MotherPie

Textual and Informational Changes & Social Disruption...

So, after writing yesterday about how our brain can change and therefore knowing we are in a state of flux from one state to another due to technology, and thinking further about how we obtain information and interact with it is fascinating.  We are in a state of social and cultural change, let alone cognitive change. That is the part of understanding the context for the death of newspapers but these things need a long-view perspective. This week the Seattle Intelligencer (did I spell that right?) went to online only. Have you looked lately at how thin the printed editions of Time and Newsweek have become? The end of the printed newspaper is being hastened by the economic situation. 

Clay Shirkey's talk at SXSW Interactive in Austin this past weekend has generated a ton of attention. His Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable is worth reading and I'll pull out my favorite part:

The death of newspapers is an example of social disruption. 

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Tim O'Reilly also spoke and he "began by saying that we're in a bubble - but not an investment one, a reality bubble. The financial crisis was top of his list, but he also referred to health, climate and so on... O'Reilly then spoke about 'the long now', which he said has been a big influence in his life and business. He explained that we should look at the long view, not just the 'right now'." 

So, think of the Word of God, just to put this in a long view.  Only a few held it in their hands but that changed with the advent of the printing press and moveable type.  In the beginning there was the word. But it wasn't printed.  I'm really going off on a long-view tangent, but think, the Westward movement was a religious/political cultural thing (Greek to Roman, to Catholic, to the Protestant Revolution) so I use this as an example in understanding our societal underpinnings in the U.S. Which are being extremely disrupted. Some say civilization would never have been possible without writing.  Text is becoming intangible.

So what is the long view? How will this revolution and extreme disruption play out? Well, the word is moving away from print, moving to cloud form with the growth of cloud computing and consolidation in server capacity/ownership - "on a scale unimaginable before. At the same time, of course, the computing power at the edges, ie, in the devices that we all use, is also growing rapidly," Nicholas Carr writes.  So if you think about the internet being just 40 years old, and we're moving into a huge second stage... then...

Carr (who wrote last summer Is Google Making Us Stupid) more recently says in The Sun: "We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization."  He's now enjoying a one-up on his ideas that the new technology is changing our cognition, since when he first expressed his ideas, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt belittled the idea that Google was making us stupid. He quotes Schmidt on a recent Charlie Rose interview (Carr's blog article also has the link to the Rose interview):

“I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.” 

The King of Cloud, Google's Schmidt, is just now realizing the huge disruptive link between tangible text and learning?

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” - Albert Einstein said. The economic changes will hasten our changes.  The cheese has moved, societally and culturally. So has the word. To the clouds.

What We Learn: Art (Contemporary Chinese Art)...

After thinking this past week of the art of oratory (Obama's  Inaugural speech),  and the art of Russia's leader, I had to swing to Asia and ideas in contemporary art regarding the art of learning.

The Chinese Art Prize Gold Winner Min Xiaofang entered  two meter-tall paintings of children's homework - mathematics, grammar, English - all graded and corrected in red ink. 10cm-wide patches of white, which looks like correction fluid, add to the authentic appearance of the paintings.  This is what is new new in Chinese Contemporary Art.

As mothers we save our children's work, but I think of this as well as something else, perhaps a little more profound in the annals of text.  As I immerse in the digital, having completed courses online, the red marks on ruled paper take me back, way back.  Learning and educational trends are leaving the blackboard behind and collaborative efforts make the red pen less... authoritative.  MIT's move to ditch the large lectures for interaction has reduced failure rates by 50%.

If art is about ideas, and good art makes you think, then... I leave you with this contemporary art work.  Would you hang this on your wall?

photo credit: Chinese Art Prize

The Great (White? Black? Mestizo? Mullato?) Hope...

 Reading culture by covers: Time put Obama on the cover for 13th time this year in a special Inauguration Preview, at left.  In 2008 political themes were on the cover 19 times at Time and only one movie star was on the cover (George Clooney).  Newsweek had 26 cover stories on politics last year -- including two on Michelle Obama. 

