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The #140conf Blog

Blacksburg’s Brethren

Our previous blog looked at the #140conf video describing the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) of Blacksburg, Virginia, launched in 1993 as a Virginia Tech outreach program. Proclaimed as the world’s first “wired town,” BEV was created with software from Virginia Tech and high bandwidth optical lines from what was then Bell Atlantic—Virginia. (Indeed, in 1996 John Knapp, director of external affairs for Bell Atlantic—Virginia, noted that there was such a positive response to the high bandwidth lines by BEV users that the company began to offer those lines to most customers in its seven-state region.)

On my Facebook wall, Neil Garland, a fellow who I haven’t seen since college (the mid-1970s), commented on my story: “I’ve spent a lot of time in Blacksburg. ‘Wired’ doesn’t even begin to describe that place. . .”

Other readers, however, soon reminded us that there are other, “honorable mentions” in the world of electronic villages (aside from the obvious one, Palo Alto, California, in Silicon Valley); some very early—and perhaps unlikely— stops on what would become the world’s Information Highway.

TELLURIDE, COLORADO. In 1993, this sparsely populated (1,500 year-round residents) resort town, 275 miles southwest of Denver, embraced on all sides by the 13,000-foot San Juan Mountains and 130 miles from the nearest interstate highway, became the first rural community in the world to offer Internet access via a local phone call. Over 1,200 people signed up for this “InfoZone” program, founded by the Telluride Institute, a research, education and cultural organization that calls itself “The Think-And-Do-Tank of the Rocky Mountain West.”

The InfoZone Program’s two principal components were 1) the creation and operation of a vital, enhanced Community Information Infrastructure (CII), and 2) to serve as a research and development test-bed for systems and services, and for the social and economic impacts and implications of an information society and thus, by example, it hoped to promote an “ecology of the information society.”

Many experts thought Tulluride to be the perfect place for a project such as InfoZone, since over 70 percent of the town’s population had college degrees at the time, and so many scientific conferences and art and music festivals are held there that on one quiet weekend there was held a “Nothing Festival.”

Then-Governor Roy Romer was promoting high-tech development on Colorado’s Front Range corridor when the Telluride Institute’s Richard Lowenberg, a former artist and planner who worked in California’s Silicon Valley, persuaded Romer and others to consider Colorado’s Western Slope areas for high tech development too. New York networking expert Allen Rowath then became involved and helped set up the InfoZone after being lured to Telluride as a result of a conversation with Mary-Chapin Carpenter following a folk music concert.

A $20,000 Colorado state grant paid for installation of a Telluride node on the Internet during the summer of 1993. The state then leased a data line so that Telluride residents could bypass typical commercial access systems requiring long-distance calls that could cost $15 an hour or more. Apple Computers Inc. donated the computers that were stationed around the town.

Designed in part to improve education and health care services, InfoZone started out providing a special electronic bulletin board system for certain American Indian communities and environmental groups. InfoZone provided free email, local and national news, conferences, and other community information. Users could log on at Apple terminals in the library, a bank, a coffee shop (the Steaming Bean Café), the regional hospital and the state agricultural center. The system allowed for participation and exchange with text postings, audio, and images. Lowenstein commented that multidimensional drawings of projects, such as a proposed expansion of expansion of Telluride ski area, could be delivered to residents’ homes via InfoZone.

At the same time, another member of the InfoZone board, Greg Law, created an audio-text service enabling callers to obtain information on town affairs, such as the upcoming town council agenda, which was faxed free of charge to any resident simply by phoning into an automated answering service.

In 1995, SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization, highlighted Telluride and InfoZone by creating a special electronic public forum, with various special-interest project folders on education, the arts, tele-community planning, and live chats (“Tellu-Tell Me”). Topics of particular interest included community health, environmental issues, Native American writers, cultural master planning, and salons. Dedicated networked computers at SIGGRAPH 95 allowed visitors to connect with users throughout the Telluride Region, at home, and via the many public access tele-computing sites around town.

Ironically, the little former mining town of Telluride had had been the Silicon Valley of the 1890s. In 1891, a Telluride entrepreneur, Lucien Lucius Nunn (1853–1925) was engaged in gold mining, journalism and banking in the town. To improve his mining operations at the Gold King Mine 3.5 miles away, Nunn financed the world’s first commercial alternating current power plant, the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant, built by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. This groundbreaking development began the “War of Currents” between the Westinghouse Electric Corporation (promoting AC) and the General Electric Company (promoting DC) headed by Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan.

A few people in 1993 speculated that projects such as InfoZone were a scheme for subsidizing people called “Lone Eagles,” the first generation of wealthy telecommuters who transplanted their jobs to America’s resorts, countryside and small communities. (In 1994, Denver’s Center for the New West estimated that there were about 10 million of these Lone Eagles scattered about the countryside. I even recall that, back in the 1990s, Rupert Murdoch was spending about six months of the year in Aspen, Colorado.)

Today, “teleworking” is common. As for Telluride’s InfoZone, it’s use is restricted to private communications for staff and consultants of the Telluride Institute.

GLASGOW, KENTUCKY. In 1994 this town of 14,062 people situated in Barren County, KY (halfway between Louisville and Nashville near Mammoth Cave National Park), became fully “networkized” by the local electric utility, the Glasgow Electric Plant Board. They used coaxial cabling that supplied not only cable TV (54 channels) and telephone, but also email, high-speed Internet access (50 times the existing dialup speed of 28Kbps) and a local network for homes and businesses called HomeLAN, which eventually would allow residents to program household appliances to run at the times of day when electric rates were lowest. Indeed, the whole project actually began in 1985, when the Glasgow Electric Plant Board investigated the idea of creating a wired network to connect to all of the town’s electric meters, a concept too advanced for that time, but commonplace today. The board decided, what the heck, let’s wire the town anyway for cable TV and that way the cabling would already exist to carry Internet traffic to-and-from residents when and if that became popular.

In 1989 cable service arrived via Scripps-Howard, then Comcast bought the network, eventually selling its 3,000 remaining customers to Glasgow in 2001. In the early 1990s Internet experts from MCI approached the town when they heard about the town’s cable TV wiring, offering Internet technology and expertise.

Although originally a coaxial network, Glasgow later upgraded to a hybrid fiber-to-the-neighborhood network, with fiber-optic lines going to groups of 200 homes serviced by coaxial cable.

At the time of its creation in 1994, sponsors and enthusiasts of HomeLAN and high bandwidth fiber optic Internet connections felt that things live videoconferencing would become commonplace, workers would telecommute, students would eventually take many classes from home, and high-tech businesses would be attracted to a town that placed signs on the roads reading “www.glasgow-ky.com.”

Unlike Blacksburg, Virginia, however, the impact of high-speed communications and networking on Glasgow wasn’t quite as great. For Glasgow, “high tech” business continued to be its production of auto parts. Farming (tobacco, dairy and cattle) remained the principal aspects of the local economy, despite the fact that it had a five-year head start on other, wealthier communities.

In an interview in August 2000, Andy Carvin (@acarvin), then running an email discussion group from Washington, D.C. on equalizing net access, told AP that “Just because you put technology in place doesn’t mean people have the skills to use it successfully. If you lack skills and content, access doesn’t add up to much.” Billy Ray, who had run Glasgow’s Internet service from its beginnings, was also quoted as saying, “Some of them [towns looking to follow Glasgow’s lead] think… just by dragging a reel of fiber-optic cable to town, the high-tech companies will come. This is only an element of a well-planned, well-operated community, It’s not going to heal all your ills.” Still, some companies in town had websites and were selling and shipping products worldwide.

Even as late as 2000 Glasgow was doing pioneering work. The town used its network to control sets of traffic lights along U.S. 31E, and its agencies shared computerized maps online to coordinate utility repairs and plot school bus routes. And that summer the town was finally experimenting with monitoring 7,000 electric meters and automatically shutting off water heaters during periods of peak demand. This proved to be an excellent move: By 2003, Glasgow residents were paying just $19 a month for 70 cable channels and super-fast Internet access for an additional $25—half the national average at that time—because the city-owned electric utility provided both cable TV and Internet access over the wires that monitored power usage, and (best of all) the utility was simply recovering its costs, not trying to actually profit from its service.

In fact, Billy Ray, still utility superintendent in 2003, estimated that since Glasgow began offering cable in 1989, $32 million of residents’ money stayed in the town, as opposed to being funneled into the pockets of giant telecom companies, most of which would not have been able to offer the advanced services available to the wired community of Glasgow anyway. (Not surprisingly, the mammoth phone and cable companies panicked over the 500+ utilities that were deploying cut-rate broadband and other services around the U.S., and began to fight to block any public gas, water and electric utilities from providing telecom services.)

