You know more than me, we know more than you, and wherever this all going, we're going there together.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2006.
Here’s an interesting perspective (excerpt from Reuters, via CNN, below) on everybody’s current darling, YouTube.
While I am not an expert, I agree with Mark Cuban (here’s his original blog post on the issue, titled The Coming Dramatic Decline Of YouTube).
I have been reading a fair bit of angry, frustrated commentary about the American Torture Act that just passed both the House and Senate in the USA.
Gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands .. what will the rest of the world think of us, etc., etc.
I have been trying to be articulate over the past couple of years about what it is to be a quasi-American (Canadian, such special neighbours) and yet see things so differently, watching in rapt confusion and wonder as the USA seems bent on demonstrating how reckless and magnificently, powerfully angry it can be.
I found this comment, by another Canadian, in the comments to this post (from Digby’s Hullabaloo) which suggests that the cat is now well and truly out of the bag .. the world is indeed different now, now that America condones and has codified the use of torture combined with the effective disappearing of habeus corpus.
Thank you, anon fellow Canadian … I found your comment to be articulate about what I feel as well.
For someone living lifelong next door in Canada, the sight of the crisis you describe on the horizon has been a long long time in coming.
As children 50 years ago, my friends and I were mystified by the uniform rigidity and jingoism of visiting American students of the same age. How could this stupid authoritarian nonsense be tolerated we wondered at the time? What was wrong with these gullible kids? There followed a long series of wars of unprovoked aggression which would have killed some of us had we been born 100 miles to the south. Gratitude for borders fails to capture the feeling. Literally, I personally know of no one in my native-born age cohort who was killed in combat. Maybe a handful in UN peacekeeping operations but that’s it.
Something started to go seriously wrong for your country with Huey Long and Billy Sunday and it isn’t near finished yet. You all need a second republic with a new constitution that actually works I think. None of my business of course. But I wouldn’t bet on you getting one without a civil war.
I am remembering that the aged supporters of Gen. Franco still live in Madrid, still refusing to be civil to their erstwhile opponents on the Left. I think you are looking at decades of incivility or worse, of conflict on class lines, and maybe race and ethnic lines too. You are deep deep shit neighbours. I will wish you the best of luck with all this. We have our own neo-con dinosaurs to be rendered harmless up here. It will occupy my attention for, say, a decade or two. In the meantime, keep the embers glowing. Something will cause all this ugliness to burst into flame. Its just too grotesque to keep hidden forever.
Shame without limits, embarassment without restraint, regrets without number, apologies to the millions killed in your name, and a century of guilt to be worn and worked off. Get on with it.
Powered by Qumana
… from a "what can it do for them" point of view.
I wonder if he asked them anything about the degree to which the NSA surveils all the lefty appeasement bloggers, building up its databases on potential terrorists or terrorist enablers amongst the legions of bloggers who don’t appreciate the systematic deconstruction of the USA’s foundations of what maybe used to be a democracy ?
I doubt it .. he seems like a polite guy who would realize that this would be impolite and off-topic 
This was a totally fascinating set of sessions. The CIA folks there included visionaries (e.g., Calvin Andrus), internal bloggers, the people behind Intellipedia (an in-house wikipedia), folks from the daily in-house newspaper, and some managers not yet sold on the idea of blogs and wikis and tags.
It sounds like there’s a fairly vibrant blogging community already, including some senior people. But, there’s cultural tension over, for example, whether a blog that contains any personal information means that a government employee has been misusing tax payers’ computers. It is a culture in transition, as you can imagine.
It began with an informal presentation by one of the analysts (first-name only, no email address) who took us through a typical day. He gets evaluated on the basis of the written reports he produces. There is some collegiality — more than I encountered as an academic — but the back-and-forth of commentary isn’t captured. It all comes down to the finished written document. (No document is ever finished, the panel said.)
The panel overall stressed that the issues were social, not technical. Also, we pushed for building memory by capturing more of the work-in-process and by linking linking linking. I personally would like to see the Agency get past the cult of expertise, moving instead to a view of knowledge as social. That means showing work in progress and capturing the discussion during and after publication. But that also means changing how analysts are evaluated and promoted. One of the participants said that already one’s "corridor reputation" affects one’s career. There should also be — and will also be — an e-corridor reputation that helps advance you because you’re a great commenter, a frequent contributor to the wiki, or have a blog that’s getting read.
Tags: JOHO, David weinberger, social software, collaboration, emergent intelligence
Powered by Qumana
Just noticed in passing … via the Guardian Online.
I wonder what elements or aspects of Microsoft DRM capabilities will be baked into what gets developed with the BBC ?
