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Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

In Dialogue: Shirky, Anderson, Bateson and Schumacher

Published April 29, 2008 by cgerrish

Technology annihilates distance. There are some good things about that and some bad. While it’s at it, I’d also like technology to do something about time. I’m reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” and I can’t help but want to thread some conversations together. Unfortunately, time gets in the way. I guess I’m looking for something like what Norman O. Brown created with his book “Closing Time.” Two texts rubbing up against each other, Brown put James Joyce and Giambattista Vico into conversation across time.

I keep imagining a conversation between Gregory Bateson, E.F. Schumacher, Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson. It’s the podcast I’d like to listen to on the BART train tomorrow morning. Time prevents that from happening. When will technology do something about that? Perhaps it doesn’t have to, if I listen closely enough, I can hear hear the texts in conversation.

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A Gathering of Tribes: Tree Huggers and Foodies Rock the House

Published April 28, 2008 by cgerrish

Last night Friends of the Urban Forest held a fund raiser at Anne Sommerville’s Greens restaurant. It was a gathering of tribes and a connecting point for future action. The treehuggers and the foodies have a common agenda around environment, sustainability and engagement. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office presented FUF executive director Kelly Quirke with a proclamation, a representative of Nancy Pelosi’s office expressed her support of the urban forestry movement, and Katrina Heron, speaking on behalf of Alice Waters, spread the word about the Slow Food Movement.

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Learning what else you can do with a Juniper Berry

Published April 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Juniper berry

Clay Shirky’s comparison of Gin and Television as mechanisms by which pain is soothed, and a cognitive surplus created, connects with a number of things I’ve been thinking of recently. The appropriate response to Shirky’s essay is to create another essay, or perhaps a photograph, that comments and connects to it. We live in a consumer society, and thanks to folks like Ralph Nader, we have some rights as consumers. But we are coming to the end of the era where we define ourselves by what we consume. 

With the vast new set of consumption choices flowing through the network, the issue of gluttony arises. You can’t just eat everything. Human beings don’t scale, and human attention doesn’t obey Moore’s law. What happens when our total number of waking hours, and not just for today, but for the rest of our lives, can be filled with high quality “content” programmed by the best curators and editors on the planet? Fill out a profile, push a button, and the entire sequence can be put into a feed ready for your attention. As material is consumed, and new material becomes available, a constant recalculation of your feed will occur assuring that you will always have the highest quality and most appropriate “content” available. Philip K. Dick is smiling somewhere.

The assumption built into this model is that we just need more and better gin. Shirky points out that if we went on the wagon, we’d have a tremendous surplus of time on our hands. And if we look at what the digital natives are doing, we’d see that 100% consumption is boring. They want all transaction to be full duplex, read/write, consume/produce. At its origin, Tim Berners-Lee created a 2-way web, but the conversation shouldn’t be limited to the network.

If we become a nation of producers as well as consumers, won’t there even be more content to consume? Yes, but there will be no obligation to consume it all. It’s also important to remember that all conversations don’t happen with words (written or spoken). A photograph can speak to an essay, so can a melody, a video, a dance, a scribble in a notebook or a painting. With a whole new set of tools and media widely available, I see a nation returning en mass to their parlor pianos and singing a song about “gin and television” and then uploading a video of it to YouTube.

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Identity, Privacy, Society: The Laws of the Tribe

Published April 27, 2008 by cgerrish

The Tribe

As we become both individuals and members of a group on the network, we become more tribal. Social graph is often discussed in terms of the linkages between the members of a set. But there’s a quality to the links that doesn’t seem to come through in the conversation. We argue that the word “friend” doesn’t properly signify in the context of social network websites because it merely describes a raw physical link of data sets. We need to take the thoughts further. When networks become social, it’s not the fact of a connection that makes the society, it’s the quality and intention of individual acts. How do the members of the group treat each other?

Anyone who has followed the formation of groups on the network from BBS and ListServs to NewsGroups to IRC and Chat Rooms, knows that primitive impulses surface regularly and threaten the structure of the tribe. The designation “anonymous coward” was created to encourage members to claim and assert their identity within the group, and to signal that no value or reputation accrued to the speech of the anonymous. Godwin’s Law is evidence that a conversation in a  frictionless environment veers into common patterns of primative gesture.

Identity, privacy and society have a different meaning within a tribe. We’re used to thinking of identity on an individual basis, but identity claims have to be validated by our society. Some day our tribes will have developed to the point where identity theft will be a crime against the tribe, rather than just the individual. The idea of privacy will have to take tribal membership into account.

We have a lot to learn from the power dynamics and organizational structures among members of tribes in non-western countries around the world. The word “tribe” itself is filled with a thousand stories and histories; some very dark, others powerfully progressive. The new gathering of tribes will be an extension of our ongoing experiments with decentralized democracy.

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