TAOS, NEW MEXICO. Taos has long been known as a tourism and arts mecca, but at one time it had a rickety phone system and its populace dwelt on the other side of the “digital divide.” Fortunately, two financial grants aided the La Plaza Telecommunity Foundation (www.laplaza.org), a non-profit organization formed in 1994 partly to help compensate for the lack of ISPs in Taos County (pop. 27,000) by furnishing low-cost and free public access to everyone in the Taos, New Mexico, region. By 1994 nearly 25 percent of the area’s 10,000 residents signed up. For those folk who didn’t own computers, 15 computers were available for use 12 hours a day at the La Plaza Telecommunity Center. Residents used the program for sending and receiving email, research and home schooling. A website was built to act as a cybercenter for the town.

Free public Internet access was available at three locations, one of them being the La Plaza office building, equipped with a T-1 line from Albuquerque; the others were in Questa and Penasco in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The least expensive way to project Internet access out there was to use wireless microwave connections between towers.

In April 1997 the days of free Internet surfing through the La Plaza Telecommunity Foundation came to an end, with home users charged a flat rate of $6 for six hours on online use and 75 cents for each additional hour after that. Users prior to that time were able to stay online up to 15 hours per month at no charge (which would now cost $12.75), though computer use at La Plaza Research Center and at their labs in Penasco and Questa remained free of charge.

Network access was all the more meaningful in Taos because many residents in remote Questa didn’t have telephones and used services such as Dialpad.com to make online calls. Internet access also helped the The Michael McCormick Gallery (still found at www.mccormickgallery.com) generate a third of its business thanks to visitors to the gallery’s website.

“We can sell artwork all over the world. It’s convenient for someone in Saudi Arabia to see the site and send me an email,” McCormick said.

Other towns in the 1990s that dabbled with dedicated Internet connections include Harlan, Iowa, pop. 5,128 and Barbourville, Kentucky, pop. 3,973, where local utilities were responsible for installing high-speed networking. Fort Morgan, Colorado, pop. 20,049 arranged for state grants to purchase new equipment and subsidize high bandwidth service for five years.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

First Wired Town, 15 Years Later

Social media is often thought of as a sort of informal, virtual app-powered “meta-network” overlaid on top of existing communications networks—something dynamic, fluid and mercurial in nature. Back in 1991, however, before many people had ever heard of the Internet, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University—popularly known as Virginia Tech (VT)—conceived of a literal, online community: The Blacksburg Electronic Village, or BEV. (http://www.bev.net)

The initial goal of this pioneering project was to have Virginia Tech Information Systems expand Virginia Tech’s existing campus-wide voice/data network so that it could be accessed by faculty, staff and students living in Blacksburg, Virginia, a town of 34,500 nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwestern Virginia. (The 22,000 students of the day made up 62 percent of the population of Blacksburg, a town which then had just 3.5 percent unemployment and was rated as one of the top 20 places in America to retire.)

This idea soon mushroomed into creating an online community in conjunction with the Town of Blacksburg and the local telephone company C&P Telephone (an operating company of Bell Atlantic) wherein every citizen in the town of could enjoy Internet access and be part of a literal online community or “electronic village” as it was called.

In a news conference held in the town council chambers in January of 1993, C&P President H. R. Stallard called the project “a test bed for the information age… It’s a unique opportunity for us to see what our vision of information services can bring.” C&P was used to dealing in advanced technical matters. Back in July 1969, President Richard Nixon’s telephone call to the Apollo astronauts on the moon originated from C&P Telephone Company equipment.

The university and C&P Telephone had spent the previous year doing a feasibility study, during which time Telluride, Colorado (pop. 1800) became the first rural community to offer Internet access via local phone call via the non-profit Telluride Institute’s InfoZone program. (InfoZone was developed partly to improve education and health services, and provide a special electronic bulletin board system to certain American Indian communities and environmental groups. Over 1,200 people signed up immediately and could log on to Telluride’s network at terminas in the local library, a bank, a coffeshop and other places around town.)

Meanwhile back at Blacksburg, despite the feasibility study, Stallard warned that the project would proceed “one step at a time” since no one could accurately determine how much the project would cost or how long it would take since they didn’t knew how much technology people would want and how many information service companies would join the project—though the university had already listed six companies interested in developing marketing, pricing and ease-of-use strategies using the Blacksburg electronic village as a “real-life laboratory.”

Best of all, noted U.S. Rep. Rich Boucher, D-9^th, the project could be done without government funding.

The principal phone company involved, C&P, spent $7 million in laying a 42-mile high bandwidth fiber optic network and digital switching center capable of sending voice and data to travel simultaneously over the same digital connection, all while Virginia Tech developed software so that town residents could easily access databases such as those of the university library. (At the time, about 8,300 of Blacksburg’s 34,500 residents lived on the Virginia Tech campus.)

It was planned that by September 1993, the network would include an off-campus apartment complex where most residents were Virginia Tech students and the city’s schools were to have also to have been linked to the system, enabling parents and children to check homework assignments by calling up the school computer. They would also be able to check if schools or roads were to be closed because of bad weather s by calling a community bulletin board, which was also to list ongoing events. Eventually, the students were to be able to take “video field trips” and access a library data bank to retrieve the text and pictures from books and magazines for their term papers.

The network actually fully started up in October of 1993. By November 1994, the Associated Press was reporting on how one-fourth of Blacksburg’s 36,000 residents and 40 business operators were linked with fiber optics to the Internet. Moreover, a partnership formed by Virginia Tech, the Blacksburg Electronic Village and two corporate sponsors founded a “virtual school” enabling students at Montgomery County schools in the area to surf the Internet. The project was funded in part by a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to get the system up and running and train teachers. C&P Telephone (renamed Bell Atlantic—Virginia, Inc. in 1994) had installed high bandwidth lines and switches so students could access information over fiber optics 100 times faster than the conventional 28,800 bit/sec, V.34 standard modems of the time. Bell Atlantic generously installed and ran the equipment at no charge for a year—normally it would have cost about $5,000 per school for equipment installation and $400 a month to use the network.

Teachers noted that the high speed network could even keep second-graders interested and in their seats for more than an hour because of its ease and its incredible speed,” wrote David Reed of the AP.

As Virginia Tech assistant professor Andrew Cohill, the head of the BEV project at that time, said, “You can’t tell kids to wait even two minutes while you download a video; they’re going to be staring out the window or shooting rubber bands.”

Thus, as early as 1994, teachers such as Ruth Lacy were leveraging the power of the Internet and high bandwidth communications in their lesson plans. In the case of Lacy’s fourth-grade geography class, she found a University of Minnesota Internet outreach program that entreated Internet-savvy users to help scientists track wolves in a national forest. The university mailed her a topographic map of the forest and information gleaned from periodic ground and air sightings of wolves were translated into positions posted at an Internet address. Each of Lacy’s students was assigned to track a particular wolf, an activity that initially helped develop map-reading and geometry skills. After that, students began asking questions as to why a particular wolf was hanging around a certain lake, or why a wolf had to travel so far to find food—curiosity that led to more sophisticated, deeper questions relating to biology and ecology.

“It’s discovery-based learning you just can’t get in a textbook,” Lacy said at the time.

A year later (June 11, 1995), local businessman Paul Wisnesky told The Lethbridge Herald of Alberta, Canada, that with his computer and the computer network, he “didn’t need his newspaper anymore,” had cancelled his cable, no longer bothered walking to the library to find new books, could check out the stock market, peruse ads and coupon offers for local grocery stores, movie theaters and restaurants, and “doesn’t have to drive to the town office to chew out the mayor about potholes and paving projects.” Even the local massage salon was advertising discount rubs via the Blacksburg Electronic Village. It was just two years into the project, and one third of Blacksburg of Blacksburg apartments were now connected directly into the Internet. A new tenant moving in to one of these apartments would find on the premises not just a phone jack but a RJ-45 jack for the Internet.

“I don’t think there is any other community anywhere that has the same level of participation in a networked community,” said Andrew Cohill in July 1995. “I don’t think it will be unusual in the future, but largely by good fortune and accident, we ‘ve become the first…. I ‘m not sure how far ahead we are, probably two to five years.” Cohill said between 125 and 175 people were signing up for the system every month, at a monthly cost of $8.60 U.S. Users had to provide their own basic PCs, and those users lacking an Internet connection had to make do with a slow analog modem.

