Posted 16:14 by Mark Federman permanent link
Intellectual Property Rights on the Block

On the Lego Block, that is. CBC News reports that Canada's Supreme Court will hear the "Lego block case," in which Lego sued competitor Mega Blok for the literal look and feel of its connecting bumps. The patent on Lego's block design, with its distinctive bumps, ran out in 1978. Mega Blok makes a compatible and interchangeable set of blocks, and were sued for violation of trademark by Lego Canada. Lego lost at trial, and lost at appeal. "The appeal court ruling affirmed the doctrine that protecting functional items, such as knobs, is a patent issue, not trademark law." Given the trouble we are now facing with software and business processes being patentable, having them protected by trademark law after the expiration of the patent would indicate a strong reversal of the intent of the laws governing so-called intellectual "property." That the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case indicates, once again, the forward thinking of Canada's judiciary on such matters, and Canada's leadership in the world.
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Posted 13:48 by Mark Federman permanent link
The New York Times: The Orwellian Olsens

And columnist Maureen Dowd scathingly probes the reversals and reveals a ground that is apparently hidden to about 50% of the U.S. population.
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Posted 13:41 by Mark Federman permanent link
The High Price of Innocence

Yet another example of a medium extended beyond the limit of its potential reversing its original characteristics: Reason Magazine has this story that demonstrates yet another "victory" in the U.S.'s "war against drugs." A man who requires high doses of strong painkillers to combat intense pain from "a 1985 car accident, failed back surgery, and multiple sclerosis" was just handed a mandatory minimum 25-year sentence for drug trafficking, even though police had never found any evidence that he actually sold a single pill, and medical evidence demonstrated that the large volume of pills in his possession were necessary because of his chronic pain. But what most demonstrates the reversal is this choice comment:

The prosecutors, who finally obtained the draconian sentence that even they concede Paey does not deserve, say it's his fault for insisting on his innocence. "It's unfortunate that anyone has to go to prison, but he's got no one to blame but Richard Paey," Assistant State Attorney Mike Halkitis told the St. Petersburg Times.(emphasis added)

Now the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, in part, "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law..." They just forgot to mention, "being proven guilty..."
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Posted 10:17 by Mark Federman permanent link
Living Democracy

Forever-Canadian-in-his-heart Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing points us to this one. The Green Party of Canada has taken an open approach to policy development and participational democracy in the formation of its 2004 Election Platform. Their policies and campaign themes are clearly enunciated on their website, but that's nothing new for politicians of all stripes. What is new is the ability of visitors to vote thumbs up or thumbs down on their policy platform by clicking on the appropriate "rank-a-plank" icon. What's more, on they offer a portal to PolicyLand - a wiki environment that allows all people who are interested in the development of election policy to contribute their thoughts and ideas. This is yet another step in the re-engagement of the public in the political process of our country.

We saw the emergence of tremendous energy and first-time political participation when the Howard Dean Campaign invited cool conversation, rather than relying solely on hot broadcast politics. (For those who dismiss this experience as irrelevant because of the candidate's ultimate lack of electoral success, remember that television's role in politics was initially thought to be a passing fad.) The Green Party, with literally nothing to lose, is building a strong base of passionate support among those who are anxious to participate in political conversations, and willing to contribute their time and ideas to creating what they believe is a better country situated in a better world.

Would the Liberal Party, or the newly rebranded non-progressive Conservative Party open their policy development to invite active participation? That would be a bold move for either entrenched party - and one that I would not expect anytime soon. What surprises me is the lack of cluefulness of the New Democratic Party in not seeking open participation. Leader Jack Layton had always seemed to be more of a "man of the people," interested in the ideas, contributions and participation of Canadians. Online, at least, he's beginning to look a lot like Paul Martin Times!

Disclaimer: I have consulted with, and offered advice to, members of both the Green Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party of Canada relative to the effects of online engagement in the political process. I publicly endorse no particular political party.
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Posted 15:36 by Mark Federman permanent link
George W. Bush for President 2004

I have had accusations that this weblog is unabashedly "left-leaning" and "liberal," which, in Canada, is a political party, not necessarily an epithet. So in the interests of "fair and balanced" blogging - not to mention probing the effects of the medium of websites used for political campaigning - I give you George W. Bush for President 2004.

