Category: collaboration

You Can Never Hold Back Spring

Published January 1, 2009 by cgerrish

Jeri Southern

The first music for the first day of the new year presents an interesting choice. Does it set the tone for the next 365? Traditionally we might select an optimistic piece that speaks to us of new beginnings. But especially this year, as we enter the new year, we can’t leave the old one behind. There’s a feeling of melancholy filled with possibility, the old year hangs in the air like an unresolved chord.

I turned to Yo-Yo Ma first. He’s an artist who’s been coming up in conversation recently. Born in Paris, raised in New York, he performed at the White House for John Kennedy at the age of seven. A superlative and joyful musician, it’s his work with the Silk Road Project that seems so important at this moment in time.

The Silk Road was an extensive interconnected network of trade routes, not only a conduit for silk, but for many other products and was also a very important path for cultural and technological transmission by linking traders, merchants, pilgrims, monks, missionaries, soldiers, nomads and urban dwellers from China to the Mediterranean Sea for thousands of years.

Yo-Yo Ma’s idea of a modern Silk Road where many cultures meet and cross-fertilize is a positive vision for a new networked world. I chose a piece from his Dvorak Album called Silent Woods.

I then turned to Jeri Southern, because the very thought of her makes me smile. There’s something of the indestructible American spirit in her voice. The photo at the top of the post is Jeri in her backyard with her daughter and dog.

And finally Tom Waits brings it home with his song You Can Never Hold Back Spring. A reminder that seasons change, and there’s a point at which the shortest day of the year is over and the light begins to return.

At the dawn of a new year, that unresolved chord can be seen in a new light. At one time we would have waited patiently in the audience for the musicians to finish the song. But now we look up and see they’ve left the stage, the chord still ringing. Yo-Yo Ma points the way with his new collaborative piece Dona Nobis Pacem. It’s up to us to take up the song and bring it to its proper conclusion.

You Can Never Hold Back Spring
Tom Waits

You can never hold back spring
You can be sure that I will never
Stop believing
The blushing rose will climb
Spring ahead or fall behind
Winter dreams the same dream
Every time

You can never hold back spring
Even though you’ve lost your way
The world keeps dreaming of spring

So close your eyes
Open your heart
To one who’s dreaming of you
You can never hold back spring

Remember everything that spring
Can bring
Baby you can never hold back spring

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Out of Band Messages: Signaling Xmas

Published December 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Music plays a large role in the Winter holidays, Christmas especially. As popular music turned to rock and roll, it was still part of the family. It played the role of the rebellious teenager— but it still resided well within the boundaries of the nuclear family. In 1963, the Beatles joined the family for Christmas with an out-of-band message delivered through the special channel of the fan club.

As ‘Rock and Roll’ lost its ‘Roll,’ left home and 1960s exploded, Christmas was left behind. The family holidays were left to the ‘family-oriented‘ music acts. As Rock music matured and started families, Christmas returned as a theme. But the new songs didn’t attempt to regain innocence; the real world and the politics of the times couldn’t be kept out of the sound. As we look back across the span of popular music, it’s interesting to observe which artists and styles of music intersect with the Christmas holidays.

The Beatles Christmas message made use of a very simple and direct technology. There seemed to be little more than a microphone, a tape recorder, the band and a loose script outline. This kind of casual production method was a far cry from the intense rehearsals and refined production methods of George Martin. The off-the-cuff nature of the message makes the communication all the more genuine; we don’t feel as though it’s constructed for our entertainment, but rather an actual message.

The sophistication of video and sound production has grown tremendously over the years. Its costs have skyrocketed, and then plummeted to an almost commodity level. By chaining together a Flip video camera, the Network and YouTube Christmas theatricals can be produced and distributed easily. The cost of the idea and the time to produce them far outweigh the cost of the technology.

Aimee Mann has left the recording industry cartel to become an independent microcaster. She records albums, tours with her band, and is one of the artists who has intersected with Christmas. Each year, for the last few, she’s put on a special Christmas show. Without the heavy machinery of the record labels, Mann has found ways of connecting with her audience using low-cost and no-cost technical tools. The production costs are low, but the communication/connection value is very high. This combination of high and low modes of production is a new model for all forms of mass media. Even newspapers have become broadcast networks, a printed paper is just one output of the content.

It’s a much more straightforward proposition for a performer to construct a persona for the highly produced recording. Like the transition from silent film to talkies, it’ll be interesting to see which performers still shine off-the-cuff and on-the-run. But mastery of low tech production modes is only one element of the equation. Video isn’t a one-way medium any longer. Messages can travel in both directions, and the best performers know how to listen.

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Ana Marie Cox’s Pie Charts and The Other Shoe

Published November 8, 2008 by cgerrish

Ana Marie Cox Coverage Pie Chart

I’ve enjoyed reading Ana Marie Cox’s tweets and posts from the campaign trail these past few months. Ana does a great job of showing us what it’s like to be on the bus, or on the plane with the candidate. While her work for Time Magazine is interesting, I found her pie chart on how a journalist spends time on the campaign trail to be one of her most revealing missives. Is being there really being there? Is it proximity or access that really matters in doing journalism? How much time does a journalist really get to spend with a candidate– per 24 hour period, how much journalism really goes on?

