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.
There are some recordings by Bob Dylan that I’ve played over and over again. Each time I play them they’re exactly the same. The quality of the sound differs, but the intention is that a recording offers an identical experience. I’ve listened to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” so many times I’m able to reproduce a facsimile of it in my mind at will.
This morning during my Sunday morning trip to the newsstand, I picked up a copy of UNCUT magazine with Bob Dylan on the cover. I was interested in reading about the latest release in the Bootleg Series called “Tell Tale Signs.” There’s a quote at the top of the article that goes like this:
“Have I ever played any song
twice exactly the same?”
“No, Bob, No”
“See? I don’t do that.”
So while I have a fixed idea of what a particular Dylan song sounds like, Dylan doesn’t think of his songs– or any songs as working that way. He never takes the play out of playing a song. I read somewhere that he never listens to his recordings; the song he carries with him is way on down the road from that day it was mixed down to a master.
In a world of scarcity– there’s only room for one version of a song- the one that will make the record company money. That’s the old model. In a world of abundance, each time we revisit a song, it’s never the same. The trap of the digital is that it only makes identical copies. The freeing potential of the digital is that every version of every page of Wikipedia is available. We now have an economic framework that can support releasing every version. Buy a single instance, or access to all versions– access to the version control system.
This set of ideas can’t be contained in one area of culture or commerce.
Traditional journalism is static. Its basic units are the article, the story, the piece. The new journalism is live. It doesn’t have a basic unit any more than a river or a storm have a basic unit. It’s process, not product. Even these things we call posts, texts, tweets and wikis are less unitary than contributory. They add to a flow, which in turn adds to what we know.
Steve Gillmor writes about the way the companies communicate, through official static planned releases of information or with live conversations through the Network.
Real work gets done in these conversations, and typically this work is being performed in the “open� because the participants realize (and have been given “permission� to work at this live level) that they have little to fear from competition because their access to participation trumps others who by definition have to react after the fact. Not only has the value moved on to the next set of conversations, but the product of this work is now being marketed to the audience most likely to buy it.
In both culture and commerce we’re looking for permission to go live, to sing the song a different way every time. But we also need to hear the song differently every time and start a conversation about it. Now, not everyone will want to go down that road. When faced with Bob Dylan in concert, some will be angered by a song sung in a new way. And when we get to that crossroads— most likely you’ll go your way, and I’ll go mine.
In his book, Muse in the Machine, Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought, David Gelernter talks about how we think at various levels of focus. At high levels of focus we think most like a machine, we are goal directed and push ambiguity to the margins. We are solving problems and making connections within a highly reduced set of possibilities. At low levels of focus we think poetically, with dream imagery, making impossible connections. Any truly creative process involves both modes of thinking. As our language grows an exoskeleton, will we push our humanity and our poetry to the margins? Will we lose our sense of touch?
Meaning is perhaps both the illusion of a perfectly clear language combined with the deep ambiguity of life and truth. Language is both within you and without you.
We were talking – about the space between us all
And the people – who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth – then it’s far too late – when they pass away
And the time will come when you see we’re all one,and life flows on within you and without you
Consuming the multicast, looking for traces of import, and then switching and focusing. Lyndon Johnson was famous for watching all three television networks at once during news broadcasts. But he didn’t consume each stream in its entirety, he was looking for cues to dig out the segments that mattered. He assembled his own narrative from this highly engaged viewing activity.
Politicians need to keep their finger on the pulse to be successful. Elvis Presley also watched all three networks at the same time. He was looking for cues to crack a different kind of code. He scanned the frequencies searching for the scent of cultural information, then quickly switched and focused.
This model was taken to the extreme in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth. David Bowie played a space alien who absorbed the local culture through a raw feed of all available broadcast channels.
The television remote control made switching simpler, but unless you could visually monitor each of the frequencies, you might miss the sign that signaled the necessity of a switch of focus. Cable television allowed the number of channels and networks to explode. Scanning the frequencies is no longer a job that can done by an individual. The Internet multiplied the possible number of channels into the millions.
Originally it was the VCR, and later the DVR and YouTube that made filtering and copying these valuable moments into a buffer for ready Network access a simple affair. Scanning the raw feed pouring off the network is now done through social media filters, perhaps most effectively by Twitter through communities of interest. A tweet containing a hyperlink is the most compact channel switcher, the most efficient pointer to items of interest.
These pointers we share through the Twitter feed point to locations in the cloud. We click and activate on-demand content that streams in to our computers. Today we think about the text, video and audio we access as a substitution for traditional broadcast and print media. But almost anything that can be expressed as software can be on the other side of that hyperlink. Here we are only limited by our imaginations.
