Posted 23:21 by Mark Federman permanent link
Prozac for Techno-Utopian Depression

My friend Adam Greenfield is having a case of post-nuptial angst, methinks. Actually, that's rather unfair, and a cheap shot. What he is having is a bad case of post-techno-utopian depression. With a considerable tone of despair, he writes, "Is the planet as a whole detectably better-off in the wake of a decade of decentralized, low-cost-of-entry information availability? Are we better informed, less superstitious, more open-minded, more curious, stronger, less afraid? Do we make better choices? I think an honest appraisal would have to conclude that the answer to all of those questions is "no." Of course, in many ways the jury is still out, and the verdict may not be fully in for a century or two (if there's anyone sentient around to hear it). And there lies the seed of my present unhappiness with technology and design: if this truly pervasive and liberating tool cannot improve the lot of our species in any lasting, meaningful sense, how much less can a new PDA, a new phone/watch/camera, a new electric scooter?"

Anne Galloway got to this story before I did and garnered a fair amount of comments on the subject. And many people wrote to Adam giving him a dose of both realism and encouragement. I'll choose to go back to, if not first principles, at least to the one person who gave us many of the principles by which we can actually understand and measure the effects of instantaneous communications: And I really don't have to name him by name, right people?

The effects of what we now know as the Internet are well documented throughout his life's work, and in particular, in his classic Understanding Media, originally published in 1964. (And did I mention that our summer reading series on UM begins Wednesday, July 9 at 7 p.m.? All are welcome; see our home page for details.) In a nutshell, the Internet structurally reverses the societal and cultural effects that our literate nature imposed on us over the past almost-three centuries. Our corporate structures have changed, and with it, the nature of work; Geographic boundaries matter less and less, both for companies and countries; time is losing its meaning and so too are the nature of monuments and our experience of history and tradition; we cannot ignore what happens elsewhere in the world, both for good and for ill; the structure of thought is changing, especially among people who do not remember a time before internetworked computers and instantaneous communications. This last point is perhaps the most significant for the future, as it will lead to the complete restructuring of education, government and corporations.

None of these changes are instantly noticeable unless one learns how to notice (and this course does compress and travel in case your institution is interested…) For the majority of society, however, noticing the real effects of change requires the passage of time before they become plainly obvious.
But if we stop to think about the overall effects of being connected, one to the other, and eliminate our usual focus on what we specifically use the Internet for, we can begin to realize the real effects of connectedness: The world moves towards becoming one common experience for all mankind, a gestalt that is continually presented as a unified image to the mind. This is not necessarily a good thing. It is, rather, quite a frightening prospect - and growing increasingly more frightening by the day. But in doing so, it presents the challenge and opportunity to restructure our patterns of behaviour and thought and valuation so as to ultimately be able to make the right choices about the world that we jointly create. And this, most certainly, will make us collectively better off as we pass through this generational nexus of humanity.
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Posted 15:47 by Mark Federman permanent link
Music Pirates and the Obsolescence of the RIAA

The move by the RIAA to launch lawsuits against individual music sharers - pirates in their view - is an interesting one. The thinking is that the action will "deter huge numbers of file-traders by prosecuting the most egregious pirates." As well, "the RIAA knows that if it can scare away file-sharers in droves, it will also succeed in undermining the P2P networks ... If, tomorrow, thousands of users each move hundreds or thousands of files from their shared folder to a private part of their hard drive, the network will become less functional."

Based on the RIAA's logic, once file sharing is gone, their revenue should return as music lovers have few choices but to revert to CDs, or patronize pay-as-you-download services like Apple's iTunes and similar. But, of course, reversals and obsolescenses don't exactly work that way.

Napster, KaZaa, Morpheus and their ilk obsolesced the RIAA and the big recording companies. They revealed several of the hidden grounds of the music industry, namely that many artists are typically not being fairly compensated, that the recording industry is not in the music business, but rather in the aluminum-and-plastic disk business, and that there is a tendency for music users, like users of other information, to want a high degree of portability, availability and platform independence. "I want my music when I want it, where I want it, delivered how I want it."

Musicians new to the business will grow up in an environment in which peer-to-peer sharing is a way of life, and the Internet is a place of conversation, building reputation and sharing experiences. It has little to do with shipping plastic disks, AOL notwithstanding. The RIAA is obsolete; aside from its well-funded ability to launch lawsuits, its influence and domination of music is over. Smaller, non-affiliated labels and musicians dealing directly with their fans via a reputation-based system of linked referrals - with a commercial facilitator to ensure that the artists do, in actuality, receive their due - is the new medium. The music pirates will become the music Queen's Navy.
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Posted 11:20 by Mark Federman permanent link
Movie Makers Reversal?

USA Today has a telling story about how movie fans have the muscle to shape the movie. And it came to the public's attention over the colour of a pair of pants. We all remember when fan-run movie sites were the targets of cease and desist orders from the studios and the MPAA. Now, movie-makers' attitudes seem to be changing. "I used to hate the Internet," [Marvel Studios head Avi] Arad says. "I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners."