But then again, perhaps my reading of the site was influenced by listening to Al Franken and Randi Rhodes on Air America Radio.
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Posted 12:24 by Mark Federman permanent link
This One is Worth Attending

...either in person or by ePresence:

Thursday, April 22, 2004
Time: 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. EST

Presenter: Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton is a leading interaction designer and researcher. He is Principal of the Toronto-based design and consulting firm, Buxton Design. He has had a long history with Xerox PARC, and the University of Toronto, where he is still an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc. In 1995, Buxton became the third recipient of the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society Award for contributions to research in computer graphics and human-computer interaction and was given the New Media Visionary of the Year Award at the 2000 Canadian New Media Awards. In 2002, he was elected to the CHI Academy, and Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada. In 2001, The Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood.

Title:
The Role of Design in Software Product Development

Abstract:
This talk could just as well be titled "What I have learned about software product design in 8 1/2 years of working with some of the best industrial designers and film makers in the world." The underlying premise is that filmmakers and industrial designers approach the design of new products in a fundamentally different way than the software industry. More often than not, software products are green-lighted, and then work begins. With films and product design, green-lighting comes at the end of a front-end process, not the beginning. Stated another way, software projects tend to go directly to development/engineering, leapfrogging over anything that an industrial designer, for example, would recognize as a design process. Our argument is that our industry's bypassing such an explicit and formal front-end design process (or in film terms, pre-production), lies at the root of many of our problems of quality, cost over-run, and late delivery. Furthermore, I would argue that the absence of this front-end process lies at the root of the software industry's abysmal track record in bringing out successful new (as opposed to n+1) products. To put my argument into perspective, I will briefly summarize the process followed in film and product design, and discuss how it can apply to software product design.

Room BA1200 [1st floor]
Bahen Centre for Information Technology
University of Toronto
40 St. George St.

There will be a live webcast using ePresence: the interactive webcasting system designed and developed in KMDI's ePresence Lab. Public archives will not, however, be available. Tune in at http://epresence.kmdi.utoronto.ca The Knowledge Media Design Institute's 2003-2004 Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the U of T's Resource Centre for Academic Technology.

Also: If you're in Toronto, don't forget about Twyla Gibson's talk on Friday at OISE.
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Posted 10:19 by Mark Federman permanent link
International Voices '04 Meetup Day

International Voices '04 Meetup Day: Meetup with other local advocates of Voices '04 (Voices Without Votes), an organization dedicated to fostering a dialogue between Americans and non-Americans in advance of the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. The Meetup happens Wednesday April 28 at 19:00 in Toronto, Montreal, New York and elsewhere.
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Posted 09:54 by Mark Federman permanent link
It Is Sad...

...when even the comics make you cry.
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Posted 09:48 by Mark Federman permanent link
Two Interesting Sessions Later This Week

If you have not yet had the chance to hear Twyla Gibson's brilliant reassessment of Plato's role in our understanding of today's interconnected world, now is the time. Friday April 23 at 12:00 noon, Twyla Gibson, Senior Fellow and adjunct assistant professor at the McLuhan Program, will be giving a "brown bag lunch lecture" at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 252 Bloor Street West, 6th Floor, Room 122.

Plato's Medium and Message: The Philosophical Roots of Culture & Technology and the Toronto School of Communication outlines the body of theory concerning culture and technology developed by a group of scholars known internationally as the Toronto School of Communication, namely, Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Walter J. Ong, and Northrop Frye. The theory and method developed by the Toronto School takes Plato's role in transition from orality to literacy following the adoption of the technology of the phonetic alphabet in ancient Greece as a model for understanding the revolution in communications and information technology underway in our own culture. The theory was extended by a second generation of University of Toronto scholars, including John Eisenberg and Deanne Bogdan, of the Department of Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Working in collaboration (and sometimes competition), these thinkers inaugurated a tradition of scholarship that (according to the Times Literary Supplement) made the University of Toronto "the intellectual centre of the world."

