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Friday, March 14, 2003
Workaday World XXI What a day! I stayed up not too late last night -- but definitely too lively. A bunch of us went out to the Drummer and Paddy Burke's, and while I was home by 11:30 last night, I was a little slow and mopey this morning. Following the relaunch of the CoF Web at the end of January, today was the deadline for members to confirm their involvement. I emailed the people who haven't yet confirmed their memberships a deactivation notice earlier today, and I've been working on customer service emails as a result for a large part of the day. I also spent time researching and considering the entries for this year's Webby Awards. As the Communitt category chair, I worked with a qualified team of nominating judges. It's not been as tightly connected or collaborative a team as we've had for the last few years, but I'm pleased with my final five suggestions for nominees. We'll see what the others vote on for the final mix! It''s 5:40, and the sun's still out. Spring's a poppin'! I hope. Thursday, March 13, 2003
South by Southwest 2003 XXI I have two more SXSW Interactive-related entries left in me. Then I need to let it go, get it behind me, and get back to Media Diet's usual business. One of the entries will be my wrapup of and commentary on the entire event's discussions, in which I'll draw connections between the different sessions I sat in on and try to make some conclusions. This is not that. This entry is a quick explanation of what I was trying to do, how it felt -- and how I think it went. These thoughts aren't fully formed, but I wanted to share a little glimpse of the process behind my SXSW reports. This is that. I've long been interested in what I consider Immediate Journalism. The Web reports I've filed during the last four annual Company of Friends Roadshows for Fast Company magazine are the outcome of my first experiments with Immediate Journalism. For the last four years, I've taken six weeks out of the office to cut a swath across part of the world. I stay with Fast Company readers in their homes. I visit two or three companies and organizations during the day. I gather with members of the local CoF groups in the evening. And I document everything I do, experience, and learn in almost-daily diary entries on the Web. People can follow me as I travel, and when I finally get back home after the six weeks, I write an essay highlighting the major themes that arose over the course of the trip. This experiment was slightly different. Highly inspired by Cory Doctorow's conference and panel reports in Boing Boing, I wanted to see how else this Immediate Journalism could be done. Cory's reports are relatively impressionistic compilations of what he considers the major points, ideas, and concepts of a given talk. I didn't want to copycat Cory, and I didn't want to compete with Cory, had he planned to file SXSW reports as he's done for other gatherings. So I could either go shorter. Or longer. I chose longer. I type really, really fast, so I was able to capture almost verbatim transcripts of what went on. Oh, I didn't catch everything, but I'm pretty sure I caught almost everything. But why go so long? Why strive to be such a completist? Many conference organizers opt to audio record the event's keynote speakers and breakout sessions. SXSW does not. And if we look at projects such as DharmaNet (for whom I've transcribed Buddhist texts in the past), the Open Pamphlet Series, and Big Sur tapes, the Left and counterculture has a long history of making talk transcripts, audio recordings, and interview-driven pamphlets widely available. The world of technology culture has no such parallel. If people are going to publish a pamphlet every time Noam Chomsky spits up soup, why aren't talks given by people such as Lawrence Lessig, Bruce Sterling, and others similarly captured, published, and distributed -- online or offline? We're losing an important part of our industry and culture's conversation and history. (That's not a slag on Chomsky, by the way.) Similarly, I just wanted to see if I could do it. And making such an effort to transcribe everything, typing real-time transcripts as the speakers spoke, lightly editing them, and publishing them -- most of the time -- mere minutes after a session ended really changed my experience of the event. While I like to think I was present and engaged with my friends outside of sessions, inside the breakout rooms, it was just me, what I heard, my head, my hands, and my PowerBook. It was kind of neat when I'd really get in the zone and almost fall away so I was typing automatically. I almost wasn't paying attention to what was being said. I wasn't ascribing any meaning to the sounds and words I was entering into the blank Word document. I wasn't really there. But it wasn't easy. While I'm not a trained stenographer -- lots of SXSW participants have asked -- and while my hands didn't really hurt at the ends of the days, my head did kind of hurt. When you're trying not to be present or actively engaged in a given situation, when you're only trying to document, project, and reflect what's happening, you get this thin feeling. You're fragile. Light like balsa wood. And it took some effort to come out of the near-fugue state to be present and in the moment again. For much of the conference I was distracted and inattentive. That was a weird state for me to be in -- actually, that's not totally true because I'm pretty hyper -- and if any of the people I hung out noticed or were bothered by it, I apologize. So. How'd it go? Great. I'll do it again. Response on site was amazing, and word quickly spread throughout the conference that I was documenting the talks so thoroughly. Some people made decisions on what sessions to go to based on what session I was going to go to. If I was going to publish a transcript of a given panel, people felt free to go elsewhere. That brings up some interesting traffic flow and attendance questions. I hope I didn't gut people's headcounts because I was there in the room. I also hope that Cory, who didn't report on much at SXSW -- but who has said he was busy in his own panels and sessions -- didn't choose not to take notes because I was. I have him and Boing Boing to thank for most of the people coming to Media Diet to read my SXSW reports. Boing Boing far and away drove more traffic to Media Diet over the last week than the other folks I've given shouts out to. That speaks well of Boing Boing's readership and influence. How was Media Diet traffic affected? Let's go to the traffic logs. Since I started doing Media Diet in June 2001, I've averaged about 100 readers -- unique visitors -- a day. Thank you, faithful Media Dieticians! But let's look at the last handful of days: March 7: 100 Hopefully, some of y'all will decide to stick around. I've gotten several emails from people who weren't able to make it to Austin for the conference thanking me for the reports, and I think that response to date goes to show that if your blog or journalism is of widespread interest, extremely timely, and not replicated elsewhere, readers will follow. That's part of why I don't regularly blog stuff that's already hit Boing Boing, Blogdex, or Daypop. Don't just mimic the memes that are already reveling in the blogosphere. Do the new. People will pick up on it. What would I do differently? I'd let the speakers know what I wanted to do -- and get their verbal permission. A couple of people were slightly surprised that what they'd just said showed up on the Web so quickly after they finished saying it, and I apologize for the surprise. The good thing is that everyone felt like I accurately captured their remarks, so the concern of misreporting their comments was relatively low. OK. I think that's enough. I would like to thank some of the people who really made my SXSW Interactive experience worthwhile. This, then, is a potentially incomplete alphabetical thank-you list. Thank you: The 15 bus, Lauri Apple, Lane Becker, BookPeople, Ben Brown, Heather Champ, Joe Clark, Viki Collier, Michael Cruftbox, Cory Doctorow, Dudley Dog, Dan Gillmor, Heather Gold, Adam Greenfield, Scott Heiferman, Hiromi Hiraoka, James Hong, Don Jarrell, Kyle Johnson, Pableaux Johnson, Morris Johnston, Philip Kaplan, Will Kreth, Eric Lawrence, Jon Lebkowsky, Gordon Meyer, Monkeywrench, Jim Munroe, Jason Nolan, David Nunez, Anitra Pavka, Derek Powazek, Melissa Quackenbush, Theresa Quintanilla, Dana Robinson, Ana Sisnett, Kevin Smokler, Molly Steenson, Bruce Sterling, Sandy Stone, Toy Joy, Don Turnbull, Mike Wasylik, David Weinberger, Rick Weller, Nancy White, Evan Williams, and Amy Yan. If I forgot anyone, let me know. You all rock me like a hurricane. Corollary: Mention Me! XXXIV One more shout out, then I'll stop eyeing my reference logs. Phew! South by Southwest 2003 XX One last batch of SXSW Interactive reports. Nancy White took some great notes on Cliff Figallo's session Tuesday morning, which I missed. Here's Nancy's report, barely edited: Cliff Figallo: Putting Online Conversation to Work Attention is energy. If a small child is acting out, giving them attention gives energy to those behaviors. Online you have to pay attention to whom you are paying attention. Pay attention to negative behaviors, you "feed the energy creature." These are concepts we’ve put to work. Having a conversation you want to get things out of consider: A productive conversation can only happen under certain conditions. Forcing people who don’t exhibit the right intention, commitment, tolerance -- sometimes you have to be selective as to who you invite. The Well said anyone with a modem, money and could navigate on, they could join. Everything else was up for grabs. Stuart Brand thought it would be good to have people with communal experience managing this thing rather than business or technological experience. There were tradeoffs there, but we did understand what it took for a community to be productive. In this case, be functional. We went through quite a learning phase in the first 5 years. Some people could inhibit others from participating in an online conversation. How can we make these things work when people who are more willing to join the conversation could dominate a conversation and send it off in directions that chase people away. We’ve learned a lot over the years. Now millions online who have experienced chat, online communities. Seen how they can work and be a total pain in the ass. It would keep people up at night on the well because there was such hope that people would join this group, writers, consultants who did not work with a team on a day by day basis. They had a hope that the well would thrive as a community. When someone came and tried to crash the party, they wanted us to throw them off, but we did not want to be the despots, the cops. We wanted the community to sort out it’s own problems. There were cases where we had to remove people because they were detractors from the conversation. It’s important to know who’s talking Intentional Community If you have an intention about a conversation in an organization or business. Shared sense of mission, purpose, ethos. It is then easier to solve problems. All aimed in the same direction and willing to tolerate each other. To listen as well as talk. Nardi, Whittaker and Schwarz called them "Intentional Networks’ PERSONAL Social networks. "We chose the term intentional to reflect the effort and deliberateness with which people construct and manage personal networks. In a conversation in NY last Fall, Listening to the City, a conversation about what to do with the site around ground zero. WHT TO do with that neighborhood, how to redevelop Manhattan. They had a 1 day F2F LARGE Meeting with tables of ten with facilitators and laptops who collected the conversational themes and feelings and fed them back to the larger group. Briefly they formed an intentional conversational community. All of their aims were tom come up with a good solution for where the WTC had been blown up. Even though they did not agree- some were strongly opinionated that it be a symbolic building that NY will not be defeated, we’ll put up something bigger. The final design is taller. We took this online the week after in groups of 30. Half