Perhaps even more revealing about the reversal of attitude is Universal's response to illicit copies of The Hulk movie being posted online. "Universal Pictures, which distributes The Hulk, was quick to condemn the piracy but careful not to alienate audiences. The studio spent more time emphasizing that the bootleg was a rough, unedited version than it did threatening to prosecute."

The more that the entertainment industry learns from retrievals, the better. As we have noted previously, EVERY new technology that applies to the entertainment industry is first dismissed and ridiculed as a passing fad, then denigrated as the herald of doom to the industry, and finally embraced as the industry realizes that the new technology has the potential to increase its revenue by yet another order of magnitude.
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Posted 19:30 by Mark Federman permanent link
Lawrence Lessig and the Rise of the Commons

Lawrence Lessig has made major progress in his drive to revitalize the commons. He successfully lobbied some major support in the U.S. Congress to support the so-called Eldred Act that sets a low, but explicit bar for copyright extension beyond 50 years. The recently passed Copyright Extension Term Act carried on the dubious tradition of extending copyright for everything relatively indefinitely. The problem is that no work - even those in which there is no current commercial interest - ever would find its way into the "public commons." The effect of this is to stifle ongoing creativity and innovation by preventing people from building upon the past, even when the original creator is dead, or has lost interest. In this way, copyright reverses from encouraging creativity to preventing creativity.

Disney was one of the proponents behind the CETA (or "Sonny Bono Act"). Ironically, Disney has made hundreds of millions of dollars from their ability to create derived works from the public domain - just think of the Disney classics like Cinderella, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, the Jungle Book and others.

Taken a little farther, we are at a point in human history in which we have to question the role of our lock-down protection of so-called intellectual property. If you are reading this online - and how else would you be reading it - you have to thank those who refused to lock-down their work, since most of what runs the Internet today has been built upon non-locked-down - or open source - intellectual property.
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Posted 14:35 by Mark Federman permanent link
We've Got XML!

We were previously using the now defunct RSSify service to generate our XML feed for all you newsreader-lovers out there. Since its demise, I've been meaning to get around to providing an RSS feed for our blog, especially since we lost about a third of our readers without it. Just link to the orange block
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Posted 11:38 by Mark Federman permanent link
Fatherly Pride

I rarely, if ever, talk about my personal life in this blog, but I'm confident that my regular readers will allow me the indulgence of a little fatherly pride this morning. Last evening, I enjoyed the enormous pleasure of attending my daughter's graduation ceremonies from middle school which, in our school system, marks the end of primary education and the transition to the final four years of high school. Not only did my daughter finish with high honours; she also won the school's awards for academic excellence in English, Design and Technology, and Music. You did a great job, sweetie! We are all so tremendously proud of you. Next September, she begins at the renowned Etobicoke School of the Arts.
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Posted 17:31 by Mark Federman permanent link


I have almost recovered from the intensity of the three days of ideaCity - not to mention the Tequila shooters at the closing party! There has been time to reflect on some of the overarching themes that emerged during the intellectual marathon and, given the calibre of both presenters and attendees, some of the overarching realities that are affecting our world:

That we are at a nexus in our modern, Western culture; that the full force and implications of "global village" is going to be significantly felt within this current generation; that the first generation of youth who have grown up never not knowing an Internet - and other instantaneous, multi-way communications - indeed have their brains wired differently than do we, the television generation; that we are rapidly disintegrating - and I choose that word very carefully - not only the biosphere, but the ethnosphere and psychosphere as well.

What is particularly telling is that the technologies that have created global village conditions - particularly among youth who have never known any other environment - are integrative in nature. As McLuhan says, and Derrick loves to remind us, "electricity put Humpty Dumpty back together again," re-integrating what had been fragmented by a book culture and industrial mechanization. But at the same time, the television generation - we boomers - have adopted the old ways of our parents and grandparents. We are now imposing dis-integrating, that is fragmenting, ways upon our physical world, upon thousands of endangered cultures within it, and upon our own ability to think, create, innovate and develop. Humpty Dumpty may be back together again, but he is a bland, homogenized egg product, with little resemblance to what made him distinct, unique and important. All the king's horses and all the king's men did their work all too well.

But What is the Message? - what are the effects - of the disintegration of vital aspects of our human existence on this earth, coupled with a seemingly relentless monoculture that threatens to take its place? The fact of monoculture means that we continue to lose the ability to adapt to the perceived threats to our way of life. We thus are moved to protect our comfortable status quo by erecting strong walls. But more than that, we are moved to eradicate those conceived threats - in other words, anything and everything that is not "us." Thus, we live in a well-choreographed state of fear that, if not imposed by Western governments, it is at the very least fed and encouraged by them. "Government loves a plague," post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote, and among many constituencies, the populace understands neither Foucault's warning paradox, nor the grim consequences, blithely wrapped in a security blanket of "nothing to hide; nothing to fear."