How to fix our world and our problems requires the mojo of a rock star, the heft of a pope, the cojones of a king, and the uuummmph of an underdog - soft power, hard power, social power and political power.  The cultural yearnings cut across the currents here and this proliferation of the O-man everywhere isn't just the hope for a leader to fix our problems, but also, and perhaps more significantly, a mirror to our (post-white) selves. 

WaPo notes this media trend: "Once, making the covers of Time and Newsweek was an event. Now... it is more of a cultural blip, one more bit of data in a crowded marketplace."  I disagree. Covers are a huge visual graphic of our society, with a date.  This obsession with Obama continues, because we're no longer black and white but nuanced.

Our great hope is a reflection of ourselves, an about face, a media vuelta, a volte-face.  No longer a Great White Hope, we need a revision of our identity.

Atlantic Monthly's Jan/Feb issue cover featuring a full-face frame of Obama, and series of articles raises the issue of our post-white world (links to all of these good articles on the flip). I was in Houston when whites became the minority there in the mid-1990s. The 1990 Census for the first time allowed respondents to check more than one box for race.  For my Oklahoma friends who had long carried Indian blood, this was a long-awaited move to recognize our mixed heritage. But yet the talk of race, in terms of who are we, continues. Frank Rich says we're not post-white in his article this week  White Like Me.  My mother sends me an email with the subject line: I Am Not A Racist! talking about Leonard Pitt's recent op ed article wondering what Abraham Lincoln would think of Obama's presidency: "Lincoln famously said in 1858 that "there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which ... will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality." I've called my parents down for politically incorrect behavior.  We're in new times, but they've not been named. Post-White? 

I've just been wondering, for quite awhile, how come Obama, who is half white, is considered Black, not White?  When will we have a new term for our gumbo-ness?  When will race not matter?

Obama Literacy: Ideas & Resolutions...

Snippet Literacy is my term for it, our digital ideas in short form, this tag line approach to ideas, shorthand rhetoric perfect for information overload. Global glyph short-form (if you will).

These are my New Year's Resolutions in graphic form, emulating Obama branding for mnemonic visuals perfect for digital literacy. Idea consumption.

Steve Rubel, marketing guy, likened it to Haiku, these Obama tags which he clipped from Obama's website to make a glyph, at right, in his post discussing the new book, Barack, Inc: Winning Business Lessons from the Obama Campaign.

Ideas and revolutions.

The O for All: A New World Logo

After looking at all of the obama logos and creative enthusiasm for a new road of change that Obama crafted, I think his logo will be considered and regarded as a symbol of the New World and a new symbol of the United States, at least as long as he's leading it. But I think it is bigger than that. Obama has rebranded the image of the U.S. with his logo.  His branding and marketing, which won awards, has shot into the stratosphere of our world who tuned in and turned on to the hope of Obama. 

With many in the world, not literate in English, the image of symbols has been the age-old form of idea communications.  Think of how the peace sign went universal.  It sold an idea and not a product at all.

Let's deconstruct the idea of this new logo for the world.  For one, it takes the red and white stripes and takes us into the world beyond, like a road leading to the future.  It reads from lower left to upper right, a design form that is uplifting and expresses hope and positiveness. The red-white-and-blue is reconstructed into an image of new patriotism.  The O represents not only Obama, but the world, round like the globe, encircling everything with the image of all, the image of completeness, which is what a circle represents.  The o for earth, sun and moon. The horizon represents a new day, a new dawning of perception and order.  Even the use of blue is peaceful, like the comfort blue of a sugary drink, not navy blue like the military.

The logo is simple, clean and wordless.  Like the Pepsi symbol, which needs no words but is understood around the world, Obama has been well-branded.  In making my comparison, I've put the old pepsi logo on top, at left the new pepsi logo and at right, the Obama logo.  At first many likened the obama logo to the old pepsi one.  It certainly uses the colors and the symbol of the circle that resonates beyond language. All cultures understand the encompassing symbolic language of the circle. A circle represents the idea of within.

