I was listening to Wolf Blitzer on CNN talking with the captain of the President’s plane, Air Force One. After 9/11, the airplane was fitted with videoconferencing equipment to allow the President to address the nation while in flight. The pilot described a process where the video signal could be sent to the major television networks for distribution to the nation and the world.
If you were designing that distribution pattern today, you’d send the video to YouTube first. Previously, only the the major television, radio and cable networks had the distribution power to reach the nation. To the extent that YouTube can accomodate realtime broadcast and provide an archive for timeshifting, it will become the primary distribution channel for political communication. The media networks will pick up the signal from YouTube for rebroadcast in realtime. They’ll provide context and analysis as a value add, but in that pursuit, they will be competing with a full range of microbroadcasters.
The dominant distribution pattern has been inverted; there were a few people who saw this historical change as it emerged over the last year. Obama, and his team, saw the possibilities of bottom up communication and executed on the insight beautifully. It will be interesting to see how this pattern becomes firmly woven into our culture over the next year.
Dominic Jones of the Investor Relations Blog sent me a link to ProxyDemocracy.org this morning. We’ve recently seen the power the of the vote in our Presidential elections. We marvel at the power of the community as we vote with our attention and gestures to surface the wisdom of crowds in social media applications. There’s another form of suffrage that is within our reach, but largely ignored. Shareholders have a say in how public corporations are run. One share of stock in a public company gives you a vote.
ProxyDemocracy.org explains it this way:
A company’s stockholders have the legal right to decide important decisions at the companies they own: they elect directors, review aspects of executive compensation, and weigh in on shareholder proposals addressing a variety environmental, social, and governance issues. History has shown that shareholders can use their voting power to create value — both economic and social — at the companies they own.
Whether you invest in mutual funds or individual stocks, you have a say in how things are run. While the recent market crash may have caused you to curse Wall Street and wish a pox on all their houses– if you’d like a say in how our financial institutions are run, a single share of stock gives you the right to vote.
If you’re already a shareholder, are you accepting disenfranchisement? The voting process as it’s currently implemented is a form a voter suppression. Once again, ProxyDemocracy.org:
In practice, it can be hard for investors to exercise their rights and have their voices heard. One important obstacle is information. Shareholders often have a hard time keeping track of when the companies in their portfolio are meeting and what the ballot items mean. Mutual fund owners, whose funds vote on their behalf at the companies in the fund portfolio, rarely know how their funds are voting and thus have no way to be sure that their interests are being represented.
Imagine, for instance, that you’d like a say in the future of the auto manufacturers in Detroit. Perhaps you’d like to have a say in how health insurance and HMOs are run. Now you can certainly vote by choosing to spend or not spend your hard-earned dollars on the products of these corporations. You can stand on a soap box on a street corner and shout at the passing crowd. Or you can buy a single share of stock and express your opinion as a shareholder. Now imagine the power of the swarm, of Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook.
ProxyDemocracy provides tools to help investors overcome these informational hurdles and use their voting power to produce positive changes in the companies they own. We help shareholders vote their shares by publicizing the intended votes of institutional investors with a track record of shareholder engagement. We help mutual fund investors understand the voting records of leading funds, making it possible for them to purchase funds that represent their interests and pressure those that don’t.
We’ve seen the power of bottom-up democracy, but it’s not only in our government that this approach can be effective. Big corporations and institutional investors will a happily vote for you, and they will vote their own interests.
Clay Shirky talks about the power of organizing without organizations, about the cognitive surplus that we have in abundance today. The tools at our disposal and our expectations have radically changed. Shiky tells this story:
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
Being a shareholder in a public corporation has been a one-way transaction. The tools to make it a highly visible two-way transaction are now ready to hand. They’re here now. And as you think about the investments you’ve made for your retirement, you should be asking yourself, “where’s the mouse?”
I’ve finally worked my way through last Sunday’s newspapers in time for this Sunday’s to fill up the in-basket. Of particular note was Peter Aspden’s column in the Weekend Financial Times. He picks up on a number of themes that have been surfacing in recent conversations. Aspden observes that culture and economies run in cycles, and that a down economy may signal a return of a more pungent cultural scene.
In a high economy, capital replaces labor in the machinery of cultural production. Works are primarily created as commercial ventures; they have a business plan, an expected return on investment, and a polished level of disconnected technical professionalism.