Interestingly, although one third of Blacksburg’s residents could in June 1995 use their high-speed Internet connections to communicate with anyone on Earth, most users said that the system had “helped revive the close-knit community feelings of an earlier time.”

“The fear was that people wouldn’t meet in person to talk anymore,” said Susanne W. Huff, who worked at the town hall training town employees to work with computers. “But that hasn’t happened… It has spurred a lot of different focal groups, people meet on the Internet using the electronic village, and then they meet in person.”

Back in 1995 the system’s designers were still puzzled over how residents could pay utility bills and taxes online while retaining credit card security and the privacy of other confidential information. Today, of course, people rarely use checks, even going so far as to file their IRS returns electronically.

The biggest challenge at the time, however, was thought to be “overcoming the seemingly in-born skepticism of the computer illiterate.” The watchword here is seemingly. Many of these ‘skeptical’ users may not have had any real aptitude or affinity to computers and networking.

“This is really an education project, not a technology project,” Cohill told The Lethbridge Herald in 1995. “The real challenge is not to get wires into peoples’ houses or software in their hands, the real challenge is to educate them about why it would be useful to have Internet access and what they might do with it. That has been much tougher than actually getting the network going.”

In February 1996, 40 percent of Blacksburg was on the Internet and 62 percent had email. Susanne Huff told The Progress of Clearfield Pennsylvania that the Japanese government officials were so fascinated by the BEV project that the town was now a part of their standard tour of America. “They go to Disney World, California and here,” she said, adding that eight groups of Japanese officials had visited Blacksburg during the previous two months. The French newspaper Le Monde at the time described Blacksburg as “La capital du tout-communicante.” (The capital of the all-communicating.) German national radio described the network’s workings and speculated on what it all meant.

Blacksburg was soon joined by other “electronic neighborhoods” such as Glasgow, Kentucky (pop. 15,000 in 1996), where the first cable “triple play” was invented: The Glasgow Electric Plant Board, the local electric utility, wired the town with coaxial cable the provided cable TV, phone service, email, high bandwidth Internet access and a local network. And, of course, there was Palo Alto, California, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, which was the first town to have a web home page in 1994 and where half of the population of 56,000 already had Internet access at home or at work by 1996.

Still, it was Blacksburg, Virginia, that initially captured the world’s interest and imagination—at least before recent experiments in Municipal Wi-Fi or “Muni-Fi”.

At Jeff Pulver’s #140conf NYC 2011, there was convened the panel discussion entitled, “Blacksburg Electronic Village: 15 Years Later” moderated by Phil Buehler (@pwbuehler), head of strategy for OgilvyOne by day, visual artist by night; with Andrea Kavanaugh (@akavan), Virginia Tech, associate director, Center for Human-Computer Interaction, formerly research director, Blacksburg Electronic Village; and Reven T.C. Wurman (@RTCWurman), photographer, formerly producer of the illustrious TED Conferences.

“I first heard of Blacksburg in 1995,” said Phil Buehler. “I was at the TED Conference, and back then at the [Ogilvy] agency, everybody was talking about the ‘500-Channel Universe.’ That was going to be the Next Big Thing. The Internet was only in about five to eight percent of households. The buzz at TED started to be about the Internet. Just to set the stage, back in 1995 computers had Pentium processors, most of them ran DOS, I think Macs ran OS 6, Mosaic was the browser, Eudora was the Number One email package, and if you wanted to get on the Internet, the biggest way to do it was to buy a box called ‘Internet in a Box.’ It was really hard to get online.”

“I was talking to Donald Norman at TED,” said Buehler. “He’s a cognitive scientist and he’s written a bunch of books, one of them being Emotional Design. He asked me, “Have you been to Blacksburg?” I said, “No, I haven’t.” He said, “Oh.” Incredibly, over 60 percent of the residents are online in 1995. I then thought perhaps this is where the future was going to happen.”

“I went down there with a team of researchers to do a lot of ethnographies,” said Buehler, “and we interviewed residents, businesses, the town government, churches, church leaders, and listened to their stories and heard where the world was going. We’ll talk about that today….”

Reven T. C. Wurman had traveled with Buehler as a photographer to document what was happening at Blacksburg.

“Back then I was still producing TED,” said Wurman. “In 1995 we had the whole Internet experience and we brought in a T-1 line [1.5 megabits per second] and both Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics brought in machines which we web-surfed on. Even the TED audience was amazed. Nobody had been on browsers, nobody had been on the Internet. So we went down to Blacksburg that year, and we saw that they guy running the grocery store already had a website and was doing e-commerce. It was so unusual to see it without the high-powered TED audience being amazed and the very prosaic grocery store manager saying, ‘Well, of course!’”

Buehler then read off a lists of Blacksburg’s ‘firsts’: The first place where you could order groceries online. The first real estate agency to showcase houses and make a sale online. The first library to offer free Internet. The first school system to wire every school with Internet. The first residential broadband. “And perhaps most importantly, the world’s first cyberbar,” mused Buehler.

Andrea Kavanaugh then reminisced about how she had been director of research for the Blacksburg Electronic Village for eight years: “Basically, they wanted the university partnered with the town, and eventually with the local phone company, to make services that were available on the campus—which is essentially the Internet access—also available when you went home in the evening. It would be for students and faculty. It’s a university town and most people lived off-campus. So it was really just a way to continue that connection so one could work in the evening when you went home. That was the initial impetus and it took a lot of training on our part and people learning how to connect their computer at their home directly onto the Internet.”

“The email was the killer app,” interjected Wurman. “The web was a big deal. People liked it, people posted. But from Grandmas to students to store owners and all through the population, people just wanted to talk to each other. It was early social media in that sense.”

“What really struck me was the percent of senior citizens online,” said Buehler. “You’d think they’d be the last group of people to go online. I asked one, ‘Why did you get online?’ and he’s like, ‘Well, nobody’s putting on the bulletin board anymore where the Bingo of Mah-Jong game is. It’s online. And if you want to be part of the community, you’ve got to go online now to find out what’s happening’.”

Buehler then said, “So, we went back there last year [2010] to figure out what’s up next. The town looks remarkably the same… The websites look different, but the town is still a small town with a Main Street and the campus is pretty much the same. Andrea, what’s changed in 15 years?”

“The main thing that has changed is this sense of comfort with these types of interactions,” said Kavanaugh. “Everyone in the community expects information to be available online and they are comfortable searching for it, interacting with other people in their groups. If you’re going to be the leader of a local group you’d better be at complete ease with Twitter and Facebook and so on, and the town government itself has been using this stuff for so long that the person who started the Twitter and Facebook account—a young woman in the public relations office—started it without asking permission, because she knew it would be fine, since people had gotten emails previously. So, just put it on the Facebook page with a headline, and over the Twitter account. That’s in contrast to another 80 prominent, innovative cities and towns around the country that are using Facebook and Twitter, but they are fairly nervous about what they’re doing, from what I can read.”

Wurman noted that the town now had a “really, really big cell tower.” Also, a restaurant opened during their visit and “it had a huge Facebook and Twitter presence, and a big party announcement on foursquare and all that. There was never a question as to whether it was a good idea.”

As Buehler noted, “I guess the culture just seems to absorb the latest ways to connect with each other. I saw a lot of people using foursquare, collecting badges and mayorships, but I thought a woman—Tina Merritt—had the best use of foursquare. She basically checks foursquare in the morning to see which of her friends have checked in at the local pool and then she’ll tweet them and ask, ‘Hey, can I drop my kids off with you?’ [laughter] I mean, is there a killer app for you iPhone called Where Can I Dump My Kids Today? Things like foursquare can help us connect with each other rather than just get ‘specials’ and ‘deals.’ A real estate fellow asked me, ‘Is there a ‘there, there?’ Is there going to be some benefit to us, rather than just checking into foursquare and benefiting foursquare? I’d love to invite Dennis Crowley down to Blacksburg to see what kind of applications could be developed for a small town rather than more badges and more mayorships.”

Whether it’s Blacksburg or the world, technology is ultimately in the service of all of us being social, be it the dialup bulletin board systems of decades ago or the Twitter, Facebook and foursquare social networks today. Places like Blacksburg just happened to demonstrate that a few years before the rest of us caught on.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012

Graffiti, Pyramids and Police

Social network usage among big corporations and other organizations continues to skyrocket. And among the public, about 86 percent of people age 18 and over even in places like Indonesia and Russia have used social media. Although the electronic vehicle for its use is new and improved, the essential concept of social media goes back thousands of years, all the way (at very least) to the graffiti on the blocks of the pyramids of Egypt, when several stonemason gangs working on Pharaoh Seneferu’s pyramid at Meydum dabbed their names on the casing blocks.

