For the first time NowPublic have done their metrics testing of who, in the UK, has the most reach in terms of broadband broadcasting, and I'm delighted to be pitched at No. 7 amongst some stellar company.
Worthy of note is that I'm three places ahead of big bro, Neil (well, you've got to have some brotherly competition, no?) and a bevvy of Guardian blogerati, and just ahead of comic legend Stephen Fry and BBC political blogger Nick Robinson. Also blushing to be ahead of the guy who really pushed me into working on my tod, Euan Semple.
There are some other great blogs and sites to try out there, and vary your reading list a bit. I bet that's what people are saying about my blog (who/how/why the hell..?)
Pic; Red boxes
It's a week late, perhaps, for some topical teaching but astounding nevertheless. Der Spiegel has published several collections of old colour photos, but this set of WW1 trench warfare in colour just reminds us that the world wasn't played out in black and white before the 50s.
Earlier this week the UK's very own "Nationalist Party", the BNP, had the misfortune to leak its member list, showing the names and addresses of racists, fascists and those who "don't want that kind of person taking our jobs". It's been citizen-created mashups of this data that have made the news.
To republish the list would be illegal, so newspapers such as the Guardian printed the numerical stats on line-art maps. Far from breaking the law, it was crowdsourcing that came up with a better solution, both allowing us to see how many BNP-ers are on our doorstep without revealing their names and exact locations. Cue the anonymous, but powerful, BNP member Google Heatmap, which has since allowed our Government ministers to realise the pockets where local politics lets people down.
These are some of the subversive uses of technology that keep an eye on money and power that we are keen to support further through 4iP. We've got a few on the boil, so keep your eyes peeled for them.
Thanks to Stuart on the 38minutes blog for highlighting it.
Nothing turns me snarky more than the assertion that 'we' are but hapless Ned Luds by comparison to 'them', the bright young 'digital natives' (eurgh...) that make up Generation 'Y' (double eurgh), the connected generation who "live through the screen" (pass me a mop and bucket). Such clichés can be heard in almost every educational, future-gazing keynote and workshop one might care to attend and, for my money, are worth nothing more than the potential for a jolly good round of bullshit bingo to keep us entertained during yet another "21st Century Learning" tyrade.
But I've found a great piece on the brilliant and long-standing Mobile Youth blog which explains clearly why I find the gen-y stuff so irrelevant and enraging:
Consider, for example, the parents - are they not also a connected generation? Doesn’t almost every 30-39 year old executive and office worker live out most of their days staring at a screen? On the way to the office they stare at their blackberries, followed by 9 hours of staring at a larger screen. The more active of this demographic will squeeze in an hour at the gym where, you guessed it, they stare at a screen. Evening activity involves starting at a screen.
Almost every economically active individual today is “connected”, so the fact that it is only youth that are connected, is a myth.
Hurrah. Now all we need to do is work out whether the average keynote presenter is 'economically active' when their audiences appreciate the hot air rising from their rhetoric.
Pic: Cow pat
I've been getting Twitter messages all day about my impromptu appearance during CNN's coverage of Obama's acceptance speech. One for the grandchildren, perhaps, to show how technology really does make the world a smaller place...
(I should point out that this is not me, but my doppelganger. And it is not a photoshopped pic. My wife is completely freaked out, as am I. I now want to meet this guy and see if he's like me, too. Anyone know who this Democrat is?)
It was tonight as our dear Spanish entrant to The X Factor gave her thanks to "the British pubic" that was reminded of a) the importance of getting your phonemes right (how I tried to get that point across while teaching it in France) and c) my second favourite Taylor Mali poem, after this one. Enjoy.
For those who weren't sure of what it was I'd be looking for in 4iP's future commissions, voilà.
This is a beautiful story of serendipity and the good will most people have towards one another, going out of their way to make a small but hugely arresting action. I'm glad to say that, in my experience, the social web has meant experiences like Mitchell's have happened to me more and more as the scope of the social web expands. Six degrees apart seems far now. It's more like two or three.
The only thing that stops us seeing it is that the mainstream channels of communication used by the majority of us rarely have an opportunity to capture this in what's left of that evening's broadcast on trivia, disaster and evil.
Channel 4 is pinning its hopes on digital mavericks (that means you), the headline on today's Sunday Herald feature on 4iP. It's not a bad piece for setting out some of the context of '4 Innovation for the Public', the new element of Channel 4 for which I am its first (and currently only) Commissioner. It also sets out the importance we place on getting some great ideas turned into tangible mobile, web or game-space as soon as possible.
Ross picks up on the potential for what's to come in his blogged summary of Wednesday's briefing and stakeholder event in Glasgow, stressing the potential that starts in 38minutes for companies and individuals to club together with their skills and aptitudes, creating projects that with the traditional boundaries and disaggregation of the creative industries would not be possible: “There’s more insulation on Scottish agencies than on most hot water tanks”...
38minutes is an interesting example of what small amounts of money - or no amounts of money - can do while creating significant impact. A few people have sneered (via email or even to my face) about the perceived 'cheapness' of using Ning as a platform for connecting and collaborating, but the impact of this network, like all others, is not to be found in its code but in the people who choose to devote some time and effort to collaborating on it. And for that, 38minutes has been a roaring success.
In Scotland and Northern Ireland we see a fairly disaggregated creative economy, the elements of which have rarely connected with each other beyond cliquey friendships and haphazard arrangements.
In Dundee we have some of the world's greatest game-makers (most of the titles you play on the Wii, DS, XBox and PS3 come from here) and, like in Edinburgh, a spattering of incredibly talented graphic artists and new media workshops. In Edinburgh, alongside these you can find some of Britain's top creative talent from the PR, ad and marketing scenes, as well as world class Artificial Intelligence research and business coming from the universities. Meanwhile, Glasgow has tended to support a strong independent TV scene, spawning a multitude of new media companies covering every size of screen you can imagine.
