I’ve been able to get some leverage on that since reading an essay called “Awe and the Machine,” by Christine Rosen. She wrote that “we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called ‘machine-made helplessness.’” Her point of historical perspective is the experience related to us by Henry Adams upon seeing a dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition:

… to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power,—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

By comparison, Rosen points out that “our machines are often portable and are such a central part of our everyday lives that we barely notice their presence.”

It’s a very convenient comparison in support of the essay’s sentiment.

The paragraph I excerpted above, from The Education of Henry Adams, is one of the key passages of one of the greatest non-fiction books of the 20th century, written by an intellectually ambitious historian who went out of his way to experience such moments as part of his personal quest to understand the general “motion” of history. It was written as a sequel to another book, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, about ”thirteenth-century unity” represented by cathedrals and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. That’s when culture seemed to have been unified to the same degree it had since become fragmented and pluralized. As he explained in chapter 29,

From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: “The Education of Henry Adams: a study of twentieth-century multiplicity.” With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better.

In other words, it doesn’t represent a normal person’s experience. People certainly marveled at machines, but few people were as transfixed as Adams. To compare Adams’s once-in-a-lifetime experience with how we feel (or don’t feel) walking walking around every day with iPods in our pockets is a bit of a stretch…

It’s important to take in a bigger picture, rather than thinking in terms of individual iPods and Kindles. The device itself can’t be separated from the larger system that distributes sound and images to it — not to mention the multitude of other services available. And consider e-books that allow us to read half of a book on one device, and when we open it up on another device it knows which page we’re on. It’s the aggregate effect that’s most impressive.

It isn’t so different from the sense of awe we experience when walking into a cathedral: what matters most is the imperceptible way that so many different elements work together: the mosaics, the sculptural relief, the structural geometry, the ornamented pillars and arches, the light coming in through the stained glass… A network of digital devices (not to mention content and users) generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than Adams’s dynamo a century ago, just as a cathedral generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than the Great Pyramids. Instead of standing outside, marveling at the direct and instantaneous experience, we have to enter into it, actively, inter-temporally, repeatedly adjusting our focus between particular components and the emergent sense of the whole.

And there’s no reason to assume we won’t see something invented this decade that’s more appropriately analogous to the dynamo. I’m roughly half the age Henry Adams was in 1900. I’ve spent years trying to understand technology — something I wouldn’t do if I wasn’t awed by it in some way. By comparison, there’s little indication that Adams had much interest in machines at all. Politics, history, and art induced most of his fascination. He was apparently more interested in geology.

A useful point of reference is Adams’s statement that in 1900 he was “almost exactly the same age” as the locomotive steam engine. He was 62 (actually younger than the locomotive). So let’s say the Internet is to us what the locomotive was to Adams. There are a few dates we could give for the Internet’s birth, but let’s be generous and say it’s 1969, when the first connection was made between two nodes on ARPANET. That puts it at 41. That means we have almost two more decades to find something that produces a sense of awe analogous to what Adams felt beside the dynamo.

(Noting that awe may or may not be diminishing, but patience certainly is.)

It might have happened to you already: e.g. while playing a massive multiplayer game with countless strangers, following “the raw feed of history” as breaking news about a big events arrives instantaneously from different directions, waking up to find your blog post or video suddenly discovered and shared by thousands of people, seeing a Wikipedia article updated within seconds of news confirming someone’s death, noticing someone you know “liked” an article you were reading (and thinking it was sheer coincidence — before you realized “the Internet knows” you know each other), etc…

None of those experiences alone is likely to generate the profoundest sense of awe, but by meditating on all of them and seeking, like Henry Adams, to understand the “forces” moving around them, eventually (if you’re lucky) we might have a profound experience on seeing something that symbolically brings it all together.