Seneferu’s successor, Khufu (Cheops), built the Great Pyramid of Giza, and workmen calling themselves “The Craftsman Gang” left their graffiti on a limestone block, unearthed 4,500 years later by Yale University archaeologist Mark Lehner. These fellows were not slaves, but conscripts (perhaps they could avoid army service by working on the pyramid). These work gangs tended to have vivid and competitive names such as “Step Pyramid gang,” “Boat gang,” “Vigorous gang,” “Sceptre gang,” “Enduring gang,” “North gang” and “South gang”. These gangs were part of larger groups working under an overseer. (There appear to have been four principal overseers, one for each side of the pyramid.)

Lehner discovered that much of the workmen’s graffiti were “tags.” The work gangs would “tag” construction areas for which they responsible—their “turf.” Today, of course, the simplest and most simple and widespread kind of graffiti is that signatory mark known as a tag. “Tag” has also become a verb meaning “to sign.” Moreover, there are also “tags” on blogs and websites, allowing for informal, unstructured classification of content. People are also “tagged” in photos on Facebook, etc.

But graffiti is still with us, even in this electronic, Internet age. At the 140Conf held in New York City, July 16, 2011, Jeff Pulver assembled the graffiti artists Jessey Pacho (@ArtofPhade) and Kedre Browne (@BubzArt), along with Scott Mills (@GraffitiBMXCop), the Social Media Officer and Graffiti Art Coordinator of the Toronto Police / Crime Stoppers International, for the presentation: “Graffiti Art, Twitter and The Police.”

As Pulver said, “When I create these events, I try to go out of my way to find people who maybe you never heard of before, but are just changing the world and making the world a better place. I think it was in December [2010] when I was in a diner in Toronto and I had a chance to meet a constable, a police officer, from Toronto, and he brought with him a couple of graffiti artists. In fact, one of them, the one who made the logo here, refused to sign his name to it, even though I asked him to. Scott Mills here is just this incredible person. He does work with Crime Stoppers International, and not only is he a cop who tweets, but he has a big heart. He’s been working with people—particularly graffiti artists, using them to leverage and effect change in ways which I never thought was possible.”

“These people have been in New York for a few days and they’ve done some incredible work here already,” said Pulver. “Scott is an incredible human being and I just want to put a lens to him and have him come out and share a story and bring out his ‘crew.’”

And with that Scott Mills emerged from offstage, soon accompanied by graffiti artists Jessey Pacho (@ArtofPhade) and Kedre Browne (@BubzArt), and photographer Steven Walton, who Mills described as “an important part of the team.” One artist who couldn’t make it that day was Nicholas Maharaj (@twittnick) who had to be in school. “School’s first,” said Mills, “and that’s what this is all about.”

“I’ve been a police officer for 21 years, in two different major urban police services,” said Mills. “Peel Regional Police, which is Mississauga and Brampton that you see when you fly into Toronto, into the airport, and Toronto Police, where I’m currently the Social Media Officer. I work in the Media Office, corporate communications now, but I was assigned to work about five years ago with the Crime Stoppers program, which is a community program, run by the community for the community. The goal is to provide a service for anonymous tips to help stop, prevent and solve crimes worldwide. “

“One person, one officer, was assigned to educated 2.5 million youth in Toronto as to how to use that service,” said Mills. “I asked, ‘How can we do that better?’ We had three missing teens at the time, one from my old school. I said that we needed to use social media. And so we started a YouTube account. We’ve got close to 3,000 videos on YouTube now. If you go on YouTube or Google ‘Toronto Crime Stoppers,’ you’ll see all types of videos, and it’s not just appeals for information from wanted fugitives or appeals for crimes. It’s community building.”

“I realized that graffiti had a really great place in the hearts of many people, including—and especially—youth,” said Mills. “I also realized that BMX Bikes had a soft spot in their hearts for the kids, and it was good for them. So we started up separate YouTube accounts called TorontoBMX and Legal Graffiti Art. We started giving kids opportunities and posting them on the Internet. Kedre reached out to me on the YouTube Legal Graffiti Art account and said, ‘Scott, I know you’re a cop. You don’t know me. I don’t even live in Toronto—I live in Mississauga,’ which was the area of my old police force. He said, ‘I want to have an opportunity.’ That was four years ago. In 2008 Kedre was given the honor of Crime Stoppers International Student of the Year, from among 1,300 Crime Stoppers programs worldwide. [Applause] He was introduced in Des Moines, Iowa at the 28^th annual training conference for Crime Stoppers International as a graffiti artist working with the police. Absolutely phenomenal, because we could actually now get anonymous information and build trust between police and crime stoppers in the community to get the information to actually prevent a crime, to get the gun off of the street before somebody dies.”

“Our tips went from 300 a month to over 1,000 a month in two years, using social media,” said Mills. “But it’s not just social media. It’s relationships and technology. And Joanne Wallace, thanks so very much for introducing us to Jeff Pulver, who believed in us. We had a chance meeting in a bar in Toronto, because of an invite from Joanne… I said to Jeff, ‘I have these great guys working with me on the theme of Graffiti and BMX and many other positive activities. Can you help me?’ Jeff looked at me and he said, ‘Let me help you.’ Well help he has. He introduced us to Invisible People (@invisiblepeople) through these guys [three men, Mark Horvath and the two artists, appear on stage]. We decided that we believed so much in raising awareness about homelessness that we wanted to raise the hope for the homeless. We wanted to show the world not really what our ‘angle’ was, but we wanted to help something for the State of NOW. And so these boys came with me down here. We didn’t know where we were going to paint, and we ended up at Tuff City Tattoos in the Bronx, and they painted this mural which the boys are going to tell you about. It’s entitled Hope for Homeless, and I hope that everybody out there is going to put some hope out there for the homeless.”

Mills elaborates: “How this fits in with Crime Stoppers is that, when we were driving down here, I got a tweet from Mark Horvath saying, ‘You need to hook up with @singlesteph380. Well, she’s Stephanie Barnes, and she’s now my friend. We’re all hooked up on Facebook and twitter. She installed our ‘Leave a Tip Tab’ on Facebook from Crime Stoppers. While we here [in New York City] we helped Tuff City Tattoos install a Leave a Tip tab, and they’re out there tweeting us today. They’re feeling the love, all because of relationships and technology.”

“Back home, people are watching,” said Mills. “I got an email backstage saying that the mayor, who is probably one of the most conservative mayors Toronto has ever had—but he’s a good guy—wants to have some police-sanctioned murals in Toronto, and ‘can Scott Mills give us a list.’ That email just came to me backstage, and I sent a message to my boss Megan on twitter saying, ‘You just changed my presentation!’ Thanks for that information. Very timely. The State of NOW!”

“We want to do a social media campaign,” said Mills. “We want the boys to paint airplanes with stuff like this. We want to have a social media campaign for Crime Stoppers International and have people take photos of themselves in front of beautiful artwork like this, with messaging like Mark’s, and these guys’ messages, and the world’s message, and the community coming together, and then you install the mobile apps, you go to places where you connect with relationships and technology. You download Crime Stoppers and you submit a tip anonymously when you have that bad feeling that something might go down, and we prevent something like a terrorist attack.”

“We were at Ground Zero today here,” said Mills, now almost overcome with emotion. “We drove down here in a Canadian Heroes van, and we’re driving home in a Canadian Heroes van, thanks to Chris Eckland. We never want another terrorist attack like September 11^th. We can prevent this people! We can prevent it, with trust and relationships and technology. We can. That’s why we want to paint airplanes! Think about when you’re going to get on a plane when you’re leaving here, and you take a picture with one of Richard Branson’s Virgin planes, or anybody’s plane. And they actually take it, put it on twitpic or Facebook, they go to our page, they download the app, and when they get that spider sense that something’s wrong, then they get that tip in and the authorities can actually go and stop something like that from happening before it starts. How many people up for that? Anybody up for that? [Applause]”

Graffiti artist Jessey Pacho then mentioned how he met Scott Mills in 2007 through Kedre. He at first didn’t trust Mills because he was a police officer, but decided to take a chance. “And from 2007 to the present,” said Pacho, “we’ve just been working together. We’ve become friends, and it’s been amazing. It’s such a blessing to know him because we bring his message and his movement to a crowd that he can’t necessarily reach, being a police officer. And vice versa—I mean, I never thought back then that I’d be on this stage or anywhere talking to these professionals, talking to these people about what we’re doing. I’m just a graffiti artist, right? But it’s not being ‘just’ a graffiti artist. When you look past the negative stigma that graffiti has, you realize that it’s actually a pretty powerful tool to effect positive change and to help build communities. I remember a mural project I managed in Toronto, and last summer we painted a mural for the Highway of Heroes dedicated to the fallen troops. The residents of the building and the condos nearby didn’t necessarily care about those back alleys, but from the mural that I facilitated with that group, they were inspired to organize a community cleanup and they came down and cleaned up all of the alleyways and really made their area beautiful. And all of this community building was inspired by the painting of a mural that came from the graffiti that we do.”

