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Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

Music of Politics: The Birth of Cool

Published October 19, 2008 by cgerrish

It was a comment by Aron Michalski on a post-debate NewsGang Live: Obama was like Miles Davis, it was the notes he didn’t play that made the difference. Somehow that’s the image that has stayed with me. It’s not a frame that will gain wide usage, but I find it useful to measure the currents of both politics and technology. Leaving space for the silence, leaving space for the other players to fill in. Not responding to every theme sounded with a long personal improvisation, but sometimes just letting them finish. Letting the silence respond– opening a space for the next theme to be introduced. Perhaps we’re seeing a kind of post-Bebop public political conversation, it may be a new birth of cool. Lowering the temperature of the debate, moving from a hot sound to a cool sound.

And it’s not just a lowering of the temperature, it’s a move to modal jazz and away from being tied down to the chord changes. Wikipedia discusses the new direction of a modal approach:

An understanding of modal jazz requires knowledge of musical modes. In bebop as well as in hard bop, musicians used chords to provide the background for their solos. A song would start out with a theme, which would introduce the chords used for the solos. These chords would be repeated throughout the whole song, while the soloists would play new, improvised themes over the repeated chord progression. By the 1950s, improvising over chords had become such a dominant part of jazz, that sidemen at recording dates were sometimes given nothing more than a list of chords to play from. Creating innovative solos became exceedingly difficult.

In the later 1950s, spurred by the experiments of composer and bandleader George Russell, musicians began using a modal approach. They chose not to write their songs using chords, but instead used modal scales. This meant that the bassist, for instance, did not have to ‘walk’ from one important note of a chord to that of another – as long as he or she stayed in the scale being used and accentuated the right notes within the scale, he could go virtually everywhere. The pianist, to give another example, would not have to play the same chords or variations of the chords, but could do anything, as long as he or she stayed within the scale being used. The overall result was more freedom of expression.

In fact, the way that a soloist creates a solo changed dramatically with the advent of modal jazz. Before, the goal of a soloist was to play a solo that fit into a set of chords. However, with modal jazz, a soloist must create a melody in one scale (typically), which could be potentially boring for the listener. Therefore, the goal of the musician was now to make the melody as interesting as possible. Modal jazz was, in essence, a return to melody.

The addition of flexibility created a return to melody. It seems to be a change that is seeping into the general environment. I’d equate melody with pragmatism.

Everett Dirksen & LBJ

The conservative George Will recently stated that the next president will need to attend to the words of Everett Dirksen of Illinois:

“I am a man of principle, and one of my principles is flexibility.”

As we move in to these difficult economic times, we’ll need to improvise, not on the well-worn chord changes, but within the new modes that we find ourselves. It’s that cool temperament that will be able to reach out and find the melody of our times.

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Unringing The Bell: Traction, ReTraction and Zero-Response Time

Published October 15, 2008 by cgerrish

The Liberty Bell

The page in the newspaper that prints corrections and retractions is one of the most insincere parts of a publication. It’s the old unringing the bell problem. Once a statement is published, there’s no real way to unpublish it. The original image, or in this case the peel of the bell, is the one that continues to resonate in our public discourse.

A common technique in political (and commercial) campaigns is to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about an opponent. One hears the attack ad, but not the rebuttal. This tactic is based on the idea that the retractions morally cancel out the original attack, and therefore they’re allowable. The negative attack gains traction before it is retracted.

The tactic works because of the built in delay– time elapses before a response can occur. The delay exists because of the technical requirements around the production of news, it’s what we call the news cycle. Interestingly, companies create the same kind of delay when they engage in a formal process of constructing replies to conversations in the market.

In the Live Network, there is zero delay. Response is immediate. The model of the news cycle collapses to the simple conversation. You say something; I say something back. You say something, interest swarms around and responds. The bell rings, but a thousand bells ring in response. Think of the sound of change ringing— Change we can believe in.

