Results tagged “tech” from Uncivil Society
Microsoft celebrates reaching a sales goal for Windows 7.
Today was one of those days where I had old media on my mind, so I took my camera and tracked the dotted lines to snap images of things I'd noticed on my daily walks.
The video above is something I've wanted to try for a while. On the repurposed Hudson River pier just south of Pier 54, there are some old installed binoculars with dusty interior lenses. I noticed that the my camera would fit in an eyepiece, and I thought the resulting image just might look like some of the old photos & films I've seen from the nineteenth & early twentieth centuries.
Et voila. Circular diffusion, gauzy images, faded color and harsh sound--it's several decades of early photographic experimentation distilled into one thirty-five second movie.
Below: a look back at the City from the Hudson in 1903. The piers below--those that survive--have been or will be remade into recreational areas, with playgrounds, greenspace, seating or entertainment complexes.
I regularly advise students and social entrepreneurs to think about trademark in relation to their ventures, and here's a good example why: Microsoft has just announced the formation of the Social Enterprise Alliance.
No, not that Social Enterprise Alliance, the organization that brings together social entrepreneurs. Microsoft's new Social Enterprise Alliance is a social networking "partnership centered on the customization and integration of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007."
A search of the U.S. trademark database indicates that "social enterprise alliance" isn't registered yet to anyone, though SEA could try to assert common law trademark rights if it wanted to try to get Microsoft not to use the name.
Of course, SEA may be OK with another SEA roaming around, but if Microsoft successfully registers the mark things could eventually interesting. My personal favorite example in this regard is the original Burger King, which got a state trademark for its restaurant but failed to consider federal trademark until after the national Burger King chain had registered it. A judge carved out a 20-mile bubble for the original to operate free from competition from the federally trademarked Burger King, but the original cannot go to scale under its own name.
Microsoft's social enterprise announcements got me thinking about social enterprise & trademark more generally, and a federal trademark search reveals another interesting development: Live Elements, a Virginia technology firm, has recently filed to register "social enterprise" as a proprietary mark for its own online networking platform.
What constitutes socially responsible search? Bing has segregated explicit images, and Google is under fire for generously giving artists the opportunity to have their work exploited for free. But for some groups, search raises even more pervasive value conflicts, such that working with the leading commercial search engines seems impracticable.
Case in point: Koogle, an Israeli start-up search engine designed for Orthodox Jews, though from the perspective of trademark law it is decidedly unorthodox:
The new site, named in a pun on Google and on a Jewish casserole pudding, is meant to let devout Jews search for things they need without encountering sexual material or breaking religious taboos. Even when filters are used on mainstream search sites, explicit results sometimes appear under subjects like “breast cancer” — as users of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) new Bing search service have discovered. (Microsoft took steps recently to make filtering more effective.)
Koogle will not only screen out sexual material or even images of women dressed provocatively, but it will also not offer things like television sets, which Orthodox families aren’t allowed to have in their homes.
Koogle will not permit any shopping on the Sabbath, from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday.
As fate would have it, I had to be out of town at the very time Amazon held its Kindle DX press conference at Pace University, where I happen to teach. Nonetheless, since such a high-profile media event took place right by my office, I figure I might as well jot down my initial thoughts here.
Of course, as per my disclaimer below, I probably should add that that any thoughts here aren't those of Pace etc. etc.--these are just the ramblings of the dork what writes this personal blog.As I noted to my social enterprise class, the arrangement that Amazon apparently has with its five universities--essentially to demo the larger Kindle as a textbook killer--reflects the symbiotic relationship between charities and commercial providers that has been the norm in recent years, particularly in such areas as higher education, health care and museums. The notion that higher education has fallen from an Edenic noncommercial purity may be an appealing myth, but from a historical standpoint it has been misleading since, oh, about the twelfth century.
From a legal perspective, arguably the most critical issue is for the universities signed on to the Kindle venture is that of retaining control over activities expressing their exempt educational purpose. Were Amazon, say, to start dictating textbook choice or the substance of the curriculum, the IRS might question whether a university is pursuing a substantial non-exempt purpose. Judging from what we've seen--and I know no more than what is available to the general public--that won't be the case, so one would expect few if any problems on the legal front.
