At DevLearn 2009 I came across a vendor’s booth that really caught my eye, not because it was flashy or anything of the type, but because all it involved was a webcam, a computer, and a squared piece of paper with a smiley face on it. What was eye catching was that as you waved the piece of paper in front of the webcam, the smiley face was substituted with information. I can see how that technology can be used in E-learning (electronic flashcards, perhaps?), but when I saw the video above…I was blown away. Those darn Swedes are up to something…and I love it!
Posted on : December-05-2009 | By : Eddie | In : Communication
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David Bowie's letter to Sandra Dodd
One of the things that fascinates me when reading something like the letter above, (a letter that David Bowie wrote to his first “American Fan”) is the fact that writing was so linear compared to how most of us write today. Imagine putting together a letter, report, or news article back in the day. I mean, once you typed something, it was practically impossible to go back and change the structure of a paragraph or rewrite something without having to start all over again. I suppose you could go back and add your corrections after the fact with pen, but that’s not very professional now, is it? Or I suppose you could do as David Bowie did when he caught an error and just make up a new word. Wi-at? Oh Bowie, you’re so cleaver clever.
In the video from my post on the birth of Web 2.0, the presentation starts with an example of linear writing, and then briefly illustrates how writing has changed with the help of technology. I’m absolutely certain that our method of writing is drastically different from the writing of past generations, but is it affecting our minds? I think so.
When I write, I go over a paragraph multiple times. When I’m done writing, I go back and take out entire paragraphs or move them up or down on a page. That’s because the writing that comes out is often disorganized and scattered. Digital text allows me to organize, delete, and restructure my thoughts on a page without having to start typing my entire document all over again. It almost feels like this style of writing was invented to suit my scattered brain.
So is technology affecting our minds? Yes, but some seem to think that it’s a bad thing. They say that it’s making us less organized and less effective. I totally disagree. As evident from the letter above, communication was not linear in 1967, and I don’t think it has ever been (unless Bowie was is as scatter-brained as me). I believe that due to our technological limitations, we forced our brains to think in a very unnatural linear fashion. Now, with the help of technology, writing is more natural, more non-linear, and I couldn’t be any happier. If you ask me whether I think technology is affecting our minds, I’d say yes…finally, I can write like I think and then reorganize my thoughts so I can at least seem like I have some structure! At the very least, people can now understand what the hell I’m writing (you’d understand if you saw my handwriting).
How is technology affecting my mind? It makes me feel normal, and that’s not so bad now, is it?
Download a QR code reader for your phone and scan me.
I picked up the first ever “Augmented Reality” magazine yesterday. I have to say, it was a cute attempt. If you are not familiar with Augmented Reality, it’s basically the convergence of the virtual world with the physical (In plain english, soon you won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s not. Machine and man will be living in the same reality). While the magazine was a decent attempt at creating a connection from the physical to the “virtual”, it was not any better than my QR code above. It’s still just a way to link information to a web page. That’s old school. What Pranav Mistry is doing will blow your mind! Here is a blimpse of the (very near) future:
Pranav Mistry is a genius. I see Pranav’s SixthSense innovation becoming the next paradigm shift in less than a couple of years year. Why? Pranav is making his invention OPEN SOURCE!
Sorry it has taken me so long to post this, it has been an extremely long week for me. This is the information I digested from Leo Laporte’s presentation at DevLearn2009.
Leo Laporte’s talk was about Media, how technology has changed it, and why it’s important for us to save the “democratic” flow of info we have. Leo explained that Mass media in the 20th century started with radio and was originally viewed as a one to one communication, usually from a ship to shore, kind of like the telegraph. It wasn’t until RCA introduced multicasting that radio really took off as a mass media. The success of radio as a powerhouse was in large part helped by Edward Bernays, the grandfather of PR, who invented mass advertising. Radio was subsequently used by advertisers to reach customers, who prior to that were using the mail order catalog.
Edward Bernays was an interesting guy and came from a very smart family (Sigmund Freud was his uncle). When he was hired to promote bacon, he went out to interview doctors and asked “Do you agree that Americans should have a hearty breakfast?” He subsequently came up with an advertising campaign that said, 4 out of 5 doctors agreed that you should eat bacon for breakfast. Bacon is hearty, doctors think you should eat a hearty breakfast, therefore you should eat bacon. Don’t think people are stupid enough to fall for that? You don’t understand propaganda (AKA Public Relations). That campaign was not a fluke. Bernays was hired by big Tobacco to come up with a way to get more women to smoke. The result? He hired women during suffrage movement to smoke cigarettes and created the “Torches of Freedom” campaign. Stick it to the man by lighting up a cancer stick. Boy, did that work.
