Personal Democracy Forum, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/19/2007 - 10:02I had been wondering if I would manage to live blog and get any posts up during PDF. How much time would the chat backchannel take up? What role would Twitter take? Initially, there weren’t a lot of people on the backchannel. It wasn’t displayed on the screen. Twitter was doing much better, and I added many attendees of PDF to my Twitter friends list. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sitting anywhere near a power outlet and my network connectivity got spotty as my batteries started going.
So, I didn’t live blog. Instead I started writing my notes of the conversation between Tom Friedman and Eric Schmidt on my laptop and then later in the notes section of the program.
It was an informal discussion and I’m sure that others will write more detailed descriptions of the talk than I will. Eric observed that this felt a lot like a Google meeting, with everyone online, and no one looking at the speakers. Tom asked Eric questions like where Google is going and if he thinks Moore’s Law applies to searches. Eric responded by talking about the focus on searches, advertisements and applications. He spoke about a network effect where more information was constantly becoming available.
They talked about efforts by Bahrain, China, and Thailand to limit access to Google. In Bahrain, the issue was about citizens seeing how much land the royal family had using Google Earth. Google was asked to shut this down and it generated a larger blacklash than simply ignoring the issue probably would have. In Thailand, there were issues about criticizing the King who is revered and it is illegal to lampoon. The generals who took over the country in a recent coup attempted to apply this to them as well. In China, Google restricts searches, but lets people know when there are items that they couldn’t return in the search. With all of this Schmidt believes, users find ways to adapt and get the information that they need.
This got to a key issue. With improvements in searching and personalized searches, how do we make sure that we don’t get stuck with people finding only information to reinforce their biases? Schmidt spoke a bit about the need for better media education. He spoke about people developing truth detectors, about people looking at politics in a television and a post-television way. He spoke about people wanting to connect and to be greeted in a personalized way. He felt that people will be less likely to take something as unquestioned truth when they first read it.
Schmidt was asked about how Google hires and what his interview was like. Schmidt spoke about a fairly rigorous algorithm looking at GPAs and how well respected the university was. He spoke about the importance of having a passion beyond work, noting the amateur rocket scientists and astrophysicists that they’ve hired. This fits with my thoughts about finding people who are passionate about what they are doing, about people who love what they are doing, who are, in the original sense of the word, amateurs. More on this when I talk about one of the later sessions.
When Schmidt went to his first interview at Google, the person interviewing him had his picture and lots of biographical information that had been retrieved from the web. This led to a lively discussion about personal privacy and the problem of kids putting up online information that they might not want potential employers to see in the years to come. It was suggested that if President Bush’s college years were on Facebook, with plenty of pictures snapped from cellphones at parties, he never would have become President. Schmidt suggested that everyone should be able to change their name at 21 and start with a clean slate. I think 21 is a fairly arbitrary number, and we would be better to recognize that we all have youthful indiscretions, even as we get older, and we need to stop focusing so much on these sorts of things.
There was a discussion about how we defend our reputations, and one idea suggested dismissively was that we could simply live our lives the way Paris Hilton does and let it all hang out there. I think we need to be careful about too glibly dismissing this idea.
Friedman observed later on that when it comes to comments about public figures online, “Whatever can be done, will be done. Will it be done by you or to you?” He repeated this in a later session and I think it is an important point. To the extent that you are a public figure, you should probably be actively defining who you are, your identity needs to be done by you. The problem of Paris Hilton, isn’t that it is being done by her, but that she is doing it to herself.
Perhaps some of this relates to a different part of the discussion. It was noted that people behave differently when they have a camera in their face. They tend to think in terms of television and it was wondered how much this is generational. Online video needs to be shorter, more informal, more entertaining. It was noted that YouTube viewers tend to select five to ten videos of three minutes each as their watching preferences.
There were many other interesting topics touched on during the discussion, but these were the ones that jumped out at me as the most interesting.