But we do have much to fear: I fear the extinction of creativity and innovation. I fear the eradication of indigenous knowledge and ancient wisdom. I fear a dictatorship of cultural banality and fundamentalist Christian values, and the concomitant marginalization of "the other." Mostly, I fear the end of thought and insight and awareness.

The main idea behind ideaCity is to provide a venue in which those to whom the many turn for new thinking can become aware of what is happening beyond the horizon of their own, admittedly limited, vision. This, Moses Znaimer accomplishes in spades, a feat for which he is to be heartily congratulated. The responsibility now rests with the attendees to map what is beyond the horizon and appropriately set their respective courses.
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Posted 17:30 by Mark Federman permanent link


An incredible morning with a powerhouse of speakers - Marvin Minsky, Lee Smolin, John Perry Barlow and Jaran Lanier - and a common theme of the nature of how smart we are, as opposed to how smart we think we are. Each expressed this theme in his own inimitable fashion. Lanier described how cuttlefish have the ability to both morph their shape and change their colour via cells that are individually controlled. Essentially the creature is a bit-mapped display with consciousness and seeming sentience. Using these adaptations, Lanier speculated how our next evolution of communications may be "post-symbolic," in which we shed the cognitive limitations imposed by our phonetic and sequential alphabet to find other mechanisms with which to communicate the metaphors that transform our minds. This may be the role of the virtual reality world that Lanier explores. He suggests, though, that the ultimate objective may be to "create things of such beauty that they distract us from the mass suicide of our own planet.

Lee Smolin had another take on this theme of how smart we think we are. He traced the history of the philosophy of science (did you get that?!) and proposed an ethic for the modern scientist. First, forget about the traditional scientific method that is rooted in the continuity of 18th century theology. Rather, all scientists should follow these principles: Argue in good faith from shared evidence to reach a shared conclusion. Honestly report the results of all experimentation, explorations and investigations. Develop a community of what Smolin calls "craftspeople" to root out errors in the arguments from the shared evidence. And recognize that anyone who can master a craft can participate in the community to develop an agreement in good faith.

Then came Barlow. Iconically, he was dressed in black, with a T-shirt that displayed the "new logo" of America: a skull with two circles on either side of the head in the form of a particular mouse whose copyright has just been extended... It is Barlow's contention that we have allowed the ecology of our thoughts to become polluted. An alien lifeform, that we know as corporations, are competing in our ecology and have seized the American mind to create - or recreate - an environment and culture for the sole purpose of allowing its own species to survive, compete and dominate the environment. Because of the mass media of these corporations, something terrible has happened to our "psychic ecology." For the human species and culture to ultimately win this desparate battle, we must be mindful of the ecology of our minds, and the fragility of that environment. While the power of the corporate species is a mass-media that is growing ever stonger in its few to many broadcast ability, our hope is in the reversal: A new broadcast medium that provides a many to few capability, where the collective strength of the human psychic ecology can ultimately succeed in overcoming the alien species. Heady stuff... and we should expect nothing less from John Perry Barlow.

He also applauded Canadians: "Canada has recently demonstrated its commitment to being a free society in its recent decisions to legalize gay marriages and decriminalize marijuana. It is Canada's opportunity to represent freedom in the world, as the United States used to be."

Freedom was the theme of the history of the United States, but now, many people have doubts. The afternoon session featured historians Margaret MacMillan and Erna Paris. Naturally, the famous Santayana quote came up: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." However, many people have commented that history is indeed being repeated by the United States in their reactionary and imperialist policies, both domestically and internationally. We must be mindful of the fact that, America in reversal means that those who repeat history are doomed to learn it..."
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Posted 11:28 by Mark Federman permanent link


This morning's pairing of explorers and adventurers Wade Davis and Bruce Kirkby were at once awe-inspiring, inspirational and frightening. Awe-inspiring through the remarkable images of indigenous peoples and wilderness environments that each shared with us. Frightening with their warning of the seemingly inexorable and systematic elimination of the biosphere and, in Davis's words, the ethno-sphere that are the source of our morning's wonderment.

We condemn genocide and decry environmental loss. However, little is said about "ethnocide." In fact, ethnocide - the systematic and planned destruction of cultural diversity among aboriginal peoples throughout the world - is encouraged and actively supported by almost every developed nation. A key indicator of ethnocide worldwide is the loss of language. Within one generation, the world has lost half of the more than 6,000 languages that existed. With the mass extinction of 3,000 unique languages, our world has lost 3,000 unique cultures that can no longer be communicated among what are primarily oral societies with rich oral traditions and technologies.

As Davis pointed out, technology and change do not destroy a culture. Over the centuries, so-called primitive cultures have responded to changes and developed techologies to accommodate changes in climate, innovations and their often nomadic lives. What accelerates ethnocide is industrialization, disease and power, almost always introduced from the West, or from newly industrialized emerging nations who have learned from the West.