But Rosen nevertheless raises an important thought, with is very much worth addressing: something has changed about our attitude towards technology. What is it? Will it be good or bad? Does it indicate we’re stuck on a giant hedonic treadmill, looking for more, more, more, more, and more information every minute? (Numb to the power of our machines while hyper-sensitively tuned to the most mundane experiences — to use a cliché, “OMFG the best cat picture evarrrrr!!!!!!!”)

Are we in the throes of an accelerating addiction? (As Paul Graham recently asked.)

Or have we outgrown technological naivety that led people in past generations to marvel at machines and associate them with utopian possibilities? (As Virginia Postrel recently argued in a piece about Americans’ declining interest in expositions like the one Adams visited in 1900.)

By reading and thinking about history, I’ve been able to find some answers (or a sense of confidence that will suffice). Coincidentally, among my biggest influence I’d include The Education of Henry Adams, as well as much of the work of Jacques Barzun, who Rosen quoted about “machine-made helplessness.”

Barzun is critical of technology and progress — but he’s critical of everything, very nuanced, wary of utopian fallacies (e.g. lamentations about the loss of simpler, better times), and just as critical of other critics and most of what came before our time. While he expressed concern about the social effects of machine, he expressed optimism as well — or what he called “spirited pessimism”: an appreciation that “experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth.” That is, after all, the spirit that led Henry Adams to lurk around the dynamos — not just in awe of the machines themselves but of what they represented. My assumption is that it’s the same spirit that will ultimately make the most of what we have now, and create the next great, awe-inspiring objects.

Barzun expressed that hope himself at the very end of From Dawn to Decadence, his massive study of Western cultural life from 1500 to 2000. His treatment of decadence doesn’t dwell on decline; he also emphasizes rebirth, or literally “renaissance” — not unlike the rebirth and reformation that happened five centuries ago — enabled by centuries of accumulated knowledge and artifacts, sparked by new technology (then it was the printing press) and kindled by , sparked frustration and boredom, until finally a few members of some generation decide enough is enough and start rediscovering their past “and [using] it to create a new present.”

That’s where I see us right now.

It isn’t simply that enthusiasts like me “don’t want to admit” that our machines “ensure that we directly experience less,” as Rosen claims. Whether or not it’s true, it’s a trade-off we’re willing to accept and in order to explore our unique, unprecedented advantages. And to many of us, too many awe-inspiring spectacles and direct experiences had already lost their allure — being too generic, contrived, impersonal, over-intoxicating, non-generative, and unsustainable — and we consciously turned to digital technology as an opportunity to develop positive alternatives.

Awe is something we naturally get over with experience. Having written this I’ve been reinvigorated not by generating naive enthusiasm but by coming to terms — realizing that it’s those of us who grow bored with our own time and place who create the most awe-inspiring inventions… to say nothing of the most enduring histories.

Thanks also to Arts & Letter Daily for linking to Rosen’s piece, and Alexis Madrigal for Postrel’s piece (at the promising-looking Big Questions Online).

The Meaning of Creativity is Changing, Again

Brian — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:24:10 +0000

Complain or celebrate if you like but you’re wasting your time.

What matters is what we do about this — or rather, what we do with this. Because if promoting creativity is important to you, as it is for me, then I hope you’ll be open to exploring ways to reconceive what it means and how it works.

I’m motivated here by the widely discussed Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis, which paints a scary picture. After learning that creativity scores in school tend to correlate with long-term success through adulthood, we’re told:

Since [1990], creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Some people may wonder if creativity is actually declining, or whether our understanding of creativity needs to change. Jeff Jarvis noted on Twitter that “millions are creating online.” Clay Shirky makes the same argument — essentially the argument in Cognitive Surplus.

But are we really “creating”?

The standard definition of creativity used by psychology researchers is “the production of something original and useful” (quoting Newsweek, but I’ve seen it in the literature from Teresa Amabile and others).