Perhaps politicans need a Regulation FD, something like the disclosure requirements for public companies. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the regulation:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission‘s (SEC’s) Regulation Fair Disclosure, also commonly referred to as Regulation FD or Reg FD was an SEC ruling implemented in October 2000 ([1]). It mandated that all publicly traded companies must disclose material information to all investors at the same time.

The regulation sought to stamp out selective disclosure, in which some investors (often large institutional investors) received market moving information before others (often smaller, individual investors).

If politicians are public servants, perhaps it makes sense to regulate transparancy and fairness in their public communications the same way we do with public companies. Regulation FD is meant to combat information asymetry in the stock market. Selective disclosure results in some investors having better and more complete information with which to judge trading opportunities. The system of journalism we have now requires both proximity and access to get the story. With that kind of scarcity implicit in the information exchange, there are lots of power plays and games that go on. The analogy to financial markets is quite exact. Large institutional investors had better access, could trade soft dollars or other favors for information that resulted in advantaged trading opportunities. Our big media companies have that same relationship with political candidates.

On July 30, 2008 the SEC provided guidance on the role of Blogs, RSS and other Network-based communications in compliance with Reg FD. Public companies may use blogs and feeds to release material information in place of, or in addition to, the traditional wire services and conference calls. While this is currently a description of one-way communication, it’s well known that the Network is a two-way medium. It’s only a matter of time before the other shoe drops.

A man comes in late at night to a lodging house, rather the worse for wear. He sits on his bed, drags one shoe off and drops it on the floor. Guiltily remembering everyone around him trying to sleep, he takes the other one off much more carefully and quietly puts in on the floor. He then finishes undressing and gets into bed. Just as he is drifting off to sleep, a shout comes from the man in the room below: “Well, drop the other one then! I can’t sleep, waiting for you to drop the other shoe!�?.

Perhaps we saw a glimpse of this possible two-way future in the convergence of Twitter, Digg and CurrentTV in Kevin Rose’s recent interview with Al Gore.

A change of this magnitude in the power dynamics of access / proximity / flow will not come easily. As Dave Winer noted recently, in the recent Presidental Campaign, we didn’t really change the way news flowed. But as in the old Music Hall joke about the other shoe, if we lie awake waiting for the sound of a shoe hitting the floor — we may miss the fact that both shoes are on the floor already. As the flow of news moves from proprietary networks to the Public Network, it moves from a one-way system to a two-way system. From its inception the Web was always already a two-way medium. After all this time, we’re still in the very early stages of understanding the upstream flow.

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Dialogues In The Floating World

Published November 3, 2008 by cgerrish

$Hopper\'s Nighthawks at the Diner$

The locus of the conversation is the place/time where something new was revealed through a coming to terms by a group of people sitting around a table. The spatio-temporal coordinates of those tables have caused me to long for some method of time travel, a way to sit at those tables and engage in those conversations. Literature has provided me with a portal to some of those locations: the table of Gerald and Sara Murphy; the Algonquin roundtable; a late night at the carnegie deli; or in a car driving across the country with a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists.

Algonquin Round Table

The Network has changed some of the essential requirements for a conversation. A place at the table is no longer necessary– only time remains as a primary home for conversation. It’s time that now calls the tune, conversation unfolds in sequence, through the river of time across multiple real time media streams.

Remember ‘that time.’ I don’t remember all the words, or how they were strung together into sentences– or even the order of the sentences. I remember I spoke first, or was it you? But I remember ‘that time,’ I remember the ride we took. I remember the big ideas we passed by– they really made an impression. They changed the way I think about things, and therefore changed my world.

Detached from place, the conversation unfolds in a virtual space. It’s the place we all call in to. Somehow, I imagine that space without light- only sound echoing in the darkness. Without visual cues, it’s a building up another kind of give and take. It’s almost impossible for me to anticipate when you are about to speak. But after we’ve talked in that darkness a few times, we develop a sense for the music of it. The rhythms, the melodies and themes provide the pocket of the groove for the next solo to blend into.

An augmentation of the conversation occurs for the speakers when the darkness lifts and they open their eyes and view the live Network. Place returns, and it’s the Network’s space that we have in common. The visual space of the virtual conversation is an undiscovered country. We use that space to verify facts, to remember names, find support in statistics, and point to a location for later reference. As we speak, we browse and co-browse, we hunt and gather fuel for the conversation.

What of the fuel? What ignites a conversation and keeps it going? From what source does it draw its energy? There’s a point at which you can stand and watch as the future comes into being. It comes, not out of nothingness, but rather from the re-combining and re-describing of the things around us. The moment when you stop watching silently and begin to bring language into the frame, you start to understand the real usefulness of the new. The new wants explaining, it seeks language.

Nautilus Spiral

Sometimes it seems as though we’re talking in circles, never getting closer to the center of the matter. But conversations are never perfect circles, they’re always spirals. Or perhaps a circle in the sense of a hermeneutic circle:

The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text, rather, it stresses that the meaning of text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

Our dialogues and monologues have entered a kind of floating world, detached from physical space and reattached to place within the Network. While the shape of the conversation is much the same, it is augmented by an extended access to memory. When I refer to my notes, they are infinitely deep. The danger is that we may end up simply reading to each other and lose our voice in favor of a chorus of quotation. It’s only when we color outside the lines that we uncover the new. For a truly exploratory dialogue failure isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.

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