BBC signs web deal with Microsoft
Steve Busfield
Thursday September 28, 2006The BBC and Microsoft have signed a "memorandum of understanding" for developing the next generation of the corporation’s internet-based services.
The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, and the director of new media, Ashley Highfield, agreed the non-exclusive deal with the Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, in Seattle.A BBC statement said: "The memorandum of understanding will define the framework within which the companies can explore opportunities for the delivery and consumption of BBC content and the evolution of next-generation broadcasting.
"This includes plans for its online archive, for a radically reinvented website in the web 2.0 world - a second generation of internet-based services - and for ways to share its online content in the future."
Areas of potential collaboration include search and navigation, distribution and content enablement.
Tags: Web 2.0, BBC, Microsoft, broadcasting, content sharing
Powered by Qumana
Yes, I am aware of the constant opportunity for conceptual oversimplification.
That said, we have been seeing hierarchy used artfully, as well as in the form of a blunt weapon, for the last several years of the CheneyBush administration … whilst at the same time it seems obvious that the use of hyperlinks and the global interconnected digital communications infrastructure is growing, as is peoples’ sophistication with the tools and services available.
You gotta wonder some days if the people ostensibly in charge believe that they can hold time to a standstill, and deny that people will not use what is available to undercut or undermine, especially when confronted with authoritarianism, fascism and non-tolerance of anything other than a march towards freedom and democracy (and yes, you do hear a touch of sarcasm there).
Anti-US and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies. This could prompt some leftist, nationalist, or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests.
The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the Internet age.
Powered by Qumana
Translated from :
Ils sont vos futurs employés…
By Michel Dumais
… and they will be coming soon to a workplace near you.
An article was published (paywall) in last week’s Financial Times by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about these new arrivals who will soon invade the labour market - youngsters who today are 15 - 18 years old. Meet the digital natives.
The title itself (They are the future; And they’re coming soon to a workplace near you. The next generation of your staff is challenging the accepted ways of doing things in the business world) is evocative of the rest of the article (Lee Rainie explains who they are and why they are different - and what employers need to think about to attract the best.).
From the first paragraph on, the scene is set with an extract from Marc Prensky’s study:
As consultant Marc Prensky calculates it, the life arc of a typical 21-year-old entering the workforce today has, on average, included 5,000 hours of video game playing, exchange of 250,000 e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages, 10,000 hours of mobile phone use. To that you can add 3,500 hours of time online.
Our work at the Pew Internet Project shows that an American teen is more likely than its parents to own a digital music player such as an iPod, to have posted writing, pictures or video on the internet, to have created a blog or profile on a social networking website such as MySpace, to have downloaded digital content - songs, games, movies or software, and to have snapped a photo or video with a phone.
Prensky also puts into perspective the age of this new generation of workers, notably in terms of their relationship with and to the Web.
“Today’s younger workers are not ‘little us-es’,” argues Mr Prensky, an educator, gaming expert, and author of Don’t Bother Me, Mom - I’m Learning. “Their preference is for sharing, staying connected, instantaneity, multi-tasking, assembling random information into patterns, and using technology in new ways. Their challenge to the established way of doing things in the business world has already started.”
Those challenges often flow from young workers’ embrace of technologies that have grown up with them. Today’s 21-year-old was born in 1985 - 10 years after the first consumer computers went on sale. When this young worker entered public school in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a computer program called the World Wide Web. Our worker’s college career saw the rise of blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, Del.icio.us, Skype, podcasts, and YouTube.
And so, the reality is that these young "emigres" at home in the digital world are thrusting their way into a workplace where the royalty still consists of immigrants and illiterates, in terms of the demands of the digital world. There’s a clash in perspective, to say the least.
Now, this 21-year-old and his peers are showing up in human resources offices as digital natives in a world dominated by digital immigrants - elders who often feel less at ease with new technologies. Here are five realities of the digital natives’ lives that must be understood by their new employers:
The 5 realities that employers today must understand and integrate into their practices before seriously thinking about employing this new generation :
*Reality 1: They are video gamers with different expectations about how to learn, work, and pursue careers.
A host of experts has affirmed that today’s young workers have internalised the new realities of work. “Job entrants now do not expect lifetime employment from a single employer,” argues Edward Lawler, co-author of the forthcoming book, The New American Workplace. “To them, the word ‘career’ is plural.”
These attitudes clearly reflect the larger realities of the changing nature of work. Yet there is also some evidence that the ethos of video gaming plays a role. John Beck and Mitchell Wade argue in Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever that games are the “training programs” for young workers (especially males) that help shape the way they behave in a world full of data-streams, where analysis and decisions come at twitch speed, where failure at first is the norm, where the game player is the hero, and where learning takes place informally.