Some would argue that much of what passes for “creativity” online isn’t very original: much of it is simply sharing and mashing up what others already made. But I think that’s a misunderstanding of “originality.” This is the argument mainly Lawrence Lessig is well known for: everything new is essentially a combination of other, older things. When we say someone created something “original,” we really mean they combined things in an original way, not that they summoned something wholly new out of nothing.

As for usefulness, I’m not sure what passes for creativity online stands up quite so well.

But then again, exactly how “useful” were all of Leonardo’s sketches of exotic contraptions — or his paintings, for that matter? How useful were Shakespeare’s plays? Or Mozart’s compositions?

Even when we look at inventions and scientific discoveries, a lot of history’s greatest achievements were created by people who just had a sense there was value in what they were doing, and they wouldn’t figure out exactly what the use of it was until they’d made it. And even then it’s often the case that the person who invents something isn’t the one who finds the best use for their invention. The history of science may demonstrate that better than anything: many people do “pure research” or develop abstract theories that subsequent generations turn into more applied knowledge and tools. Think of how Reimannian geometry enabled Einstein’s creativity (or so I understand: I’m no physics expert), and then the “usefulness” of Einstein’s work isn’t so obvious to me, but subsequent physicists keep using it in their work and eventually the process generates results the rest of us recognize, albeit indirectly.

That’s how the creative process works online: it’s social: someone does something or makes something just to see what will happen, other people with the same impulse repeat the gesture and add their own twist, taking influences from others; eventually someone sees an opportunity to build a platform (or at least a blog), that becomes a social object in itself that others use as an influence in their own creativity…

It’s thanks to the markets built up around silly expressions and apps that a few profoundly useful ones develop. In the culture that emerges, tools like Google’s App Inventor start appearing and we could end up with another whole class of inane creations that are needed to foster the next round of transformative inventions…

So no, we’re not becoming less creative; we’re just creating a new kind of creative culture.

Update: the also-unconvinced Alex Tabbarok points to the website of the researcher quoted in Newsweek… see how much creativity has accomplished since sites like that were made!

What I’m Reading

Brian — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:02:47 +0000

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration.
A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which are cut-and-pasted and paraphrased from others (in most cases the reader has to flip to the end-notes to learn who).
My must-read list has grown by at least a dozen books after this…

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail

I picked this up from the library a couple of days ago while wandering aimlessly through the stacks, kind of frustrated that I’m having trouble being interested in anything. I gravitated to the shelf of “big history” something I’ve wanted to read for a few years and finally got nudged towards after watching the doc based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel last week (excellent, btw).
It combines history, anthropology, neuroscience (and other disciplines) into a very fascinating account of how we cope with “deep time” — i.e. all those hundreds of thousands (or millions, or billions, depending on where you decide to start your story) of years of so-called “pre-history.” The notion of a Deluge was a way to deal with all of that uncertainty: people didn’t have to explain much of what came before (other than the cause of the Deluge itself) because it wouldn’t have effected anything that happened since. More recently, historians talked about the Dark Ages as a point at which history was apparently reset. I’ve noticed the First World War can be presented with Deluge-like qualities in some accounts of 20th century history.
No doubt the time we’re living in right now will have the same sort of effect on future people’s historical consciousness…

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

I skimmed this at the book store enough to know I’ll have to sit down and actually read it. It isn’t merely a rant or an expanded version of his famous Atlantic essay. The takeaway from most of the reviews I’ve read is that Carr makes a fairly good case, but he leaves some very big questions open: “So what?” and “What should we do about it?”
Ultimately I think when we try to answer questions like those, we’ll end up discarding much of Carr’s argument as essentially moot. At the very least it’s supposed to be well written and apparently a pleasure to read, and I’m grateful we have at least one source of lucid and somewhat sensible dissent…

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Not out in Canada until next week, so I can’t say much about it.
Shirky’s concept of “cognitive surplus” (which he presented at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo) was a great boost to my general point in Truth, Will & Relevance. I get a sense that my thinking is very close to Shirky’s — albeit lacking his brilliance in formulating simple phrases to convey complex, moving ideas.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

The promotional push behind this book focused on their “obesity is contagious” idea.
The single-word title led me to expect Connected to be a the kind of non-fiction book that only needs to be 25 pages long but stretches out with + 175 pages of anecdotes and repetition, but there’s a lot of sociological substance in it — more like Bowling Alone than Blink.