Biodiversity is the key to species survival around our planet. Ethnodiversity is its analogue for the survival, and continued expansion, of human culture. When we think of our affluence, we should bear in mind Wade Davis's definition of currency: "Currency is a measure of the social relations beween people." Based on this consideration, who is truly wealthy? When we are presented daily with the ambitions of some national regimes to export our Western way of life, and to impose our democracy, education, standards of living and other trappings on aboriginal peoples, we must pause and reflect on one simple reality: Our lifestyle has existed for only about 300 years. Theirs has survived nearly 10,000 years. Who can learn from whom?
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Posted 08:32 by Mark Federman permanent link


Can you define happiness? Or perhaps more importantly, can you measure happiness in order to define what are the most important factors in creating happiness among a large population? This is the work of Ruut Veenhoven, yesterday afternoon's last speaker. Veenhoven found that Satisfaction with one's life is the most significant determinant of happiness, and that has a lot to do with one's ability to make the environment - their personal environment - livable and "life-able." In other words, we become most satisfied if we are able to adapt to our environment in such a way that we can, as the cliché goes, have a life. Detailed surveys in countries around the world were conducted, and the results went through extensive statistical analysis in an attempt to explain and understand what makes us happy. Apparently 75% of the variation in people's happiness can be attributed to a few factors in a society: material affluence (although some of the happiest people are in relatively poor countries), freedom and rule of law. Apparently the Russians are the least happy nation on earth, with their happiness plunging shortly after the fall of the USSR. The full research database and details are in the The World Database of Happiness.
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Posted 17:25 by Mark Federman permanent link


This afternoon's most amazing session was given by Alexander Tsiaras of Anatomical Travelogue Inc.. They have developed medical imaging capabilities that are truly remarkable - unlike anything I, and judging by the response, the rest of the audience, have ever seen before. Using conventional ultrasound and sophisticated algorithms, they have the ability to see "through" various tissues and fluids to image specific organs and skeletal structure. Then, by applying colouration algorithms, they are able to provide fully coloured and differentiated imagery of what normally appears as cloudy shades of grey.

But then, they do something that takes their work from impressive to stunning: They animate the images. We were treated to an absolutely gorgeous movie of insemination, conception, embryonic and fetal development and birth, all done through the magic of Anatomical Travelogue. They have extended this work to imagery on adult bodies in motion for everything from pre-surgical investigations, to patient education, to health education and true colour commentary for the last Superbowl.
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Posted 14:01 by Mark Federman permanent link


One of the most enlightening sessions this morning was the talk by Pamela Wallin, once a journalist and now Canada's Counsel-General in New York. She highlighted the now exceedingly evident differences between Americans and Canadians in the wake of their induced, and internally reinforced, fear. Wallin explained the corporate reluctance to send people to Toronto - the litigious nature of Americans result in an avoidance of risk, in this case, the potential risk that an American employee sent to Toronto may return and infect others with the dreaded SARS. (The fact that no one outside of a health care facility has contracted SARS is besides the point. Never let the facts interfere with a good fear.)

Where once Americans were rugged individualists, risk takers who opened new frontiers, now they are a nation paralyzed by fear. What then happens when the fear expands to diminish economic risk-taking, erecting citadel walls as opposed to monuments dedicated to capitalism? Wallin offered this thought provoking paradoxical question: How do you stop the spiral of fear when you declare war against an unsolvable problem?

What is clear to me is that the complete failure of the war against drugs, for instance, and its resultant devastation among America's inner cities and local economies, presages an analogous possible future that is truly terrifying. The war against terrorism, and its resultant paralysis (and reversal) of all that had made America one of the world's great nation, may ultimately lead to an irreversal decline in America's ability to survive in an increasingly open world.
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Posted 11:59 by Mark Federman permanent link


The second morning at ideaCity started off with a wonderful concert by cellist Ofra Harnoy, who treated us to the warm and resonant sound of a 300 year old cello. She was followed by McLuhan Program Director, Derrick de Kerckhove, who presented our vision of Global Village Square to an enthusiastic audience. "The idea of the global village square," said Derrick, "may not change the world, but it may change the idea we have of the world." GVS is a series of audio and video portals, located in public places in cities throughout the world, that allow ordinary people to interact with one another without the limitations of geography or requiring any special knowledge or equipment. The first test of GVS will be to celebrate the twinning of Toronto with Milan in early July.

More later. The fanfare that calls us for the next session is sounding...
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Posted 08:32 by Mark Federman permanent link


One of the most interesting comments that came out of yesterday's afternoon sessions was from Dov Charney, CEO of American Apparel. In Charney's words, their company makes "100% sweatshop free" T-shirts and other clothing. Located in poverty-ridden East Los Angeles, American Apparel pays a decent living wage, and, unlike a typical clothing factory, applies direct collaboration among the work team in designing and manufacturing its products - a telling reversal of the industrial age, fragmented manufacturing processes that we have come to know and certainly not love. However, the interesting comment had little to do with Charney's business directly. It was a wake-up call to people of my generation. Charney said, "This is the 60s all over again, and we are leading a revolution against the boomer establishment."