Aspden identifies the trends he’ll be looking for in the new year:
Cultural Promiscuity (global silk-road type connectivity and mashups)
Pungent Pop Culture, a return to seriousness
Profundity and complexity welcomed once again
The return of Art Cinema (and a farewell to cinematic infantilism)
Art Galleries returning to the sterner business of moving hearts and minds
In a down economy, labor replaces capital in the cultural work product. The industrial pop culture complex will turn to high glamor / high gloss products as they did during the great depression. It’s a formula that depends on owning the means of production, large concentrated audiences, low prices and controlled distribution.
Price of Movie Tickets
1940 $0.24
1939 $0.23
1936 $0.25
1935 $0.24
1934 $0.23
1929 $0.35
1924 $0.25
1910 $0.07
As means of production has gone digital, and the distribution networks have gone open, the old formulas are harder to pull off. The studios will have to depend on more and more on special effects and simulated realities to generate the requisite buzz– machines replacing humans. The return to a pungent culture is a cyclical event– the classic example for me was Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theater.
Theater should not, because it could not, compete against the overwhelming spectacle of film and should instead focus on the very root of the act of theater: actors in front of spectators.
However this move to the digital appears to be a more foundational change, the very axis of the cycle has been radically shifted. While the high end can go ever higher, the field of play has been opened for a new generation of artists. High and low have lost their polar relationship; real connection can happen across the Network through multiple endpoints. The cost of producing high quality digital output continues to go down, while the talent required to produce high quality digital output remains ever the same.
While a film on a large screen in a movie theater isn’t the same as watching on an iPhone or a laptop; nor is a film the same a grand opera at its best. New media will breed new forms– new methods of reading and writing. As the technology falls away in favor of the performance, perhaps we’ll see some of Aspden’s predictions come true. It could be as simple as a camera, some light, three people dancing and some narration– A Band of Outsiders.
Earlier this month I was wandering through an exhibit of work collected by Philippe de Montebello for the Metropolitan Museum. I found myself in front of a photograph by Richard Avedon of Marilyn Monroe. The context of the photo was the idea of theatrical self-impersonation. As Avedon tells the story, there is no such person as Marilyn Monroe.
“Marilyn Monroe was someone Marilyn Monroe invented, like an author creates a character.” Recalling a session that took place at his studio on a May evening in 1957, he continued: “For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that’s—she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn’t photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.”
In the networked social space created by our new modes of communication and interaction we enact a similar form of theatrical self-impersonation. Most of who we are is hidden from view, each identity is constructed and by definition, incomplete. Shakespeare’s words ring true today as we signal to each through roles constructed and manipulated at a distance.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts
But we shouldn’t limit our exploration to the commercial sphere, there are other modes in which this idea of theatrical self impersonation can play out. One of the stories that Ray Ozzie has been telling lately to introduce himself to Microsoft and the world has to do with a online system called Plato. An experience Ozzie had 33 years ago on an online network captured the promise and depth of this new space of interaction.
By the mid-1970s, PLATO’s many features included email and an instant messaging feature dubbed “Talk-O-Matic.” Ozzie wrangled a job working on the project, and, while doing so, communicated online with a collaborator who worked remotely from off-campus. Ozzie was impressed by the eloquence and intelligence of his offsite workmate and the two quickly bonded. Ozzie’s only complaint was that when they sent instant messages to each other, his offsite colleague was a frustratingly slow typist.
After their joint project was completed, Ozzie met his remote partner in person for the first time during a party at the partner’s house in 1975. Only then did Ozzie discover that his colleague was a quadriplegic, bound to a wheelchair, whose slow typing was a result of having to interact with the keyboard using a stick held in his mouth.
The incident had a profound effect on Ozzie. He was struck by how the technology allowed them to connect so closely, despite physical constraints and without preconceived judgments. The two had met in a shared mental space that was uniquely enabled by networked technology.
While we sometimes think of this networked social space we’re exploring as new, in an era where innovation occurs at lightening speed, the roots of the basic interactions reach back to a time out of mind.
The visible artifacts of these theatrical creations become detached from their originators and float freely in a field of play– currency traded in our social dance. Paul Ricoeur talks about these artifacts as “oneself as other” (Soi-meme comme un autre). While some talk of a technology that will allow us to aggregate the disaggregated, scooping up all the disparate pieces of personal identity and weaving them into a whole, the element of time renders these attempts necessarily partial. Perhaps we’re due for an exploration into the polar opposite of the single whole identity. The poet Fernando Pessoa created the literary concept of the heteronym. A heteronym possesses distinct temperaments, philosophies, appearances and writing styles– Pessoa had more than 70. Would the words I write here be the same ones I’d exchange with you over coffee at a little cafe on the other side of town? I really couldn’t say…
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
