Archive for September, 2007
Why the word still rules
I’m all about words. And so is the web. If Marshall McLuhan was still around, he’d say this is no coincidence.A while back, I wrote an article about the role of McLuhan’s literacy legacy in his media theory. I argued that his identity as an English professor was not merely a pitstop on the way to media gurudom but the core of his intellectual operating system.From his forecast of the collective unconscious and his understanding of media as extensions of our sensory apparatus to the problem of narcosis and the emergence of a neo-tribalism, he saw the shape of things to come through his academic rear view mirror. For McLuhan, our play with words - arguably the cornerstone of human cognition - offered the most clues about how we organised the world in our own image. These insights are especially prescient in our current technological moment, which is all about the word.
Worst practices v. your online identity
In January 2004 I read a post at Loic Le Meur’s old blog that changed my approach to online life and activity. He warned us to “build and check your virtual identity and online reputation or you will be in trouble.” This post inspired me to establish a more strategic online identity and maintain some consistency in my selected metadata (stated background, interests, visual media) and contact networks. Given recent worst practices in new social networking services, Le Meur’s advice couldn’t be more prophetic.
Facebook’s recent - and obnoxious move - to allow open searching of FB profiles outside of FB should be read as a warning sign of things to come. This, only one week after they permitted a tool called Friend Finder to bypass user settings to allow people to spam you add you as a friend - even if you had specified that access to your profile was “message” or “poke” only. This is what happened to me and others. And if that wasn’t enough, my privacy settings were compromised within hours of the automated public search. Somehow, my privacy setting changed from “friends only” search to “all my friends and all my networks.”
Do schools kill creativity?
Sir Ken Robinson, from his TED talk on creativity
If you haven’t done so already, you must watch Sir Ken Robinson’s wonderful TED conference talk “Do schools kill creativity.” He’s got the timing and wit of a comedian combined with the uncommon insights into future of learning and business. View it here.
According to Robinson, the problem with creativity is not that we lack it, but that we don’t really get much of a chance to nurture or explore it. And this isn’t our fault. Robinson says we’ve unlearned it as a result of traditional learning models that privilege literacy and numeracy above other forms of learning and effectively “kill” the original gift of creativity we all possess.
Participatory Media Literacy 101
Ross Mayfield and Howard Rheingold’s Participatory Media Education Resources offers the most thorough and succinct overview of participatory media I’ve found. From the introduction:
“Recent technological changes have made much wider social changes possible: Until the end of the twentieth century, only a relatively small and wealthy fraction of the human race could broadcast television programs, publish newspapers, create encyclopedias; by the twenty first century, however, inexpensive digital computers and ubiquitous Internet access made the means of high quality media production and distribution accessible to a substantial portion of the world’s population. In 2006, more than one billion people are connected to the Internet and close to three billion people carry mobile telephones. These technological changes in accessibility of production tools and distribution media have led to social, cultural, economic, political changes in the ways people communicate, a set of technologies, practices, and skills some call participatory media
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