Then, on Saturday, April 24 from 9:30 to 18:00, The Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture presents Material Worlds: At the Intersections of Print and Material Cultures. It is being held in the Electronic Classroom (Room 001) at Emmanuel College, University of Toronto, 75 Queen's Park Crescent, and features a keynote address at 14:00 by Janice Radway from Duke University, author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire.
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Posted 22:17 by Mark Federman permanent link
Playing With Words

From Anne Galloway via Caterina, a fun diversion, and a new take on a chain letter:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I would add, continue to track the source chain (that would now read, "From Mark, from Anne, from Caterina") and add to the analogy (that would be "a fun diversion, a new take on chain letter and [your analogy here].)

"Jews and gentiles alike found his irreligion shocking or disconcerting."
- Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God
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Posted 16:06 by Mark Federman permanent link
Protecting Your Publicy Privacy

And while we're on the topic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a useful how-to Guide to Protecting Your Privacy when using Google's new Gmail service.

The Problem: Google uses cookies - bits of identifying data that automatically allow a website to "recognize" you - to link every Google search you conduct on the same computer and browser. This could be used to help Google to refine your search results or their display to match your preferences more closely. Even though Google keeps this search information stored on its servers, without your name and other personalized information it has no way explicitly to link searches to your other activities and correspondence on the Internet.

The problem is that the Gmail service may change this. All of a sudden, Google can know exactly who you are every time you search the Internet using its service. And not only that, its databases know who is sending you email, to whom you respond, and even what you write about. With innumerable search results and up to 1 gigabyte of email messages per Gmail account at its disposal, Google could pull together an extremely detailed dossier on each of the millions of people who use its services every day. Such a vast assemblage of nuanced personal information could become a bigger privacy nightmare than government projects such as Total Information Awareness (TIA).

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Posted 15:52 by Mark Federman permanent link
Amazon A9 - Publicy to a Whole New Level

John Battelle fawns all over the new A9 search portal from everybody's favourite cliche book distributor, Amazon. You can go read John's review, and the many comments that have been popping up all over the blogosphere about Amazon putting their own graphical user interface wrapper on a subset of the Google database, the Alexa database, and their own database of books. When you go to find out what's new & cool about A9, you find this little gem:

Diary: This is the newest and (we think) coolest feature of the toolbar. You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page.

In other words, A9 conveniently provides a place for you to annotate a given website that is forever associated with that website. A boon for researchers, for instance, who now have the capability to retrieve the idea of "marginalia" or margin notes that are scribbled in dusty library books.

With marginalia, subsequent generations of scholars can see what their academic forebears were thinking, and the cognitive associations they made, while reading a particular text. It was like combining clairvoyance with a time machine, giving the contemporary reader a way, albeit limited, to tap into perhaps great minds who held that particular volume before them.

Regular readers will be familiar with my notion of publicy, the reversal of what was private or intimate into voluntary public revelation that occurs under the accelerated conditions of instantaneous communication. In the examples we have experienced so far - chat room revelations, outered thoughts in the blogosphere, personal webcams, among others - we actively realize that we are "performing" in publicly accessible space (even though our sensory perception of the 'net is largely that of private space.) A9's "coolest feature" now subtly removes one veil of this realization. When we make our "marginal" notes into the A9 toolbar, we outer our thinking in a way that we perceive as completely private. We are not intending to publish these notes directly, as in a weblog. We are not musing "aloud" (note the oral metaphor!) on IRC or some instant messaging service. We are typing notes into a client application on our own browser on our own workstation. But A9 stores these in a central database, and will undoubtedly create links between the content that we are (in)voluntarily contributing to the active web and our wider browsing, purchasing, creating and commenting.

Those who muse aloud on the street are often seen as eccentric, a little kooky perhaps, someone to whom we give a wide berth at times. With A9 and its deceptively inviting and "cool" toolbar, we all become that out-loud muser, whose musings remain inextricably and perpetually linked to our now and future DigiSelf.
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Posted 10:00 by Mark Federman permanent link
Tony really must try harder

Marshall McLuhan said, "Social anger and sensitivity sharpen the awareness of the funny man so that his "jokes" are stabs or probes into the cultural matrix that plagues him." Former Python Terry Jones is just such a plagued funny man. His biting piece in yesterday's Guardian "marks" UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent essay, "Why We Must Never Abandon This Historic Struggle in Iraq," that appeared in the press last weekend. Terry Jones's assessment? Tony really must try harder.
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Posted 09:38 by Mark Federman permanent link
Living Like Leonardo

Passed along by my friend Arnold:

It's a Party. It's a Birthday. It's a way to meet some people, stretch your brain and have some fun. Join us on April 15th for the Living Like Leonardo Event - Leonardo da Vinci's 551st birthday and the kick-off to the 3rd Annual Creativity & Innovation Day celebrations.

