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The Quite Serious and Virtual Worlds
Among the "quite serious" uses of Second Life, according to this week's Economist: (1) Peter Yellowlees, a psychiatry professor at UC Davis, immersing his students into how how a schizophrenic experiences the world and (2) a certain former Governor's recent entree into the virtual space. The Economist considers Second Life's economy -- broadly speaking -- as a self-sustaining system and on its implications for the offline world. Great piece and a bit difficult to summarize.
(An article like this is a reminder of how refreshing it is to find something well-researched and well-written in the popular media. To read something timely and actually learn from it, glorious! The Economist has no bylines; their motto is "what is written is more important than who writes it." From an old interview with editor Bill Emmott:
We're no different from other journalists: we don't lose that urge for a byline just because we join The Economist. We give bylines on our supplements, and we encourage our journalists to write outside the magazine to give them a chance to develop their own names. But if a journalist is really turned on by international affairs, then The Economist is a unique place to work where they will gain a lot of access to companies and governments and experts. They gain a lot for what they give up.
Maybe when your ego's no longer in the picture, you sit down and write hard for the thrill and pleasure of the craft. [Though, I admit -- if I wrote for them, I'd probably hate it. But then again I've got a pretty healthy sense of self and I like the way my name looks.])
A Nation Afraid of Its People
You know, I can be so cynical. When I saw
the hubub
in the blogosphere around this week's Newsweek cover featuring
"Losing
Afghanistan" around the world and "My
Life in Pictures" -- a story on photographer Annie Leibovitz
-- in the U.S., I thought that it had to be some sort of prank. But sweet
Mary in the morning, no. I hopped over to the Newsweek
International site and they've got the covers displayed right there
-- as they are below, except that I've got them horizontal instead of
vertical for easy viewing. As if they don't even know to be
be embarassed by this:
And we wonder why things are as they are. Sometimes the only thing to
do in a situation like this is to quote John Kennedy:
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant
facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For
a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood
in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
Yep.
Cracking Open the Facebook
Scola's got a new post feature story up on the Personal Democracy Forum concerning Facebook's decision today to open up the network to all comers. (After midnight, I refer to myself in the third person.) Here's a snippet: What Facebook did today is to open up the system so that anyone with any old email address at all can join, create a profile, "poke" other users (an innocuous term today that the college kids I know don't seem to find funny), and the like. Identity is only proven on the basis of email address ownership -- meaning that all I have to do to join up is to enter in nancyscolarules@gmail.com and then respond back to an email sent to that address. This process, Facebook says, guarantees that profiles are created only by "a real person."
A real person, maybe, but of course not necessarily the real person that I'm going to represent myself to be on Facebook. There's little (as far as I can tell) to stop me from creating multiple profiles and picking from a Chinese menu of characteristics for each. That may sound simple, but it's a complete upending of the "one person, one profile" idea of identity that has carried Facebook this far. Please read it, but they gist is that Scola thinks that the trouble with Facebook 2.0 points to how difficult it's going to be to manage how we do identity and social networks online.
Internet 2020
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new report out, The
Future of the Internet II. The report is the sequel to a 2003
report of the same name, which itself was inspired by Ithiel de Sola Pool's
1983 Forecasting
the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment, a look back at
what the experts of the time made of the telephone in its early days.
The Pew researchers asked a group of somewhat self-selected technology-savvy
respondents to react to seven different scenarios, from whether a global network
will even exist in 2020 to whether by that time we'll have "lost"
people all together into virtual-realty spaces. The responses include fears
of a growth in multiple personalities that will give rise to "cyberpsychiatry,"
that privacy will soon be nothing more than an illusion, yadda yadda. There's
even the hope (I think) that there might come a day when every newborn baby
is seeded with an RFID chip. I skimmed the report because it was kinda boring
and too science-fictiony for my tastes. But from what I saw, one thought.