Kedre Browne explained how they wanted to do a large scale mural in New York, what was in the mural and how Tuff City Tattoos gave them the opportunity to have some fun in the process.

The whole presentation was the result of a perfect amalgam of synchronicity, social media and earnest goodwill. Another little monument in the State of NOW.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2012

With Social Media, Everybody’s a Critic

Back in the days of my academic indecisiveness, one of my professors who comes mind, Fred Adelson was an authority on American art, who split his teaching duties between Boston University and Rowan University in New Jersey.

In any case, the most controversial art book of that time (1975, to be exact) was Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word. The legendary author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities had taken aim at the world of contemporary art, coming to the conclusion that “Art” (with a capital “A”) was defined by a clique of super-influential critics of the day—in particular Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg.

This controversy has become heightened in recent years, as social media can literally make every blogger an art critic, complete with his or her own “art theory.” It surfaced at the 140 Characters Conference in Tel Aviv, held on July 6, 2010, in a panel discussion entitled, “Twitter and the Arts,” moderated by Romi Itzhaki (@romi99).

Itzhaki started by saying, “…what I’m talking about is to combine art and technology in ways that includes audience participation as part of the experience.” noting that, in a visit to an exhibition at a museum or art gallery, “you experience something: Excitement, boredom—you’re moved, you’re sad. And no one has that but you. You have no control over the experience. You leave the room and you leave no mark. A visitor who visits the exhibition after you has no clue about your experience, your feelings, your thoughts. And they have no control over the exhibition or see interpretations of the work. And I’d like to change it. First of all, I’d like to enable audience comments and display them as part of the exhibition. Our consumer is an art critic. You could display more context, do you think, using augmented reality in order to allow the user to explain his experience of the exhibitions to create continuity in the space? And we haven’t thought about Twitter as a tool to gauge the audience preference and affect the exhibition selections. And in one sense the audience reactions should be an intimate part of the exhibition. And in this panel we will look into this concept, trying to evaluate it, good or bad.”

Panelist and publisher Deddy (David) Zucker, said, “In listening carefully to the speakers, the message of many of them was very clear. And that was that authority—“The Authority”—does not exist anymore. Or you could call it the diminishing of authority, of power. We can talk about the source of the news. Who or what is the source of news? What is truth? Everybody participates, and nobody knows what’s true and what’s not true, what’s false and what’s real. So why should we behave differently in the arts? I mean, who is the authority to decide for me what’s a good piece of art? Why should 10 critics or 20 or 30 teachers decide for me what’s a good piece art? I have friends who may understand a piece of art, much better than most critics.”

Romi Itzhaki responded with, “So what you’re saying is that not only should the audience participate, the audience should decide what is considered art?”

Zucker replied: “I would even say more. I can see us dispense the idea of an exhibition being of great artists. I mean, who said that we cannot be the greatest? Let us assume that your mother’s gallery presents us a proposition of hundreds of works, and the walls can take only 15. Who says you couldn’t create a better exhibition not with critics, but with the decisions of one thousand people who are twittering on the web?”

Fellow panelist Miki Kratzman (head of the Photography department of Bezalel Academy of Art) was more in favor of critics, saying “I think the problem with this idea is that, when you see a piece of art, if you don’t know anything about it, like when you see Picasso’s Guernica, you need some knowledge to put things in context. You combine the context, and the [existing] knowledge when you view a piece of art.”

David Zucker reacted with, “It’s not a journalist or a professor who knows about the background of Guernica, it’s definitely necessary to know it, however. But since we are all living in the liberal world, we all know that Guernica is part of the Civil War in Spain. We are part of those who admire and support the Republicans rather than the Fascists. But I can think of many people who could look at Guernica quite differently than we ‘liberals’ do. So why give them the power, or the ‘authority’ to interpret Guernica? I could think of people who supported Franco, or may be even more dedicated—people who are revisionists looking at the Republicans in Spain and thinking of their crimes during the Spanish Civil War. These people look at Guernica differently than we liberals do. And if you are a Catalan or a Basque, you look at Guernica differently than an authority who sits somewhere and tells us what he thinks the painting is all about. Guernica is about many stories. We can all make stories to be part of the [painting’s] background. There is no single background. There are backgrounds. It is in the eyes of the visitor to an exhibition what is Guernica and what it expresses. For some people it expresses a disaster, for others a hope. They are all very equal [in importance] and they all have the right to explain to me what Guernica is.”

The third panelist, performance artist Maya Elran, said she wanted to “take a middle line between what these two gentlemen are saying… Like it or not, there is a mass of people who create extra content and context for each work that has been created in the real world. The way I see it, in terms of those of us who have been engaged in performance art, I am interested in what happens in between the people who are creating the artifact and the audience itself. To me this is the arena in which all of this is happening. Performance art is actually based on assembling of three things: First of all, the human body is your material, and the two other elements are that it is time-based and space-based. It’s almost as if it’s only the experience that the audience can take back. There is no way to create a ‘souvenir’ out of this art. We have to be there to experience it in real-time. But many people within the Internet community may have a clue or think they have a clue about such art. Even so, one can meet a varied audience, people I know who know the history of each and every work. “

The questions posed by Tom Wolfe decades ago still reverberate in places like 140conf Tel Aviv 2010. What do you think? Are you one of the “I know art when I see it” crowd?

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2012

2012, Here We Come!

End-of-year writings among pundits generally fall into two categories: the “year-end-summary-and-a-look-ahead to the coming year” and that time-honored favorite, “New Year’s resolutions.” I suppose this one falls into both.

A Look Behind and a Look Ahead

First of all, Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conferences have become a galvanizing force in Cyberspace, with people learning how they too can use social media for social good. As for the future, Jeff has let the cat out of the proverbial bag in a recent email to the 140conf followers: In early 2012 we’ll be seeing a rebranding of 140Conf into The State of NOW, along with a new online community, also called The State of NOW, with many of the features of Facebook, CompuServe, etc. that draws upon the existing 140conf videos (with transcriptions) and provides a place for people to set up both public and private discussion groups and forums, as well as personal blogs and “walls” like Facebook.

This new website integrated with content contributed by the community will be curated by Jeff Pulver and Yours Truly. (I’ve retained my traditional job description as Editor-in-Chief.) Setting up the whole shebang has taken a bit longer than we expected, but we think you will be intrigued with the result and will participate in our great social venture.

In the meantime, catch the new YouTube channel for our community, 140Talks (http://140talks.com) where many #140conf videos may be enjoyed. One the video front, as Jeff has announced, the 2012 State of NOW in New York City (to be held on June 19/20 at the 92nd Street Y) will sport our “Late Night Talk Show” set, complete with a Steve Allen/Jack Paar/Johnny Carson desk and couch along with a live band assembled by our musical director, Matthew Ebel (@matthewebel). Jeff realized that, when used in conjunction with the website, The State of NOW is really a sort of interactive TV show, and that the audience will be able to connect with one or more Characters at the conference, leading to who knows what kind of synergies.

As Jeff also mentioned, another goal is to boost our online viewing audience at the June 2012 conference from 100,000 people to 250,000 or more people, via “State of NOW” viewing parties to be held at various places around the world. (You’ll be hearing more about this in early 2012.)

New Year’s Resolutions for Us All

No, this section isn’t about dieting, quitting smoking, exercise, getting out of debt or spending more time with the family, admirable goals thought they may be. Actually, this is more about admonishing us all to get organized (hopefully via our upcoming The State of NOW website) and helping others, particularly those on the other side of “the Digital Divide” who haven’t a clue how to use social media to further their efforts to help society. (Not surprising, since even major corporations are clueless about exploiting the power of social media to further their marketing and organizational initiatives—about 7 out of 10 marketers say they don’t know what the social media conversations are surrounding their brand, and there’s a popular “Social Media for the Clueless” group on LinkedIn.)