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida

Skimming the book and reading the reviews suggests it brings together much of what Florida was blogging around the worst of the economic crisis in 2008 (much of which I re-blogged here).
I’m honestly having trouble motivating myself to read something I assume I’m already in full agreement with — though I certainly recommend it to anyone else…

Testing Wave Embeds: With Thoughts On Collaboration

Brian — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:03:49 +0000

A Book About Truth, Will & Relevance

Brian — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:16:13 +0000

My book is finished and available for purchase, download, or reading online. Sorry if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, where I already mentioned it a few days ago. This is the formal “announcement.”

Description:

Truth, Will & Relevance outlines an innovative way to understand human nature and conduct — conceived specifically to address today’s complex opportunities and challenges using the technology that defines our time.

Reading Options:

purchase the printed soft-cover book priced at US$9.99 at Lulu.com
download a free PDF via Scribd
read chapter-by-chapter online

Background:

This is a unique book. On one hand, much of the content originated in the form of essays and blog posts; on the other hand, most of the research and tough thinking behind all of them — the “heavy lifting” — was done earlier, before any of these essays were written, with an eye on eventually fusing everything into a single, “big picture” argument.

So now?…

The rest of my writing will focus largely on the ideas outlined in the book, which is really a germ or a seed from which to expand. A lot of sources, arguments, and elaborations were left out of it — consciously (though somewhat unwillingly), knowing that I would have ample opportunity to develop those in blog posts and maybe articles.

In the process of putting this together I also managed to spin off a couple of rough outlines for books with more mass appeal, as well as more comprehensive rigour, which I would approach in a more conventional way, i.e. looking for financial and editorial support.

Thanks to everyone who provided comments & encouragement along the way.

Lesson for London in Civic Engagement

Brian — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:55:53 +0000

Yesterday a new website launched, Action London 2010, providing Londoners what promises to be a textbook perfect case study on dos and don’ts of civic engagement in the digital age. They say (and have demonstrated they are) working to improve the site quickly, to their credit. I wasn’t going to post this but I eventually decided to lay out my thoughts coherently while still fairly fresh — hopefully just once — because this is applicable to every civic engagement initiative (e.g. one I’ll be discussing with others on Thursday). We’re all learning the same lessons.

In an article about the site in the Free Press, the group’s spokesman stated there’s “no hidden agenda.” Since then we’ve learned (through pressure) it’s backed by a group of associations and coalitions mainly representing development, construction, and manufacturing, plus Nash Jewellers. Formally, the online interactions I’ve seen were handled by a PR company.

Maybe there isn’t a hidden agenda, but they seemed to begin by doing all the right things to make it look like there was. When a website with opaque backing calls itself “grass roots,” I think the chances are pretty high that it’s astroturf:

Astroturfing denotes political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but are disguised as spontaneous, popular “grassroots” behavior.

Come to think of it, I’m skeptical every time I hear the word “grass roots.” It’s like the rule-of-thumb I’ve heard about people who brag about running with biker gangs: if they feel like they have to say it, they’re probably lying (or just confused about the meaning of what they’re saying).

Don’t get me wrong. Everyone’s entitled to promote their interests in a democracy. And don’t automatically count me as opposed to the interests this group represents — in fact, I’m eager to learn more about them; I’ve never really been able to figure out what I think about how and where development should occur [for example]. I’m personally more of an urbanite by nature, but I’m hard-pressed to impose my sentiments on my friends and family who like large lots around the outskirts, at least not without really knowing what I’m talking about — which I don’t (as far as that issue is concerned… but on the issue of openness, on the other hand…).