Marketers know very well the power of mass media. For a long time, the fact that content creation was limited to those who had the means (as explained in a previous blog entry) made the average person very susceptible and the media moguls very powerful. Laporte talked about how he got into the media industry on his first stint as a disk jockey, and how much he had to beg and plead to even get on college radio. When he finally got a radio show, it was from midnight to 5 am on a Saturday night. Though he was the talent, his access to a mass audience was always controlled by the powers that be.
Years later he got his cable TV show. It was pretty successful and it attracted smart tech geeks. While the show reached 200,000 people, it wasn’t enough to keep him on the air. Advertisers weren’t buying. As his old boss put it, “Brand is the refuge of the ignorant: smart people don’t care about brand and are not swayed by ads”. Ouch.
Fast forward to today. Mass media (Old Media) is failing. Media companies that had a monopoly on communication are suffering. Technology has changed everything. Now a person like Leo can run an entire studio from a room in his house and have more listeners than ever before. His worth is not based on advertising dollars, but on content. I guess you can say that he can finally have smart viewers without the need to worry that the brainy geeks are going to get him fired. He has more freedom to speak and do as he pleases. Under the Old Media model he couldn’t speak up against advertisers even if he disagreed with them because they paid to run the show…now, he doesn’t have to worry about it because he runs his show, with his equipment, and they don’t pay his bills. I could come up with a multitude of ways that things have changed for the better, but the main point is that it’s all because the Old Media system is being destroyed and the two inventions made it happen:
1. The microprocessor, because it made it possible to move audio video, etc…and transmit at the speed of light
2. The internet: because it made the microprocessor come to life by giving us the network to transfer all this information and knowledge.
The media is crumbling because technology that used to be for the select few is now accessible to the average human being. No more towers, radio stations, recording studios, etc. Now, a person like me can have a complete multimedia studio on their desk (and I do!) and broadcast to a mass audience. Today, the internet is an enabler, tomorrow the cell phone (did you know there are people in Tanzania with no electricity, but plenty of cell phones? They use community charging stations…believe it!). This is unprecedented access and it scares the bejebus out of these Old Media guys!
You think these moguls will let their empires crumble without a fight? No way. They built an empire to numb us and make us all passive consumers, they are not about to let this internet thing get in their way. This is the reason these humongous companies are pressuring foreign governments, and our own, into signing the ACTA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement) in 2010 under the guise of “Counterfeiting”. These people are trying to gain control over our New Media to keep selling to us their CDs, Television shows, video games, and all the advertisement that come with dumbing us down!
I hope you value the freedom of information we are starting to see, and which we hope to have in years to come. I do. You should know that the internet is under attack from Big Media (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) and Communication (Comcast, AT&T) who are trying to shape the internet into a system that serves their financial interest. You all know that money is very powerful and these companies have lots of it. They are willing to buy off as many people as they can to gain control, including politicians. I’m of the belief that mass people can beat these companies who are trying to restrict our access. This is why I forward you Leo’s call to action. Please go to http://www.savetheinternet.com and sign the petition to force your government to stand up against these big corporations and save Net Neutrality. This isn’t their media anymore, it’s our media, and this is why media still matters.
I leave you with this. Edward Bernays was a man with a proven track record and many clients. He wrote:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
- Edward Bernays, 1928
Is this the world you want to live in again? I don’t.
If you haven’t heard of DevLearn, I don’t blame you. I didn’t really know about it myself until earlier this year when I started doing a ton of research for an e-learning project I’m working on. What comes to mind when you think E-Learning? It doesn’t mean getting a degree online (though it’s one type of e-learning and not to be excluded either). Rather, E-learning is a broader concept about the delivery of learning content, of any kind, to an intended audience via electronic means (computer, video, cellphone, etc.). Whether you’re talking about teaching Kindergarten kids the ABCs using a computer game, or doctors in L.A. learning how to use robotic technology in a simulation to perform brain surgery on a patient in Beijing (I made up that example so don’t go looking it up), it’s all included, and DevLearn is a place where geeks like me convene once a year to talk about all things e-learning. Electronic implies computers, computers imply internet, and of course, going with the natural progression, the internet implies Social Media. This year, lots of vendors and presenters focused on the “social” aspect of learning and this has been one of the most interesting DevLearn Conferences in recent memory (from another attendees account). We live in interesting times and there’s no doubt about it, it’s going to get even more interesting.