The O of All, even if unintended, has been created.  It is already out there, virally.

The brand is there, after this presidential campaign season, circulating as an idea, even if other textual translations don't translate.  Ethan Zuckerman has just written about the polyglot internet and its need to have a system of translation for textual information for his speech prepared for the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of the Internet.  Symbols are needed shorthand and Obama's is masterful. I even saw people putting their hands together as one might to make a heart, but making an O, in the celebrations after the elections.  Perhaps even the "ok" sign of the o alone will shift?  Obama didn't use it, but neither did he use Shepard Fairey's poster.

Now that you've read this, go compare the logos of candidates I studied and see if you don't see the brilliance of this branding.  You need no letters or name, now.  The O logo, like the Nike symbol, stands alone.

My Tulsa friend, B, sent me this image, right, circulating in Tulsa (which went for McCain) right after the election.  Blue state bumper sticker capital Santa Fe wouldn't sport anything like that.  But with the new world branding of the obama logo, hmmmm. Even O shit may take on new meaning.

I'm on an art kick at the moment.  I can not, not, not, let this art go unspoken for.  Elvis has left the building, the cat is out of the bag, the toilet has flushed.  The O is out there.  I wrote last July that he was selling like soap.

Oh no? Oh yes. O.

3 in 10: Obamanos!

One third of eligible American voters didn't vote.  So 7 out of 10 eligible voters either voted for McCain (or someone else) or didn't vote.   Barack Obama had 3 in 10 eligible voters who pulled the lever for him. 

Just thought I'd give you a statistic you probably aren't thinking about that came up in comments on my post yesterday. I researched the numbers and although not exact because some numbers are still outstanding, I thought it was interesting.  (So is the fact that other than the JFK/Nixon election, you'd have to go back 100 years to find out a season that drew this high of a percent of eligible voters). 11/9 update for more exact figures: Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004

Other than that, all I've done is cull through a few of the 88,200 obama designs on 2,630,000 products on just one site alone, made by everyday Joes and Janes.  Joe as in Joe Everyman. 

This is the icononization of the idea of the candidate.  The obama logos proliferate, ad infinitum, in a post-postmodern way -- iteration after iteration after iteration.  It is the idea of the idea that morphs and is never static, never grows stale, can always be open to being reinterpreted yet resonate and hold meaning.

This election season engaged at least 64% of the eligible voters and numerous others in the cultural conversation, especially digitally, in a place that knows no bounds. Except the limitations of who could and did act to actually vote.  36% of Americans can't get off the couch.

The Digital Shift in our Literate Lives...

How are we managing information?  When 35% of BlackBerry and PDA users say they would choose their device over their spouse, it makes you wonder what we are finding ourselves bound up with and dependent upon for our life needs.  I think of this now that my internet is back up and I can work on a research project on media, text, knowledge and our current communication and literacy shift.

Brian Solis' diagram, above (click to enlarge), illustrated his ideas of our online conversation, the digital shift in our literate lives. His conversation map "is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate."  The diagram was part of Ross Dawson's Visual Representations of the Social Media and Web 2.0 Landscape which takes some of these ideas further.

Bernard Lunn writes on ReadWriteWeb about sites like LinkedIn, a business networking site. "Web 3.0, aka the Semantic Web, is "the combination of mass collaboration and structured databases" (my definition) then I may have just seen the early signs of Web 3.0 in action," he writes. The site that provides a better search experience than Google? Business social network LinkedIn -- 361% year-over-year growth handily beats Facebook's 56% growth in the same period. LinkedIn is less useful to somebody without a deep network.

There is so much social networking out there that I've yet to set up some things and play with them. But how the semantic web is making information accessible made me stop at a site like ZoomInfo where you can manage your "personal brand" by creating an accurate, up-to-date Web profile that can be found all in one place and edited regularly, or so the site says.  Some of these entities will shake out over time as LinkedIn would be better, I think, than ZoomInfo.  Regardless, aren't you tired of all the different digital identities you have to keep up with?  The consolidation of a single digital identity will help push us to Web 3.0.

