interactivity

I got a chill reading this post from Seth Godin:

So, very soon, you will own a cell phone that has a very good camera and knows where you are within ten or fifteen feet. And the web will know who you are and who your friends are.

What happens?

What happens is that you have no privacy. Seth sees a big upside.

See a dangerous driver? Send a video snippet to the clowd. The clowd collates that with a bunch of other shots of the same driver... busted.

And the clowd also knows where you are, camera or no camera. So it can tell you when your old friend is just two gates away from you, also wasting time at the airport waiting for her flight. Or it can do Zagats to the ten thousandth power by not only suggesting the best nearby restaurant (based on your food circle of friends) but can also integrate with Open Table and only recommend restaurants that actually have room for you. Or it can let restaurant owners do yield management and find you a table at a good enough restaurant at the best possible price...

This is going to happen. The only question is whether you are one of the people who will make it happen. I guess there's an even bigger question: will we do it right?

If you do what he describes, can it be "right"?

Imagine the feeling of going to the doctor for that private medical condition, and everybody knows. Imagine being stalked by an admirer or resentful ex while you go about your day. Imagine broadcast spam being pushed at you via phone where ever you go. This adds a whole new meaning to the term "cyberbullying."

The drunk driver scenario? On one level, it's a description of being guilty until proven innocent. Everything you do is under scrutiny.

And of course, not all scrutinizers are equal. It's quite obvious that the government and big business will have more scrutinizing power than your snoopy neighbor. Is that the life we want in a free society?

There at least should be a toggle-able opt-in/opt-out, yes? Or are we to live in the Matrix, plugged in with no option, doing our duty by exposing our entire lives to the machine?

To me, the real possibility of this new age is the empowerment of the individual. That's the power of free (as in freedom) exchange of information. That's the power of open source. That's the power of collaboration, mash-ups, crowdsourcing. Empowerment, not simply a cooler, sexier sublimation to the System. Isn't that the real dream? Isn't that the un-tapped economic and cultural goldmine?

Seth Godin is worth reading because he so frequently comes up with some interesting insights about this modern world that's evolving and growing before our eyes. But I think here he gets it this wrong:

If I had to pick one word to describe what's new, what's different and what's important about now vs. then, it would be "choice."

The choice of more products.
The choice of more retailers. Many a click away.
The choice of more consumers to ask for an opinion.
The choice by marketers over who to market to (precision increases).
The choice of workers to be virtual or flexible or change careers.

He goes on with some for-instances.

The thing is, I don't see choice as being some "new" 21st-century phenomenon. In fact, in many ways, there's less choice today than there was 25 years ago. There may seem to be more banks around, but what I've been seeing is massive bank consolidations. The local banks in my area are being absorbed by -- or absorbing -- other banks. I can buy insurance for my company from any number of brokers, but they're all selling the same thing, often the same underwriters, especially when it comes to health insurance. There may appear to be more credit card offers out there, but these companies have been consolidating so rapidly, I think I have one single card in my purse that has not merged and changed names in the past 2-3 years.

Bob Warfield takes on Seth's idea and riffs a bit on "scarce," as if it were the opposite of "choice," but then points out:

The web moves in punctuated equilibrium. Most of the time, choice is illusory. It consists of thousands of minor variations on what are just a few common themes. Most people crave consistency, because they can’t handle too many real choices. And yet thousands of minor variations are strangely unsatisfying. We can invest all the time, seek all the answers, work hard to get to depth, and we’re left wanting more, or at least wondering if this is it. Delivering something deeply different to break us out of the drone of all that mundane choice is valuable.

Seth does hit on one thing, though: "More choice in who to listen to (and who to ignore)."

That's true. However, I feel that is only a symptom of the real paradigm shift in our economy and culture today:

Voice.

Every day, in the "old media" of traditional broadcasting and newspapers, we see closed-minded -- and I'd say willfully ignorant -- attitudes expressed about how unimportant blogging and social media are. But they are speaking from platforms that are feeling a bit disempowered by the new media.

The new media are what have given people their voice. And it's not just that now we can hear what people used to just shout back at the television. We (the people) are changing. It's amazing what happens when you get a sense that maybe, this time, when you speak out you will be heard. That's profound. It's revolutionary.

People can talk back. Talk back to companies. Talk back to politicians. And, most important, talk to each other. We have more choices to listen to because we have more people saying things.

We have voice.

What do you say?

WiMAX is on the way, finally.