What television did to a generation in the 1960s, instantaneous communications via the Internet, SMS, and other similar modes of connecting are doing to the youth generation today. It is a reversal, boys and girls, and reversals bring evolution to a new way of organizing our world. Dov's observation of the retrieval is bang on. As John Perry Barlow said to me as we went to the first night ideaCity party, "Shit. What have we become?" And Barlow, for one, knows the power of youth revolution.
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Posted 16:51 by Mark Federman permanent link


Marc Emery is the President of the BC Marijuana Party, and an engaging speaker. He described the incredible incarceration rate of people for marijuana offences throughout North America - 90,000 arrests leading to 30,000 convictions per year. Marc described almost unbelievable injustices, often in the southern United States, all in the name of the war on drugs. But what was most fascinating about Marc's talk was his discussion of the work he is doing in drug treatment with iboga, a root that is indigenous to Gabon. Although it induces hallucinogenic effects during the initial treatment, in a period of between 2 and 14 days, the long-term substance abuser is completely cured, both from the physical addiction and the psychological addiction. He has so far treated 23 people, all successfully. It is a truly amazing breakthrough for the chronically addicted.
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Posted 11:13 by Mark Federman permanent link


Phil Nuytten was up next. In his own words, Phil is an "armourer," that is, he supplies the undersea devices, submersibles and suits that aquanauts use to establish a human presence deep below the surface of our interconnected oceans. He described his ambitious vision: Ventbase Alpha, an underwater human habitat, pressured at one atmosphere - like our normal atmospheric conditions - in which people would live and work. The habitat would be established near the deep water heat vents. Superheated minerals are dissolved in the effluent from these vents. The moment they hit the cold, deep water, the minerals condense and precipitate, looking like plumes of black smoke. These minerals can be harvested, without doing any damage whatsoever to the undersea ecology, and sent up to the surface for refining and industrial use. The heat from these vents supply more than enough energy to power the habitat, making it truly one of the few environmentally responsible industrial installations that humans have ever conceived.
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Posted 11:08 by Mark Federman permanent link


Here we are at ideaCity 03, the intellectual and cultural love-in organized by media visionary Moses Znaimer. Through the three days of over 50 presenters and three fabulous parties, I'll try to capture some of the more interesting and exciting ideas that come from the fascinating people I meet.

This morning's theme was exploration, both of the heavens and beneath the sea. Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of the legendary Jacques Cousteau, kicked off the morning with an impassioned plea for the preservation of the major element that connects us all - our shared planetary water systems. He told a story about a panel that he attended in Johannesburg, sponsored by Unicef. Towards the end of the panel, a 13-year old boy came forward and told the panelists that he had listened to a lot of talk about what should be done, but had seen very little that was actually being done. His point? If the leaders don't get busy, the kids will do it for them. He then proceeded to leave them his email address, in case anyone wanted to contact him! Cousteau then related his recent experience in Washington, D.C. during which he discovered the legislators were completely unaware - not only of the pending tragedy facing our world's oceans, but of the mechanisms and technologies by which they and we can interconnect with one another. Senators and congressmen and women were, quite literally, disconnected from the rest of the world. Cousteau advocated for direct democracy and direct voice, using telecommunications technologies for people to have a direct voice to their legislators. If I can buttonhole Cousteau, I'll have to point him to the Emergent Democracy initiative!
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Posted 23:50 by Mark Federman permanent link


A defining moment in the history of modern mass-media was the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate, the first such encounter between U.S. presidential candidates to be televised. Marshall McLuhan noted that, among people who only listened to the debate on radio, the common opinion was that Nixon won. But the nascent medium of television carried the day; Nixon was just not a television person and the telegenic Kennedy carried the election in a narrow result. Partisan politics has never been the same since.

We may be witnessing another, analogous nexus in politics - one whose influence has already been seen in South Korea, and before that, the Philippines. Vermont Governor Howard Dean is running for President in the 2004 election. While this fact, in and of itself, is not particularly interesting, what brings this candidate to our notice is his extensive use of community-creating technologies. All candidates have websites - that's not news. Dean, however, is using a weblog to talk directly to, and with, his constituency. He is using texting to allow his campaign workers to reach his constituency. And he is using Meetup to organize local meetings in cities across America. This is one candidate who is paying attention to the sea change occurring, particularly among potential voters who typically feel uninvolved in, and alienated by, partisan party politics. It will be tremendously interesting to observe the early primaries. The question of whether the Dean campaign can reach and engage disaffected voters using technologies that can create emergent communities may mark another milestone in the alliance between politics and mass-media.
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Posted 21:07 by Mark Federman permanent link


Last evening at the Coach House, we were treated to a wonderful philosophical smorgasbord by McLuhan Fellow Gianluca Baccanico. Gianluca explored the notion of borders and totems throughout our society, and most particularly in the world we are creating in digiSpace. The discussion spanned a great variety of topics, but two thoughts in particular captured my attention.