Thursday, April 15th
6:00 PM - 10:00 PM
$10 at the door
Roxy Blu
12 Brant St.
Toronto
(Between Adelaide & King, 1 street west of Spadina)
RSVP to Kristen

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Posted 17:16 by Mark Federman permanent link
Where Are the Embedded Journalists When You Need Them?

Being heroes... Jo Wilding writes Inside the Fire in Falluja, for openDemocracy. A sample:

me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window.

We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance. I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

I am outraged. We are trying to get to a woman who is giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you are shooting at us. How dare you?

Rules of engagement? There are no rules of engagement...
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Posted 16:51 by Mark Federman permanent link
UbiComp Meets its Fashionista Match: Prada Epicenter Revisited

Fredshouse has this piece on the failure of New York's $40 million flagship store's attempt at ubiquitous computing.

the real problem is those pesky humans that use the system. The potential uses and benefits of ubicomp often seem "obvious"; most of us in the field have spun variations of the same futuristic scenarios, to the point where it seems like a familiar and tired genre of joke. "You walk into the [conference room, living room, museum gallery, hospital ward], the contextual intention system recognizes you by your [beacon, tag, badge, face, gait], and the [lights, music, temperature, privacy settings, security permissions] adjust smoothly to your preferences. Your new location is announced to the [room, building, global buddy list service, homeland security department], and your [videoconference, favorite tv show, appointment calendar, breakfast order] is automatically started." And so on. Of course, what real people need/want in any given situation is FAR from obvious.

Equally, the effects of these environments on real people are far from obvious. That's why we employ the McLuhan thinking tools such as the Laws of Media tetrads and media temperature, as McLuhan himself said, "to think things out before we put them out."

By the way, that's what McLuhan for Managers - New Tools for New Thinking, and the accompanying seminars and playshops are all about.
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Posted 16:31 by Mark Federman permanent link
Killing Culture

This story on Mindjack is one that is important to tell. The Killing Fields by J.D. Lasica heralds the end of folk culture and modern mythology - particularly in America, but elsewhere as well - thanks to an increasingly draconian intellectual property regime. For instance,

a preschool director who said she received letters warning that the school could not show videos to her young charges without a license or hang protected cartoon characters on the walls without permission. He also interviews members of a Rolling Stones tribute band who perform under a legal cloud and husband-and-wife party clowns in Anaheim, California, who were warned not to create balloon animals for kids that looked too much like Tigger, Barney, or the Aladdin genie.

This is why Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture is such an important read, and an even more important demonstration project. It is increasingly difficult for me to fathom the lack of understanding among those who not only lock down their so-called intellectual property, but aggressively attack those who would comprise their audience or future source of content or promotion. And I'm not merely referring to the big record companies and their various industry associations around the world.

By the way, how many new, independently-written books are there about Marshall McLuhan, anyway?
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Posted 10:47 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Speech That Would Win the Election for Bush

More from the remix culture. If George W. Bush would make this plea for peace, there are few who would not support his re-election bid.
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Posted 16:02 by Mark Federman permanent link
The McLuhan Lens

Recently, a friend wrote and mentioned that she is finding "the McLuhan Lens" an increasingly useful tool to help make sense of our world, particularly in light of the political processes - the election, the 9-11 hearings, the Iraqi war - that now occupy the airwaves. Here is part of my response to her:

I don't know if you remember the first Matrix movie. The protagonist, Neo, was given a red pill that, when ingested, allowed him to see the world as it really was, and distinguish it from the fantasy in which he previously existed.

The McLuhan Lens, as I like to call it, is that red pill. In particular, by using McLuhan's various thinking tools as frames to enable our own awareness of the effects of the things we conceive and create (whew!), we learn to "think things that no one else can think about those things which everyone else already sees," to quote German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

The small world being smaller than one might like? You betcha! That's precisely what McLuhan meant by his meme, "global village." It's more than "what happens over there directly affects me over here because there is no 'over there' - everywhere is here." It means that we exist in what Eric McLuhan calls an "electric crowd" of zero mass and infinite density. In our digiself incarnations, we are psychologically all crammed into one mind - albeit one that is schizophrenic beyond belief - Being John Malkovitch writ large.

