Awkward but full of awesome power
I turned 30 earlier this year and I'm already old enough to feel digitally disabled. Compared, that is, to these up and coming humanoids that appear at the University as freshmen already packaged into local power collectives. Their bodies braille their way across campus while they engage the social information world through their cell phones. In our program, it can feel as though we are clumsily cleaning the house before an important guest arrives. Or rather, trying to hastily finish a bathroom remodel before we sell the house. The next occupant is the teenage civilization of today's digital society. They're the ones who can actually use this stuff, and in just a few years they'll be able to vote and dance all night long too.
This was on the xpresso blog at http://xpresso.blogsome.com/2006/10/23/21st-century-media-kids/. It is an excerpt from an article entitled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. It is by Henry Jenkins.
According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt &
Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly onethird
of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases, these
teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.
So these gangly awkward bands of roving teens already assemble into participatory cultures, eh? Well, good for us for trying to build architectures of deliberative participation (phrase donated by deliberative democracy bullshit generator 2.0) into environmental politics at Lake Tahoe. I think the folks whom would be the most likely to use our website and add meaningfully to it may be MySpacers and weird metro climbers who show up at the crag and play Dave Matthews from their collapsible ipod/speaker combination. They can use buttons and text, they can cut records and make movies and still look dim and lazy. We might want to talk to some young undergraduates to get some pragmatic digital networking advice, and some guidelines for how to engage the youth who will be coming online to vote in the near future. They come as a network and they will probably turn into a lint trap. But maybe not. Let's be ready for the best in case things don't go rather poorly.
I had more, but then I started staring off at some undefined point in space for what seemed like forever.
Designing our Web site
Gerry McGovern is an Irish Web consultant who writes a
weekly column, among other things. His most recent column is about what makes a Web site successful. His point is that sites that win design awards are often the opposite of what makes a site successful for a customer:
"The Web is a functional, practical place. A great website drives the customer to act. It uses clear, substantial language, rather than clever, meaningless words. To quote David Ogilvy again: "When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.' I'm with Demosthenes."
The shiny surface wins awards. Real substance wins customers."
Besides our primary projects, what else do we need to include in our new Web site to make it useful to citizens at Tahoe? What combination of activities will be so compelling they will want to visit it again and again? Or, what do the projects need to include to stand on their own as compelling action?
Improve Your Newspaper!
Jason Kottke writes a fantastic blog that all of us should be reading. I found this article through him and feel like if I didn't pass it along, I'd be doing the cohort a disservice. So
read it. And be sure that you steer clear of Frank if you decide to talk about it.
The Long Zoom
A good story in The New York Times Sunday magazine today called "
The Long Zoom" described a new game that
Will Wright (creator of Sims, among other games) is working on called Spore. It allows users to create an entire universe, building through six different spatial scales: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization, and space.
The game allows users to understand how dynamics change depending on the scale of the system they are creating. As we work to conceive of journalism as something created at the tribe or city level (to use Spore scale) rather than solely on the scale of creatures, this different perspective may enable us to see new ways to combine and change old practices.
The author of the story (Steven Johnson) begins by describing how each age has distinct "ways of seeing." He writes:
Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.
We're trying to figure out what "the long zoom" looks like for journalism, for Lake Tahoe, for our own projects. I think it's a powerful "way of seeing" that has great potential for innovation...and in the meantime, we can experience what it means to live in "endless complexity."
Are newspapers doomed?
Michael Kinsley, the
now infamous former editor for the LA Times offers
this perspective on the future of newspapers. On the surface it sounds a bit like sour grapes, but he does have a few solid points in there. Like this one:
The "me to you" model of news gathering--a professional reporter, attuned to the fine distinctions between "off the record" and "deep background," prizing factual accuracy in the narrowest sense--may well give way to some kind of "us to us" communitarian arrangement of the sort that thrives on the Internet.
He also makes the same typical mistakes that big media-types tend to make: that all bloggers are the same - navel gazing morons who talk about their own personal hygiene and whatever else suits them. Good bloggers may not be smacking him in the face, but shouldn't a seasoned vet like him be able to distinguish?
Does reading news online narrow the perspective of users?
At Langdon Winner's talk this evening, Frank asked whether the Internet might not be a narrowing, undemocratic influence because it enables people to encounter only the ideas that they already support. He and Langdon discussed the use of personalized, "mynews" type sites that Langdon says prevent the kind of serendiptious encounters with the local community that readers of newspapers regularly encounter.
It's an important question that we'll continue to grapple with in our program. Even our conversation about the mytahoe.com vs. ourtahoe.com is a variation of this concern.
The exchange reminded me of a debate crystallized in Cass Sunstein's book
republic.com. James Fallows wrote a
review of Sunstein's book in The New York Review of Books in 2002. I thought he made some important arguments when considering the evils of the "Daily Me" as Sunstein referred to it:
The filtering available on Internet sites is primitive compared to the filters, cushions, and blinders that surround us the rest of the time. The patterns Sunstein warns about—a lack of shared experience and the balkanization of Americans according to class, region, religion, and ethnicity—are real and worrisome enough. But the Internet is a trivial source of the problem— let's say one thousandth as important as the educational system, from school districts with their unequal funding to the faulty system of college admissions. Or residential patterns. Or who marries whom. Or tax policy. Or the existing broadcast media, which let you drive coast to coast listening to nothing but right-wing talk radio or NPR. Or cable TV, with one channel showing only bass fishermen and another showing only success-motivation seminars. Or patterns of commuting, which have evolved from buses to cars, and remove people from accidental contact with others. You could un-invent the Internet and still have every problem Sunstein fears.
Fallows goes on to talk about the nature of using the Internet -- how often one thing leads to another leads to another:
Compared with most other indoor activities, time with the Internet is less filtered, more open-ended, more likely to lead to surprises. If you read a book or magazine, you usually keep reading. If you watch a video, you watch. But if you start looking up information on Web sites, you almost never end up where you expected. There's a link to something you'd never heard of before, some news you hadn't known was interesting. It's not the same as walking to a new part of town, but it's a lot more surprising than listening to the radio. The feeling is similar to that of going through library stacks—if there were no dust and you could instantly zoom from floor to floor.
Perhaps we can think of ways to test this question in our own work...looking at traffic statistics on our Web projects and by talking to people about their on and offline patterns of conversation and information.
Awards for innovative journalism
The Institute for Interactive Journalism announced the
2006 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism this week. A site called
Global Voices Online won $10,000. It's a "a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School." The
Twin Cities Daily Planet won a $1,000 Wild Card award for helping many fragmented city groups connect. Six other projects won awards, and a number of other interesting projects were nominated (scroll to the bottom of
this page for links to various categories of entries.)