38minutes.co.uk has not been marketed, sold or advertised. Initially, its Channel 4 members told seven people about it. One month on we're approaching 400 members, all of them top class new media producers from one of these sub-sectors, ready to collaborate on the next generation of public service... well, not broadcasting.
What we're after is anything that is not telly, but which helps change the lives of people in Britain, and which may have the potential to change the lives of people wherever else they may be. By not being about broadcasting, limited by the geography of transmission towers, 4iP could create projects that have a global impact on the way we use, adapt, share, manipulate data, create change and improve the world around us.
So, having already turned around a few ideas submitted through the online proposals system since our launch in Scotland this week, never has there been a better time to get to know your colleagues in the new media business, suggest your ideas and land a 4iP commission in the coming weeks and months. *
* Make sure you read the ethos of the fund before applying, and that you are or are prepared to start living, working or spending your production budget in Scotland, Northern Ireland or one of the other regions in which 4iP is working.
Pic credit
Having appeared in the Wall Street Journal stateside a few weeks ago, little could I have known what sexy new role the financial press would take on as we struggle to understand what's going on around us. I don't know if my big bro Neil could've known either, but congrats to him on being made Editor of the WSJ.com Europe edition. Where would you start on innovating online publishing, as he's done in the Guardian these past 'n' years, when the thing you write about is collapsing around your ears? Looking forward to seeing the answer unfold in the coming months and years.
"New technology is the devil incarnate. We should go back to the good old days"
"New technology is the panacea we've been looking for."
The reality is much more nuanced than that. It's not about the good or the bad (it's not about pedagogy vs technology, the unfortunately entitled panel session I'll be on later).
danah boyd is talking about teaching young people to think, by taking a look through the viewfinder of social networks and the mobile devices we are already and will increasingly use to access, connect and share on.
It's about teaching young people to think. The reason we taught literature, film, mathematics in the past was to provide a reason for people to think. The introduction of technology alone will not necessarily help young people think. Worse still, technology is seen as a means of unleashing new cash, in a cynical way ("we have all Macs")
We don't just teach algebra to teach algebra. We teach it to help understand the world around us. When we think about teaching (with) technology we have to think about how it fits into this world around us.
That's hard.
Technology is fundamentally taking apart the world around us. Technology opens up the potential to access much stuff around the world, with the teacher and their rear view mirror allowing the context and meaning of that to be brought to light.
The contexts of social networks
Social networking sites have three core structures that make them work:
1. Profile
When we enter a room we tend to take some thought about decorating ourselves: what we wear, do we put on that tie...? Online we are an IP address, a rather undecoratable unappealing code. Therefore, where we create a SNS profile we're taking some care to create a presentation of ourselves within a space. Bedroom culture is the same, but on social networks it's amplified.
2. Friending
There are three clusters of behaviour: 30-40 friends, worried about their nearest and dearest. 300 friends are all the people they met at school, at church at the youth group. Very few teenagers collect Friends (politicians, music), reaching into the hundreds of thousands of friends. Mostly they're boys, collecting "hot girls". They're creating that list that, apparently, lots of boys used to make on paper.
But whether someone is your friend or just your Friend becomes socially awkward. In girl culture girls grew out of the habit of exchanging friendship bracelets to work the equivalent online.
3. The Wall
Comments, testimonials, the wall... in the early days of SNSes, people spoke in the third person about their friends (and still do on LinkedIn, inhabited by older professionals). Later, it began to be used as a space for conversation that complimented other places where conversation was going on (IM, chat).
Looking at it as a stream of text one could be mistaken as meaningless "how are you", "fine", "you?", "OK"...
What's going on is "public social grooming": it's a way to upkeep your social status as friend which, after all, is only a check box at the beginning of the online Friendship.
Why are young people spending so much time on MySpace?
We used to have permission from our parents to roam really far. Nowadays, the circle of navigation has been greatly reduced to the garden, out of public view. We've also tended to programme the lives of our young people more than we ever did, meaning we leave less time than ever for them to socialise.
Other characteristics of online interaction
danah reckons than social network structures will go mobile soon, within two years. I would bank on them coming a lot sooner than that, given that many of those with the better phones can already and do already interact on their various SNSes through mobile. In the UK, 3G is cheaper and more ubiquitous than most places on the planet, so we can expect it sooner here.
Location-awareness is increasing, making the network part of social networking even stronger.
Knowledge is online, and when we don't know it first time around we access just in time when we're mobile.
Notes of her talk, as usual, riddled with errors and unreliability.
One of the challenges of 4iP is to create some projects that help us all get more direct democracy than current 'democratic' systems afford. Apparently we needn't try too hard: YouTube's doing it already.
The systems have been unable to change quickly enough (or at all) beyond the 'safe' model that encourages elites to represent us (as Billy Connolly has said: anyone who wants to be a politician should, as a consequence, never be allowed to become one). Social media means we don't have to continue down the path of this elite choosing which issues are important enough to take on; we can use the wisdom of the crowd to filter and prioritise issues, and even get around to sorting some of those out amongst themselves.
The new fascinating read from Demos on the "Video Republic" shows just how far YouTube and other video sites have gone in opening up alternative democratic routes for youngsters. And, true to form, there's a YouTube video explaining this, too.
John Connell picked the item up from this parish's online bookmarks and has speedily summarised the main issues, all of which touch on areas that still require development, though, or just cogniscence by those in positions of power to do something about it. Basically: there's more to be gained from us all, foot soldiers and political or decision-making elites, harnessing the power that online video has unleashed:
All of these could be met with "it's easier said than done"; it would be rather cool for 4iP to just do it rather than talking about it.