Pop culture is increasingly a global phenomenon and we use it as our lingua franca for describing the dynamics of our world. Look at this little piece of writing in which I have already used two movie references to metaphorically transform meta-philosophical concepts into (possible) touchstones of your experience.

What disturbs me to my core is when such pop culture metaphors are used to script what we consider to be the reality of our world. Are there archetypal models that were once fantasies of a pulp fictionist that now form the foundation of foreign policy, and set young men and women on a life-altering, if not threatening(!), course? Are our politicians haunted by recurring visions from both the silver and small screens that influence their behaviours, regardless of the ultimate consequences? Is "life imitating art" no longer an ironic happenstance, but the requirement for responses to be seen as credible by a public weaned on Neil Postman?

Tragically, Marshall McLuhan is misunderstood by most people: His work was not a heralding beacon for the world we were fashioning, but a warning of the potential erosion of our will, and the transformation of our psyche into a Narcissus-like transfixed state of perpetual unawareness.

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Posted 19:11 by Mark Federman permanent link
GWB, The Standup Comedian

George, stick to your day-job. No, on second thought, we may all be better off if you don't... But definitely, give up the attempt at standup - you leave yourself open to the McLuhan media effect of consumers becoming producers. Sardonically disturbing, to say the least.
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Posted 16:47 by Mark Federman permanent link
Lessons Through the Rear-View Mirror

A great piece in the New York Times that speaks to fundamental flaws in both the mandate of the "9-11 Commission" and many of the approaches to improving security in the wake of the tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Learning to Expect the Unexpected introduces us to the risk concept of "the black swan:"

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

In addition to hindsight bias, the author notes that our reward systems are not designed to reward the prevention of risk events that are not entirely measurable because they are not deterministically predictable. Remember "Y2K?" People thought that the massive investments in technology upgrades were an unnecessary waste because nothing happened. Many fail to understand that the reason nothing happened (and the reason that many software systems now run considerably better than previously) was those massive investments. We have been habituated in our actions to ensure that, once they occur, specific Bad Things will Never Happen Again (a cliché that should never happen again.) But that narrow focus on avoiding future embarrassment from being caught twice, as it were, exposes us to the Bad Things that occur for the first time:

The greatest flaw in the commission's mandate, regrettably, mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk. The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don't know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them. And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. After a black swan like 9/11, we must look ahead, not in the rear-view mirror.

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Posted 13:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Death of the Internet

Perhaps a little premature, but, as McLuhan reminds us, we feel the effects occur before we clearly understand the causes. And we are now seeing the creeping effects that will indeed leave us with a dead Internet. From the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this item on the evolvingDigital Imprimatur:

These technologies together create a strong current toward the creation of the Secure Internet -- 'No ID, No IP' -- only certified packets, payments, programs and data are allowed. Mainstream computers ignore, or are cut off from, all traffic not on the Secure Internet. Not because Big Brother/Big Content has a grand conspiracy but, rather, because well-intentioned policy-makers and techies want to stop worms, spam, porn, fraud, terrorists and all manner of other ills.

As a side-effect, however, the open Internet becomes a thing of the past.

While I am not a conspiracy theorist, controlling the free-flow of conversation and communication will undo many of the initiatives that give pause to those in power. The reversal of consumers to producers, that McLuhan emphasized as a fundamental effect of instantaneous multi-way communications, disrupts the status quo - a status quo that has become too comfortable for many in our world.
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Posted 12:43 by Mark Federman permanent link
Fried Rice

While I still believe that individual engagement, discussion and airing of the issues is the future of politics in truly democratic societies - I'm an optimist at times - broadcast politics still holds massive sway in the United States of America. A major television political event occurred yesterday with the testimony of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice before the so-called "9-11 Commission" in Washington. The way the various news reports covered her testimony is particularly revealing about the effects of the devices that have become so commonplace in modern broadcasting.

Despite the action on the screen, whenever there is a text headline, our eyes are immediately drawn to it, and that comprises the ground for the image and voice-over. So when Rice revealed her 9-11-brand tagline, "There was no silver bullet," that phrase overrode almost everything else she said. Were you warned by Clarke? "There was no silver bullet." Was the President briefed? "There was no silver bullet." Did you ignore the memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States? "There was no silver bullet."