Still, the relationship between Amazon and its partner universities is bound to raise questions, especially among academics from outside relatively more commercialized disciplines such as law and the natural sciences. Essentially what we have here are universities helping a single company to establish dominance in the market for educational texts.
There are analogues throughout the university--exclusive deals for soda machines and big box franchises running student bookstores--but this venture is more central to the academic enterprise. Given the realities of Amazon's usage policy and proprietary DRM, one could argue that the university's control over its curriculum would be illusory should the Kindle become the academic norm. It's one thing to force an academic community to choose Coke; quite another to create an environment where student must buy Kindles and professors are expected to assign books that are available in the Kindle format.
We can also expect questions as to the ethics and practicality of requiring students to buy an additional, not to mention branded, device in order to pursue their studies. Even with the academic discount that is likely to become available (extrapolating from the deals available from computer & software companies), the Kindle is in the price range of a netbook, low-end laptop, PS3 or an iPhone. As any number of other people have noted, the market is primed to be more receptive to electronic texts that can be viewed in media students already own or would like to have another reason to buy.
Finally, the Kindle venture is also interesting from the perspective of the history of the university as a medium for processing and transmitting information. It's tempting to classify those who favor the Kindle as on the cutting-edge while branding those who question it as hidebound traditionalists, but that would be a drastic oversimplification. In fact, one could argue that the Kindle itself embodies a traditional approach to electronic communications media.
As Marshall McLuhan observed, our initial impulse when dealing with a new medium is to recapitulate more familiar forms--for example, early TV transmitted stage plays and symphonies before developing rhetorical styles that expressed the television medium. At base, the Kindle does little more than replicate the textbook. Sure, the Kindle weighs less and does not cost as much as a many required texts, but that's it. The fundamental model is still one-sided and top-down: the authors write a text that students read.
That's not the environment in which today's students live and work. To be valued in the marketplace--and yes, to live a more meaningful life--students need to do more than read books. They have to become adept at finding useful information from a wide range of resources and communicating ideas in ways that are useful & engaging.
Perhaps a more cutting-edge approach than replicating the textbook would be to shift away from the model of students as information consumers. Instead, we could focus on helping students become more effective and compelling information producers. Rather than requiring students to buy a fixed text, we could focus on creating opportunities to collate resources and to write material that would in turn help future students learn.
In this environment, the professor relinquishes the industrial age mantle of hallowed authority to assist students in becoming professors themselves. By this I don't mean professors in the sense of the contemporary academic guild, but in the classical meaning of the word from which "professor" is derived--the Latin profiteor, "to speak forth." What university professors do is no longer the province of a privileged few; today everyone has the opportunity--and the responsibility--to gather, produce and transform information. The sooner we stop pretending that university professors have a monopoly on expertise, the better professors will be at fulfilling their new social role.
That said, I'm curious to see how this Amazon venture will play out. Among its other functions the university is a place for experimentation, and this is exactly the sort of thing we should try--especially if it means I get a free Kindle!
My background today has been Turner Classic Movies, which has been playing a series of films and short subjects from the 1930s. There's quite a bit of fascinating stuff here re the interplay of technology and culture, particularly in relation to an economic crisis.
The cliche that "Americans flocked to escapist entertainment" is enticing, but wrong--there's nothing escapist about it. It's all quite strategic, even at its most playful.
I'll explain this more here & elsewhere once I finish a hard-deadlined project, but for a glimpse of what I'm up to just check out an old Robert Benchley mock-educational short. Stuff like this sounded a death knell for the professoriate as a profession with authority--when everyone has access to rich data and mass communication, someone who claims to hold the information franchise becomes inherently ridiculous.
Does that make the academy obsolete? Not necessarily. However, with seventy+ years more of technological development, the need to adapt becomes even more urgent.
I'm Learning to Share offers a revealing look at Archie Comics as an archive of technological change. Below: a page featuring a Scopitone, an old, once cutting-edge, visual jukebox:
Earlier today, I received a helpful note from Jimmy Wales confirming that his term on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation did not lapse. Contrary to the Valleywag post, the Wikimedia Foundation had not only re-appointed him to the board before December 31st but had reported his re-appointment to members of the Foundation's email list.