The Mobile Intelligent Terminal was unveiled at a Samsung-sponsored industry conference on Mobile WiMax, which is just coming into use and promises fast broadband connections over long distances.

The device weighs about a pound and contains a fold-out keyboard, 5-inch screen and 30 gigabyte hard drive. It runs the full version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system and also supports the CDMA mobile phone communications standard, which is used in South Korea and other countries including the United States.

Kim Hun-bae, Samsung vice president for mobile research and development, told reporters that the gadget is the world's first WiMax device that also works as a mobile phone. It also can access the Internet, make video phone calls and display television as well as other video.

The "MIT" is so new that googling up the model number, SPH-P9000, yields nothing, not even a hit on Samsung's own site, where they promote their WiMax products, but not this new mega-phone-thing.

(Is "MIT" really going to be the acronym? "Hold a MIT in your mitt!" "Communicate mit MIT!" "MIT me sometime!")

Never mind the funny-looking device — I mean, check out this AP photo [pop-up window] — I'm really excited that WiMAX is almost here.

WiMAX is a wireless digital communications system, also known as IEEE 802.16, that is intended for wireless "metropolitan area networks". WiMAX can provide broadband wireless access (BWA) up to 30 miles (50 km) for fixed stations, and 3 - 10 miles (5 - 15 km) for mobile stations. In contrast, the WiFi/802.11 wireless local area network standard is limited in most cases to only 100 - 300 feet (30 - 100m).

With WiMAX, WiFi-like data rates are easily supported, but the issue of interference is lessened. WiMAX operates on both licensed and non-licensed frequencies, providing a regulated environment and viable economic model for wireless carriers.

WiMAX can be used for wireless networking in much the same way as the more common WiFi protocol. WiMAX is a second-generation protocol that allows for more efficient bandwidth use, interference avoidance, and is intended to allow higher data rates over longer distances.

This is going to change more than cell phones. [More on Wikipedia.]

It all makes my new Palm 700p seem rather archaic.

Today, Lakshmi Chaudhry has an interesting article up on In These Times: Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?

The article runs down the usual dichotomy blog observers dwell on: how blogs are at odds with mainstream media. Prospects for how blogs might change the future are measured not in how the interactive media form is changing our culture and the very way we engage with the world, but in whether blogs can generate a specific outcome in the 2006 elections.

An Internet-fueled victory at the polls would certainly be impressive—no candidate backed by the most popular progressive blogs has yet won an election. But electoral success may merely confirm the value of blogs as an effective organizing tool to conduct politics as usual, cementing the influence of a select group of bloggers who will likely be crowned by the media as the new kingmakers.

Winning an election does not, however, guarantee a radical change in the relations of power. Technology is only as revolutionary as the people who use it, and the progressive blogosphere has thus far remained the realm of the privileged —a weakness that may well prove fatal in the long run.

In 2006, the biggest question facing blogs and bloggers is: Will their ascendancy empower the American people—in the broadest sense of the word—or merely add to the clout of an elite online constituency?

I don't think I agree with that conclusion -- or even the question. And I think the problem gets down to preconceptions of what a blogger is.

Blogs are literally vox populi—or at the least the voice of the people who post entries and comments, and, to a lesser extent, of their devoted readers. Telling bloggers that they’re wrong or to shut up is somewhat like telling respondents to an opinion survey to simply change their mind. When journalists reject bloggers as cranks or wingnuts, they also do the same to a large segment of the American public who seeblogs as an expression of their views. Such dismissals feed the very alienation that makes blogs and bloggers popular.

The irony is that bloggers are most powerful when they work in tandem with the very media establishment they despise. “Bloggers alone cannot create conventional wisdom, cannot make a story break, cannot directly reach the vast population that isn’t directly activist and involved in politics,” says Peter Daou, who coordinated the Kerry campaign’s blog outreach operations. Blogs instead exert an indirect form of power, amplifying and channeling the pressure of netroots opinion upwards to pressure politicians and journalists. “It’s really a rising up,” says Daou.

Can this online rebellion lead to real political change? The prognosis thus far is encouraging, but far from definitive. [emphasis added]

See, this is where I have a problem. I submit that the only reason we have what might be called "Establishment Bloggers" is because, today, the information media environment is still dominated by the international media conglomerates. Of course blogs can't take on the mainstream media alone right now! Blogs are totally outgunned financially and in terms of audience.