For companies, this puts a premium on designing engaging work that allows workers to make a clear contribution and be rewarded for the same. If “organisation man” has become “gaming man”, then the importance of worker morale is elevated - as is the value of basing work on completed tasks, rather than other measures of work effort such as hours on the job. “Give them projects to complete and then stand out of the way,” argues James Ware, who helps run Future of Work, an organisation for facilities, IT and human resources professionals based in Prescott, Arizona. “These kids quit when they are frustrated trying to finish a quest that will ‘get them to the next level’.”
*Reality 2: They are technologically literate, but that does not necessarily make them media literate.
Our research has found consistently that the dominant metaphor for the internet in users’ minds is a vast encyclopedia, especially among younger users, who have grown up relying on it to complete school assignments, perhaps too often clipping and pasting from websites into term papers.
Sandra Gisin, who oversees knowledge and information management at reinsurance giant Swiss Re, says her colleagues marvel at the speed with which younger workers communicate and gather information. But she has had bad experiences with younger workers accepting uncritically the top results from a Google search: she says the firm will begin training programmes next year to teach workers how to evaluate information and to stress that “not all the best information is free”.
Dow Jones news organisations have similar worries. They have created programmes for journalism educators and reporters-in-training to drive home the point that journalists should not rely on a web source without checking its origin and confirming the information in other ways. “We drive home the point that it’s not good enough to say, ‘I read it on the internet’, without taking other steps to verify it,” notes Clare Hart, president of Dow Jones Enterprises.
At the same time, younger workers’ comfort with online tools can be a boon to marketing departments. Ms Hart, 45, says younger workers on the staff “convinced us baby boomers” to put more information from Dow Jones conference presentations online and to create podcasts of the best of them. Since then, e-mail offering podcasts is opened about 20 per cent more frequently than traditional marketing e-mail.
*Reality 3: They are content creators and that shapes their notions about privacy and property.
More than half of American teenagers have created and shared content online. They think of the internet as a place where they can express their passions, play out their identities, and gather up the raw material they use for their creations.
So, why shouldn’t a young employee think it clever and fun to post on his blog pictures of Apple computers being delivered to the loading bay at Microsoft headquarters? That is what Michael Hanscom, a temporary employee for a Microsoft vendor, did and was fired for violating the company’s non-disclosure rules.
In the many-to-many broadcast environment of the internet, the prospects for data haemorrhage from companies have grown exponentially. Clearly, companies need to create policies about how internal bloggers should treat company information, what kinds of intellectual property need to be protected, and basic norms of behavior that should guide people who want to create online material.
*Reality 4: They are product and people rankers and that informs their notions of propriety.
This is the wisdom-of-crowds generation that grew up rating peers’ physical attributes (amihotornot.com), pop culture creations (Amazon metacritic.com reviews), teachers’ style and grading practices (ratemyprofessors.com), and products (epinions.com). No surprise, then, that there are websites drawing decent traffic for people to rate their bosses, their clients, and their customers. The tone of online commentary is often racy and retaliatory.
So, organisations might ponder a new clause or two in the policy manual about online etiquette inside and outside the workplace. “Most companies have policies in place against harassment based on things like sex, race, and ethnicity,” says Lynn Karoly, an economist at the RAND Corporation who has studied the 21st century
workplace. “But we should probably create new categories of policies to handle unacceptable online behaviours where liability might emerge.”*Reality 5: They are multi-taskers often living in a state of “continuous partial attention”, where the boundary between work and leisure is quite permeable.
The ubiquity of gadgets and media allows younger workers to toggle back and forth quickly between tasks for work and chatter with their friends. Many marvel at their capacity to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. An even sharper insight comes from Linda Stone, a technology consultant, who has noted that many technophiles function in a condition she refers to as “continuous partial attention”, where they are scanning all available data sources for optimum inputs.
Those who operate in such a state are not as productive as those who stay on task. They also do not make distinctions between the zones of work and leisure, consumer and producer, education and entertainment. “Their worlds bleed together,” argues Charles Grantham, another principal at the Future of Work. “It is pretty useless to try to draw borders around different spheres for them. It’s better to let them shift among them at their choosing as long as the work gets done.”
Again, companies would be wise to spell out their tolerance levels for the amount of personal activity workers are allowed and their expectations about the availability of workers outside the office and after hours.