As I tried to indicate in my post yesterday, my aim was not to take sides in the controversy but to highlight the rhetoric associating nonprofits with incompetence, backbiting and arcane bureaucracy. The popular perception that nonprofits grow less responsive to their mission as they scale up is an environmental factor that can harm even the most efficient organization--for example, it's one reason why legislators & AGs time and again seek to improve their electability by calling for charity "reform."
With regard to the Wikimedia Foundation more specifically, it is dealing with dilemmas faced by any number of nonprofit organizations. Relying on donations is for many people an essential quality of 501(c)(3) status, yet asking for donations is nonetheless often criticized as an unseemly preoccupation with money and marketing. Nonetheless, when a nonprofit tries to reduce fundraising requests through corporate sponsorships and ads, the criticism can actually grow more intense as some purists accuse the organization of selling out. For more on these tensions and ways to resolve them, check out my article on law and nonprofit design.
The Wikimedia Foundation also highlights other important issues faced by nonprofits. One obvious issue is that of executive pay. Contrary to the critics I don't find the salaries of the Foundation's top staff to be excessive--there are any number of nonprofit (and for-profit) executives who get paid more for doing less in organizations of similar size & scope, and under current law comparability is a key metric. That said, as any number of nonprofits have experienced, the use of donations to pay substantial salaries can, however counter-productively, provoke a backlash.
Another issue faced by the Foundation: whether the millions potentially raised by online advertising are worth the risk of adverse action by the IRS. It's something the Mozilla Foundation is dealing with now, although for somewhat different reasons. For the Wikimedia Foundation, placing ads on Wikipedia pages could arguably give rise to a substantial amount of unrelated business income, which in turn could jeopardize its tax exemption. There are subtleties and strategies in this regard that I'll discuss here soon enough--for now, suffice it to say that the Foundation's current practice of relying on donations could be the wiser course of action for reasons that go beyond maintaining a noncommercial culture.
NOTE: Update here.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' term as a director on The Wikimedia Foundation has expired, prompting Valleywag to launch this salvo:
How did Wales come to this embarrassing pass? The former porn merchant and options trader, who has traded sex and money for his help in getting Wikipedia entries edited, has met his Machiavellian match, in the form of Sue Gardner, a Gothy, spider-tattooed Canadian pop-culture expert who now runs the site he helped start as Wikimedia's executive director
Incompetence and infighting are endemic to nonprofits, of course. But Wikipedia's bureaucracy is distinctly, fearsomely awful. The site, which dictates the online reputation of countless living people and companies, itself operates by rules that are completely incomprehensible, determined by a self-appointed group of volunteer editors who can seldom stop arguing over obscurities to explain their ways to outsiders.
No one should be surprised, then, that Wikipedia's overseers are so hobbled that they can't even fill vacancies on the board — a situation Gardner has exploited expertly.
Whatever the particulars of the Wales' situation, the perception of nonprofit governance evident above is well worth noting.
Above: a resident of the Lutheran Home in Topton, PA--a senior citizens facility near my childhood home--participates in the popular Wii bowling league:
Senior citizens, who are sometimes presumed to be averse to technological innovation, are embracing Nintendo's video game system.
"It's surprising how they've taken to the Wii technology," said Sue Fogel, activities coordinator at The Lutheran Home. "Once they got the knack of it, they were hooked."
On the Nintendo Wii console, seniors are bowling, golfing and playing baseball and tennis without venturing outdoors. . . .
When it comes to moves, few can match 83-year-old Ted Jentsch's sidewinder-style body language.
Coaxing the ball into the groove with a nod here and a nudge there, Jentsch nailed three strikes in a row - called a turkey - and finished a round with an impressive 193.
The performance made his day.
"I was feeling lousy all weekend, and I almost didn't make it," said Jentsch, a retired pastor of St. John's Lutheran in Sinking Spring. "Playing like this, though, gets me energized."