But there's no reason at all to assume that things will stay this way. Because what we're seeing is a cultural and economic transition from the hit-driven, passively experienced information and entertainment marketplace to the long-tail-driven, actively engaged information and entertainment marketplace. And the megacorporations are institutionally not well-equipped to take advantage of this, for while they have the money, they do not have the vision. And their corporate cultures are lost in ideas that no longer can thrive, yet are beholden to the interests of a well-fed management that generally has treated content producers with disrespect, if not outright contempt.

It cannot last.

Let's go back a little bit. Once upon a time, television was considered a toy for the wealthy. I have heard enough stories about that day when the Phelps' or the Johnsons got the first TV on the block to make it clear to me that the world was a lot different then.

A lot different.

Flash forward to the 1990s and everyone had a television. Heck, everyone had three televisions! By the time the dot-bomb happened, the only people who didn't have televisions were people who deliberately chose not to have televisions. What once was a luxury item for the upper middle class became a staple item for just about every American's life.

There's no reason to assume that today's blogging demographics will be any different.

To be sure, there are barriers that separate the blogging public from the non-blogging public -- but ultimately they are not economic. I know enough working moms, disabled poor and unemployed students who are blogging to know that the assumptions of an economically-defined "blogging elite" are way off target. While one needs a computer to blog, it doesn't have to be an expensive one. And unless one is of the baby boomer generation, and did not grow up to some extent with computers around, having a computer in the house increasingly is seen as essential -- for shopping, for job hunting, for keeping in touch with friends and family. When you can buy a Dell for $250, and use free blogging software or a free blogging service, the barrier to having the tools to blog is rather low.

And it's not like you have to spend all day blogging. Nearly all the people I know blog in their spare time, in addition to one or two jobs, family commitments and so on. You don't have to be part of the idle rich to blog. So let's just dismiss notions that blogging is done just by "the privileged."

Rather, the dominant demographic distinction is along educational and cultural lines. Let's look at the latter first.

Take television: Today, people are starting to find they don't have as much time for television. And so people try to squeeze it into other parts of their day: in the car, in the shower, on in the background while eating or getting dressed or paying the bills. Once upon a time, some 58% (if memory serves) of the television viewing audience watched the last episode of M*A*S*H. Today no show comes close to that. Not by half. Not by half of half. And it's not just because people are watching more channels. It's because more and more people are finding that they just don't have time to watch.

There's also a new generation now that doesn't watch at all. No news, no cartoons, no sitcoms, no Law & Order.... The TV sits there, turned off, unused. They don't want to watch. They'd rather be online. Or gaming.

The other main divide between bloggers and non-bloggers, I believe, is education -- and while that to an extent can be proscribed by economic class, it's not impossible to obtain. In fact, those fortunate enough to have gone to a competent high school probably learned how to write well back when they were learning how to drive well. (Me, I couldn't write a coherent paragraph until my last third year in the state university, and I got two tickets for speeding and one for rolling through a stop sign before I turned 18.)

The format of blogs today is the written word. And let's face it, you have to have at least some education to communicate in writing. If you can't write what you mean, then blogging probably won't work out too well, because nobody will understand you! (And if you podcast or vlog, you need to be able to competently put the piece together, which also takes some technical and/or learning skills -- in addition to communication skills. And, of course, you'll have to have "it" -- that compelling presence that makes people want to listen or watch.) But education can be obtained, and it's an area where the poor can out-perform the trust-fund babies.

Yet given these economic and cultural barriers to blogging, it may seem to some that blogging is doomed to marginalia in the media realm. But these barriers to blogging are going to fall, and rather quickly. Why? Because while blogs will almost certainly morph -- into visual and aural communications in addition to textual -- one thing will not change: the interactivity of (what we call) blogging.

On the web, people interact. People find their voices and express themselves -- which is a far cry from the common television experience. Bloggers are not couch potatoes. Bloggers do not sit back and watch whatever is on. Bloggers do not sit passively through commercials. Bloggers choose.

It is the active, interactive, decisive way of getting information that defines blogging more than stereotypical notions of Joe Bloggs sitting at his computer in his PJs. And it is the active, interactive, decisive way of connecting with the world that is just starting to sweep through the media world today.

I would go so far as to say that there's no way blogs -- or what blogs become -- won't transform our society. They're already transforming our culture. And while the mega-media companies are the big players today, and still dominate, in the end they will have to adapt or die, because times, they are a' changin', and they won't wait for nobody.