with facilitators and half without facilitator. All could read each other’s conversations. Most of the groups that did not have an assigned facilitator, one rose from the ranks and took on that role to lead the conversation. It was quite and emotional couple of weeks. Some had lost close relatives, friends, involved in recover efforts, had seen the towers collapsed. Everyone had a strong emotion around it and willing to engage in the conversation. But there were differences between groups. Some people were tying to shout their positions down the throats of other people. We call them the tall towers people. Bu t there were other people who were victims family who said the memorial was most important. There were complaints that they were getting more than their representative voice. It wasn’t fair that their emotions were going to sway how things would developed. Mostly people were concerned about the trust that their input would be part of the decision. They hoped to have some effect on the decision makers. As it turned out it really did. The F2f conversation was widely reported as expressing strong disapproval to the initial plans. Based on that the publicity of getting this strong disapproval and sent everyone back to the drawing board. The online conversations contributed that yes it was important that the towers be tall and there be a memorial. And the chose design reflects this. Trust, Identity, Reputation These are concepts you see being talked about on the web. Software is being developed and put in to portal software. I was associated with a company called RealCommunities which had a flexible database where people could establish identity and a reputation management module. A lot of this stuff operates in our daily life according to where we trust people, what we know of their identity and reputation. When engaging in online conversations with people online you rely on many other factors to determine if it is worthwhile in engaging in the conversation. You are investing your time. Don’t want to feel like you’ve wasted it. What we found on the Well when we all came together, a bunch of people who didn’t know each other with just a bunch of words on a screen connecting. Came to a point when Howard Rheingold and Howard Mandel started a conference called "True Confessions." It was basically a place where people could write stories about themselves. Up until them people learned just what they learned about each other in conversations about politics, news, sports. That was valuable especially if you engaged in conversations across topics. A person in politics might be a flaming liberal and you were conservative, but in the parenting conference both have kids and shared experiences. A multidimensional relationship, the way it is in real life, we know each other from at least two different contexts. Helps us get a sense of what these people are. IN True CONFESSIONAS once they saw a bit more about each other’s background, it opened up the community. They knew this person was what they stood for, what they’d been through, why they were what they were. Leadership When you start a conversational community you will find different kinds of leaders. Founders who understand the mission, where the conversation is supposed to go, who was invited and why. The Implementers who actually start the conversations, comfortable with the tools, recognize what to do with the vision provided by the founders. The Sustainers hang in there. The facilitators, the challengers who keep volatility in the conversation and attract more people to it because conversations generally want to expand. Power Imbalances Destabilize Make it difficult for people to trust. Today’s world situation. People don’t necessarily want to go along. They don’t want the US to say not only are we the most wealthy, but powerful, military strength, democracy – and thus our vision is the most powerful vision. But will we be kept in our place. Will other nations keep their validity. France is digging in it’s heels. Other countries are digging in their heels. The Truth Will Out The internet has lent this whole other side to propaganda. You can’t keep a lid on things anymore. There will be other visions represented. Blogging, even though its in principle the same internet publishing model, we’re probably being blogged as we speak -- this element was not there when Berners-Lee put up the initial web pages. Blogging is now a medium, or an application of the medium, that allows many viewpoints to come together, cross represent each other, disagree with each other. A wide conversation that when used well in communities in trust -- which does nto mean you necessarily agree, but you understand where they are coming from, but as long as you believe they are speaking from the heart, you have a level of trust that they are a known element, not a maverick, one who spoofs you. In a conversation if the truth doesn’t out, if people don’t agree to speak truthfully, not a balance of weight in the conversation, and least everyone going in the same direction of having a productive conversation rather than shouting each other out. On the well we had "subtext" you could read a conversation and tell if there was dissatisfaction or lack of cred under the surface. People might not say it, but a vibe, of argument running below the surface. In an online discussion that happens on a company’s intranet you will find a lot of that. People are afraid to really express what they believe because their jobs at stake. If the company does not have a culture that encourage people to say what they believe, if people don’t’ feel they can say what they believe, it will still come across in refusal to participate or what you can read between the lines. People’s subconscious. Belief system at work that they did not want to express because it would create a hassle, an argument. But their subconscious will still come through in how they talked. Weinberger: Typical in business that there is an imbalance in power. What do you do to accommodate conversations? This is part of the problem with business culture and how it’s developed through the years. In the first couple of chapters of Building the KM Network, we run through a quick history of civilization and how we got through the industrial age, how orgs formed in a hierarchical sense built on a military model. Was not important what the lower ranks thought. Whoever was running the place held all the knowledge and wisdom, hired lower ranks with wisdom and now power. The net has broken into distributed non hierarchical model. Business has not caught up. They go through team building sessions and OD trying to enable a more open and distributed conversation, but still that power balance exists if the upper levels of management don’t participate in conversations that cut across the layers. At the Well it mattered that Steward Brand as founder of the Well participated. But he was sort of thin skinned. If anyone criticized his vision or suggestions, he didn’t stick around very long. We always wished that he would. He was initially a very vocal participant but when the hard questions started he did not feel it was necessary to answer them. That’s when the leadership model has to move on. When the founders and CEOS aren’t going to participate… now the customers are much more powered. They can talk to each other. They can talk about products through boards such as Epinions, online gatherings like on Edmonds.com about their cars, and if the company is not going to be part of this conversation, its going to suffer from not getting, taking and using that feedback. I think not being a CEO and not choosing to work within a company as an employee, throwing rocks from over the wall as a consultant, my council is that companies have to evolve. Look at Enron and all these scandals. If these conversations aren’t enabled with in the company all kinds of things can take place. If they aren’t talking about it they see how it gets out of control. Companies, careers, 401Ks ruined. It’s hard to visualize what its like working in a co with tens of thousands of employees and how you get them started. But conversations start incrementally and can spread within organizations. Weinberger: Short of changing the ethos of the org, a big challenge, many companies would rather die than do that. Experience on the well, someone gets on where the power imbalance is wrecking the conversation, the answer to Brand is not step down from your role, but change your conversational behavior. Do you have advice or help for working within the conversation itself, short of changing the way businesses work? What do you do about power imbalances? First acknowledge it. That there is that difference between the person who is operating from a higher rung on the ladder One of the people I worked with on the LTC forum came up with the idea of a "Full Value Contract." When a conversation is engaged, in this case online, that going into it everyone agrees that they are going to give full value to the conversation. They make an agreement going in that they are gong to listen, respect, do what they can to encourage each other to speak, not dominate the conversation, do everything they can to make the conversation as useful for ist purpose as they can. It’s a very important idea that you have an agreement, which formalizes the conversation more than they usually are. Usually more ad hoc. People set up a forum, invite people, a topic. But as far as any kind of social contract they have to evolve over time. On the Well we had "you own your own words" which was formulated to protect the well from liability but adopted as a rallying cry for personal copyright issues. Social contracts evolved by trial and error. When you go into a conversation you set up for a purpose, presenting everyone with some sort of contractually worded agreement can really help, especially where there is a power imbalance so everyone assumes an equal role, even with different levels of responsibility. If a biz is going to have an online discussion w/ CEO and higher folks, that they declare this is the way it is going to be. Not a George Bush press conf where you have to ask the right questions to get picked on. Question: Would you advocate to people with power to use an alias to make it a more egalitarian environment? I don’t that’s really what you are looking for. You are looking for true identity. If you use an alias that allows the person with the higher power position to act like a fly on wall, Joe Everyman and speak. It might be useful for them, but for everyone else, fi they don’t know this. I was thinking more of a person with some dominant power enters the conversation; it tends to polarize the conversation by dint of their identity. If you wanted exchange of content, not identity, it would make it a more level playing field. [Cliff asked Nancy what she thought. She talked about unintended consequences of anonymity and the importance of treating root issues at the root. Organizational warts just appear even bigger online.] It’s (anonymity) tempting. Does it create a false sense of security? What is the organization is about? An organization that does not operating to certain ideals in the offline world, online they have to be based in reality. We are proposing to do work with a company that is promoting the idea of the democratic workplace. They have models and theories and they want to start online discussion. There are plusses and minuses to the democratic workplace. Gonna rip through the rest of the presentation (clock ticking) Looping Getting into an argument …saying if we oust Sadam Hussein it’s going to reduce terrorism and the others say increase and it goes around and around. You don’t’ want to spend time doing that. We’re in a loop and shoot for common ground. Sorting, looking for the exit point to looping conversations. Diplomacy, as we’re seeing, does not work all that great when it is relegated to national PR> What are the conversations that are really happening. People being diplomatic can lead to beating around the bush. Talk about the real stuff even if it is hard. You shouldn’t have to have to use diplomacy. Spit it out and say what you mean. Not getting Work Done Summary Questions Corollary: Mention Me! XXXIV Another shout out to for picking up on my SXSW writing. Renee just sent me the nicest email. Corollary: Mention Me! XXXIV Shouts out to for mentioning my SXSW coverage. Thanks! Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Mention Me! XXXIV My South by Southwest 2003 reports got good response this past weekend, and I'll follow up soon with some commentary on the event -- as well as some insight on what the immediate journalism experiment felt like. This is the first time I've confblogged, and it went over well enough to do it again in the future. Thanks to the folks who've linked to the Media Diet coverage to date: If I've missed anyone, let me know. I'm just going off references today. South by Southwest 2003 XIX Bruce Sterling and Derek Woodgate: Tomorrow Now Do I really need to introduce Sterling? Woodgate is the principal partner of the Futures Lab. Here is a rough transcript of the discussion: Introductions Sterling: I'm an author. My most recent book is actually a futurist book. After I did this book, I got this really sweet gig writing for Wired, writing this monthly futurist column. That explains what the heck I'm doing here. Derek and I are going to start ripping on six major league change drivers. Were just going to ping pong some things back and forth. Woodgate: I'm principal of the futures lab here in Austin. We work with major corporations looking for what we call future potential for them. We really look to provide them with what a strategic plan or R&D company can't. I'm a political economist by profession. Open Spectrum Sterling: Topic No. 1: Open spectrum. This baby's come completely out of left field. People are suggesting that you could divvy up the spectrum and rain it down on people's homes. I've got it right here in my machine. I'm running off Cory Doctorow's groovy little 802.11 thing. This is just the baby verson. I'm interested in the struggle because it a microcosm of a bigger one. It's a struggle between the pigopolis and the pirates. Or law and order and the multitudes. In the world of open spectrum, it's very open. No one knows what its good for. The people who are in charge of the spectrum allocation are very worried about it. After the '90s it's very clear that you can bring a lot of capital to stuff, make it widely available, and still lose your ass. You can go down in flames by bringing people access to information. Here we've got my favorite version, Motorola Canopy. What your talking about is a really big antenna, kind of a moonlight tower. Everyone pitches in a couple of bucks. It's no big deal. The thing is, this is just a small range of spectrum that’s good for microwaving chickens. If we can get just one tiny chunk of Clearchannel's empire, one wasted classic rock station, we could cover the country in 18 months. There would be no last mile problem. Woodgate: We've been following the spectrum thing, too. We're looking for a tipping point, and I'm not really sure we're there. The car seems to be the tipping point. People much more believe in the local area network than in mesh. The thought is that putting these standards in cars by 2007 means that Ford and Daimler are all in this together. If it really gets commercialized in that way it’s a very consumer-oriented way. We've seen the death of satellites. Other than moving heavy data, where open spectrum's better, we're probably going to see more of the local area networks in the short term. From a business pojnt of view it’s a little different. Bubble Money Sterling: Let's talk about the business side. That’s Topic No. 2: Where's the bubble money? Where's the economic activity? Where's the business model? So much glass was put in the ground and so much human energy was expended for something that doesn’t have a business model. The death of portals is a problem. The death of ISP's is a problem. If something like Canopy takes off, there go the ISP's. Its interesting to me that the biggest thing going right now is Google. Google isn't a portal. It's all about getting right into the database. Get me right into the database. Who is this poor guy from Red Herring? I saw him on CNN this morning. He says, "I was googling it. I was bloggering it." I was blog dancing him. He says, "Yeah, the enthusiasts usually start it and then someone like me comes in to finance it." I was, like, "Where's your magazine dude?" How many times do these guys need to be punished? How much money do they need to lose? When will they learn that the Internet is a product of the sciences and the military. Those aren't profit-motive ventures. CNN doesn't have any money to send anyone to Baghdad this time around. Fox lost heaps of money, enough money to build entire cities from the ground up. There's no money. There's no money in Blogger. There's no money in the corporate media. Money has to come from somewhere. Unless information wants to be worthless. Unless we just want to be worse informed from machines that work worse and worse. That’s the trend I'm looking at, and it's bugging me. Woodgate: I agree with you, but I think there are some places where there is some bubble money. Don't throw it all out. If you look at the drivers, you can see some trends. Things like escapism and maximum pleasure are really quite important. In things like entertainment or really serious stuff, there may not be any money. But in things like experience collecting, cultural diffusion, there may be money. We are seeing some real creepage in a whole host of environmental issues. Where there is going to be real money is in security and in self-preservation. As a futurist, I usually never try to guess where I should put my money, but security is one of those areas. In addition, I think we need to look at biotech. Another thing ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous Computing Sterling: Let's move right into that. Topic No. 3: Ubicomp. You're beginning to see some of this popping up. When you start having these little gizmos, you know you're moving in the right direction from where it goes from hand waving to where it really hurts people. Ubiciomp bites man. I think that the first area is traffic monitoring and traffic rings. The mayor of London OK'd the installation of traffic monitoring cameras that take snapshots of your license plate. You get a ticket. That's OK. We don’t want to run people down. But what worries me is ubicomp mission creep. Now you’ve got a database of everybody and her sister's license plate and what they're doing downtown. I don’t know if any of you Austinites have noticed the bloom of video cameras. What is our city doing with this video? How do you leave town without them knowing? How do you really know when you're driving across town to have a little rendezvous with your boyfriend that your husband wont call up and ask where did my wife's license plate go? It's a ubicomp problem. Its an Orwellian ubicomp problem. It's sexy. The upcoming war between palm tops and cell phone gadgets will be interesting. It's weird. I'ts one of the most exciting places of concurrent technological development: Handhelds trying to become phones and phones trying to become palm tops. Woodgate: Every project that we've been working on for the last 2-3 years, ubicomp has been a really critical aspect. There are two sides: the everywhere and the nowhere. The likely thing is that the suit is most likely going to be an office. Given heads-up displays, you can really customize them. Having personal wireless area networks is going to be pretty exciting. MIT is working on that. So are a lot of companies, particularly companies making wear ware. Sterling: You’ve got to love a term like "wear ware." Then GPS can be where wear ware. Woodgate: What we're seeing is a tremendous number of new polymers with circuitry embedded in them. Sterling: I love Materials Connection. Their job is to go to Italy and buy all the weirdest shit. They put it in a cubby hole and people pay just to come and handle the stuff. I could make a fork out of this! It takes a while for new materials to become adopted. They’ve been at it for a long time. I ran into this one guy. And he gave me a chunk of foamed aluminum. It's froth. That stuff just smells like the future. Woodgate: It's good from the sense that you can really understand how you can build anything. That’s important from a sensory perspective. It's really important that it felt good. The technology really has to be invisible. We're looking for, even with ubiquitous computing, things that really do something formless. One interesting point you made is about the handheld vs. the cell phone. I don’t see the future of the screen being between the handheld vs. the cell phone but a piece of plastic. Sterling: One aspect of this that’s being underplayed is ubijunk. The first wave of ubicomp isnt going to work very well. Then you end up with stuff that's just waiting to be turned off or picked up or thrown out. What happens if you walk into a room that’s experienced the blue screen of death? What if there are buggy rooms? Who do you call? The difficulty of cars has always been the planned obsolescence of cars. What happens when you try to drive an obsolete smart vehicle? It still thinks it's smarter than you, and it's been in a couple of wrecks. Its GPS map is 18 months out of date and you drive right over the edge at 80 miles an hour. Bad maps cause you to blow up the Chinese embassy. What if it's in your clothes? I have an ID tag in my underwear, and I wash it one too many times. There's a whole Philip K. Dick world of hilarity here. Industry Sterling: Let's move onto Topic No. 4: Influence on industry. The thing that impressed me with the foamed aluminum wasn’t the thing itself but the amount of sensing. You almost need aluminum moussing. Just the right temperature. What happens when that crashes? What happens when it's no longer under the control of experts? What if I can go down to Kinko's and foam me some aluminum? It’s the Linux model for physical objects. It's a really intriguing organizational problem that our society has that no else seems to have. What happens to General Motors if people can build cars? What if you could just download the stats to build a Model T? That can't be that hard. Henry Ford wasn't that big a guy. What if you built one out of foamed aluminum and chopped bamboo? How much would it really cost? Maybe a couple of million dollars? A Model T cost $400 bucks new. And there was no one in particular making them. It's a Red Hat automobile. There's no digital rights management. When it wore out you'd just make another. How would we fit that into the litigation structure? Who do you sue? What are we going to do when kids are making stuff -- stuff -- not drivers, but actual stuff? We have a major military problem over it. The terrorist spread of mass destruction is basically a Linux model for nuclear weapons. That’s why were going to take out Iraq. It used to be that only governments could afford weapons of mass destruction. Now small groups of networked activists can get their hands on the stuff. They're only weapons. And weapons have a manufacturing aspect. You just have to make the stuff. Aluminum stuff is suddenly contraband. Walk around downtown Austin and see how many aluminum tubes you find. It concerns me. We don’t really have methods to deal with this stuff. People's attitudes are becoming polarized. At the top end its becoming more and more ferocious, and at the bottom it's becoming more and more corrupt. We need a middle here. Woodgate: We're seeing some of the modeling techniques that are allowing people to make things like little toys. But it's beyond us to work out the distribution problems,. Fabbing's going to be an important part of some community aspects. But the whole issue of community structures is part of society. If you look at the changing nature of work, we are seeing a real breakdown of traditional structures, particularly in knowledge work. There's no real need for these big organizations. You can come in and do what you need to do at any time. We're starting to see what we call community companies. They're not just profit-making companies but communities of profitable individuals. In Europe, we're seeing already that people are negotiating their own contracts on a very different basis. They're looking for a retirement lifestyle all the way through their entire