What I see as the most likely turn of events isn't mentioned in the report
-- that by 2020 we'll have evolved into ever more hardened and extremist
sorts of human beings. It's, of course, a complicated and yet not all
too original thought and I'll admit that I'm only going to scratch
the surface of it in this post. The one mention I see in the report of the broad
idea is this:
These technologies allow us to find cohorts that eventually serve to decrease
mass shared values and experiences. More than cultural fragmentation, it will
aid a fragmentation of deeper levels of shared reality.
- Denzil Meyers, Widgetwonder
But then again it's not so much shared cultural experiences that I'm
interested in here. The days of everyone watching I Love Lucy or whatever
it might have been are probably over and done with. It's rather that the
Internet medium seems to reward most and just be better-greased for
promoting the organization of people and ideas around similar, highly-structured,
and particularly dogmatic world views. I'm thinking poltical bloggers,
yes, but also establishment political reporting done online and even modern
social networking sites like Facebook. Real life is fluid and squishy and shades
of gray -- that's one of the things I like best about it -- but I don't
know how well that's going to survive on the Internet.
Take the aforementioned Facebook. The
ask made of college freshmen is to define their likes and dislikes, political
leanings, favorite books and movies, relationships and even who your friends
are for all the world to see. It might be too much, I think. Too rigid for an
18 year-old. It would have been too much for 18 year-old me, for sure -- at a time where
I was just working to sort myself out, poke and prod myself to see what the
future Scola might be, to then make the evolving me public to my entire social
context. (Even if that context is just limited to my university -- in fact,
maybe especially if it's just limited to that narrow little social
field.) And to do it in the language and categories and drop lists pre-selected
for me! Those were liminal
times, baby, as they should be. But I don't know if there's room
for people be liminal or evolving any more, at least on the Internet. I don't
think that's a small deal. In fact, I think it's a very big deal
indeed.
I'm too US-centric in my thinking on this, I know. And too influenced
by my exposure to electoral politics done online, most likely.
Red Hook, Brooklyn: where one just so happens upon...
...delicious key lime pie baked in the basement of an old bottling plant in an otherwise desolate section of town.
Interactive New York: Refugee Camps and Urban Gaming
Outside our garden apartment here in Park Slope is a guy pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. He's on his cell phone and just had this to say, "This area is nice, man. I like it a lot. Lot of trees and shit." Right on, but trees aren't the only thing we've got going on. This weekend, for example, there are two things of note right in our area, both experiments in creative interactive experience, though geared perhaps towards two distinctly different moods.
First, in Prospect Park about three blocks from our house is the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières "Refugee Camp" Exhibit, the same one that has earlier been constructed in Central Park. I hope to go check it out soon but it's drizzling a bit at the moment. One prefers to imagine a refugee camp experience without also having to be cold and wet. Will the Refugee Camp Exhibit avoid some of what has plagued the Camp Darfur refugee camp recreation in Second Life -- namely that sitting in front of your computer and wandering around in an empty virtual space doesn't inform you all that much about what it's like to be forced from your home under the threat of violence and starvation and subjected to a communcal living experience with no real end in sight? I think so, but we'll see.
And then over the river and through the tunnel in Manhattan is Eyebeam's Come Out and Play Festival 2006, complete with urban interactive games like MegaPutt -- a massively-multiplayer game of mini golf in the East Village, Spy School -- a text-message based espionage game, and Quoto -- a 30 minute challenge to photograph famous quotes "rebus-style" using the props provided by New York City. The last I had very much liked to participate in, but alas, all full.
One, the Web that Joins Us
Happy One Web Day! This is the day that we celebrate all manners of web -- spider webs, Jim Webb, webbed feet. Alternatively, it's the one day a year when we sit and contemplate what it means that a global network connects humanity together in ways never before possible. You know, as someone who cares about social networks, social organization, and the potential for knowledge sharing to make the world just a darn better place, the rise and expanding reach of the Internet/web over the last many years has really been something to behold. Certainly worth celebrating for at least one day a year.
In New York City there will be an event today at noon at the Battery featuring Craig Newmark, Meet Up's Scott Heiferman, and others. But this is a holiday in the spirit of Festivus, a do-it-yourself celebration that you can make of what you want. Check the wiki for what other folks are doing around the world and honor the day in your own special way. The preeminence of the one true One Web Day anthem, however, shall not be questioned: One, the Web that joins us
In rich complexity.