Right from the get-go, I was intrigued when I read they were having Andrew McAfee and Leo Laporte as keynote speakers. Andrew was the guy who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 (and who coincidentally announced and “released” a book with the same title at the conference, allegedly hot off the press) and Leo Laporte, who I consider a champion of not only technology, but also of New Media. I’ll talk about Leo Laporte’s keynote on a later post. But first…
Posted on : November-15-2009 | By : Eddie | In : transparency
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Joe Wilson is in the headlines again:
“One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country.” This written statement by Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina on the health care bill was identical to one by Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer and used language suggested by lobbyists.
The headline from the New York Times article reads “In House, many spoke with one voice: Lobbyists’” and has Joe Wilson on the front cover. We know Mr. Wilson from my blog post on his outburst during Obama’s speech and the importance of transparency.
With the technology and ability to reference check on the spot and look into ties, why do so many public figures insist on feeding us lines? I don’t think it has hit home quite yet that these aren’t the 1990’s, when you could claim or say anything and chances of you getting called on it were slim. We are in a different age. I look forward to an interesting backlash.
Some academics argue that today’s students are ill suited for school due to their inability to write and they blame the internet for it. One can argue, and I concur, that the real problem is that schools are ill suited for the way the world now communicates. Let me give you an example:
Pretend you are a 14 year old living today. From the time you were born, you’ve probably been around technology. The world you know is full of rich media. Messages are tailored (very effectively, by the way) by companies who understand that you live in a world of video, images, sound, and interaction. You learn best by simulation, collaboration, and participation.
It’s not that kids don’t know how to write, it’s that they lack context. You take them from a color world and put them in a black and white classroom, you’re going to have trouble relating to them, and them relating to you. This is the first time in history in which the role of the teacher has been so blatantly reversed. For the first time, children know more (sometimes a lot more) than the teacher about the world they live in, and this scares them (not the children, the teachers).
Some scholars are stuck on method, when they should be focused on purpose. If the purpose of school is to prepare students to go out in the real world, and the real world is now communicating using video, animation, music, multimedia, and everything else in addition to writing, then who’s really preparing who?
By now, most people know Joe Wilson. Good ol’ Joe was the “heckler” at President Obama’s speech to Congress on Health Care on September 9, 2009. In my post about transparency a couple weeks ago, I touched upon the fact that now more than ever, things are becoming very transparent (especially if you are in politics). I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but just kept forgetting to do it. Here it is:
When Joe opened his mouth, he should have remembered that he had quite a few skeletons in his closet.
Ouch...that's embarrasing. Via Raw Story
Did he forget that this information is public?
Open Secrets
Did he forget that when dealing with social media things can quickly escalate?
How to contact Joe Wilson...
Not only by having thousands of people flood your site with mail disapproving (to put it mildly) of your disrespect and crashing your entire system (and causing you THOUSANDS of dollars in bandwidth overage charges):
Shut down!
…but also, monetarily:
Joe's Competitor in South Carolina got HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars in contributors immediately after his tirade. Prior to this, he had no chance!
By now, most of us have seen the original Did You Know? videos. The video above is NOT one of them, but it could definitely pose as one. I can almost guarantee that some of this video’s info will show up in some presentation, conversation, or research paper as fact one day. This scares me.
At the very end, the video asks, what does it all mean? Well, to me it means that one of the biggest problems with the “information age” is that there aren’t enough hours in the day to reference check all the information we come across. That’s not to say the information that we do reference-check is any better. As we all know, most truths we take for granted today may have already gone through a huge level of warping themselves (e.g. Honest Abe wasn’t so honest, was he?). What I am saying, however, is that we must sometimes trust that what we are seeing or hearing is true enough, at the expense of being dead wrong.
I heard this quote (Edward Said) a long time ago and I think it rings true:
“History is written by those who win and those who dominate.”
Well, today, those who dominate are those who can create content and influence people. The good news is that every man, woman and child with some basic equipment can access these tools to educate a new generation of people. The bad news is that in the wrong hands, these tools and a little mis-information can very well be deadly. The person sending us into WWIII could just as well be a delusional politician or a 15 year old with Adobe After Effects and bad info.
One thing I always tell people is, information is not knowledge. Information is only a collection of data. Knowledge is information and experience applied. Sadly, there’s not enough knowledge to go around in the world and we don’t have time to reference check every “fact”. So, did you know?