(Tags: pdf2007)
Personal Democracy Forum, part 1
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/18/2007 - 22:28At 7:30 this morning, I arrived at the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum. I’ve been to every Personal Democracy Forum that they’ve had, so this was old home week for me. It started off with a networking breakfast where I ran into many old friends. Even at 7:30, there were plenty of people sitting off in one corner or another doing their networking via the internet, and one person quipped that there were likely to be many people added as friends on Facebook or MySpace during the networking breakfast.
Andrew Rasiej gave the welcoming remarks and we went to the first speaker, Larry Lessig. Larry’s talk was entitled Free Culture, Free Politics. I’ve read Larry’s blog, but never heard him speak in person. It was an engaging talk.
He started off bewailing the either/or thinking, which I’ve also talked about as black and white thinking or binary thinking. He spoke about it in terms of copyright. Many people present copyright as either you are completely for it, RIAA style, including things like the DMCA and CTEA, or you are completely against it. He pointed out how this is a false dichotomy and went on to provide good examples.
Before he went into that, he explored a tactic of staunch copyright defenders to portray anyone opposed to anything other than the strictest interpretation of copyright laws as ‘communists’.
I don’t want to move on from this without exploring what I think is an important underlying theme. So many of the battles are between a radical individualism, every man for himself, where any sort of collaboration is unacceptable, and an idea that we are all in this together, part of a community, that has some sense of responsibility to our brother, to our neighbors, a sense that there are times when we can and should work together for the common good.
"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy"
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/17/2007 - 16:38Be subversive, click here.
Conference Fugues
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/17/2007 - 11:04At the final wrap up of the Media in Transition conference, David Silver made a couple of interesting comments that seemed in contradiction with one another. He spoke about how the conference was too traditional in its format. You had your keynote speakers. You had your panelists and you had ten minutes at the end of each session where others could add their own brief thoughts in the form of questions. The conference wasn’t enough of a conversation. It didn’t reflect the way the transitioning media was changing the way we communicate.
At the same time, he bewailed the large number of people using email, twitter and other online tools during the conference. In this world of constant or continuous partial attention (CPA), it means that speakers only get partial attention. In an old media view, this isn’t desired. I remember teachers often asking for our total undivided attention, yet for those of us who probably would have been diagnosed with ADD, that was pretty hard. There was always a squirrel running by some window outside.
Most people tend to speak of CPA negatively. People are distracted from the keynote speakers. I would like to challenge that. Twitter, email and blogs are some of the tools that can be used to make the conference much more of a conversation. A few conferences I attend have a chat room which anyone can join and share their thoughts. These chat rooms are often projected on the screen behind the speaker or panelists so even those without a laptop at the conference can at least see what everyone else is writing.
Personal Democracy Forum has done this very effectively, yet it points out a problem. Sometimes the chat can be more interesting than the speaker, and if you aren’t an interesting speaker, this can be particularly threatening.
As people start doing mixed reality conferences that take place in part in Second Life, where the people in the audience can see what is going on in Second Life, and the people in Second Life have their chat going on, as well as seeing a video stream of the conference, the distractions can get even more confounding. A person can chose an avatar of a squirrel and go running across the virtual stage. “Look there goes a squirrel”, takes on a whole new meaning in these contexts.
Yet there are good reasons to include these sorts of tools for making conferences more participatory. First and foremost, there is Dan Gillmor’s old saying about the audience knowing more about the subject than the journalist. It seems to apply well to audiences and speakers at conferences. Then, there is another aspect, what I think of as the art of the fugue.
I think it is damaging to suggest that we should live single threaded lives, giving our undivided attention to one topic and then another. Life is more complicated than that. It is a fugue, a tapestry, with many themes or threads weaving together to create a beautiful picture. It is counter point.
So, tomorrow, I’ll attend Personal Democracy Forum, and I look forward to the whole event, the speakers, the chatting between sessions and the backchannel, not only for the information that I’ll get but also for the chance to participate in a fugue, a tapestry which celebrates the many voices, the point and the counter point of our political dialog.
