This is Violence

More on Asymmetry and the Web

If you haven’t seen it yet, Jay Rosen has an excellent run down of some of the journalistic implications of the newest Wikileaks story around the release of the Afghanistan War Logs.

The whole thing is really interesting and you should read it all, but one of the most interesting for me was his fourth point:

“4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

I’ve written a couple other times about the asymmetrical nature of the web, but what I find interesting about this is that it show a possible direction for the relationship between traditional, physical organizations and the more abstract digital ones.

How any organization bound by traditional rules of law and codes of conduct operates in a world where organizations not bound by these same rules become increasingly powerful is critical I think. In this case it’s journalism, but the same could apply to any brand.

Things I Liked #4

Where Americans Are Moving
Apparently I like maps. Last week it was Flickr maps showing resident and tourist photo locations for various cities around the world. This week it’s migration patterns for Americans. What I like about the map is that you can pretty quickly see which cities are growing, and which are shrinking based on the over all color surrounding it.

Portland is, not surprisingly to any one who lives here, growing.

Detroit, not so much.
Creative Failure
A big part of working at Fight is trying things out. We try things all the time, most of them don’t work out exactly right the first time. The important thing for us to understand why they don’t work out, make changes and try again. With that in mind, I loved this interview with Adam Lisagor about the role of failure.

I was first made familiar with Adam Lisagor from his video work with Put This On, where he showed me how to tie my shoes. Yeah, I’m serious.

Good is Good
Last August I wrote a post defending the role of the web and social media as a functional component of peoples social interactions. I lead it off with this quote from the movie Heathers.

“People will look at the ashes of Westerburg and say, ‘Now there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society.’”

I was reminded of that when I read this charming little anecdote about a four year old playing Grand Theft Auto. Video games take a lot of heat for corrupting our society and our children, but reading this, it’s hard for me not to wonder if it’s the games doing the corrupting, or society.

“He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn’t want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.

Getting behind the driver’s seat of the fire truck awarded him with the most fun he had while playing Grand Theft Auto. With sirens blaring, he chased down the first red dot on the map. As he approached a car engulfed in flames he began showering it with the truck’s water cannon. Fire after fire, he extinguished them all.”

Misreading the Twitter Revolution
Khoi Vinh posted a link to this article on the Foreign Policy site looking at the reality behind last summers events in Iran. As someone who loved the idea of Twitters role in building a revolution in Iran, I found this article not disheartening, but rather deeply fascinating. Getting insight into the realities of what happened, and what didn’t, helped to reconcile the disconnect between the story we got here in the U.S. and the eventual outcome, or lack thereof, in Iran.

Home Star
There is a lot of conversation right now about the role average Americans, or more precisely our use of fossil fuels, played in the gulf oil spill. Regardless of where one falls on the blame scale, I think most reasonable people agree that this is another sign that we all need to take a more proactive approach to how we use energy.

Good magazine had a great post this week about the Home Star program. Having spent the last few months working on energy saving programs for a client, it’s amazing how effective some really small, and really cheap, changes can be. Especially compared to the cost of cleaning up after ourselves.

Things I Liked #3

Locals and Tourists
Turns out I’m not the only one who likes to pictures down in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Locals and Tourists is a great little project by Eric Fischer doing just what it says: plotting the locations of photos taken by…locals and tourists in cities around the world.

It’s interesting to me to see the geography of the cities become so visible through the data. Even more so to see the notion of “what’s interesting” about each city described through the cameras of people who live there and those that don’t.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Digital Strategy
Last week I mentioned the upstart Texas Tribune as an example of journalism alive and well online. This week I found this article by Folio about The Christian Science Monitor and their efforts to understand how they exist and what they mean in a digital world.