Decades ago, when director/actor Orson Welles was making one of his many appearances on the old Merv Griffin show, Merv remarked “thanks to television and the media, all of the stories out there eventually come to the public’s attention,” to which Welles replied, “Oh no, no. There are many interesting stories of people out there that never come to light.”

One might think the situation is better today, thanks to the Internet and social media. For example, there’s Morgan Burnard, a 16-year-old from California, who traveled to Haiti for her birthday, saw the post-disaster situation there, and created non-profit organization, the social media-powered Sweet Sixteen Foundation that gives birthdays to hundreds of Haitian orphans. A young, formerly unknown person giving many little moments of joy to many young people like herself.

The barrier to entry on the world’s stage has been eliminated, or so it seems. But the “Digital Divide” among those who are plugged into the Internet and those who aren’t, does exist. We usually think of it as a matter of economics, of that poor guy in the ghetto who runs his own soup kitchen but is unable to tell anybody about it, but in fact the Digital Divide is as much one of age and expertise (or lack thereof), as the size of one’s bank account. The sad fact is that not everyone is not technologically-savvy or has an affinity to computer and communications hardware and software, regardless of their economic situation.

Take Joe Nicholas, aka “Joe the Bloodhound” who spent over 25 years as a K9 cop in New Jersey, using his dogs to find missing people and fugitives. He solved over 253 out of 254 cases, and although allegedly retired, he continues to help those people who come to him in search of missing relatives. Someone had the bright idea of helping Joe by putting him on TV (Hey, if it works for the Ghost Hunters, it’ll work for anybody.) A TV pilot was produced by Nick Davis, whose grandfather, interestingly enough, was Herman J. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote Citizen Kane with Orson Welles (see the trailer for Joe the Bloodhound at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1LpjtbRp3s) but the stumbling block has been getting the series on the air. A petition page is squirreled away at http://www.change.org/petitions/bio-channel-please-order-a-series-of-the-bio-channel-pilot-joe-the-bloodhound, but the stated goal of raising 50,000 signatures (to interest the A&E network) seems staggering without the harnessing the power of social media, and Joe is currently not into all that. He knows dogs and finding missing people, not twittering.

So in the coming year, as we set up our groups and forums of like-minded (and hopefully publically-spirited) individuals, let us try to seek out and help those who could benefit from social media, but who remain mystified by boxes that have blinking lights and glowing screens, let alone synergistically engaging millions of cybercitizens over multiple channels. Every uplifting story deserves to be heard; every do-gooder should be brought onto the world’s stage via cyberspace. Everyone should be involved in the marketplace of ideas and the vast world of electronic social interaction. Let’s try to help those who don’t know how to use the tools with the same proficiency as we do.

Now that’s a real New Year’s Resolution!

Happy New Year!

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Friday, December 30th, 2011

Jeff Jarvis, The Article and ‘Gutenberg’s Parenthesis’

I first heard of journalist, educator and social thinker Jeff Jarvis (@JeffJarvis) in my youth when he was writing for TV Guide and People magazine. In 2000, when Folio magazine listed the 10 hottest startup magazines of the 1990s, one of them was mine, Computer Telephony, and another was Jarvis’ far more interesting Entertainment Weekly. Jarvis has also served as Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News, and was a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner.

Jarvis is one of those fellows who interacts with so many people that he doesn’t really need social media, as he resembles a live communications packet, picking up, digesting, transforming and spewing forth new ideas as he bounces from one group of media mavens to another.

He also always seems to be in the right place at the right time. Take 9/11 for example. As for Yours Truly, I heard about the September 11th attacks at about 10 a.m. that morning. I wish I could say I was right on the scene, camera and notepad ready, or at least engaged in something exotic like sitting at the bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, sipping a Mai Tai and watching the events unfold on CNN via a satellite phone Internet connection. Alas, I was actually ensconced at my home in Harrison, New Jersey, working on the manuscript of my fourth book, a technical tome entitled Voice over DSL. I had toyed with the idea of journeying to the World Trade Center aboard the PATH train that day, as I had been doing some consulting for the world’s first all-Flash website, the now defunct Town24.com, the headquarters of which was only a block away. I searched my mind for an excuse to go there so I could partake of chef Michael Lomonaco’s comforting American cuisine at my favorite restaurant atop the World Trade Center, Wild Blue. (Its famous sibling restaurant-in-the-sky, Windows on the World, was one floor up.) But I was lost in thought that morning, typing away, and world events passed me by.

Jeff Jarvis, on the other hand, had just arrived on the last train from New Jersey as the first airliner crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. Moreover, instead of fleeing the scene, he charged headlong into the maelstrom and managed to capture the first interviews with survivors and first responders to the disaster. He later credited the immediacy of reporting the event with spurring his later career as the author of such blogs as BuzzMachine.com.

Jeff Pulver made a point of impressing on the audience how lucky they were to be experiencing Jeff Jarvis first hand at the 140 Characters Conference in New York, held on June 16, 2011. Pulver said, “I’d like to introduce a wonderful friend, Jeff Jarvis. If I said all of the wonderful things about him, I’d eat up his ten minutes. Let me just say that this guy is magic, and he sees the world as it is and where it goes and I have the greatest deal of respect for this man. And if you can, just give a warm welcome to Jeff Jarvis, please. Give it up!”

“Thank you,” began Jarvis. “Today, I’m not a journalist, I just play one onstage. So pardon me while I get in character.”

In Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, there’s a pause and then he screams out, “Damn you! Now you’ve gone and friggin’ done it! You started ruining the business model of newspapers with that Craigslist thing of yours, then you allowed anybody to publish from anywhere in these blogs you write! And then you distracted everybody with that Facebook thing. But now, now you’ve gone too flippin’ far! You’ve attacked, all you tweeties, you’ve attacked the sanctity of The Article.”

Jarvis then turns, makes an internal adjustment and calmly says, “I’m back.” There are some chuckles and applause from the audience.

“So when Brian Stelter, the amazing star of Page One, the movie [Page One: Inside The New York Times] and young reporter of The New York Times, went to cover the Joplin [Missouri] tornado, he did amazing things, as he always does, tweeting from there,” says Jarvis. “That’s all he could do was tweet. He had no paper. He had no pencil. He forgot them. He had his phone. There was no connectivity—all he could do was SMS. He begged his desk back at the Times to take his tweets and turn them into a story, so he could keep on working and reporting. Andy Carvin (@acarvin)—who you’re hearing from here at 140conf—the amazing Andy Carvin, has been doing phenomenal work covering the Arab Spring, of course. And what strikes me about what Andy has proven, in twitter and the Arab Spring, is that news is now beginning to mimic the architecture of the Internet; end-to-end. Right?”

“The witnesses are telling the world,” says Jarvis, “and they don’t need us, but Andy still looks down on this and adds value. He picks out the good stuff, he finds the good people. He vets. He questions. He answers. He debunks rumors. He adds incredible value. So, based on these things and a few other things, I had the temerity to question whether The Article, the story, was still the atomic unit of news, that there weren’t all kinds of new forms and means of news.”

“Oh man, you would of thought that I had just put your Mom in prison and poisoned her apple pie,” said Jarmus. “The anger that came up online—because I dared to question ‘The Article’—and [understand that] I wasn’t trying to kill The Article. People said, ‘He’s killing The Article. You are replacing The Article with Twitter.’ No I was not doing that. I was questioning whether it was the only way to do news anymore. We always had to do that. If news is truly a process, as Andy shows, Andy’s thing never ends in a product; he just keeps adding value all day long. In the midst of the Arab Spring he did 1300 tweets in 20 hours. The process was going by. Now, people found out news from that and they created articles of that, but it didn’t always have to be an article. News can take many forms. So I dared to say that and one person online said that I was trying to replace the traditional elements of journalism. Frédéric Filloux said last week that I was partaking in ‘the collective glorification of approximate journalism.’ Bull.”

“What I was [actually] saying was that The Article is a luxury,” says Jarvis. “Now, they thought that meant that it was not needed. No. The Article is a precious thing. It takes a lot of money and time and effort to make an article. And how many of the articles you read in newspapers, how many of the stories God knows you see on TV, really add value? They repeat what you already know. They give you background again and again and again and again, when a link could do a better job of that. The Article is a byproduct of the process of news. Pardon me—“

…And Jarvis once again metamorphosed into his loud, almost manic persona: “They call it a narrative, because it has a narrator! A story has a storyteller! It’s my job as the storyteller to tell you the story. Got it? That means I decide what the story is. I decide what goes in it. I decide what doesn’t go in it. I decide what’s the beginning and the end, because the story has to have a beginning and an end so it fits in the hole I put it in. That’s part of my main skill. That’s what I do for a living! And when you question the form of the story, you’re trying to put me out of a job! FU!”