Note that this isn’t just a matter of principle. Looking at it strategically from their own self-interest I think it’s the wrong play because it gives their opponents something really substantial to discredit them with — coincidentally happening at about the same time that genuinely open government initiatives are growing more prominent on the radar in Canada, and front page news from the U.S. brings lessons on the futility of opacity.

People are getting wise. People deserve a lot more credit. You can’t protect this kind of information anymore. It’s going to get out — and then some: there’s also a lot of extra information laying around that people can use to speculate erroneously about even more nefarious intentions. Don’t even give people the opportunity to imagine. Better to invest in generative strategies that increase accountability, reputation, and genuine trust. Better to educate people.

And if for some reason you expect an openly informed public to be a losing scenario for you, then maybe the best strategy is to start unwinding and cutting losses or radically reconceiving your assumptions now before the real changes come.

Ultimately I can’t oppose any initiative that at least moves us further ahead on the learning curve, and I welcome the opportunity to learn and participate in the conversation — if people are willing to meet on common ground, with few conditions and full disclosure.

Conceptualization: Cyclonic Engagement

Brian — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:28:55 +0000

This post touches on social media engagement but it’s more generally a demonstration of the process of conceptualization itself. The discipline of imagining and developing these kinds of concepts is the deliverable I’ve been developing for the past few years and converting into the Open Conceptual enterprise model. Social media just happens to be one of the most dynamic and opportune domains right now.

One concept that caught my attention recently is the Socialgraphics Engagement Pyramid, developed by Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group:

What first struck me was that while I was inclined to interpret these as “stages,” which people can progress up through, the relationships between them are not necessarily continuous. I understand that the folks at Altimeter may not have conceived these as stages like I did, but I think a lot of people at a more advanced level ought to discuss different types of users not just in terms of static segments but as occurring in dynamic processes of becoming something else.

Another notion that struck me was that Watching and Commenting are both ways of giving or contributing in to something, while Sharing and Producing are both ways of generating or distributing out to others. I wondered if these might best be arranged into quandrands — with Curating, which is a bit of everything, occupying the centre.

Doesn’t look very pretty — and it doesn’t convey the size of each group, which the pyramid does quite effectively — nor does it convey the dynamic qualities of how these don’t merely stand in relation to each other but actually flow.

My next thought was that there might be some kind of spiral or fractal pattern that gradually converges in around the centre, which would illustrate the size of the different groups and how they flow into each other. I started doing an image search and that led me to this:

Background image by Dave Stokes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33909700@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

The notion of “cyclonic engagement” may not be best for marketers looking for a sense of stability for framing strategies, but I think we need to talk and think more about how the different types of engagement tend to affect each other: each phase “pulls in” the phases below it, while the lower, more massive phases provide the pressure and momentum that keep the whole process moving.

This would probably be more useful for thinking about media, rather than marketing. Marketers have more control over the whole process — they can dip in and out a little more freely, addressing specific types of people at will (though I expect this will change, as marketers are increasingly becoming media themselves) — whereas media folks swim deep inside the process and never really get outside or above it.

I’m not talking about how media people market themselves, I’m talking about media as it pertains to the real value and uses of actual news and knowledge — how it affects our discussions about culture, politics, economics, etc…

Just some things to think about for now. I’ll have to dive deeper another time.

Notes:

• Technically it would have been more appropriate to call this an “Engagement Vortex” (a cyclone is just a special kind of vortex) but I didn’t want it to turn into calculus homework — nor did I like the “black hole” connotations.

• Also for the sake of avoiding the wrong connotations, I turned the picture on its side to make it look less like a toilet being flushed.

• And I changed “Commenting” to “Replying” because the longer word played havoc on the aesthetic proportions.

• Lastly, I stuck with “curation” for the sake of not bringing too many discussions into one, but the meanings and merits of that term in this context are worth discussing. Read Joanne McNeil’s post at Tomorrow Museum if you haven’t yet.