One, the mirror of many screens
One full diversity.
One, the world around us,
All humanity,
A world to shape by what we make
Through connectivity!
Have a great One Web Day.
SXSW: Pick My Panel in the Panel Picking Process
I have a great deal of faith in technologists -- and by "technologists" I mean anyone really who works in developing, understanding, or shaping technologies -- because I've seen time and again that what they're committed to most is problem solving. Gov. Warner (yes, I know it is a bit pathetic to actually reference the wisdom of the guy that I work for) says time and again that if business worked like politics, executives would go to their shareholders at the end of the year and say, "we didn't actually do anything this year, but we sure made the other guy look bad." It's instead the ethos in the modern technology world to try the damnedest to build something better, day in and day out. Part of the motivation for doing so is money, of course, but there's nothing wrong with that.
I went down to South by Southwest Interactive -- a four-day festival of geekery, from technology to digital design -- in Austin in March of last year exactly because I wanted to surround myself with technologists after five years on Capitol Hill and be inspired by their spirit. It worked, and so I'll be going back again next year. SXSW 2007 will be a bit different though because the panels as the conference will in large part be chosen through an panel picking process. Everyone is invited to participate, though the votes of past and future attendees will count for more.
So I've gone and submitted a panel for this next SXSW. I'll admit it to you and to you alone that the idea behind it is to see if we can go ahead and suck some of that can-do spirit into the political process:
The on-going fight over network neutrality showcased the rising political interest and might of tech-minded folk. But neutrality was just the beginning. From free culture to muni-connectivity, from BitTorrent to the wireless spectrum, we'll hash over the issues held dear by technologists. And we'll figure out how the community can problem-solve its way into political service. So, please, if it feels right for you to do so, please vote for this panel. Important stuff, I think.
Scholars and Intellectuals, Too
Senator Barack Obama at a rally today in Old Town Alexandria, Viriginia, for Jim Webb, running for the U.S. Senate:
In Jim Webb, we have a candidate with the sophistication to write novels. That's a good thing. We want our warriors to be scholars and intellectuals, too.
Alas, we were losing the light when the Senator was speaking and the photos didn't turn out so great, but here's Obama:
And more Obama:
Lest you think this was an unhappy event for the Senator:
David Scola...
 ...is not only my very own and only brother. (For whatever reason, when people discover that I indeed have a brother, they demand, "older or younger?! OLDER OR YOUNGER?!" I'll say only that he's 33 years old and I'm not.) He's also one heck of a photographer. He's been doing as an avocation for years. Now, through the magic of the Internet, you can see for yourself. He shoots in black and white and perhaps I'm biased but I do think that he does nice work in picking up details and framing shots in a way that captures meaning beyond just what's in the picture.
He's just started showing his stuff and will be doing so this weekend at the outdoor Bloomsbury Fine Arts Festival along the banks of the Musconetcong River in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. If you happen to be in the area, please do check it out.
"I forgive. I forgive."
The reported last words of Sister Leonella/Rosa Sgorbati, the Catholic nun killed by gunfire yesterday in north Mogadishu, Somalia in what many are seeing as a reaction to Pope Benedict's citing of a 14th-century text that called Mohammed's legacy "things only evil and inhuman."
That's what you call one hell of a lady.
Remix Architecture
As the global face to the Creative Commons, iCommons is the group responsible for spreading the ideas of Creative Commons -- "open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing and free culture" -- around the world and doing it as a united movement. How we create and handle content internationally is perhaps even more interesting an experiment than how we do it here in the U.S., and so I was very happy to get the chance today to contribute a post to the iCommons blog. While, as I should mention, I still wrote on something here in New York City, that's only because I don't know much about the international stuff yet.