Gianluca reminded us that in Dante's Inferno, each type of sinner is punished in a "community" that is especially designed for the type of sin committed in life. Noting that the letter "f" can easily be mistaken for the letter "t" (especially when it is inverted), and the letter "o" can be broken to become the letter "e," Inferno easily morphs into Interne…. This, of course, raises the question about whether our digiSelves create their own levels of Hell to which we are banished as members of some online communities. Let's face it, sometimes the Slashdot crowd resembles the fifth circle of Hell: "They spend their time here either tearing at each other in anger or gurgling in the black mud below. This level contains all those who lived crude, vindictive lives."

In terms of community, Gianluca notes that societies typically erect totems that serve at least as a symbolic, and sometimes real, gathering point. While Derrick de Kerckhove pointed out that traditionally, totems are phallic in nature - and today's architectural totems, like the Empire State Building, Tour d'Eiffel, and the CN Tower obviously so - we have to consider what constructions or artifacts comprise the totems in digiSpace. Gianluca suggested that the Internet itself has become the totem for the globe; that in eliminating geographic boundaries between people and enabling connections that serve to transcend many cultural and societal barriers, cyber-places are the community gathering points. What is interesting to me is that totems in digiSpace often seem to be emergent in nature, and social software seem to enable that emergence. Our totems are occasionally virtual community gathering points, like the relatively new MarginWalker; occasionally they are the dynamic collections of blogs that connect one to another in conversation via comments, permalinks and trackbacks. But, of course, there is a substantive difference between places where we just decide to get together, or the creation of one of Rheingold's Smart Mobs, and a place that becomes an iconic community landmark. So Gianluca's question remains: What is the nature of digiSpace's new totems?
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Posted 19:28 by Mark Federman permanent link


One of the most difficult things for a business manager to do is to figure out precisely what business he or she is actually in. Most people know what their nominal business is, but understanding what the dominant messages are is often more tricky. Most of the time, an entrepreneur becomes too caught up in their own marketing and image to be able to clearly understand their own environmental ground. I bring this up because last evening, I was at the opening reception for a new business whose partners both understand, and make no bones about, the true nature of their business.

The Art Company looks and feels like a gallery, and is located on the very hip and happening Queen Street West gallery scene in Toronto. But one of the owners, my long time friend Arnold Wytenburg, explained his business to me this way: "We're not a gallery. We're a retail store." Arnold went on to describe how, for artists who are well established in the major galleries and collections throughout Canada, it becomes very expensive to show some of their now less expensive works. Many of them are in storage, simply because a traditional gallery who work sells the work of a given artist for $30,000 cannot afford to show and sell his $3,000 pieces. Couple this with the fact that many younger collectors who might want to purchase pieces in the $3,000 range aren't really sure about incurring the financial risk of an unknown artist. The Art Company connects these two opportunities in the retail market, by making less expensive works of proven artists available to the relatively new fine art collector. At the very least, the art retains its value, buoyed by the established reputation of the artists. The artists get to move their lower priced pieces from their basements to the walls of appreciative audiences. And, judging by what was on display at the opening, the proprietors of this particular retail store have fabulous taste when it comes to selecting their merchandise. This is one case in which, "I can get it for you retail" makes perfect sense.

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Posted 11:54 by Mark Federman permanent link


So the A-List Bloggers club has convened its next get-together in the form of the Weblog Business Strategies conference, to which I referred yesterday. The debate about Tony Perkins and his AlwaysOn venture continues.

I went to peruse AlwaysOn just to see what the hubbub was about. To my eye, whether or not AlwaysOn is a blog is not the salient issue. What AlwaysOn does demonstrate is affirmation that bloggery represents to journalism what Napster/Morpheus/KaZaa/BitTorrent represent to the RIAA and MPAA - a disruption to what has been considered a stable and unassailable business model. I return to one of my favourite questions with which to challenge business people seeking McLuhan-flavoured advice - What business are you REALLY in?

I think it is by now fairly evident that the business of the traditional journalism and mass entertainment providers has been less about selling news, music or movies, and more about selling stained newsprint, advertisements and shiny acrylic and aluminum disks (and formerly, strips of rust-covered mylar).

Tony Perkins is indeed a smart entrepreneur. He lived through the demise of his newsprint-and-advertising (both with glossy finishes) business, and resurrected Red Herring as AlwaysOn, taking the hottest memes and spinning them into a business whose content looks almost identical to that of the now chopped Herring.

McLuhan said, "If the medium is the message, the user is the content." In this case, the question of whether AlwaysOn is a blog is truly irrelevant; it is pure entrepreneur, pure Perkins.
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Posted 21:42 by Mark Federman permanent link


And now, as a public service, we refer you to the Simple Guide to the A-List Bloggers. (Thanks, Ben!)
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Posted 18:47 by Mark Federman permanent link


I enjoy reading David Weinberger's blog because I respect David's approach (mostly) to the issues of the Internet as they relate to our physical lives. Over the past couple of weeks, David has been live-blogging at several blog-themed conferences, the lastest of which is hosted by entrepreneur Tony Perkins of the late Red Herring magazine. In today's episode, blogged at a blogs for business conference, there is much ado about whether Perkins is co-opting the term blog. His latest business, AlwaysOn, is maybe a blog, maybe not, maybe a blog disguised as immersive advertising... it isn't clear to me. Blogs are being written about in the popular press, apparently appearing on sit-coms (although I haven't yet seen this myself), and even BusinessWeek has gotten into the act.