Jentsch, who once taught sociology and anthropology at Kutztown University, offered an academic's view of Wii bowling.
"This is an interesting way that modern technology has made it possible for people who can't perform vigorous physical activity to have a social experience and enhance their feeling of self-esteem," said Jentsch, who walks with a cane.
Over the past few weeks several folks, including students, have expressed an interest in my opinion on FORGE, the Africa charity that became a social enterprise cause celebre when its founder, Kjerstin Erickson, decided to blog about its financial problems on Social Edge.
I've been puzzling over what to say here for a while, because, well, I have the pleasure of meeting & working with a lot of young leaders of charitable start-ups, and as folks who know me in the real world can tell you that when I'm dealing with 'em one-on-one, I'm a real up-with-people person.
No, really. I even have a Russian badge that certifies me as a member of the "Happy People Club"!
Anyway, my preference is to encourage the good and, where there are missed opportunities or areas of potential improvement, to make my suggestions with a suitable amount of moral support. You don't get to see that on the web, where even the broadest smile gets reduced to cold digitized letters--one reason, by the way, I like to illustrate my posts with pictures.
Since the stakes are so high with FORGE--literally, the organization's survival could be at stake if it does not hit its long-term fundraising goals--I was reluctant to join in with my own SWOT analysis lest it be misconstrued as a takedown. And that's not an idle concern--though social enterprise talks a lot about being more businesslike, there's an unfortunate tendency to see departures from "yay you for being the most revolutionary amazing successful innovator ever" as a personal attack.
Still, folks are not just fundraising for FORGE but holding it up as a model for other charities to follow, and FORGE has been gracious enough to welcome public scrutiny of its actions. So I tell ya what--here's the EULA for the rest of this post:
By reading the rest of this post, I agree that Jeff, as a certified member of the Happy People Club, is aware that Forge is providing social benefit and deserves my support if I want to provide it. I also agree that Jeff is never, ever wrong except when he is, which he's not, generally, except sometimes, when, hooooo boy, is he ever!
Above: the mechanization of the human spirit in the service of giving away free underwear. More about the event at Racked; here's my Flickr set of the box and what's inside, as well as the full thermal body scan revealing the coldest parts of my body:
I'm still busy with things that keep me from sustained writing here or on Blog@ & JustMeans, but over lunch I did get a chance to read highlights from the latest issue of New Scientist. Social enterprise types will love the special feature on renewable energy--I've been wondering about the tech re harvesting tides, so I really liked that part--but my hands-down favorite article is Tools Maketh the Monkey. Not only does it illustrate how scientists have come around to McLuhan's core theory about technology as an extension of the self that alters our perception, but it describes contemporary experiments designed to foster a human sense of self-awareness in other primates. The video above illustrates where ape communication will inevitably lead; below, a key excerpt:
Iriki's unique perspective on the problem is that tool use was the catalyst for a much more important mental breakthrough, albeit one that took 1.8 million years to unfold: the emergence of a sense of self. By this he means the ability to conceptualise one's own existence in time, plan for the future and understand "intentionality" - your capacity to change your environment.
So how did tool use give rise to a sense of self? Iriki believes the starting point is the way tools induce a modification of body image - the basic mental representation of "self" that consists of knowing where the physical body ends and the environment begins. When we use tools such as hammers or tennis rackets, we integrate them into our body image; our brains treat them as a temporary extension of our hand or arm. To turn a stone or a stick into a tool, our ancestors would have to have done the same. This, Iriki argues, led to the gradual dawning of a sense of self more sophisticated than the basic body image, creating a new evolutionary force that rapidly ratcheted up intelligence. "Once you have a sense of self, you can intentionally control the environment, and that modified environment in turn puts selection pressure on your brain," Iriki says. He has dubbed this dynamic, two-way interaction between brain and environment "intentional niche construction", and argues that it is the missing link in the story of human evolution.
Sense of self was crucial for another reason: it allowed our ancestors to conceive of the existence of other selves, each with their own intentions. This is the essence of "theory of mind", which is what underpins our shared understanding and hence communication, language, society and culture.
