Jon Lebkowsky's Guide to the Universe
www.flickr.com
|
|
Jon Lebkowsky writes about culture, technology, media, and sustainability, and has been blogging regularly since 2000. He's an acknowledged authority on social media and online community. He leads web development projects and consults with businesses and nonprofits on web strategy and social technology through Social Web Strategies, a consulting partnership with David Armistead.
To contact Jon Lebkowsky, click here. Join the Weblogsky Group on Facebook Check out Weblogsky book and cd recommendations: Amazon Astore
|
August 22, 2008
Chasing the Flame
"Chasing the Flame" is a blog advocating for "a smarter U.S. foreign policy," extending the work of Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian United Nations diplomat who was killed in a bombing in Iraq in 2003. A post there by Jonathan Prentice, on the subject of intelligent empathy, caught my eye. Intelligent empathy will mean finding effective ways to hear the views of those most affected and bring them into dialogues from which they are typically excluded - and to do this at the outset of a policy initiative, not as an afterthought. It will mean recognising that these individuals must own a process as much as those in power or the international community do. It will require patience and the imagination to find, and find ways of reaching out, to new partners; it will require a willingness to deal with messy assymmetry; and it will require a conviction that the end goal of a just and sustainable outcome rather than a quick victory really is worth striving for – that the pragmatic and the ideal can be united. Category: Culture, Global Voices August 20, 2008
History of the Internet?
The National Science Foundation has published "NSF and the Birth of the Internet," including videos of Vint Cerf, GEorge Strawn, and Rick Bina and a timeline for 'net evolution. How accurate is NSF's institutional memory? When Dave Farber posted a link to the video to his "interesting people" list, he got several critical responses that capture much more granular historical info from various perspectives. If you're interested in net.history, you can see those messages in Dave's archive - look for 8/18/2008 and following messages on "NSF and the Birth of the Internet." Category: Internet August 17, 2008
Tibetan Sky Burial
In this burial ritual, corpses are dissected and fed to birds of prey. Called jhator, this "is considered an act of generosity: the deceased and his/her surviving relatives are providing food to sustain living beings." Generosity and compassion for all beings are important virtues or paramita in Buddhism. Although some observers have suggested that jhator is also meant to unite the deceased person with the sky or sacred realm, this does not seem consistent with most of the knowledgeable commentary and eyewitness reports, which indicate that Tibetans believe that at this point life has completely left the body and the body is simply meat. [Wikipedia Link] [Eyewitness Account by Pamela Logan] August 15, 2008
humdog
Erika Whiteway just emailed me that Carmen Hermosillo, aka humdog, died. I looked for an obit and found a post by my former FringeWare partner, Paco Nathan. "Among those who formed the core of FringeWare," he says, "Humdog becomes the first of us to go to our ancestors." Tiffany Lee Brown reports that there'll be a memorial service in Second Life tomorrow. I met humdog in the Mondo 2000 forum that RU Sirius and I were hosting on the WELL, where I also met Tiffany and Erika... and recruited all three to become substantial voices in the FringeWare community. Carmen was a fearless passionate poet. I never saw her face. We all have demons, and Carmen's demons and mine were set at odds in the end, something I always regretted terribly. We have finite relationships throughout our lives and we should respect and support all of them, a lesson I learned too late to fix some of my own deep connections that were broken, carelessly and without much thought, in the 90s. I looked for a humdog poem to quote here, and found this translation she'd done, which seems appropriate: for elisa so that you can read them with your gray eyes, so that they may find asylum in your heart so that you could take pleasure in my happiness, so that i could place before you -Gustavo Adolfo Becquer August 13, 2008
Predictably Irrational
I haven't read Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, but I sat in on an hour-plus phone interview Brian Massey led with Dan last night at a Bootstrap Web meeting, and I was impressed by his insight, based no diligent research into into irrational thinking and its impact on our behavior and decisions. Decison-making is difficult and complex, and it's worth studying how we decide what we want, which always happens in context. We make relative comparisions. He mentioned how Olympic Bronze medal winners are happier than Silver medal winners, because the silver winners are thinking, "damn, a little better and I could've had the gold," whereas bronze winners are thinking "wow, a little worse and I would've had zilch." He also discussed how Starbuck's created an experience that differentiated them from Dunkin Donuts, though both derive significant revenues from beverage sales. He also noted Dunkin Donuts' advantage in sales: their coffee drinks are really mostly coffee, where as Starbucks' coffee drinks are mostly milk, which is more expensive. Dan has many snippets of insight as videos on his site (via YouTube). Here's an example, on relativity: (A podcast of last night's conversation is forthcoming; I'll post a link when it's available.) Category: Business, Consciousness, Culture August 12, 2008
Stalder on Shirky
Interesting critique of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody by media theorist Felix Stalder. [Link] This tension between commercial and social interests points to another dimension of Web2.0 that is completely missing from Shirky's book: the new division of labour, this time between paid and unpaid. He rightly points out that we are witnessing a ‘mass amateurisation’, and explains this by way of an example. Racing car driving is difficult, so we have professionals for whom driving is not a means but an end. However, driving a normal car is so easy that amateurs can do it while trying to achieve other things (like arriving at work on time). So, through a combination of new technological tools and new cooperative strategies certain professions - photography, publishing, journalism, etc. - are becoming amateurised and their professional products find themselves in competition with ‘user generated content’. Is this pointing the way to a 'post-capitalist' society, as envisioned by the Oekonux project? You might think so, given the total absence of economic dimensions in this book. But, I suspect that Shirky would laugh at such a notion all the way to be bank. As a consultant to many media companies he must be keenly aware of the strategies to extract, concentrate and appropriate value from all this user generated content. I would love to hear more about it - and I'm sure Shirky knows a lot about it but, unfortunately, he is not telling us. Is "Web 2.0" a framework for empowerment, or exploitation? Same question of markets in general - empowerment, or exploitation? Or both? Category: August 7, 2008
Greenwald followup by Simon Owens
At Bloggasm, Simon Owens has published a very thorough followup to the Glenn Greenwald piece that I blogged recently. Owens spoke with Greenwald: He compared this hypothetical investigation to ones initiated by other news outlets when reporters had botched stories or false information was published. Category: Citizen Media, News August 3, 2008
Trolls
"The Trolls Among us" is an excellent New York Times article by Mattathias Schwartz, also a staff writer for Good. Schwartz discusses trolling behavior online, focusing especially on /b/, a message board at 4chan.org where trolls (people who intentionally disrupt online communities) hang out – and more specifically on conversations with James Fortuny, "the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman," and Weev, who says "trolling is basically Internet eugenics." The article is a fascinating consideration of what you might call alternative social thinking. Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well. Category: Community, Culture, Digital Lifestyle August 2, 2008
Greenwald on Anthraxgate
Much confusion swirling around the death of anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins, now a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks that nudged us so much closer to the invasion of Iraq. Glenn Greenwald's been investigating - he's raising "vital unresolved questions" in an article (with many updates) at Salon. The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism. Moving to Mars?
Aviation Week says NASA's alerted the White House about plans to announce Phoenix lander evidence that Mars may be habitable. International news media trumpeted the water ice confirmation, which was not a surprise to any of the Phoenix researchers. "They have discovered water on Mars for the third or fourth time," one senior Mars scientists joked about the hubbub around the water ice announcement. No hint of organics on Mars, but if it's habitable, I wouldn't be surprised to see colonization plans on the drawing boards. Category: Space |
worldchanging column links to jon's weekly columns at Worldchanging. polycot posts older entries | ||||||||||||
 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
| ||||||||||||||