A debate over the originality of the design of the Freedom Tower -- that's the memorial to be built in the site of the former World Trade Center -- reached the courts recently, an unusual turn of events because architecture is very much a "remix" art. Designers borrow ideas from each other all the time and are reluctant to take each other to before the law. Here's a snippet from my post:
Shine vs. SOM became the first major case of architectural copyright infringement in U.S. history, in large part because of its high profile - the design of the Freedom Tower was on the cover of New York papers for many months. But cases of architectural copyright don't often make it to the court for another reason. The field itself is built on the idea that new work is built on old work, new ideas remixed from old ones; and architects are reluctant to challenge that prevailing norm. But in this case, the court found that Childs appeared to have gone beyond permissible architectural borrowing. The design of the two proposed buildings were so similar - both featured a twisting diamond-shaped facade unusual in architecture - that the court ruled that the case could proceed to trial. (Judge for yourself.)
Of course I have to say this, but I do think it's an interesting issue. I for one don't think much the collaborative creative process behind how big buildings get built, not nearly as much as I might think how music is created. So it was great fun for me to dig more deeply into this idea of whether theres is an architectural "commons."
Anyway, hope you'll check it out. And thanks of course to iCommons for lending me a bit of their space.
LastFM: an Experiential "Review"
I started the day this morning with the decision to try out Last
FM. That's the social-networking radio station that allows you to pick out
recording artists, stream a station created for you, see what the rest of the
world -- including your friends -- are grooving on. With LastFM, you respond
back to the radio, giving the songs it feeds up "love" or banning
them altogether.
I was feeling a bit dopey and couldn't remember what music I actually do like
listening to. Prepare to mock -- I inputted this: "Lauryn Hill, Ani di
Franco, Eminem, Kelly Clarkson, Green Day, Queen Latifah." The first song
keyed up in my new custom station was the Indigo Girls' "Power of Two."
All right, must every woman of a certain age and proclivity like the Indigo
Girls? Still, I enjoyed the song. Next up was Dar Williams' "Whispering
Pines." A little slow but fine enough.
Then Eminem's "Amityville." I'd never heard it, as it's from his
early Marshall Mathers LP that I don't own. But isn't playing an Eminem
song when I the word "Eminem" in the station creator a bit of a weak
move? The song was a tad graphic for work --"slit my mother's throat..."
is, I think, more appropriate for after hours. I ban. Next up, 50 cent's "As
Time Goes By." Banned. Erykah Badu's lovely "Orange Moon," and
then Ashlee Simpson's "Shadow," which -- say what you will -- is the
perfect sort of music by which to draft blog posts, emails, and the like.
But I'm scared to say I like it because Simpson is tagged as "Similiar
to: Lindsay Lohan," who I stay away from on principle. Next up is the Game's
"Hate it or Love it." Catchy. On to Lauryn Hill's "Jerusalem,"
then Linkin Park's "One Step Closer." Out of utter precariousness
and a dislike of the yelling of the lead, um, screamer, I ban it. LastFM attempts
to soothe me with Alcia Key's "Butterflyz."
Now we've got Raul De Souza's "Sweet Lucy." Finally, an artist I
have completely never heard of. That's largely the point for me of using a social
music tool like Last FM -- to find new music that I wouldn't be turned on to
elsewhere. So I'm thrilled, even though it sounds a lot like the theme song
from "What's Happening."
We're on to Britney Spears' "Thinkin' About You." (Really, can we
not use our grown-up words with our band and song names? "Linkin"
Park? "Butterflyz"? "Thinkin'" About You?) It's clear to
me now that LastFM thinks I'm a 16 year old girl. Sweet Mary mother of God!
LastFM spits in my face with Lindsay Lohan's "Disconnected." "I'm
only not lonely when I'm lonely myself...I always backtrack forward...DISCONNECTED!"?
I don't deserve this. Banned, Lindsay. So banned.
Some Green Day "Ha Ha You're Dead," Red Hot Chili Pepper's "Coffee
Shop," and Fiona Apple's "I Know," all of which I enjoy. Washington
Dead Cats' "Surf and Destroy" up next. Fun -- sort of Barenaked Ladies
but actually weird. The Dead Cats are tagged as "Similar to: Queen Latifah,"
which seems a bit odd, but I imagine it to be the result of the algorithmic
mojo magic that makes LastFM work. Next is Queen Latifah's "I Can't Understand."