How the media is using networking social platforms like Twitter is something I wanted to delve into. NYTimes writers are using Twitter.  News has always been a narrative-in-construction so this is one more journalistic tool but with my internet down for days and days (forever, it seemed), that research will have to wait.

Ideas of literacy, digital text, symbols, signs and the representation of ideas and how we obtain, share and work with knowledge and culture are in continual flux, beyond a liminal moment.  Knowledge in cloud computing and the semantic web are changing our ideas of literacy.  My earlier post on the ABC's of Learning: Online Literacy, Textual Learning & Thinking had more to do with the ideas rather than the nuts and bolts of how we are working with the networking and social media and that is why I think the Solis Conversation Diagram might be important. 

Being Digitally Literate is completely different from our textual ideas of literacy. We're born with a need to share, learn, relate and be in community.   
 

Fashion as a Tableaux Void...

This runway shot from New York Fashion Week by Sergey Dolzhenko/European Press Agency captured a brilliant idea - the blank canvass of the female.  The photo accompanied a NYTimes article, The Sun Never Sets on the Runway, about how Fashion Weeks have escalated in venues, lengths and number of places. 

Our adornment makes statements. Of our culture, our community and our place within it, our statements of individual uniqueness and our class.  Dressing is an act of art and communication.  Your outfit makes a statement in a language all of it's own. 

I've never sat in a Fashion Show, but I sat in an audience last week (no photos allowed) to see the Acoma Pueblo Indians dance their Feast Day dances.  All dancers carried or wore evergreen boughs.  Each woman's outfit was the same with variational flourishes.  Same for the men.  The paint signified meaning, the noise makers symbolized group participation and harmony.  The hand rattles even held meaning.  To me, I didn't understand the language of the dress beyond knowing that conformity within the group was more valued than individuality.  Regardless of where you are, playing the game of reading the language of the dress is an interesting game in cultural signs.  Santa Fe or NYC: can you spot the tourist?  Atlanta: Can you determine the class of the person?  Think of your own place and what you wear to reflect your place in your community, your belonging and your individuality.

My children make statements of their own and they sometimes don't fit into my own cultural and social frame. Or they push me out of my own frame (having girls will do that).  Even these things - my understanding or misunderstanding of the clues of dress -- indicates the change of signs, the inability of symbols to be stagnant.   In Atlanta, pearls are the conformity symbols.  In NYC the status marker is the handbag, or, for men, leaving a suit sleeve unbuttoned to flash that it is tailor-made. 

 

Cultural Participation: Politics as Spectacle, The Oz of it All...

The arena creates iconic transmission of cultural relevance and we, as the audience, take it all in. That's what political communication is about, idea-wise.  Culturally we relate not by reading, necessarily, but by our sense of participation, digitally. 

Follow me with a 106-old American idea of cultural transmission:  The  Tin Man hit the stage in 1902.  Did you read the book, or did you see the performance? The  Tin Man became an icon. So is now Obama. 

It is a spectacle of performance and we engage and participate in the conversation of it all.

How often have you talked about the Olympics?  A gillion of us watched it, unlike what we share now since we've moved from mass sharing and experience.  How many people could you talk about Olympics with? Presidential elections give us mass engagement. But what else? The Bible is and remains the predominant textual reference but Wikipedia is moving up there in frequency of use, yet is is so open to change and interpretation. The meaning is not locked in, digitally, anymore.  I've ratcheted up my meaning to enhance my point. I've meshed two photos of MSNBC political announcer Keith Olbermann in order to merge the two headlines that played under him into one photo.  The spectacle of performance in the arena that rocked a generation when the Beatles did it and this time, Obama closed it all.

Have you heard about {title of show}? It is a new hot Broadway musical, but its title alone states my meaning.  Next year The Wizard of Oz celebrates its 70th year but the Tin Man lept upon the stage first. That gave us all our frame of meaning for a Yellow Brick Road.  You, too, can follow that iconic path to the other realm (where hearts and souls are missing?).  Now meaning is sort of unhinged, like the {candidate}.