career. I'm also looking at that from the fabbing point of view. Sterling: I wonder how you make those structures accountable. And how you can plan that lifestyle when you have no idea how long you're going to live. Biotech Sterling: Maybe we should move onto topic No. 5: Biotech. I'm concerned about the structure of the American healthcare system. There's a not so slow crisis brewing there. One of the worst aspects of this I've seen is a revolt on the part of healthcare workers on insurance rates. They're refusing to heal sick people because they can't afford the healthcare premiums. This is a sign of a breakdown in the social order. You can't maintain that drain on the insurance companies. We've tried. The US has struggled with this for many years, to find a balance between socialized medicine and the high-tech treatment we’ve been aiming for. It doesn’t matter if you can get four heart transplants if the guy next to you at the bus station coughs antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis on you. I belong to the generation where it's sort of a given that healthcare will continue to improve and lifespans will continue to expand. But you see life expectancies crashing in large parts of the world. The World Health Organization used to think that the population was on it's way to 11 billion. Where is it now? 8.3 billion. Where'd all those people go? AIDS, mostly, actually. AIDS and a crashing birth rate. When people don't have sex carefully, we get AIDS. And when people have sex carefully, we get crashing birth rates. We don’t treat our public health as though we all share the same species. The low end and a certain number of people are going to die from this. It's not going to be pretty Some things are pretty. We have a much better sense of cellular development at this point. I'd be pretty concerned about the degree of antibiotic resistance. We're going to be domesticating microbes, figuring out what they do and how they work. Whereas we used to have home pregnancy tests, we're going to have home everything tests. You're going to have microbe sniffers on towers. Bad cloud today. You're going to have microbe sniffers on every water faucet. There's a potential there for non-commercial health monitoring activity where we can actually see what's eating us. It's a no brainer for domestic offense because it's a bio-war defense. You can see this in elk wasting and West Nile virus. Out of this crisis better things will come. Woodgate: Other than the UK, compared to other healthcare systems, yours is probably the worse. With new bio materials, tissues, and genetics, we're going to see massive growth in that area which will counterbalance what we see happening. Particularly with an aging population, the costs are up. All those things cost money, and it's going to be even more difficult to keep the system running. We're going to see more prevention techniques. The air that’s inside your house is 2-3 times worse than the air outside your house. We're going to see a lot of things pumped into the air at home for therapy. Equally, were going to see new soaps and other materials. Sterling: Instead of home fire things, why don’t we have home cold germs things? People are used to paying a lot of money for medicine, but prevention is more of a hobby. Why can't I see the inside of my head every morning? Why can't I scan my body head to toe and have that as my start page so I can see how much calcium I've lost in my spine? Why do I have to go to an expert and pay them to tell me? The mechanisms of decay in the human body, there are probably eight or nine of them. We might beat one or two of them in pretty short order. You could have fresh dewy young skin but still be going blind or deaf. Life extension isn't going to be like this fountain of youth crap. You'll have life extension in your nose. You'll spend all your time patching things up while you're Chernobyling somewhere else. I think the first people to do it are going to really suffer. Don’t ever be the alpha test for a biotech upgrade. Let the junkies do it. Let RU Sirius do it. Let the extropians do it. Globalization Sterling: We're done to our last topic here: Globalizatioon, Americanization, anti-Americanization. The war. Movement in the street. NATO, the UN, the scene, baby! Woodgate: Is globalization Americanization? It's really China-ization. The factory of the world is in China. The way globalization spreads is more about timing than anything else. It's perceived as Americanization because there's a complete gap between the ideology of America and the ideology of the rest of the world. In most of Europe and in Japan, you don't have ultra-capitalism like you have in the US. Look at what's important to people's lives. That makes it really different and difficult. You have the same problem internally between states and federalization. States are going their own way. There's a massive change that’s going to go on. If it doesn’t, the US is going to go through a really difficult period. That might not be the end of the world. Go back 100 years and you have two world wars and tens of wars elsewhere. And we're still here. 10 years from now the US will be very different in its attitudes. It has to be if it's going to sustain any kind of growth. Sterling: I think a lot of people mistook globalization for Americanization because for a long time Americans held the megaphone. During the '90s there was kind of a period of quiescence. People in the rest of the world expect Americans to behave the way the Washington Consensus would have us act. But now we've got more of a Serbian or South African-style regime in power that’s trying to shift foreign policy away from here. It's a large continental, militarized superpower with a population under surveillance and punishment. That’s not the way America was when it was globalizing. Other countries are globalizing better now. ??? Al jazira ??? has the vitality of CNN during the first Gulf War. I would expect this second Gulf War to make them. They're a global newsmaking organization. They're breaking a lot of stories, people. The non-resident Indians have had a huge impact on their home country. Al Qaeda are globalized Arabs. They're guys with western educations and engineering degrees. They're globalized Arabs and they're angry about it. I think it's about time the globe woke up that 4% of the people in the world can't do all the damn heavy lifting. If you're Brazil, you need your own damn government. The idea that the UN becomes irrelevant because the Bush administration says so is ridicuolous. It's not like the Chinese prime minister is going to stop talking to the Indian prime minister because they shut down a building in New York. The future is people in Belgrade talking to people in Latvia. This too shall pass. The clock will not stop ticking. Armageddon never lives up to its hype. Things change and they change for the better, the worse, and the indifferent. Let's all go to my house and have a beer this evening. Tuesday, March 11, 2003
South by Southwest 2003 XVIII Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class Florida is a professor of economic development at Carnegie-Mellon Universiy and author of The Rise of the Creative Class. Here is a rough transcript of his remarks: Kirk Watson: Welcome, everyone. I'm pleased to see such a crowd. As the former mayor of Austin and someone who tried to pay attention to why regions flourish, I have been enamored with Dr. Florida's work for some time. It is difficult to be a rock star when you talk about economic development and regionalism. Richard Florida is a rock star. Many of you already know that he's the author of The Rise of the Creative Class. If you have not picked up that book, you should do so. In Austin, Texas, we debate creativity all the time. It's stirring debate all around the country. Richard Florida: When you callled me up, it was a long time ago. When you said, "Will you do South by Southwest?", I jumped out of my chair. I said, "Sure, I'll do South by Southwest!" It's great to be here. After writing this book I've gotten to be interviewed by lots of journalists. The book couldn’t have been written without two places, Newark, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I teach at a place called Carnegie-Mellon. If you know anything about Carnegie-Mellon you know it’s a pretty technologically oriented place. When I was recruited there in 1987, Pittsburgh was going through a bit of a transformation. They recruited me and the whole idea was to turn Pittsburgh into a high-tech place. The steel mills were closing. We would develop small business incubators, high-tech councils, and spur economic development. I used to come to Austin and talk to people in entrepreneurship. The idea was that we could do some of that in Pittsburgh. You might not be aware that one of the Carnegie-Mellon spin-offs is Sun Microsystems. Carnegie-Mellon was spinning off companies, but for some reason they weren't rooting in Pittsburgh. In 1991 and 1992 we thought we'd hit a major home run. We'd landed a big Internet search company, Lycos. Everyone thought that that was the company that would change Pittsburgh. 1994 came along. It was my seventh year, so I got to go on sabbatical. I went to teach at Harvard. I opened up the paper one morning, and it said Lycos to move to Boston. That was a surprise. This was the company that was supposed to transform Pittsburgh. And it was moving to Boston. People move to the place that has the best jobs. You will do anything in your community regardless of what it takes to lure those jobs. Here was the bizarre thing. The people weren't moving to the jobs. Jobs were moving to the people. When I called the people at Carnegie-Mellon to see why Lycos was moving to Boston, it wasn't that Boston was offering economically incentives. Lycos was moving because it wanted to be closer to the people that were in Boston. That's when the lightbulb turned on in my head. Companies don't lead economic growth, people do. People move inexorably to the highest paying jobs. Maybe, just maybe, the biggest driver to economic growth was where people choose to go. When I looked back over the entire field I found not one paper about this question. No one had even bothered too ask. We did all sorts of research. We talked to waiters and waitresses. We talked to people in bars. We talked to students. Students are interesting because they're making location decisions. And we did some statistical research. The first thing we figured out was that most people have belief that what generates economic growth and wealth is technological progress. Some people criticize my notion off the creative class as elitist. Generally speaking, the field of economics says if you want to grow your field you need to invest in technology. My simple-minded notion was that that was far too narrow of a conceptualization. Technology is a very narrow sliver of something called human creativity. Where you get real cycles of economic growth is where the different kinds of creativity come together. When hippie culture and universities come together, centers of economic growth have always been centers of creativity. Where in the hell is Silicon Valley? It may be nerdy, but it's equidistant between the Haight-Ashbury and the Monterey peninsula. Before the Grateful Dead, there was John Steinbeck. It has always been a place of creativity. In the Bay Area, when Apple when to Valentine to ask for money, he didn't care what they looked like. Creativity is the source of innovation, not technology. The argument in the book is that creativity is involved in and integral to everything we do, every good we make, and every service we provide. I learned that from my father. My dad's glasses cost $8 or $9. I'm not going to tell you how much these bad boys cost, but they cost a lot more than that, and I got them for 50% off. I didn't just buy the glasses, I bought the creative content. Whether its eyeglasses or textiles or CD's or music or architecture, everything is valued increasingly it’s the creative content of goods rather than the physical content. Creativity is the economic force. Where does creativity come from? This is the point that many of the critics of the book criticize. Isn't the idea of the creative class elitist? Every single