While many other, far bigger, organization continue to try to shove a square peg into a round hole, the CSM took a holistic approach, looking at their entire ecosystem and not just looking at their digital footprint. By trying to understand not just what they wanted as a business, but what their customers wanted, they have been able to design a complete system of inter-related publications, both on and off line. This quote from the beginning of the article shows their efforts to understand what they mean in the larger news/internet world:

“Our approach is a composite of the learning economy—we’re serving people without a lot of time, who are trying to understand complex issues quickly, and contribute to a solution. As one guy here says, our mission is ‘Help me get smarter, faster.’”

Kites and Oil
I continue to love seeing the way people use ever increasing access to ever shrinking technology to solve real world problems. I wrote early on about CubeSats and Make, and a couple weeks ago about the Afrigadget Blog. Living a world of Tivo’s and iPhone’s it’s consistently refreshing to see technology stripped down to it’s basic elements and used to serve an individual’s needs.

This week brought this article in the Times about Grassroots Mapping, a project originally designed to help communities create maps, now focusing on documenting the gulf oil spill. With BP trying hard to exert control on information getting to people about the ongoing devastation in the gulf it’s great to see ingenuity and simple technology outsmarting them and allowing everyone to see what’s actually happening.

Finally, I really want to do this to Marco.
Awesome.

Things I Liked #1

To attempt to balance the ratio of time I spend here talking about things I don’t like to those I do, I’m going to try an experiment: “Things I Liked” will be a weekly list of 5 things I enjoyed that week. We’ll see.

BPGlobalPR
Sometimes people ask me about the name of this site. The answer is projects like BPGlobalPR. BPGlobalPR is a perfect example of the asymetrical nature of competition on the web.

In a time when corporations seem able to actively limit journalism, BPGlobalPR may be one of the few points of commentary on the matter generating any large scale response. I’ve read that it was the images of dead sea animals and destroyed landscapes that fueled a national boycott of Exxon after the Valdez. Absent that, this may be the best we can do. Without a press free to report on the actual situation, this stands as a small beacon of hope that multi-national corporations and their PR firms don’t control everything just yet.

Lost
Yeah, okay, so I just yesterday wrote a post about Lost as a cautionary tale for designers. I stand by that - as a product, Lost ended up being pretty terrible. But there was a reason I watched it for 6 years - aspects of the show were also pretty amazing. So much has been said, it seems silly to write more, but I can’t think of a program that has done more to layout a map for what narrative television could be in a post-internet world than Lost. Whether it was their consistent usage of DVR easter eggs, ARG’s; their direct response to conversations with fans written into the show, or their usage of other non-connected mediums to tell the meta-story (how many books were referenced in the show?); Lost stands a milestone in post-modern T.V. narrative.

The Texas Tribune
You could be forgiven for believing there are just two sides to the problem of journalism and the web - pay wall, and no pay wall.

The fundamental question these two sides actually seek to answer, though it’s rarely stated as such, is: “How do you maintain exactly the same business model you’ve always enjoyed in technologically and culturally changed landscape?”

The answer is becoming increasing clear to a lot of people: you don’t.

Enter the The Texas Tribune an online, non-prift news site started about 6 months ago to try a different path. This is from their About page:

“Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.”

The Texas Tribune I think makes clear a needed distinction in the conversation about the future of journalism: are we fighting to save journalism, or fighting to save profits? Looking the Tribune, I’d say journalism is alive and well.

The Tribunes 6 month report card

AfriGadget
This morning I’ve seen a bunch of tweets about a rumored update to Apple TV. Google just announced their version, Google TV. In a couple weeks we’ll all be seeing the next iPhone. For many of us, innovation can add new levels of convenience, new ways of creating, or new ways of communicating. Working in marketing, innovation can quickly become something viewed in terms of new “brand opportunities.”

The AfriGadget blog reminds me on an almost daily basis that for a lot of people, innovation is a matter of life and death. This isn’t capacitive touchscreens, or 1000fps cameras, its car batteries, broken mirrors, and old bikes, each of which is having profound impacts on peoples lives.

Okay - so that’s only 4 things, but it’s my first try. 5 next week for sure.