Our Yellow Brick Road was a symbolic shared idea.  No one read the text. It was all an idea iterated in performance, swallowed visually, absorbed culturally. Do you value the book? Most likely not. It was a visual shared audience experience that became referenced in our happy-forever-after idea of American Life.  If you see it now, it will most likely be digital and out of copyright realm and available for mash-up and meaning unhinged from the original. Authorship becomes detatched.  So has Obama.

How often can you find shared experience with a local newspaper story? Printed newspaper readership along with a linear book format is diminishing.  Politics is our avenue for shared mass culture engagement, for mass experience engagement. It is a show, a spectacle for participation.  No wonder Obama moved into a new arena.  No wonder he wanted the arena for backdrop. No wonder McCain's party thinks celebrity.  Digital idea blips produced and digitally transmitted.  I saw Native American Obama Posters all over Indian Market.  They will be collector's items if not already in a mass pop-art way where the iconic face is the symbol (think Warhol and Jackie).

We have time in summer, every four years, to watch a big production of achievement, of winners, of heroes.  We are therefore supremely primed, every four years, to be ready for the televised spectacle of presidential selection politics.  We can have a common conversation. We can bond over referential icons. We have been prepared to become the audience, to take it all in, to absorb it all, think of it in terms of branded bits and symbolic references.

Iconic iterations, created, produced, presented for mass spectacle and participation.  America formation and presentation in the 21st century is awe, awe, awesome.

We are picking our heroes, watching the camera zoom in on the performers. 

It is our way, our cultural medium for our consumer society.

The Ides of August: Little Boy, Female Athletes & Perfection...

Doom and awe. Veneration and destruction. Perfection and the pushing of limits.

This week the Olympics kick off and a perfect 10 for gymnastics will no longer be used, ending one idea of perfection.  The peak age for gymnasts is trending up, due to new rules.  Once upon a time I sat in gyms in Houston, a hotbed of gymnastics with Romanian coaches, while my oldest daughter worked for one more half twist off the parallel bars, one more spin off the beam. She'd started her sport in Oklahoma, working out next to gymnastic Olympian medalist and two-time All-Around World Champion Shannon Miller, the most decorated gymnast, male or female, in history. "How could they take away this beautiful, this most perfect thing from us, the one thing that separated our sport from the others?" asked Bela Karolyi, a gymnast coach who encouraged my daughter at one point, on the dropping of 10.0 as the top score in Olympic gymnastics. 

Dara Torres, a 41 year-old mother, is seeking yet more swimming medals this year at the Olympics.  That is the female athlete I'll be watching and it isn't the new swimsuits that will make this swimming competition newsworthy, but the barriers that we see being pushed by a female. Once a swimmer, I took up running in my mid-30s when I learned that female runners peak at age 35. Or that was the thinking, then. Boomer Chronicles has a list of the oldest athletes competing.  So, in our 60s we can compete in equestrian events - just think.

Death and threats: Little Boy, the first atomic bomb used for killing, caused a 'rain of ruin' when it was dropped 63 years ago this week in 1945 on Japan's port city, Hiroshima, killing an estimated 80,000 immediately and up to an additional 60,000 who died from injury and radiation by the end of the year (compare that to over 1,250,000 Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion).  Living not too far from Los Alamos, the lab where the first atomic bomb, the Trinity, was developed, I think about how these nuclear works still threaten the world.  The threats this week regarding Iran's refusal to adhere to international pressures makes President Truman's warning to Japan apt for our times: "It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26, was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on this earth,"  Truman said. Sure enough, Little Boy shocked and awed the world. 

Big boys and bombs - such a male thing.  A Perfect 10: female-esque.  Bad taste - what mother would let her gymnast daughter do this?

Ideas of perfection, both for destruction and competition, are on my mind.  The ides of August.