Yet Chaundhry's analysis remains plodding in the present:

But many like Daou remain skeptical about the power of blogs to directly impact politics at the grassroots level. “You’re not going to go out there and mobilize a million people and have them all come to the polls and donate money. Blogs will never do that,” he says

And they may be even less effective in areas that are traditionally not as internet-savvy as the rest of the country, be it the rural red states or impoverished inner cities. Creating a virtual “community center” is unlikely to compensate for the Democrats’ disadvantage on the ground. Due to the eroding presence of unions, Democrats no longer possess a physical meeting place where they can target and mobilize voters—unlike Republicans, who rely on a well-organized network of churches, gun clubs and chambers of commerce.

"Never" is a word rarely proven true. And viewing blogs through the lens of today's economy and today's demographics is a mistake. We do not stand at the end of time. Our society is changing incredibly rapidly. And the old paradigm of hierarchical authority presenting information from the mount will gradually fade away to a world of lateral networks, interconnections and multilateral conversations. What that eventually will look like, who can say? But it won't look like Fox News or the Washington Post.

Several years ago I had an online diary. I'm not quite sure why I wrote it, or posted it online. I didn't know at the time. But the pragmatics were difficult enough -- I was essentially hand-coding the stuff -- that when Xanga came along, I had to try it. (I really wanted to join LiveJournal, but you needed an invitation or had to cough up something like 20 bucks to join, so I ditched that idea. To this day, I don't quite get LiveJournal and how it works. I visit LJ sites, but they leave me rather baffled. There, have I established my naïveté well enough?)

At first, Xanga was kind of fun -- posting things, getting props from others, building friends' lists.... But after about a month, I got bored with it all. I just couldn't see the appeal of all this first-person storytelling. Its interactive features were limited ... and far too in-grown for my taste. It started to feel like an echo chamber, and boring at that. So I let the little blog die.

That was 2001. Yet now -- today -- I cannot imagine not blogging, or not being surrounded online by bloggers writing about themselves. I suppose I've changed a little. But I think the culture has changed ... profoundly.

About 20 months ago I started up blogging again. I was in -- let's just say a pause in my overworked working life -- and thought I'd start up a Blogger blog. I chose Blogger because it was free, and ubiquitous. Why I started it up was mainly just to rant a bit -- anonymously -- about whatever struck my mind. Soon it ended up getting rather political, which made me grateful of the anonymous choice; I would not want to meet some of the folks I encountered online. (No, I won't give over the blog's particulars. That would spoil it, now, wouldn't it?)

How far we've come since 2001. Some people like to call what we have now "Web 2.0" -- as if the internet evolved in stable releases, like Photoshop or Word. I suppose it's only natural to try to define something that eludes definition. And since there's no telling where exactly we're headed in the evolution of internet-based interactivity, the tendency is to assume that we can make like Heisenberg and know, at least, where we are.

The thing is, can we really know where we are? Do we in fact have the right perspective on the present? What's more, are we truly served by seeing history as leading up to where we stand "at the end of time," so to speak?

The patterns we see are informed by our own perspectives. It may turn out that we haven't even begun to see change in our society. How can we know, when we don't know what will be? How can we judge what has happened, when we see it all as leading up to where we are now? Aren't we flotsam trying to define oceans? Galileo was persecuted for blasphemy. The Edsel was supposed to revolutionize motoring. The idea of graphics as used in Xerox's GUI interface was a non-starter in the face of IBM's PC, but became the heart of Apple's success and the primary component of interactivity today. The internet's IP went largely unusued for years, and now we're running out of IP addresses.

At the time, nobody had any idea what the result would be for any of those moments in history. Now we view those legacies through the lens of today. We view all these things as parts of patterns through which we (think we) understand the world.

But these patterns are ever-changing. Our perspective evolves, and consequently so do our demands on the world (and ourselves) change. And as we learn more, and experience more, our understanding of what we experience now will have changed.

Galileo is immortalized. Apple is a business success. The Edsel has its picture in the dictionary entry for "flop." And we move on ... to look back and see our triumphs and follies -- and then our folly of believing those prior interpretations.

What will come of this blog, I have no idea. I'm not writing for the echo chamber. I'm not writing to share "the truth." I'm just trying to figure some things out, and part of that process means posting some of my questions and tentative conclusions here, thankful that there's not a Spanish Inquisition ready to lock me up, but not really sure where all this is going, just the same.