human being is creative. That's what the book says. Creativity is the great leveler. It defies race, gender, ethnicity, appearance, and sexual orientation. You can't hand creativity down to your children no matter how rich you are. If you suck at playing guitar, you suck. It comes from real live people who defy type. People are the critical economic resource, not the raw materials, gold, or oil. Those places that can attract creative people because they provide the environment, they're going to be the economic winners. Because people are fickle. What do people want? People want to be themselves. All the other stuff give signals that a place will let people be themselves. If creativity is the economic force and creativity comes from people and people are the real thing that matters, we come to the third thin. That's the role of place, of community, or region. Geographic place and community have become the essential organizing building block. Geographic place and community have supplanted the corporation. That makes our job a heck of a lot harder. We, all of us, have become stewards of the essential economic building block of the creativity age. It's not just the Internet. This has been going on for 100 years. The great story of the 20th century was that the Internet was going to make place irrelevant. What is a corporation? What is a company? Well, the company pays dividends, salaries, and wages. It provides a base of people to participate in the company. How does a company do that? The company takes a person, a human being, and matches them up with a task. In the age of the Company Man, companies matched lots of people to lots of jobs, and it worked relatively well. Anyone remember what IBM used to stand for? I've been moved. Your company was your life. What's the average length of a job today? Three years. What is the mechanism of matching people to work? The geographic place. For a company, the geographic place provides a thick pool of potential people who can come to work or leave work to do more interesting things. People told us we won't move to a place for a job. We want to move to places with lots of jobs. We want to move to a place where there's a vibrant labor market. Place provides this critical economic organizing function. We began to ask people why do you move. Jobs weren't high on the list. Economists believe that people move according to economic incentives. If you're a 22 year old and you're graduating from college, and there's a great job there but no boys or girls, where are you going to go? People go to other people. Creativity people have always wanted to live in creative environments. There weren't a lot of people who are paid to be creative, so you had these little pockets of people. According to our research, there are 38 million people paid to be creative as part of their job. That's a third of the workforce. People wanted to be in exciting places with lots of stimli. They wanted outdoors stuff. They wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do. It's not just about the high arts. The things that came through was what we call the informal arts, the independent arts, or street-level culture. Artistic and cultural and music scenes. We associate a place with its audio identity. We had do develop an indicator, right? Can we make up a bohemian index? We counted the people who were paid to be bohemian. It's an admittedly crude, flawed measure. But when you test across 300 metro cities, places that score high on this bohemian measure have high rates of innovation and economic growth. Places also need to be open, accepting, inclusive, and tolerant. Places that are exlusionary and segregationist, creative people move away. Then other people move away. What would be an indicator that a place is open? We build a measure of foreign-born people and called it the Melting Pot Index. Canada's gone one better. They call it a mosaic. We accept people to melt and become assimilated. The Canadians say it's a mosaic. Come, whoever you are, bring your cultural heritage, and you can be a Canadian. It's bogus bullshit that creativity is American. 30% of the companies in Silicon Valley were founded by a non-American. The places that are open are the economic winners. Then I met Gary Gates. I was studying the high-tech stuff, and Gary was studying gay people. We met, and we put our lists together, and the high-tech cities were also the gayest cities. I named my five favorite cities, and they were the top five gay cities. Places that are open to diversity, places where anyone can come and plug in, those are the places that are going to get economic advantage. It wasn't so much that gays or the bohemians drove or attracted economic growth, but that the place attracted people and creativity bubbled up from the people who were there. Lastly, what people gravitate to in a world with high levels of transience is history and authenticity. Pittsburgh might have a lot more history and authenticity than Austin, but we want to eradicate it. We knock down the Homestead Works and put up a mall because we were afraid o our past. Austin has leveraged its history. I grew up in a Leave it to Beaver family. My dad went to work, my mom stayed at home, and there were two boys. You know how many Americans live in a family like that today? 7%. Between 93% and 75% live in some other kind of different setup. It's not one or the other. It's not about recruiting families, gays, or singles. It's about having cities that have something for everyone. South by Southwest 2003 XVII Paul Bausch, Anil Dash, Justin Hall, Ben Trott, and Mena Trott: Beyond the Blog Bausch co-created Blogger. Dash used to write for the Village Voice. Hall has a long and storied history that you can check at Justin's Links. The Trotts co-created Moveable Type. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion: Mena: Welcome to the Beyond the Blog panel. I'm one of the co-creators of Moveable Type and co-founder of TK which is the company that releases Moveable Type. I also have a personal blog called a A Day Late and a Dollar Short. Das: My name's Anil Dash, and I live in New York City. Until recently I worked for Village Voice Media. Before that I worked in the music promotion industry. And now I'm freelancing about Web logs to see if there's a possibility of making a living in this area. Bausch: I was one of the co-creators and developers of Blogger. Recently I helped write a book about Web logs. Ben: I'm co-creator of Moveable Type as well. I have the exact same bio as Mena except my site isnt A Dollar Short, it's Stupid Fool. Hall: In 1994 I got really jazzed about making pages on the Web using Simpletext and Emacs. I did that for 9 years. I kinda fell into freelance journalism because it’s the thing closest to writing on the Web and getting paid for it. Mena: We want to talk about how the different elements of a Web log are going to evolve. Basically, we see a Web log as a reverse chronological, permalink-filled sort of mess. It's open to question whether the chronology is important. Hall: Personal Web sites were a big topic of conversation at SXSW four years ago. Today we talk about Web logs. If everyone organizes their thoughts in reverse chronology, there are other ways to organize our thoughts. There's something being broken about the Web sites being so strictly controlled. What possibly could be better? Bausch: I have to defend reverse chronology because I helped put that in there. It adds a hint of structure to something that might not have structure. Mena: I agree with Justin that we shouldn't be limited to reading Web logs in day order. Part of it is that we expect it, but if you find somebody's Web logs six months after they started, you don't care about the date, you care about the content. Bausch: We need a way to get a sense of how ideas evolve and how memes move throughout communities. Before Web logs put that structure into the Web, there was no shared time. Web logs provide that. Dash: One of the things I think is valuable about having time in your Web log is that there's a contract. There's a social contract. You want to know when there's going to be something new. If it's ordered by date, I can scroll down to what I've already read and get a sense of completion. The contract has been fulfilled. Mena: It isn't so much the date but the expectation that they're going to be publishing. Hall: It's like commitment. Mena: It's commitment. It's weird. When I see a regular Web site it's weird. What is this? They haven't updated this in six months? Hall: Even with personal Web sites, there's no sense of immediacy. The convenience of Web logs is neat because people can make their own personal newspaper. That’s great. But now that we've got personal newspapers down, what else can we do? Dash: I want to be able to view by category or by author or by topic or by arbitrary category, not the ones that they've assigned. Mena: PB [Paul Bausch] has a lot to say about where the content is. We have personal newsletters. We want to publish our thoughts, own our thoughts, and be responsible for them. Bausch: As people get the taste of controlling their own information, it's going to be harder and harder for centralized sites to get people to contribute there. We contribute to the Web in lots of different ways. It's not just about posting to our Web logs. We post to other sites. We post via email. We IM. It's just one big text box. All of these applications can talk to each other. You can post a review to Amazon.com but why can't you also post it to your Web log? Ben: This comes back to identity and ownership. How do you feel like you have control over your information on these other sites? Your URL is your identity in a sense. You have the control over where it flows. Mena: I think that’s why Web logs have take off. We have our identities. And we like that control. Hall: That predates Web logs in a way. Dash: Part of what interests me is this entry form, though. There is one entry that works. You have our URL, your identiy, your entry form. I want blogs to look the same. I want to know how they work. I want it to be a desktop application. I want anything I do in Word on the desktop to be available to all of these media. Hall: I was talking to a guy whose working on a universal gaming system. The game scales to fit the client. The direction you're moving with blogs is happening in other areas of electronics. Mena: This is Matt Haughey's Web log. Bausch: He realized that he's contributing to many different places across the Web. He didn't have a place to aggregate all of this information together. If you don't know Matt personally, you might not know that he contributes to all these different sites. It's sort of a next step of taking information that’s distributed. Mena: if you post a comment on Amazon, you don’t want it to be limited to Amazon. Dash: I almost resent that someone else control swhat I've written. The tools need to evolve so I post to this one place, and it's posted somewhere else. Bausch: The interfaces are so similar, why can't they just talk to each other? Dash: Can't we all just get along? Hall: I was in Japan taking pictures with a cell phone, and I decided I would only post in Japanese. It's hard to write in these shrunk-down devices. People are also hacking audio blogs. Dash: Audio blogs suck. Hall: No, it doesn't fit into your rational Web log structure, Anil. Dash: How many people here have had a crush on someone just from reading their Web log? You fill in the blanks just like you do in a book. Hall: Do you like pictures? Mena: He doesn't even like pictures. He likes straight text. Dash: I want binary. I want to be able to fill in the blanks myself. Because you know what it is. Hall: What you really want is video blogs. Is that what I'm hearing? Mena: Let's play devil's advocate. I have a similar feeling about audio blogging, but I think it'll work as supplementary content. Not every post needs to be audio. Maybe it would work in a disaster. Hall: Matt Haughey at the bottom of his blog said that he wished he had a recording of the sound of the forks hitting the plates in the restaurant he was in because it was so dinny. Dash: If we look at what Ben and Mena and Paul have done with moblogs, or little photos that they've taken somewhere, that is interesting