I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin: I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort [...]
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cultural evolution,
facebook,
fiction,
film,
generativity,
internet,
movies,
narrative,
stories,
storytelling,
truth,
web,
writing
Few people would disagree that as more brands & memes vie for our attention, the simple act of communicating has become an accelerating arms race. We shouldn’t necessarily complain. Not more than a decade ago it would have been impossible for most of us to get any kind of public attention for our products or [...]
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attention,
cultural evolution,
development,
generativity,
history,
learning,
open/conceptual,
politics,
public relations,
public sphere,
social media,
web
“Heuristic” — an ugly word that everyone should know — is used differently in various contexts. It generally refers to a process of making open-ended, provisional decisions in order to get into a better position — “for now” — from which to act and decide better later: Let’s see how this works out — find [...]
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cultural evolution,
culture,
decisions,
heuristics,
learning,
music,
progress,
society,
technology
Generativity is one of the core concepts I keep coming back to. I think it’s at least as important as “sustainability” and we shouldn’t think about one without thinking about the other. Recently I noticed Tim O’Reilly mention it with new (to me) associations in a TechCrunch post about Gov 2.0: The government may build [...]
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development,
evolution,
generativity,
innovation,
institutions,
intellectual evolution,
jonathan zittrain,
open government,
open innovation,
open source,
tim o'reilly,
twitter,
web
Mark Bauerlein complained at WSJ.com that “Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues.” It has something to do with all the time they spend, according to Nielson Mobile, sending and receiving an individual average of maybe 1,742 or 2,272 mobile text messages per month. And what’s supposed to be bad about that? Bauerlein’s concern is that “much of [...]
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asd,
asperger's syndrom,
autism,
cognitive styles,
communication,
create your own economy,
cultural evolution,
evolution,
generation y,
language,
mark bauerlein,
neurodiversity,
nonverbal communication,
psychology,
society,
the dumbest generation,
tyler cowen,
work
During the weekend I spent some time writing yet another criticism of old media protectionism. I called it, “Because You Wouldn’t Go to a ‘Citizen Prostitute’ for Sex, Would You?”… this is the tame version. What so many protectionists miss is that telling stories and getting to the bottom of things are basic human motives [...]
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careers,
cultural evolution,
dan rather,
jeff jarvis,
journalism,
knowledge,
motivation,
news,
newspapers,
paul berton,
psychology,
social_media,
will to relevance
Another bit of a ramble (I love where it ends up), starting with this Time Q&A: TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging? Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that [...]
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blogging,
careers,
cultural evolution,
digital media,
evolution,
higher education,
history,
progress,
social media,
technology,
trends
by OpenConceptual on 07-15-2009
in concepts
Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.” That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate [...]
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competence,
cultural evolution,
evolution,
failure,
finance crisis,
generativity,
institutions,
love of learning,
new economics,
organizations,
physics,
pragmatism,
quantum theory,
randomness,
science,
success
There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter): “Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).” It’s a good following to the last post, about [...]
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cultural evolution,
evolution,
ideas,
intellectual evolution
The news sure spread fast. It interrupted broadcasts and seemed to consume Twitter — as much as it can be consumed by any single event. Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices reported, according to his metric, that 15% of all posts on the service mentioned Michael Jackson. By comparison, he never saw Iran or Swine Flu [...]
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meaning,
michael jackson,
narrative,
paradigms,
pop culture,
significance,
twitter
My work on the LdnBeta thing really exemplifies my “learning is personal, knowledge is social” mantra. I’ve been putting an awful lot of time into it — which would seem to be a great personal loss — but it’s gratifying be stretched a little. As per Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory it’s great (for a change) to have Direct [...]
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anticapitalism,
capitalism,
change,
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ex industrialism,
industrialism,
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post-industrialism,
selfishness,
selflessness,
society
by Brian on 05-16-2009
in media
Above all the claims about the need to save journalism, about it being essential to our society, etc, this fact seems to be missed: the more essential journalism is supposed to be, the more continuously prevalent it should appear throughout history. How much historical continuity is there? Where did journalism really come from? What is [...]
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cultural evolution,
evolution,
history,
journalism,
media,
practices,
professions,
twitter
Survival of the Fittest Ideas
by OpenConceptual on 07-07-2009
in commentary
There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter): “Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).” It’s a good following to the last post, about [...]
Tagged as: cultural evolution, evolution, ideas, intellectual evolution
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