Many companies see no option but to embrace the world of digital natives. Agilent Technologies, a top global measurement company, began early this year to distribute iPod Nanos to new employees hired from US college campuses. The Nanos were preloaded with podcasts describing each of the benefits offered by the company, such as the 401(k) retirement plan and options for health insurance. “The college kids loved getting the benefit overviews preloaded on the iPod, while our older workers often preferred to read about these things on our website,” notes human resources manager Cathy Taylor. “There are different generational learning styles.”
Still, the ethic of podcasting information is now spreading through the company and some of those older workers have caught the bug, too. For a recent retirement party, staff from Agilent’s far-flung offices collaborated on a podcast for the retiree. “You Raise Me Up” by Andrea Bocelli was dubbed over the voiced well-wishes and the podcast was played over a WebEx teleconference. “It was a first for a virtual retirement party,” enthuses Taylor. “We’ll be doing it again.”
Tags: Web 2.0, digital natives, digital immigrants, Prensky, Pew, workplace of the (near) future
Powered by Qumana
My friend Euan has a recent post up about the BBC’s more recent experimentation with Web 2.0 services, which i believe is part of their strategy towards making their web
Noticed in the Globe and Mail’s Technology section today
Tech Poll
The entertainment industry seems split on how to approach the booming growth in social media sites, primarily because copyright content inevitably appears on sites such as YouTube and MySpace. On one side, some companies are preparing to sue and on the other, some are inking deals. Will the industry’s growing interest in social media sites:
- Eventually ruin on-line communities ?
- Make them a better destination ?Results:
… dis-information, that is.
Via the comments section at FDL, referring to a piece in the Washington Times. Bush meeting with bloggers ? We all know there has been a divide open up … between wingnit bloggers who defend everything and anything the Bush Mutant Ninja Commando Fascists put out there, and so-called lefty bloggers who oppose anything the Bushites say or do under the general belief that they are up to no good.
To me it is clear that there has been much deconstruction and destruction of the rule of law and the overall system of checks and balances in the USA, pretty quickly really .. accompanied by an illegal and immoral so-called war (really a preemptive invasion that did not preempt anything) … so I belong in the second of the two camps mentioned above.
The point with this post is that the Bushites are not satisfied with owning the vast majority of the souls of people working in mainstream media, but feel they need to call bloggers into the fray as reinforcement. I’d argue that so much of what they have perpetrated on the American public … lies camouflaged as high-minded fear-based rhetoric, or straight-out lying and the re-writing of recent history … has been so outrageous that the left-wing blogs have acquired force and weight [recisely because all they have tried to do is chronicle the descent into dishonesty, depravity and shame.
It continues to astound me that while we are surrounded daily with evidence that the once-proud nation of the USA os quickly being brought to its knees by its very own leaders and the sycophants installed all around them.
Case-study material for the rest of yours and my lives, at the very least.
check this out– looks like booosh is trying to keep up with Clinton! Wonder if Jane and Christy were invited!!!
President Bush has invited bloggers to join him today as he signs into law a bill creating a database of federal spending — a recognition of their role in forcing the bill through Congress over the objections of senior senators and an indication of how much bloggers are changing the political process.(snip)
Some of the bloggers also will have a chance to talk about their work on the bill tomorrow with Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget.
“They definitely showed a tremendous interest and a dogged determination to see this bill passed, and we are happy to invite them to the White House,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
Glenn Reynolds, who led the charge from the right on his blogs Instapundit.com and Porkbusters.org, said blogs have given a voice to the constituency that wants spending controls and accountability. That means lawmakers can’t talk about financial responsibility while getting away with profligate spending on pet projects.
“That’s sort of the big news here,” Mr. Reynolds said. “What blogs make it hard for people to do in a whole lot of different ways is tell one group of people one thing and tell another group something different, and hope nobody noticed.”
Powered by Qumana
Via CNN.com Technology
CEO bloggers communicate to the masses
September 18, 2006SANTA CLARA, California (AP) — Sun Microsystems Inc. CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently became "un blogeur" when he started publishing his Weblog in French and nine other languages.
Schwartz, whose online journal attracts 50,000 viewers each month, says going international will generate new customers attract prospective employees in Europe, China and elsewhere. That puts the 40-year-old chief executive at the vanguard of a trend in corporate communications, one that tears down barriers between executives and consumers.
"The blog has become for me the single most effective vehicle to communicate to all of our constituencies — developers, media, analysts and shareholders," Schwartz said in an interview in his Silicon Valley office. "When I go out and have dinner with a key analyst on Wall Street or a key investor from Europe and ask them if they’ve read my blog, they almost universally say yes."