to me. It is a snapshot of their life. Audio could be supplementary content. But photos and text are less intrusive and work better for me. Hall: They're less captivating. You can multitask more easily just with text and pictures. Mena: In Japan, they're not really allowed to use their cell phones on the train -- as though to speak. So they're IM'ing. Hall: They're also checking their stock quotes and getting their fortunes told. Mena: We should talk about identity. Ben: I guess identity as your identity is your URL. Mena: In the sense of your reputation, how do we see the blogroll changing? Ben: I don’t think we'll see it change much in terms of how it looks, but the back end will change. Like the Friend of a Friend thing in XML. You have data in interchangeable formats that you can make sense of. You can graph relationships. Bausch: Blogrolls are used for several different things. These are the people I fit in with. Dash: Or want to fit in with. Bausch: Yeah. This is my community. These are the people I trust. We need tools. No one is going to write Friend of a Friend files by hand. It's just like RSS. The tool should handle the creation of it and the consumption of it. It's moving beyond what tools can currently do. You're going to need semantic search engines. You're going to need to be able to traverse the tools. And these tools aren't here now. Dash: The number of Web logs I track has gone up exponentially. I know a lot of people who keep active track of 20 and then through an aggregator keep up with 100 Web logs. Hall: Those aggregators increase Web log consumption. Dash: The next threshold is 10,000. If you use an aggregator and all this stuff, I honestly think that a lot of people will actively track 150 and passively track 10,000. Mena: The day we have no jobs. Dash: You may not know everybody by name. If you take everything your immediate friends have posted in a given day and then go out two degrees, you've got Metafilter. It looks like Metafilter. Mena: We're evolving to each of us having our own Metafilter. Hall: What's the Lafayette Project? Dash: As far as I know it's what Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan in New York are working on, some sort of content aggregator. Bausch: I don’t know that RSS readers are the best way to read personal publishing. Dash: Is this because of the amateur thing? Bausch: We're all designers. Mena: That’s just part of the personal publishing thing. There's a bigger part. Are we just aggregating text? If I was writing about design, I want people to see my site to maybe think I know what I'm talking about. Question: Why do you even want to keep track of 10,000 web logs? How much information can you assimilate even with 20 or 30? Hall: If you look at what the newspapers now, they've got hundreds of reporters. They take Ap and Reuters stories, and AP and Reuters have 10,000 reporters. So the New York Times is basically 10,000 reporters. Anil's tool is people's amateur, non-professional, non-corporate news sources. Mena: We assume that when we get to 10,000, we will read them differently. Hall: If we read them like we do now, we'll need to buy a new mouse every two days. Dash: For me, it's because I don't watch TV. I would rather have 10,000 people's real realities than one B-list celebrity on a desert island. Hall: Or 10. South by Southwest 2003 XVI Po Bronson: What Should You Do with Your Life? Author Bronson wrote the books Bombardiers and What Should I Do with My Life?. Here is an extremely abbreviated transcript of his remarks: What should I do with my life? Often, we don't like having to answer that question. It's itchy and confusing. We feel about destiny the same way we feel about inheritance. We want it to come easy. We feel that if it doesn't come easy, it's wrong. We know the text and the subtext. The text is never enough money, never enough time. The subtext is psychological hurdles. Some people feel the question is self-indulgent. What is freedom if not the chance to live for yourself? In farming, success doesn't come at the expense of another man. We equate money with freedom. True economic freedom is the confidence that you can live within the means of something you're passionate about. It's a dangerous thought that you're environment won't get to you. Academia compared to Hollywood is like bathing in altruism. It's wrong to assume that it's in good times that we can change our lives. It's the bad times that force us to change. Sometimes the answers aren't out there. They're in here. How many events in our lives do we just ignore? Learn to love what you get, not just get what you love. If you're open to strangers, willing to be empathetic and willing to learn from their stories, you can have a new life every day. Interlude: South by Southwest 2003 XV After the sessions ended yesterday, I headed over to the Film Threat party at B.D. Riley's. There, I met up with Jim Munroe and David from MP4. We talked about punk rock, filmmaking, and road trips before Jim and I left to meet my friend Amy so we could sit down and get some food. After dinner on the deck at Iron Cactus, we made our way to Texture for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cyberorganic Jam. Remember Cyborganic? Ahhh. The party was fun. Cory gave a rousing talk about the ongoing erosion of our offline and online rights. Sandy Stone, founder of UT-Austin's ActLab gave a short welcome and then lapsed into an extremely interesting spoken-word performance piece about cats, RF, and the fragility of life. We stayed almost until the very end, and my night last night was not as late or as crazy as Sunday. Still, I've taken this morning a little easy. Migas and a smoothie for breakfast with Rick, the 15 bus downtown, and more impressionistic note taking during Po Bronson's morning session. We'll turn our attention there now. Monday, March 10, 2003
South by Southwest 2003 XV Mikela Tarlow and Philip Tarlow: Digital Aboriginals Mikela and Philip are corporate consultants and the co-authors of Digital Aboriginals. Here is a rough transcript of their talk. Philip: Digital Abroiginals is the name of a book we wrote. Mikela: I was working on a proposal for our second book, Charting Your Career in a World Without Rules. The proposal was kind of bogging down. I was talking to our agent, and I said I was getting a little bored. He said, "What do you want to do?" I said I'd write a book called Digital Aboriginals. 10 years ago I was in a museum. I've always had a passion for aboriginal paintings. We were in the Museum of Modern Art, and there was a new show getting hung. They were paintings of circuit boards. It began this journey of what was encoded in those images that could lead to a deeper understanding of what was happening in the digital landscape. What we do when were not writing books is consulting to corporations. We walk into places like Coca-Cola and Philip Morris and play stuff like this. We do consulting on future trends and the big picture. Philip: Mikela's background is in anthropology. My background is in the fine art. I'm a painter. We're both interested in trends but in different ways. Mikela: What you see there is a picture we took last year at SXSW. Philip: And up in the upper left-hand corner is a segment of a tribe of aboriginals from north Australia. They were just having a meeting, sitting around. There is some connection and relationship betwene these two photographs. Mikela: The aboriginal photograph just shows men. Women participated in those circles, but the women are very shy. As we put those two images together, even the number of people was identical. The ideal number for small group work is no more than 12. When you put together more than 12, it becomes difficult to do complex tasks. And if you look at the distance, its about the right distance for sitting around a fire. There's another number that begins to appear. Malcolm Gladwell writes about the number 200. That number 200 is interesting because it's about as large as a tribe ever got. Once they got bigger than 200, a power struggle would occur and the tribe would break apart. 12 is the family unit. And 200 is the economic unit. It's just the last couple hundred years that were tryign to work in these mega-corporations. We're going against our biology almost. Philip: Another level of talking about these photographs is that these aboriginals assumed that they were connected, connected in a way that’s hard for us to understand because of their connection to the earth, to plants, and to animals. Digital aboriginals means that we're coming full circle. We're relearning what it means to be connected. Mikela: A lot of what's happening in the digital landscape, like blogging, is triggering this biological memory. This is where our research is. Is there something happening in our culture that's very similar to what's happening in the business landscape and in our journey of consciousness? How we describe that centerpiece is with four platforms. The first one is Who Owns the Wind, which has to do with the dissolution of ownership as we know it. Ownership is not working. The second piece has to do with the return of the storytellers and the collapse of traditional advertising. Advertising people say that as soon as Tivo households hit 10 million they're going to stop doing TV advertisements. Even people who listen to the ads don't remember where they heard what. What does that mean if advertisers can't reach you with traditional advertising? The only way to connect with us is authentic stories. Philip: Authentic and compelling. Our feeling is that this is just the beginning. You can't fool the public. Mikela: The third platform is Tribal Mind, which has to do with collaborative work structures. And the fourth platform is Riding the Songlines, or the capacity of new models of leadership and consciousness. When the dialogue space is transformed the power relationship is transformed. Whenever the power relationship is transformed we must change our perception of what is important. When Matt Damon was in Japan, teenage girls held up their cell phones to stream video to their friends. The traditional media was also there. Who is more important in that equation, the teenagers or the media? Those teenagers are the ones who are going to create the buzz about the movie, not the article in Teen People. Now you have to consider how to connect with the teenagers. A traditional press release is not going to connect with them. Philip: Gere are some of the things that go along with storytelling. They're all ages. Nobody's bored. And nobody, I can assure you, is asking whether this is his original story. This is a story that has been told since time immemorial. Mikela: This is how the big stories happen. When stories were conveyed by oral tradition, storytellers revised stories when people looked away. The oral tradition gives you tremendous feedback. These stories become fully tweaked. Philip: It was also considered a work in progress. It was never a finished product. Mikela: You were not allowed to create an original work until you had copied all of the masters. Philip: Original work was not a concept. Copyright? There was no question about that Mikela: What Lessig is describing is the way things have been since the beginning of time. We're returning to an oral culture. I think we're the last generation that's going to write the way we write. The average person use to know 50,000 words. Kids today know about 25,000 words. When was the last time you said "I sauntered across the room?" You don't. That's a written word, not a spoken word. If we're approaching the characteristics and number of words of an oral tradition, what does that mean? In an oral tradition, reputation is extremely important. Relationships are extremely important. Intimacy is extremely important. I grew up in a strange household where we had a lot of books about Zen tradition. There was a story about a teacup that I used to hear all the time. When we began telling these stories in corporations, we decided we needed a story that communicated the importance to open your mind. Philip: This is the story of a student who had been wanting his entire adult life to visit with the master and watch the master perform the traditional tea ceremony. Finally, the opportunity arose. As