Does anyone else detect the distinct fragrance of a "blog bubble" - an overhyped phenomenon that is so hip and cool that it is everywhere dahling... According to the Laws of Media, becoming ubiquitous - a cliche - is one of the tell-tale signs of obsolescence. Oh, blogs aren't going away, but that isn't what obsolescence means. Obsolescence refers to the medium's loss of potency, of influence, of its dominant force. And that would be a shame indeed, since the potential for the mode of conversation enabled by blogs is indeed phenomenal.

However, like the Internet bubble - whose resounding pop allowed the Internet to recede into ground, and thereby begin to create and wreak its most potent effects - we may have to wait through the seemingly inevitable explosion and deflation of the now bloated blogosphere. Those who are left blogging may discover the hidden ground effects that, like my students have heard many times, will let them try to take over the world!
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Posted 00:26 by Mark Federman permanent link


One of the more interesting exercises in applying McLuhanistics to our world is doing the media analysis backwards. What do I mean by "backwards?" When we are learning to work the tetrads, we often take a medium and figure out its extension, reversal, obsolescence and retrieval effects or messages. But most of the time - in fact, according to McLuhan, all of the time - we observe the effects before the causes, that is, we perceive effects and only later can we identify and name the new medium from which the effects emerge. And it's awfully difficult sometimes to peg the tetrad quadrant of a newly observed effect.

Case in point is this article from United Press International that points out, surprisingly, that Jews are flooding back into Germany. In fact, more Jews are going to Germany than to any other country in the world, including Israel. More than half a million Jews lived in Germany before World War II; after the war, only 15,000 were left. By 1990, that number had crept up to only 33,000. But today, there are over 200,000 Jews who have made modern Germany their new home.

"Rabbi Carl Feit, a Talmudic scholar and cancer researcher at New York's Yeshiva University ... interpreted the Jews' return to Germany as "a fulfillment of a biblical spiritual theme -- the rebirth and rejuvenation for which there are many examples in history, where Jewish people in one part of the world or another have seemed to have been eclipsed only to reappear against all odds and common expectations." Feit added, "The biblical paradigm for this rebirth was the return of the Jews to Israel" from the Babylonian captivity in 516 B.C."

So is this a retrieval? Or is it a reversal? The latter would require an extension that had been pushed beyond its limit, indicating an evolution to a new form. The former suggests a new medium that extends something... the question is, what? Either way, today's Germany bears observing, not as an example of the "Old Europe" that the U.S. administration derides, but exemplary of something quite new, and perhaps quite ahead of the rest of the world.
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Posted 22:40 by Mark Federman permanent link


Friend Ben Hammersley has this interesting entry about the problem of leaving, or more precisely, the problem of one's digiSelf leaving. "As a journalist, I've set up trial accounts on all sorts of sites, blogging tools, online services and email lists - most of which remain unused after the first few days. I now find myself wanting to control my digital reach - I want to disappear from these sites, and in many cases it's proving very difficult indeed."

As it turns out, the digiSelf is a remarkably resilient and persistent beastie. The other problem is that digiSelves tend to be active when we real humans are not, tending to propagate through sold email lists, cross-postings and links, not to mention government, financial and other institutional databases.

What makes matters worse is the combination of persistence of the digiSelf and the ever-in-the-present perception of our experience of the Internet. I found myself losing a contract, for example, when one of my digital incarnations - now about 8 years old - misrepresented me as having a primary interest in one area of specialization, when I really have moved on over the ensuing 8 years. Many people have posted articles, opinions and other work over a long period of time, some of which no longer reflect the author's world- or life-view. However, when someone happens across that writing today, the message of the Internet-as-medium creates the effect that the writing is current and in the present. And like the cyber-elephant it is, the Internet never forgets.

A literate person will compare this with a series of books that one author may write over time that reflects an evolving mind. Of course books are a very different medium, and create a very different effect. Books capture time; Internet does away with it.
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Posted 16:44 by Mark Federman permanent link


Over at JOHO I noticed a reference to an interesting piece by Tristan Louis about the potential, and likely, future of the Microsoft / AOL-Time Warner settlement, and the revival of that old cliché, convergence. Louis's argument essentially is that if AOL-TW controls the production of the content - movies and music - and Microsoft controls access to that content via an integrated-with-the-operating-system browser and tight Digital Rights Management, MS/AOL-TW will be the only show in town... literally!

This future represents the reversal of some of the effects of Internet as content delivery mechanism that many are enjoying now via systems like KaZaa, and the considerably more fair Bit Torrent. Imagine AOL-TW's entire content production of music and video, only available via Windows Media Player, locked by Microsoft DRM, since that's where the majority of the market will live. Frightening!