Why have I not heard this brilliance until now?!
But more Alicia Keys, more Erykah Badu, and I'm getting a bit bored with this
musical selection. Same old, same old, for the most. Where are the undiscovered
(to me) gems that I expected LastFM to dig up for me? Even though I have to
think that I'm still drawing from the collective taste database of other users
at the backend of Last FM, I imagine that the secret sauce is when you connect
up with other users and pick and choose from their music streams. Alas, I don't
yet know of anybody that I know that is on and actively using LastFM. So I'm
stuck in my own, non-diverse, plain vanilla loop of music.
Schmap and Photography
 A new outfit called Schmap emailed
to ask if they could use a use a photo of mine that I took while down
in Miami. The Schmappers, it seems,
troll Flickr for useable photos and
ask
the
photographers
to hand them over with full credit and without compensation. The photo
they asked of me is a very
seriously crappy one, but I still said okay. The
way Schmap works is that travel info is overlaid on a live mapping app,
and
photos of some of the sights
are flashed in the right side bar. The
images link up to the original Flickr pages
from whence
the photos
came. (For
you licensing geeks, my photo was licensed by Flickr under a traditional
"all rights reserved" copyright. I admit, with sheepishness,
that it never occurred to how my Flickr photos are licensed. Turns out
that Flickr
does let you set Creative Commons on your work. That's fantastic,
but I'd like to reserve the right for folks to have to ask permission,
like the Schmap folks did, for how they use my photographs. I just do,
and
so I'm leaving traditional copyright intact until I see fit to do otherwise.
Wow, this is quite a long parenthetical. But forge on with me for a moment.
The Schmap terms of use I agreed to when I said, sure, use my photo were
on a page that reloaded and disappeared after I clicked "Okay." From
what I can scrape from the site, I gather that the Schmapped photo retains
the same licensing terms as it did before, especially considering that
what they use is really a thumbnail that links right through to Flickr.)
I could be
troubled with the idea of not paying photographers for their work and
then turning and building a business model on the
idea.
I like photography a good bit, and we should pay to support the arts
we like. But come on, how good does a photo of a hotel have to be?
What's wrong with me taking a few snapshots during my travels and sharing
them
with folks who are in turn going to offer them at no cost to others
who might then use them to plan their own journeys? Maybe some travel
guide
photographer might be out of a gig or two, but then again she can save
money by downloading free travel guides.
"Path-Breakingly Mockable!" Gov. Warner in Second Life
Here's a sign that your week is going to be a strange one. You send a note
around your office saying, "on the virtual Mark Warner -- tie or no tie?" So, we
introduced the governor into Second Life,
an online virtual space, on Thursday. In the immediate, one neat part was seeing
the wide range of coverage the launch got. Some of the folks in our office were
most pleased to see it covered by CNN's Situation
Room, Washington Post's the
Fix and Washington
Sketch, and The
Hotline. (The title of this post comes from the Hotline: "This new
venture might be mockable, but it's path-breakingly mockable.") Others
were more thrilled to make Boing Boing (pre-event post here
and post-event post here)
and the G4
gaming network. It was ignored by most of the big political blogs, which we
expected, and it was an education to see how it rippled through the rest of
the online world. The quasi-official New World Notes blog has the deepest background
and reporting, here
and here
and an interview with me here.
It was also mentioned or covered by Instapundit,
Ottowa
Citizen, Ted Leonsis,
Red
Herring, 3pointD,
Federal Computer Weekly,
Rikomatic
(who has video),
1UP.com, and Gamepolitics.com
here and here. There's also photos of the Gov's
avatar and him typing
away at a computer and more coverage on the Forward Together PAC blog here,
here,
and here.
Everyone from our experienced political staff to cantankerous Washington reporters
had a lot of fun customizing their avatars and flying around the Second Life
space. For one blip in time, we brought a little bit of joy to the lives of
some hard-working folks. Good enough.
I want to talk seriously about why we brought Gov. Warner to Second Life and
what we think it means. But it was a long week and right now I'm going to sign
off now and do some real-world lazing about.
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