he watched the master pouring the tea, he felt privileged to be in the presence of the master. He noticed that the tea was getting dangerously close to the top of the cup. Before he knew it, the tea had overflowed and was staining the table. He continued to pour. At a certain point, he couldn't hold back any more. "Master, the tea is overflowing! The cup is full! It can't take any more!" And the master said, "Yes, just like your mind." Mikela: I heard this story many times. It wasn't until we started telling this story until we discovered the meaning of it. The reason why he gained enlightenment? There are two reasons. One is that the tea ceremony is a profound part of their cultural context. It's a metaphor for all life. In anthropology, it’s the difference between a high-content culture and a high-context culture. The second thing is his relationship with the teacher. He had such profound intimacy and trust with the teacher that everything the teacher said was like a pebble in a pond. Philip: He was listening differently. Mikela: The story used to just be a stupid story, but when I began to think about it in a different way, it came to life. We don't spend a lot of time doing things over and over and over and over and over and looking for deeper meaning in things. I think blogging is going to shift our society, and it's because of the storytelling. Something happens when you go deeper and deeper and deeper. These core archetypes have formed in every culture of the world. As storytelling is being introduced not just into the cultural space but also the corporate space, the ancient creative is being tapped into in ourselves. These are some of the things you would learn if you studied with a mystic. You're not your personality. Everything is connected. You are the storyteller. Does that seem familiar? Is it something that you kind of know at some level? We came up with this phrase: digital sutras. Those are statements designed to shift your consciousness in a certain way. Philip: They're sounds. They're like a scientific experiments. Mikela: What are our big predictions for the future? Virtually enhanced real-life events are going to be more and more where the artistry is going to exist. We're also in an age where complexity is going to reclaim control. The third is established redundancies. The capacity to utilize social networks will be the work of the next generation. In an information dense world the unrepeatable present moment will become a highly valued event. South by Southwest 2003 XIV Karl Deckard, Cory Doctorow, Maitresse Elise, and Jim Munroe: Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter Deckard is a senior game designer who has worked on Metroid Prime for Nintendo and Half-Life. Doctorow is outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a contributor to Boing Boing, and author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Elise is an adult actress and writer of erotica. And Munroe was managing editor of Adbusters before writing novels and making video games. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion: Munroe: My name's Jim Munroe. I've written three novels. One of them is about another guy who goes to another planet to teach English. But when I'm at parties, I find myself saying I write novels. And I say it's science fiction-influenced stuff. I'm interested in my own tendency to sidestep that sort of stuff. I'm very interested in people who are involved in things that are not terribly highly regarded by society in terms of the arts. Doctorow: I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm a blogger, a science-fiction writer, and I work for a nonprofit organziation called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I write science fiction, and not just science fiction, but science fiction for Slashdot readers that will get published on the Internet. That can be seen as one step below self-publishing. It's considered scraping the bottom of the barrel. But if there's hope, it's in the trolls. Will someone care about the poor Slashdot reader? I write for them. You need to be involved in Internet culture to understand it. I'm fairly unapologetic about using terms and jargon that comes out of that milieu. I get surrounded by people at science-fiction conventions by people who wonder what I'm smoking. Science-fiction writing doesn’t pay for shit. Roald Dahl sold his short stories one at a time for enough money to feed his family of four for a month. Asimov's pays about enough to feed a family of four for a meal. But occasionally, the New York Times discovers you and what you do. Fuck you gutter, the New York Times thinks I'm cool Elise: Ive done a lot of things in the adult entertainment. I'm on this panel as a porn actress. I've done four adult videos. Two were bi and two were lesbian. I've done stripping. I write erotica. I've done the modeling. I've done the Internet. I also have a Ph.D. in romance linguistics. The adult entertainment industry got me through school. When people ask me what I do, I say translation. That is one of my jobs. But that pays nothing. If someone's truly interested, I'll go into detail about what I do, but if it's just anyone, I'll say I'm a writer. If they ask what I'm writing, I'll say true-life adventure stories. I'm not ashamed, but sometimes you do have to protect yourself. Deckard: I design video games. I worked on the PC game Half-Life and a game for Nintendo's console Metroid Prime. What is this gutter? Who are these people who look down on all of the careers were talking about today? And why do we care? Munroe: The cultural gutter is just something I made up. I made up this idea of there being gutter genres. I've always been attracted to science fiction, but people generally remember the crappy science-fiction movie that they saw and stigmatize the genre as a whole. I'm drawn to the genre with the interest in defusing that as much as I can. When I got involved in video games and started talking about video games, talking about them as art, I realized that I'm drawn to these genres because they have a basis that keeps drawing people back to them. Because I like violating these cultural norms, it’s a perfect place for me. For unconventional thinkers like Elise, instead of following a traditional writing career with a smattering of erotica, she did what she did. When I write a science-fiction novel, I feel free. You get to write about robots, for Christ's sake. There's a fundamental fun element that draws me to it. I have a lot more freedom in terms of what I can do. Elise: I've really been enjoying the BDS&M I've been seeing in the mass media lately. I don't mind the lesser stigma. My sister understands what I'm doing a little more. My parents appreciate some of the writing I've done, but they don’t know everything I'm doing. It's a huge fantasy being a porn star. It's fantasy being a stripper or a dominatrix. You get to be a schoolgirl, a teacher, a nurse. My life is not boring. Doctorow: Who are the people looking down their nose? And why does it matter? It only matters when it matters. I used to work at a science-fiction bookstore, and I used to hang out at the science-fiction library. "Speculative fiction" is one of those shame words. "It's not a comic, it's a graphic novel!" When I was 12, it was a great place to hang out. But when I was 20 and applying to a writing program at York University, saying I wanted to write science fiction was fairly embarrassing. In Canada, much of the writing is supported by arts grants. And they don't award grants to genre writers. That can mean the difference between a writer having time to finish writing a novel or not having the time. I like having the freedom to write about the things that excite me. You guys are my tribe, and it's not necessarily the case that this is weird. But in the larger world, there's a bit of disdain for such unbridled technology-related enthusiasm. Not having to be apologetic about being enthusiastic about technology is good and refreshing. The rewards of fiction writing are so slim that if you didn't love it there'd be no reason to do it. I'm glad to be in the gutter to write like I feel like writing. Deckard: The kind of work I do I don’t necessarily want it to be talked about at dinner parties. I want people in cool smoky lounges and subway stations to talk about my work. That's my tribe. That's who you should be doing your art for: the people like you. There've been a lot of times in my life where I've noticed that there is definitely a "them" spoiling things for me. I don't know who they are. I've worked in Seattle and in record stores for a lot of my time. When the Nirvana record "Bleach" came out, we all loved it. Then some jerk at Rolling Stone dubbed it the Seattle grunge scene. We were wearing flannel because it's cold and wet in Seattle. It's hard to keep creativity when you have to filter it through so many people. Doctorow: Working in the gutter is working out of scrutiny. William Gibson got an honorary Ph.D. from the Rhode Island School of Design. William Gibson's start in the genre is actually pretty interesting. He used to draw single-panel comic strips for fanzines. We are all geeks under the sin. It's nice to avoid the scrutiny. Elise: What we have in common is that we enjoy extreme fantasy. In the leather world, there's a huge crossover between the leather community, science fiction, games, and Ren fair. I consider myself to be a big geek in a big way. Put me in a costume and I'm happy. Is there a bigger stigma being a sci-fi geek or being a porn enthusiast? Doctorow: Do we really need to measure? My pain is like… [He gestures with his hands.] Elise: This isn’t about pain. Munroe: If you're at a rock concert, it's cooler to know a lot about porn than it is about science fiction. Fantasy is an interesting thing. It's assumed that they're immature. A lot of people's enthusiasm for it and dismissed. Everyone has that inside them. We go on a binge/purge thing. We watch a couple of Hollywood movies and then we read a very important novel. You know how there are writers who are light, but filling? I like to think of myself as the falafel of science fiction readers. I enjoy it when someone says, "I don’t like science fiction, but I like your books." Doctorow: I thought you were science fiction influenced! Munroe: I'm over that. I've come to terms with that. The fantasy of it is its strength. The media is heaping attention on, say, Grand Theft Auto. But I feel like it's like it was with comics 10 years ago when Watchmen came out. 10 years later, people don't really think about comics the same way. The stigma remains. Because these genres are fantasy based, they slip towards the gutter. They may have a moment in the spotlight, but then they fade away. I think that's a good thing. Deckard: It's not interesting to me that these people are pushing these things back into the gutter. That’s being driven by people who might not understand any of these genres. If you've never seen this film that you say is so bad, how do you know it's so bad? Question: When you got into what it is you do now, did you have a community there to begin with that you felt supported by? Elise: you know how they say if you're going to smoke pot, then you start heroin? If you become a stripper, the next step is porn. I didn't have any stripper friends, but being in the leather community, I was very comfortable. And I didn't start stripping under I was 31. My leather friends thought it was great. When I started doing movies, I had huge support. I don’t know if I'd want to move to Southern California and just do them with anyone. Doctorow: Science-fiction writers in Toronto are really lucky. When I was 12, I was hanging out at the Spaced Out Library. By the time I was 16 and got to alternative school, I was in a writing workshop. Munroe: I just met Cory a few years ago. I didn’t really have any contacts with the science-fiction community. I grew up making zines in the punk-rock community. I started self-publishing and ended up with a full-length novel. I published my first novel with Harper Collins, and it didn't work out that great, so I decided to self-publish my second novel. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it weren't for zines. Self-publishing is OK. Deckard: I basically grew up my whole life playing video games. I knew it was something I wanted to get into. In college I studied graphic design. It was a natural step to get into game design. I moved out to Seattle to work for Nintendo and did graphic design for their magazine and players guides. And then I got a job in game design. Question: There's a good deal of economic force behind what you do. Yet you perceive it as being in the gutter? Munroe: The economics are just an indicator for the appetites that exists for these things. The guilt that I'm performing is just a mirror of how socially as a society we aren't comfortable acting out these fantasies. We cordon it off. Doctorow: If the gutter is just right, you have no scrutiny, and there's vibrant economic activity. Elise: The money is a driving factor in the adult entertainment industry. But a lot of people go into it just out of curiosity. Deckard: When my wife and I were talking about this, she said, "Haven't you already stepped up onto the curb?" Because video games do sell well. Doctorow: The urge to transgress is the urge to step back into the gutter. They've mainstreamed Grand Theft Auto, but can they mainstream Journey Through the Cancerous Colon? Deckard: Games are a much more family thing in Japan. It's not just little Timmy buying games. It's mom. And it's a bunch of games. It's the same for comics and porn. One section of the gutter that's not included here today is board games. Board games are huge in Germany. I end up having to import games and translate them so I can play them. Question: I would argue that you're doing this to indulge yourselves. If you make money, great. But if you didn't make money, would you still be doing it? Elise: I would still do it, but less often. Doctorow: I started submitting science-fiction stories when I was 16, and I didn’t get accepted until I was 26. When I got my advance for the novel, I got a check for a three-paragraph piece in Wired. The check from Wired was $100 less than my advance. Munroe: People aren't in this for the money. Elise: There are people in it for the money in my field, and they're not happy. Question: What do you guys think is the difference between the cultural gutter and the cultural leading edge? Historically, it's always been such. Bright interesting people find bright interesting things and then the broader culture caught on. Doctorow: William Gibson writes about denuding the counter culture landscape. The last scene he saw get co-opted was punk. That took 18 months. Then came grunge. That took three weeks. Staying on the transgressive edge makes it harder to participate in the denuding of the counter culture landscape. Question: Why are some things, like being a fantasy football player, accepted, while other things are scary? Doctorow: I think people wear Star Trek tunics because they're proud. The signifier of a Star Trek tunic is "I am incredibly proud of being distant from your pop culture. Screw y'all." Munroe: It's also a matter of not having a clue and not caring. There's nothing secret or attractive about the secret society of Star Trek. Deckard: A lot of times, people don't care what those other people's opinions are. I've been a big skate punk since I was a little kid. People kind of look at us weird when we come up on our skateboards. I don't care what they think. It's kind of sad to see that lost. Just as grunge got big, you start seeing cheap skateboards in K-Mart and Target. All of a sudden it becomes less us. You do everything you can to make that not happen. Doctorow: Then some bastard came along and made Tony Hawk Skating. Those bastard video game makers sucked out all the life out of skating. Interlude: South by Southwest 2003 XIV After last night's Fray Cafe and the last two days of active transcribing, I'm feeling a little burnt out. While I went to the "Computers vs. Blackboards: Net Learning or Not Learning?" panel discussion this morning after meeting Scott Heiferman for breakfast, I did email for work instead of taking notes. Then, after lunch with Don Jarrell, the coordinator of the Austin Company of Friends group, I skipped Joshua Davis' keynote entirely in order to meet deadline for the May CoF events calendar. If anyone comes across any notes or transcripts for these two events, let me know. I'll at least link to them. Sorry I couldn't keep this up the whole conference. South by Southwest 2003 XIII Carrie Bickner, Ben Brown, and Kevin Smokler: Book Culture Bickner works as assistant director for digital information and system design at the New York Public Library and runs Rogue Librarian. Brown co-founded So New Media. Smokler works as a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and runs Where There's Smoke. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion: Smokler: Please address all publishing questions to the publishing panel at 5 o'clock this afternoon. Thank you. Brown: Bling bling. Bickner: Happy happy. Smokler: Joy joy. Good morning, everybody. My name's Kevin Smokler, and I'll be your moderator this morning. We'll be talking about books and the Web. Are they friends or enemies? Friends or lovers? Friends with benefits? When I came to South by Southwest in 2000, I was a failed writer and looking for something literary. I was looking for something book related, and they had an e-books panel. That was three years ago. The e-book issue has largely been put to rest. It's more or less considered a failure in publishing circles. We never think now about publishing and the Web in terms of the Web supplanting books. We're looking at how the two relate rather than will one dominate the other. Bickner: I am with the New Your Public Library digital library program as the assistant director for digital information and system design. Smokler: Ben Brown is a Web rock star, personality, and all-around good guy. But for our purposes today, he's the co-publisher of So New Media, an exciting, interesting new model of publishing. The very definition of being published has changed thanks to the Web. Bickner: I am by training a librarian, but I'm also a writer. How I got into librarianship, initially I thought I'd be a special collections librarian, an archivist. It turned out that I actually knew a lot about technology. Now that I'm in the digital library program, my job is almost what I started out to do. It's preservation. How do we preserve our digital cultural heritage? 50 years from now, how are we going to be able to find these objects? Brown: I'm a Perl programmer by trade, but I have a creative writing degree. When I started doing a lot of writing and looking for places to publish, it's not a great market for the kind of stuff I write. I was living in New Zealand at the time and I pitched a lot of articles about book culture. Magazines there just weren't interested. So I started a magazine. I did it myself. I did it punk-rock style, and we sold several hundreds of copies. When I got back, my partner and I started So New Media to primarily focus on writers who mostly publish online. Smokler: I'm a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and until last week was working on Central Booking. We also used that forum format and software interface to have authors come visit. Our readers would post questions and the authors would answer them. Where should we start? The four main areas we've brought up in terms of where books and the Web intersect in interesting ways are promotion, dissemination, preservation, and selection vs. publishing. Three years ago, there was a lot of talk about print on demand. Before we could do that, seeing your book was some mark of quality, some mark that you had in fact made it as a writer. Your book had passed through some sort of selection process no matter how good or bad it was. The Web has turned that entirely on its head. What does that mean? Now that everybody can be published, what does it mean to be published? Now the question isn't who can get published and is that worth reading, but, as a reader, how do we select what's worth reading? Brown: We have a pretty rigorous selection process. We get hundreds and hundreds -- OK, many many -- submissions every week. We've done 12 books or something. We can't read all of the submissions that we get already. One of the major things we evaluate is: Does this author already have somewhat of an online following? Beyond that, it is very much my personal tastes in books. My hope is that the people in our audience will have tastes similar to what I have and just buy everything we put out. We've done everything from personal narrative to science fiction. But they all fall in moderny categories. Another thing is dealing with the authors and how enthusiastic about the book. Some people are like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll put out a book." And other people are like, "Yeah! I'll go on a world tour, I'll visit 200 cities and put on a circus act in every city." Those are the people we publish. The first people we published were members of the high-click personal Web site community. They had a decent audience. Our goal was not to sell books to viewers of the Web sites. The goal was to get writing on the Web already into the hands of people who buy books at the bookstore. It's not new, but there are thousands and thousands of books being released every week into the bookstores. There's no distinguishing between your book and another. You've got to get out there and do a little song and dance for people. One of the first people we did was Greg Knauss. He did a 40 Web log tour. Every day he'd do a virtual reading and write a piece for all these different sites. He got a lot of press because nobody had ever done that before. It was a tremendous promotional vehicle, and Greg could stay at home with his kids. Smokler: that’s a more creative promotional effort than 90% of New York publishers have thought of. Until the last year and a half, very few publishers' Web sites had anything other than the season's catalog. If you've ever been to a reading, you know that readers just salivate over any information about the writing process. The Web is able to hone in on that in ways that other media cannot. Neil Gaiman did a blog while he was writing American Gods. Robert Olen Butler wrote a short story live on a Web cam. The science fiction community has embraced that first for obvious reasons, but it's only the beginning. We know how the Web has changed how books are made. Let's talk about the reverse. Bickner: One of the most exciting things that happened in my career took place at the New York Public Library. We took in a box of papers from Malcolm X after his trip to Mecca when he rethought a lot of his ideas. These ideas have been unexplored because of a lack of material. This box was found in a storage locker in Florida. The storage owner sold the stuff, and it eventually ended up on Ebay. Through a lot of negotiation and other work, the New York Public Library acquired the collection. That the box survived was an accident of the stuff the material was written on. Once we got the collection, we started getting calls from people who also had boxes of Malcolm X materials. I began looking for the analogous accidents and the analogous materials in the Web world and it's not there. Let's say Josh Davis has a flood in his basement. Does someone save his CPU? We're not taking steps now to preserve digital materials. 20 years from now, how are we going to understand Cory Doctorow's editorial process? Smokler: The way authors compose their books is changing. The number of authors who compose their books with pencil and paper is shrinking. There's a group of people called the Pencil and Paper Society, but those writers are rare. Bickner: This is something that we just photographed at the New York Public Library to digitize. It's Walt Whitman's copy of Leaves of Grass. The pencil marks you see are his editing comments for the second edition. This physical object shows you what his process was like. My own manuscript shows tracked changes in Microsoft Word. The Walt Whitman book is physical. With this, it's not just about saving the Microsoft Word file, it's about having the technology to read these tracked changes. 20 years from now, is someone going to want to see the email that I sent Tanya, a friend who helped m | |