CEOs of smaller companies have already seized on blogs, and big companies are increasingly joining in — despite the potential for disastrous backfires. In its unfiltered form, blogging lets them bypass the public relations department, journalists and industry analysts and speak directly to the public.
Powered by Qumana
… can be found here.
On 9/11, Keith Olbermann speaks out about 9/11
Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.
All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.
And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.
I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.
And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.
However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds — none of us could have predicted this.
Five years later this space is still empty.
Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.
Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.
Five years later this country’s wound is still open.
Five years later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.
Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.
It is beyond shameful.
At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial — barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field — Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."
Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.
Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won’t.
Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they’re doing instead of doing any job at all.
Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.
And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.
And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.
The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.
Those who did not belong to his party — tabled that.
Those who doubted the mechanics of his election — ignored that.
Those who wondered of his qualifications — forgot that.
History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.
Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.
The President — and those around him — did that.
They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."
They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.
The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11 is "lying by implication."
The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."
Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.
Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.
Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.
Yet what is happening this very night?
A mini-series, created, influenced — possibly financed by — the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.
The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.
How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you — or those around you — ever "spin" 9/11?
Just as the terrorists have succeeded — are still succeeding — as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.
So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.
This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney’s continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.
And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."
In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves."
And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn."
When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:
Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you.
Powered by Qumana
… and / or for the truth.
From MyDD, some thoughts on Disney’s new propaganda-based business model.
There is a window of time now for Mr. Iger to step up, an ‘apologize for Tylenol tampering’ moment. He needs to cancel this miniseries, and take personal responsibility for inadequate oversight. He should privately fire the people responsible for this total disaster of a project, and apologize.
That’s the only way to restore Disney’s brand among a large group of very angry people. Be brave, be public, and be honorable. It’ll work.
And what will happen if he doesn’t? Well, it’s not just boycotts. Those are probably going to happen, but that’s not what Iger has to worry about, or his corporate brethren. You see, Disney has a number of political objectives, as is obvious from the donor patterns of their corporate executives and their lobbying behavior.
One of them is the egregiously awful broadcast flag. Disney is leading the effort to give Hollywood control over how your TV and TiVo are built and what you can do with programs you watch. This is in the Stevens bill before the Senate. Democrats didn’t really have any reason to deny Disney its political candy, since Disney was thought to be responsible with its content, or at least not overtly insane. Their credibility on this front is going quickly, and donations to Chuck Schumer aren’t the palliative they once were.
Another is copyright extensions, which Disney has used to keep its perpetual license on characters like Mickey Mouse, who should by now have fallen into the public domain. Democrats didn’t really have any reason to think that this was anything but a dispute over intellectual property, with corporations like Disney having motives that are only as pure as Snow White, versus pirates bent on stealing songs and movies by hardworking artists. Now that Disney’s credibility is going, lobbyists for Disney are going to find it tougher on Capitol Hill, and lobbyists for the Creative Commons movement are going to find a much easier reception.
Iger knows there’s a movement bent on routing around his unreasonable and political control of free speech through copyright extremism. He’s got a choice on whether he gives that movement a whole lot of real political power.
And thing Disney wants is media consolidation. Disney wants to buy everything, since media is seen as a scale business. It’s pretty obvious to Democrats if this movie airs that Disney is not a responsible public steward of the airwaves it controls right now.
Why should they be allowed to engulf even more assets? Like Creative Commons, the free media movement is growing rapidly, and it is a real movement that could receive a dollop of political power thanks to Disney’s exceptionally and impressively poor judgment.
Mr. Iger has a choice about what to do here. I don’t imagine he’ll make the right choice, but he might.
Powered by Qumana
Personally, I have little doubt that forms of online social networking will be developed for all sorts of different demographics, and community and interest / action groups.
Some of them will be seen as industrial, or info age business spaces, some of them will be seen as political / social action spaces, some of them will be seen as entertainment / social spaces where people share interests and hobbies, gossip and ways to get together.
It was, and is .. treason.
I originally started this blog (and my wirearchy site) because of my conviction that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (as David Weinberger has pointed out repeatedly, whether that is always a good thing is another question entirely) and that organizational structures and processes still firmly implanted throughout the corporate world were rapidly approaching obsolescence.
And, in my infrequent moments of possible wisdom, I realized (and have even written about) the probability that there would be massive resistance, and that real change would be slow. Many many others have recognized this, and added to the realization that changes to structures and cultures relating to the industrial age and industrial worldviews about efficiency and productivity would be hard-won and in large part slow in coming. A relatively recent (January 2006) article in The Economist titled The New Organization seemed to back up my (and others) point of view.