In fact, this last time is a silver bullet, but not one targeted towards terrorists. The semantic twists that Dr. Rice reads into this particular Presidential Daily Briefing may well provide the tipping point for the Bush Administration. But I'll leave that analysis to other commentators.

The powerful use of text over video to further heat up a medium that has become hot since McLuhan's time is illustrated exceptionally well by Fox News. To see it, follow the Fox News link, then copy and paste this javascript code into the location bar of your browser:

javascript:accessVideoPlayer(8189,'Talking Points','Talking_Points');


To cleanse your brain from that session of political hypno-therapy, I will post a link to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show's editing of Condoleezza Rice's testimony as soon as it is available. Much cooler, indeed!

Update: Isn't it interesting that The Daily Show is decidedly not posting its video headlines of the 9-11 Commission. Let's see now... which media conglomerate owns Comedy Central? In any event, here is Lisa Rein's link to The Daily Show's take on Condi Rice's testimony that they call, "Me Ain't Culpa!"

Update 2: Well, they finally got around to posting it. Me Aint' Culpa from the Daily Show site.
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Posted 13:51 by Mark Federman permanent link
Talking back to your TV

The Toronto Star has an article today that describes an intiative to cool down today's television by turning the otherwise passive watching of an otherwise - excuse me for saying so - boring awards show into a competitive game. Apparently when we watch the upcoming Genie Awards - Canada's answer to the Oscars - you will have the ability to "Talk back to your TV." The idea incorporates a trivia game in which people compete against other viewers across the country by answering questions via a website or, in the case of Bell ExpressVu customers, through the interactive capabilities of their set-top box via the remote control device. The popularity of quiz shows was that viewers could compete against the studio contestants - it made TV somewhat more participatory - cooler - and thereby more enjoyable. Shows such as American or Canadian Idol that employ a dial-a-vote format are successful as far as ratings go. But there is a significant difference in the effect. In the latter case, the Idol competition is akin to a sporting event in which fans root for their favourite competitor. Voting is merely another way to chant, "We're number one!" Here, the viewers themselves are the contestants on the quiz show - another McLuhan reversal in which the audience makes the show in a very real fashion. Very cool indeed.

I'm quoted in the article, and it's the first time that I've seen a good explanation of McLuhan's media temperature in the press.
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Posted 14:12 by Mark Federman permanent link
More Voices - This Time From America

Over at Voices Without Votes, the project organized by McLuhan Fellow Peter Deitz in which the world can write a letter to America, there is an interesting response from an Amerian. Nathan Ham writes,

Should America's 280 million people have the chance to vote in Canada (which has a population of 32 million) because its liberal immigration policies make it an easy point from which terrorists try to cross into the US? Or how about Mexico? Should Americans be able to vote there to put in place leaders that will reform the economy, removing the economic reasons that motivate illegal immigrants?

Do random citizens of the world really want me to play a role in determining their domestic policies? I'm sure that most Europeans wouldn't like what I would choose for them, and there's really no reason I should have a voice. I think that the world has a pretty damned fine arrangement on who gets to vote for whom.

Moreover, Ham legitimately offers this challenge to the rest of the world: "My main problem is that non-U.S. citizens don't want to assume the mantle of responsibility that comes with being a US citizen."

A good question that assumes a very specific ground of the span of governance: Mr. Ham's position is that each country's business is a matter for the citizens of that country alone. While I think even Mr. Ham would tend to agree that this does not apply absolutely in matters of foreign policy, is it absolutely true in all matters of social or fiscal policy? Is there some international ground upon which we all stand in these matters, for which an international conversation might prove useful? Both Americans and non-Americans can weigh-in on these issues at the Voices '04 site. And watch for an upcoming conversation and poll to be conducted jointly by Voices '04 and The World Votes that asks each party to consider the ground of the other.

And speaking of America talking to the world, Air America - left-wing talk radio - launched yesterday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland and (soon) San Francisco as well as on the web. I've been listening to The O'Franken Factor with political comedian Al Franken and veteran NPR host Katherine Lanpher. Wicked stuff!
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