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Composite Identity: A Collection of Wholes

Published October 14, 2008 by cgerrish

African Masks

Lately I’ve been thinking about identity as a composite. There was a point where I was convinced by the reversal of poles – switching from the system-based identity to the user-centered identity. An individual has many roles and she can reveal whichever identity attributes that are necessary for a particular transaction. We think of these fragments of identity as the pieces that make up the whole. But another way to look at it is to think of identity of a composite of wholes. Some elements match exactly, but live in a different name space. It’s probably not a complete list, or maybe it’s too long, but here’s an an initial take on the modes of identity. Each one could be consider a whole identity.

  • Anonymous
  • Citizen
    • City
    • State
    • Nation
    • Journalist
    • Politician
  • Social
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted
    • Artist/Writer
  • Personal
    • Medical
    • Legal
    • Financial
  • Consumer
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted / VRM
  • Business
    • Employer
    • Employee
    • Contractor
    • Proprietor

If identity is composite, should there be a single control point? If there were to be a single point of access to the management of this identity, authentication would have to be both multi-factor and multi-band.

Should we put all our eggs in one basket? With investment portfolios we preach diversification– we seek assets that don’t correlate in changing markets. It’s called covariance, we don’t want everything to go up or down at the same time. If we can’t risk a single control point, then we need to move to multiple control points. And in fact, even the ownership of identity is in question. We hear a lot about “my data” and “my identity,” but there is no data or identity outside the Network. The idea of multiple control points means more than I control my identity from multiple credential sets, it means I share control of my identity with other entities. The power and political economy of an identity is distributed throughout a network of relations. We don’t live in a frictionless plane, we live as mortals, among mortals, in this world that unfolds around us in the stream of time.

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The Story and The Clip: Keeping Life Present

Published October 12, 2008 by cgerrish

Reading Newspapers

We are storytellers.

Many years ago, when I was in the public relations business, the news cycles were much longer. I would read 4 or 5 newspapers a day– morning and evening editions. You could easily watch the set of stories being reported change over the days. Some stories had legs, others came and went, filling out the rest of the paper. Seasonal and evergreen stories came around each year like clockwork. We also had a news clipping service that tracked our clients’ names. A room full of people read the paper each day and clipped out the stories put them in an envelope and mailed them to us. Looking at the patterns of syndication, you could see how stories spread from one newspaper to another. That way of making sense of the stories we tell each other is no longer an efficient method to yield the storyline of our culture.

Sunday is a great news day. The newspapers are filled to the brim– I still like to read at least three; and the morning political talk shows are filled with news maker interviews and analysis. While I still filter through a large stack of newsprint to find the most interesting clips of the day, my methods have had to evolve. By the way, here are a few pointers from this morning:

The digital record of our history is piling up around us, providing an inexhaustible supply of frozen transcripts to hold over our heads and point at. So much is gathered into the digital archive, how can we make sense of it now? How do we turn it into a story we can understand?

Woody Guthrie jams

I now depend on a variety of filters to snag the best bits, the most important clips from Sunday’s output and drop pointers to them into the Tw*tter stream. I want the best clips, no matter what their source. The publication I read is jam session assembled every day by  a circle of freelance editors I’ve discovered on the Network.

The new models of journalism work on this same basis. Both The Huffington Post and Tina Brown’s new vehicle, The Daily Beast, break down the walls separating a particular publication from the rest of the Network. It’s the pointers that are valuable, not the walls around the garden of a publication. More and more we’re seeing those hyperlinks pointing to both professional and amateur sources; both inside and outside of a publication; both inside and outside this country. The sense of the space of a publication has profoundly changed.

The sense of time has changed as well. The old news cycles were based on the physical processes required to write, edit, typeset, print and deliver a newspaper. The new cycles are based on both the new technologies and the fact that life unfolds in real time. It is continuous, it always has been. Access to the raw real time feed is important, but it’s in the clips and stories that we memorialize our lives. It’s the pointer I send you, and the one you send me, that helps me make sense of what just happened.

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