McLuhan said, "There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." This is no time for "tube potatoes."
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Posted 16:04 by Mark Federman permanent link


One of my friends was perturbed recently over some corporate oneupsmanship within her company. My friend has the responsibility for maintaining a set of complex operational information, and making it available for marketing purposes. She takes great pride in her work, and is lauded as a "buck stops here" type of person throughout her company. Meanwhile, a marketing department elsewhere in the world has created a cool (not McLuhan cool, but "wow, man" cool) toy in Flash based on some of that operational information. They have received kudos for their toy, but not for its completeness or accuracy. They did not involve my friend, but want to scoop her information to improve their toy. To avoid this situation deteriorating into an ugly international turf war, my friend sought my advice, not to solve the problem, but to help her achieve awareness as to the complex dynamics at play.

Although I typically shun faddish clichés, it seemed as if that now-tired expression, "Knowledge Economy" might be an appropriate metaphor in this instance. In the Knowledge Economy that exists within the company, I wondered what the currency might be, that is, what is exchanged between different pockets of corporate culture, in other words, between the various tribes or fiefdoms that make up the company worldwide. To take the metaphor a bit further, I wondered how they had established or negotiated the currency exchange rate for their internal "foreign trade."

In some corporate cultures, sharing information is highly valued. The currency, or means by which value is measured and determined, is the amount that is shared. The person to whom the company turns for information, for instance, is a very wealthy person indeed in such a corporate society. Conversely, if the company is run with a psychology of "Knowledge is Power," that is he or she who has the knowledge has the power, knowledge hoarding tends to predominate. This is the Kingdom of the Expert, to whom all must pay their respect. Knowledge is seen as a non-renewable resource, and is portioned out with great care.

With global enterprises, it is often the case that the evolution of the local society, and its values, is different among different geographies. One's currency may be the amount of information shared, while the other might measure personal wealth by the size of a person's information stockpile. Imposed Knowledge Management initiatives, like tying personal compensation to the degree of participation and contribution in KM, are one way of ensuring compliance, if only malicious compliance. Sometimes, "non-tariff barriers" are constructed to nominally encourage knowledge sharing without actually having to do the sharing. Such mechanisms such as layers of management approval, or "passing it by legal," often do the trick. What then is needed is a CTO - no, not a Chief Technology Officer, but a Corporate Trade Organization within the enterprise, through which the various local cultures can be understood and appreciated, and perhaps most important, a fair exchange rate between the local knowledge currencies can be established.

Otherwise, global policies for global enterprises often lead to world wars.

Update: Consider this excerpt from Understanding Media: "The primitive or nonliterate use of money is especially enlightening, since it manifests an easy acceptance of stable products as media of communication. The nonliterate man can accept any staple as money ... and many products have acted as major shaping forces of community life in many cultures [including corporate cultures ...MF] When one of these staples becomes dominant as a social bond, it serves, also, as a store of value, and as a translator or exchanger of skills and tasks." (from the chapter on Money, The Poor Man's Credit Card.)
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Posted 17:35 by Mark Federman permanent link


The current United States administration views the United Nations and other multi-lateral organizations, like NATO, as irrelevant compared to forwarding its own interests in the face of opposition from its former staunch allies. What this has resulted in is the effective evisceration of these institutions, at least according to a recent international poll of over 15,000 people worldwide conducted by the Pew Research Center. "The figures show that the publics - the European public and our public - are feeling that the ties that have bound us together for the last 50 years are weakening," said Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. secretary of state and chair of the Pew Global Attitudes Project. "I see this as very serious."

Did the United States' policy of pre-emptive invasion create a more secure, or less secure, world? Is there more or less interest among emerging countries for Western-style democracies? "In fact, feelings are so intense in the Islamic world that Osama bin Laden was chosen by five Muslim publics - in Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority - as one of the three political leaders they would most trust to "do the right thing" in world affairs."

Not only does the world distrust America; Americans distrust the world, with Americans polled responding with a favourable impression of Germany and France down 50 percentage points compared to a similar poll done in February 2002. Faith in the United Nations' role in resolving international conflicts also fell dramatically in the current poll.

Why would any of this matter to an increasingly isolationist United States, with its apparent "we're strong enough, screw the world" attitude? We must remember that given the degree of interconnectedness among business and commercial interests, financial markets, and ordinary individuals who can be organized into a cohesive protest force almost on a moment's notice, being ostracized in the Global Village is akin to being shunned in a Mennonite or Quaker community. Today, no one country can afford to go alone without incurring considerable economic and social damage. And taking lessons from the Philippines and South Korea, in which instantaneous interconnections were significant contributors to the ousting of an old regime and its replacement with another, more responsive leadership, the U.S. Administration should sit up and take notice.

The sarcastic protest sign, "Regime change begins at home," reflects the opinions of a not insignificant populace across the United States. Perhaps it's also time to remember that democracy for the world sometimes means listening to the majority of the world.
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