Above, the first image from Google's GeoEye satellite--Kutztown University. It's just a few miles from where I grew up in PA Dutch Country. Nearby you can find the Kutztown Folk Festival, Renninger's Farmer's Market and scads of Amish farms. That this area, best known for its natives' resistance to technology, would be the first subject of this cutting-edge satellite photo is one of history's wonderful little inside jokes.
An apt observation from Free Exchange, an Economist blog:
It is also remarkable that the issues were framed and debated by America’s leading economists almost exclusively online. No elaborate committee reports. No think tank publications. Even the questions at the Senate Banking Committee hearings were influenced by the online commentary. When the historians go back to suss out the bill’s genesis, they will have to devote significant time to a virtual exchange of ideas.
Arse Electronika is a sex & technology conference now underway in San Francisco. This year's theme: "Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction."
Here's the streaming live video feed and home page, with includes archived sessions.
A fascinating article in the NY Times this morning about technology and the NCAA. Things that stand out:
- the bylaw prohibition on info tech during games (interpreted not to include headphones)
- the contrast between the field info environment and the rest of the team's IT
- the stopper: concern that allowing tech during games would exacerbate the gap between rich universities and the rest
One effect of online social networking technology is that it intensifies the environment that Marshall McLuhan called "all-at-onceness." Old divisions fall away--near and far, high and low, word vs. picture--in favor of composition.
Part of this integrative process is the fusion of the personal and professional. Topics that were once taboo in polite conversation--money, religion, politics--are now a salient feature of the connected self.
In most respects I have no problem with this. I see myself primarily as a Watcher when it comes to organizational technology--I'm interested in seeing what happens but have little to no personal stake in any particular tool.
But there's something going on that's gotta stop.
Namely, political campaigning in social networking accounts connected to 501(c)(3) organizations.
Here's the problem. Section 501(c)(3) prohibits charities from intervening in political campaigns, either for or against a candidate. The prohibition is absolute; if the IRS so decides it's one strike and yer out.
Yet if you pay careful attention to charitable Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, message boards and other social media, you can find any number of accounts associated with 501(c)(3) managers also being used to tout Obama, slam Palin, raise funds for a political party and so forth.
Sure, a person can express political preferences and still be involved with charity--so long as the proper distinctions are made. But in many cases that's not what's happening.
Here are a few things I've noticed recently.
A Twitter account promoting a charity slips in news of a fun fundraiser targeted at defeating a particular candidate.
The Facebook account of a program manager also incorporates campaign fundraising widgets and promotions for upcoming rallies.
A charity message board explores how members can leverage its resources to help a campaign.
For obvious reasons I'm not linking to any of this stuff. At the very least the integration of the political and professional provides grist for critics to call negative attention to a charity; at worst, it could provide grounds for the IRS to revoke a charity's exemption. This is why a number of charities with anxious lawyers maintain a strict ban on political campaigning by employees at work, on charity tech or utilizing the charity's email.
Particularly if you're a charity manager (i.e., officer or board member), you should maintain a firewall between accounts that promote your charity and those in which you advocate for your personal political preference. For example, a personal profile that identifies you as a charity's manager, lists the charity's website as yours and provides an email address that resolves at the charity's domain could be cited as grounds for concluding that the account is an extension of the charity, especially if the account is being used to promote it.
Again, charity managers are as individuals allowed to support and oppose political candidates. At the very least, take clear steps to establish that an account is personal and that you're not speaking in your capacity as an organizational representative.
Clumsy, artificial, against the unifying spirit of the web--yep, I agree with that, and more. But the IRS has made clear that the same rules that apply in the real world also apply on the web, as any group that has been audited for its page links can affirm--and even if the IRS doesn't come after your charity, your charity might come after you.
Since hearing Yelle's A Cause des Garcons yesterday on the Nubian Queen Comics MySpace, I gotta confess I've become a bit addicted to it for my work background today.
What kills me about this video is the way it represents the effects of media in daily life--the integration of the hair dryer music into the sound, the anthropomorphic transformation of mundane tools into things that affect the singer's life in odd and unexpected ways--good stuff.
Another good one from the same singer is the Ce Jeu video, which is a clever play on color and form.