Jarvis breathes deeply, sighs a bit and returns to his more reflective state: “There’s something else going on here. That’s part of it. This fear of what happens with a story. But I think there’s something more. I’m very proud of myself because I haven’t yet plugged my last book, What Would Google Do? still put in hardback, and coming out in paperback in September [laughter]. But I will mention that I have a new book called Public Parts: How Sharing In the Digital Age Improves How We Work and Live, coming out by Simon & Schuster, September 27^th [2011] at a bookstore online and audio near you.”

“But in the process of doing that book, I did a lot of research on the notion of making publics,” says Jarvis. “It’s really about the tools that we talk about: Twitter, Facebook, the Web, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, all of our beloved, dear tools that we have as the ‘net, that we, my friends, must protect. And so I’m looking at those tools and I did research back to Gutenberg, believing that the Press really gives us a lot of lessons about what’s going to happen now with our world.”

“One thing I found out was that, when the book came out, it scared people to death,” says Jarvis. “Just like the Internet does today. It scared them because it changed how they see the world. There are some great researchers in Denmark—we’re talking about the Gutenberg parenthesis [which is the theory of Prof. L. O. Sauerberg] that knowledge and information were passed around orally or copied, remixed, changed as it went. It was a process. The book [then] came out and knowledge was pressed on the paper. Many copies, under your name, owned and distributed widely. That scared authors at first. But it also had a huge impact on the public, because it changed their cognition of the world. It changed how they viewed the world. The same way as the discovery of a New World did. Everybody had a map. They knew what the world was, and then suddenly there’s this new world there? That’s what the Internet is to our world today. The net is this ‘Gutenberg press’ changing the world, allowing people to create new things.”

“So, in the Gutenberg Parenthesis, these researchers from the University of Southern Denmark argue, the world went through a big migraine headache going from this oral process world and into this fixed serial world,” says Jarvis. “And that’s how we see the world. And we’re coming out on the other end of ‘the Parenthesis’ now, where it doesn’t necessarily go back, but it does get us back to an idea of—we’re oral, we talk a lot—it’s about conversation—it’s a process. We all pass around everything. It gets remixed along the way. There’s no beginning and there’s no end. No alpha and no omega. And so when I question the ‘holiness’ of The Article, I found out I was questioning the key way that people look at the world, and they get very emotional about it. They get very angry about it.”

“But I think it’s quite vital to keep doing the ‘holy work’ that you’re doing, tearing that world apart, not because it was bad, not because articles will ever go away. They won’t. They add value. They are a luxury. I don’t want to get rid of them, I want to raise them up, so they actually friggin’ tell us something. I want them to include new information, include new things. I want them to be the process of truly adding value to a process of news. So I look at that and I say, ‘What you’re doing with twitter, what we do with all of these tools, we need to keep doing and change and challenge the process.’ So following me [on stage] is going to be a friend of mine named John Paton, who is a wonderful, wonderful man, who now runs—he’ll tell you about it—Journal Register, a newspaper company. He put digital first and print last in this company. The Guardian today announced, following him, that they are now ‘digital first’. What that really means is that digital becomes the driver of where we go. The problem we have, the thing that we cannot keep on doing, is to define the New World in terms of the old.”

“One more point,” says Jarvis. “When the Gutenberg press started rolling sometime between 1440 and 1450, it took, according to Elizabeth Eisenstein, the key scholar on his work, 50 years before the book took on its own form. The book still mimicked scribes’ thoughts. It was still called ‘automatic handwriting’. People didn’t create new books until 50 years [later]. It didn’t affect society for 100 years, clearly. By that math, we are now at the year 1467. We cannot imagine what the future holds, what the Internet is, what these new forms are. It is all so new; it is too new to clamp it down. It is too new to regulate it. It is too new to define it, even. And it is too new to stop experimenting.”

“So I’m not questioning [idea of] The Article,” says Jarvis. “I’m not trying to get you [to question it] either. But I do want us all to question our assumptions.”

Questioning ideas and in particular, assumptions, lies at the heart of the kind of critical thinking prescribed by philosophers going back as far as Socrates. Great thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through the Enlightenment and contemporary academia would encourage each of us to approach practical as well as abstract problems from various perspectives, and then to ponder and choose from among many possibilities, hammering and combining them into solutions. Social media, as it turns out, is tailor-made to tackle such tasks, so long as there are people like Jeff Jarvis reminding us that our technological tools are capable of much more than we short-sighted mortals can possibly imagine.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

Activism, Social Media and Some Thoughts on the Holiday Season

The word “holiday” is derived from the Old English word hāligdæg, which originally referred to special religious days. Thus, “holiday” comes from “Holy Day,” though many U.S. holidays, (e.g. The Fourth of July) are now basically secular in nature.

As every social commentator and run-of-the-mill pundit worth his salt knows, the easiest way to get noticed by readers—even though it also involves infuriating or losing about half of them—is to espouse opinions (and not necessarily extreme ones either) on religion or politics.

In the case of religion, it’s quite easy to rankle the masses—history’s list of any one group of otherwise sane and congenial human folk massacring another over religious beliefs would fill volumes. (As for everything that happened in the even longer dark antiquity of pre-history, well, it gives Yours Truly the shivers.) Atheists and agnostics too are contestants in the never-ending battle royal, be they totalitarian dictators oppressing millions of hapless souls with holocausts and other assorted exterminations and slaughters, or just those simple nameless and unmemorable unbelievers who find themselves victims of theocratic excess. (I recall reading that the headquarters of the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s atheist activist organization, American Atheists, had its walls on occasion peppered with a few rifle shots by anonymous representatives of The God of Love.)

As the gut-spilling American poet, novelist and short story writer, Charles Bukowski, wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

As for politics, America has become perfectly polarized politically, a perpetual 50/50 stalemate of liberals and conservatives in government, the source of much argument and general ill-will among an increasingly disenfranchised American public. The kind of extreme political views—both conservative and liberal—we observe these days in government are not just the hallmarks of blindly partisan idealogues, but are symptomatic of some honest-to-goodness, clinical mental illness. Such a cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs political environment is actually not new in America, nor is violence resulting from it, as tales from the first half of the 19^th century reveal.

For example, during a heated Congressional debate over the Compromise of 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. “Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” Benton roared at the senators who stood between them, but someone immediately disarmed Foote and order was restored in the Senate Chamber. (The Compromise was eventually completed and the Union remained intact for another ten years.)

Just a few years later, however, in 1856, Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina became angry when Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts took to the Senate floor and delivered an anti-slavery speech in which he denigrated Brooks’ cousin, Senator Andrew Pickens Butler (a supporter of slavery) by comparing him to a pimp or john, then uttered the words, “The senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error… He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.” Two days later, Brooks, that chivalrous Great Man of the South that he was, upheld his cousin’s honor by beating Sumner with a gutta-percha cane until he was unconscious. (Sumner did not take his seat in Congress again for three years.) Although Brooks was heralded as a great man through the South, the incident was used by Northerners to depict the Southerners as violent fanatics; this rather uncivil act, along with other political squabbles, brought America ever-closer to the Civil War.

On the shelves of the Harvard University Library, one can find the following passage on page 186 of United States Magazine, Volume III (July to December, 1856): “Judge Kellogg, a venerable citizen of Michigan, arrived in Washington last week. It was his first visit to the Federal Capital and when the cars stopped he was a little uncertain where he was; but as he noticed that all the passengers were leaving the cars, he followed suit. As he entered the main hall of the depot he saw a man engaged in caning another ferociously all over the room. ‘When I saw that,’ says the Judge, ‘I knew I was in Washington immediately.’”

Prior to the 1840s, the public rarely heard of such incidents, since newspaper reporters, the bloggers of their day, often became embroiled in the chaos themselves. Many reporters were beaten by congressmen; one nearly had his finger bitten off (a type of behavior normally associated with an attacking chimpanzee). Thus, the public rarely knew of the more interesting events and “almost murderous feeling” in Congress that, as one onlooker wrote to the speaker of the House shortly after Sumner’s caning, “could lead to demonstrations upon the floor, which in the present state of excitement, would almost certainly lead to a general melee and perhaps a dozen deaths in the twinkling of an eye.”