Minds for Sale

Brian — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:53:56 +0000

This talk is causing me to reconsider many assumptions and ideals.

For the most part I still believe in cultivating more creative and educational autonomy for ourselves in order to overcome the digital sharecropping and sweatshop-type mind labour that critics are warning us about.

Ultimately I keep coming back to my belief (for now it is based largely on faith) that there must be enough people like me out there (somewhere) who are apathetic about games and incentives — and passionate enough about being responsible and doing genuinely valuable things — to maintain a balance.

The web can and should be used to reveal consequences and open things up for scrutiny, not hide them.

At this point things might go either way, so if we like openness, responsibility, and genuine value so much (as I do), then let’s not waste any time developing good platforms and communities to keep people’s attention preoccupied from the potentially bad ones.

Our challenge is to create and provide experiences (rather than impose them) that will shape social norms to favour moral accountability before too many people get comfortable not having any.

Creating a Platform for Collaboration

Brian — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:32:50 +0000

Yesterday I read a really interesting story about a project to develop a new tool for researchers at the massive CERN laboratory (the folks who made that gigantic particle accelerator in Switzerland) to collaborate and share expertise more effectively.

It’s a great complement to what John Seely Brown and John Hagel recently wrote about growing from a do-it-yourself culture to a do-it-together culture:

… the second and third level of pull begin to move us beyond “free-agent nation” stories into a new domain of scalable peer learning that can lead to the emergence and rapid evolution of very large and highly innovative global institutions. Scalable DIT offers the potential to turn the experience curve on its side, generating increasing returns to learning and performance improvement.

CERN might qualify as such an institution. It’s composed of thousands of researchers, representing hundreds of universities and dozens of nationalities. Many of the scientists and engineers are based in different countries and spend very little time together on-site…

Then along comes this young hotshot who knows his way around computers, thinking about setting up new systems to connect and keep track of all the experts and their expertise — especially as things are constantly changing and new researchers are always coming and going.

At one point he was thinking that each researcher would have their own page and it would link to other researchers’ pages — sort of like a Facebook for scientists, I suppose.

This is what he was thinking when they started pushing to build the Large Hadron Collider:

In addition to keeping track of relationships between all the people, experiments, and machines, I wanted to access different kinds of information, such as researchers’ technical papers, the manuals for different software modules, minutes of meetings, hastily scribbled notes, and so on. Furthermore, I found myself answering the same questions asked frequently of me by different people…

In a way it doesn’t sound all that original. In the past couple of years we’ve heard a lot about organizations using social media-type tools to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration through the web.

There are also a growing number of more academic initiatives, including OpenWetWare (for biology), and more commercial communities like InnoCentive.

But in another way, what this guy is doing — or perhaps I should say, what he already did — was original. The guy I’m talking about is Tim Berners-Lee, the platform he developed at CERN in the 90′s is called the World Wide Web.

The More Things Change…

With all the recent buzz about the social web, it’s been too easy to forget that the web is simply continuing to get better at what it was always intended to do: make people more knowledgeable and make knowledge more sociable.

It’s a good idea not to stray too far from that. It seems to keep recurring… But we also need to stay busy making and doing things to take advantage of both the social and the knowledge aspects of the still-growing web.

It took about twenty years for the web to become genuinely embedded in our society. It is important now — i.e. we can more or less take it for granted — in a more profound way than we could only a few years ago.

But the momentum has not slowed. The web is far from maturing. Let’s assume it has only begun to affect society, and we’ll need to prepare for more drastic changes.

While we can’t predict what new things will come, we can anticipate the general shape of change will continue to emphasize making people more knowledgeable and making knowledge more sociable. Work on projects that go towards those ends; it’s hard to imagine going wrong like that.

The above quote is from Weaving the Web, written by Berners-Lee and published in 1999. You can start with his original proposal.

Brian Frank » web

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