What finally brought some civility to Congress was the invention of the telegraph. Acts of violence or even mere verbal gaffes could be instantly relayed across the country to newspapers hungry for interesting, page-filling material. Senator John Parker Hale of New Hampshire (the first senator to make a stand against slavery) admonished his colleagues within minutes of the Foote-Benton clash, saying that reports were “already traveling with lightning speed over the telegraph wires to the remotest borders of the Republic… It is not impossible that even now it may have been rumored in the city of St. Louis that several senators are dead and weltering in their blood on the floor of the Senate.”

Today of course, we have the Internet and social media that have magnified the production and dispersal of information, opinions and rumors. The worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement—which actually began in Spain—is in constant communication, rousing support and keeping its members informed of the more severe actions by authorities. Ironically, The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) designated November 4, 2011 as “Social Media Day” when politicians and social media experts met to speculate how Wall Street (and American business in general) could more effectively leverage social media in their quest for profit.

Politicians, too, have attempted to add social media to their respective PR/mind control portfolios. President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign pioneered the use of social media in politics (particularly targeting specific audiences with fund-raising and get-out-the-vote messages), though Howard Dean did use simple email and other Internet-enabled software tools as early as 2004 to raise money and organize meetings. National Football League Players successfully used social media in their billion dollar battle against the owners.

Down at the level of us little folk, the Internet and social media, particularly such efforts such as Jeff Pulver’s 140 Character Conferences and The State of Now, prove that like-minded individuals and groups can find each other and be mutually inspired to bring about changes for society’s benefit in a grass-roots, bottom-up manner. Whether it’s using twitter to build classrooms in Tanzania or help fund works of art in America, modern communications enables everyone to “state their case” and attempt to galvanize enough support to effect real changes in society.

“The bottom has the real power to communicate in a way that these organizations have never had to deal with,” Democratic consultant Joe Trippi told POLITICO, in reference to American businesses, at the NYSE’s Social Media Day. “They just don’t structurally get that they don’t have the power they used to have and that’s why you see the Tea party and Occupy Wall Street and other bottom-up kind of movements being able to connect a lot more and challenge your messaging.”

Public relations folk like to believe that all communication is persuasion. The greater the ability to communicate, the greater ability to persuade others and effect change. A single person with an idea is powerless unless he or she can communicate it to others. Prior to Gutenberg, “media” was simply word-of-mouth or writing books on parchment or vellum, one copy at a time. Guttenberg’s press of 1450 enabled the world’s first “media battle” to occur, which was not political, but religious: Printers in over 200 European cities cranked out both Reformation works by Protestants and anti-Reformation works by Roman Catholics.

It was soon realized that some authors were better masters of the tools of narrative and rhetoric than others, and that some techniques were better at moving public opinion.

After reading a February 1843 parliamentary report on the Industrial Revolution’s effects upon poor children, Charles Dickens planned in May 1843 to publish a political pamphlet tentatively titled, “An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.” Dickens soon changed his mind, realizing that his talents as a novelist better enabled him to convey his social concerns about poverty and injustice via a sincere, masterfully written Christmas narrative rather than a mere polemical pamphlet.

In a letter to Dr. Southwood Smith, one of 84 commissioners responsible for the original report, Dickens revealed his new plan of attack: “You will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force—I could exert by following out my first idea.”

And indeed that turned out to be the case. It may seem astonishing today, but by the mid-19^th century, the celebration of Christmas had somewhat fallen into decline. The holiday had lapsed into a series of minor, almost bureaucratic community and church-centered observations. A wave of nostalgia led to efforts to revive it with the popularization of the Christmas tree and the Christmas card. But it was Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, published on December 19, 1843, that established the sentimental yet jolly festival of generosity that Western culture knows today. (It also led the name of “Scrooge” and the exclamation “Bah! Humbug!” to enter the English language.) Even more ironic in retrospect is that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, itself a somewhat supernatural but basically secular tale spun by a novelist, did more to promote the essential concepts of Christian charity than has any scholarly religious treatise or heart-felt sermon in centuries.

Dickens could afford to pay for the publication of A Christmas Carol himself. The press is free, as Walter Lippmann allegedly said, to those who can afford one. The same could be said about other forms of mass media: Radio, television, movies, etc., throughout the 20^th century.

It is only today, with the rise of inexpensive broadband connections to the Internet and cheap data storage, that individuals can come together in the tsunami that is social media. It powered the Arab Spring, which has turned every Egyptian, Bahraini, Libyan, Tunisian and Syrian citizen into a journalist—a great eye on violent injustice throughout the Middle East. It spurred those San Francisco residents who took to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to protest the killing of a BART passenger shot by a police officer—cell phone service was blocked at four BART stations in an effort to stymie protestors, which in turn led to vigilante hacks from the group Anonymous, that posted the names and addresses of BART police officers online.

But for all the miraculous feats of social media, for all its egalitarian-enhancing capabilities, it is but a vehicle for ideas and symbols that originate with people. For too long the holiday’s colors, green (symbolic of evergreen and holly, which remain green and full of life when winter has killed other living things) and red (symbolic of the apple of Adam’s Fall) have been overshadowed by the green of ill-gotten Wall Street gains and the red of the blood of war and terrorism.

And so we come back again to the individual, newly-empowered with the technological might of social media. The idea, the will to act, starts with an individual and is directed with other individuals in mind.

To end with another quote from Charles Bukowski: “You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”

Happy Holidays to you all…

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2011

Do We Need ‘Teacherpreneurs’?

Toward the end of President Harry Truman’s life, someone asked him, if he had to redo his presidency all over again, would he emphasize one thing in his policies above all others?

“Yes,” replied Truman, “education.”

An ironic statement, given that America’s educators have had a long-running love affair with The Drama of Defeat.

Good-natured attempts on the part of education theorists and the few remaining conscientious teachers, principals, and school staff to revolutionize education have failed more often than not. Or, as Thomas Edison would have said, “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work.” Failure and mediocrity haven’t stopped more and more money and manpower from being thrown at ways to “fix” the mile-long laundry list of things wrong with the education system in America. Back in the 1990s some children of an acquaintance of mine pointed their classrooms out to me, which both happened to be on the second floor of their elementary school in New Jersey.

“Why do you have to walk all the way up there?” I asked.

“Because the whole first floor is where the administrators are,” the oldest one said.

No doubt a regular Brains Trust.

In U.S. higher education alone, we have a lack of standardized testing and rankings (with a watering down of the standards that exist), low retention rates, low transfer rates from two-to-four-year institutions (made all the more laughable by the fact that many of our community colleges aren’t even considered ‘higher education’ by European standards), an increasing lack of racial and economic diversity, a lack of accountability concerning downward trends, professors engaged in too much research, the undervaluation of teaching in an increasingly uninquisitive, anti-intellectual society, and a general lack of intelligent leadership, which only lead us to the present mess.

In a land where self-esteem and “personal best” is valued over achievement, and half-hearted effort takes precedent over actual success, civilization itself slowly begins to unravel from Kindergarten on up.

As education author Laurie Rogers has written: “Public-school students struggle to do basic mathematical, scientific or literary activities that are reasonable for their age. Many elementary-school students are not progressing from addition to multiplication; some never progress from adding on their fingers. Many middle-school students can’t consistently multiply in vertical formats, do long division, or convert fractions into decimals. Many can’t read at grade level. Subjects other than literacy and mathematics—such as civics, history, economics, forensics, second languages, social studies, art, music, gym, geography, ethics and communication—are given short shrift or have been eliminated completely.”

There are, however, a few independent thinkers out there who are attempting to swap out mindless bureaucracy with innovative, disruptive techniques to refresh and invigorate the American Educational Experience.

In an earlier blog, I mentioned Mike Karnjanaprakorn (@mikekarnj) the co-founder of Skillshare, who reminisced about one of his favorite teachers, Mark Fenske, during his talk, “Let’s Start a Learning Revolution” at Jeff Pulver’s #140edu conference held on August 3, 2011 in New York City.

“Well today, I’m really excited to be here, so thank you guys for having us,” he began. “Today I’m going to talk about how we can start a learning revolution in our country. “

“Originally I was going to give a talk on the usual things we used to talk about, such as why college is overrated and the problems of higher education, but today I want to focus on the solutions rather than the problems of education.”

“I’d like to talk about one of my favorite teachers. Mark Fenske was a professor I had in grad school,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “He taught a class in creative thinking. Every Wednesday we had to get in front of an auditorium, a whole room like this, and every week he would give us a project. We had to come in and present our ideas. Mark Fenske worked at an [advertising] company called Weiden & Kennedy with a guy named Dan Weiden and he was part of the team that created [the] Nike [campaign] and the tag line, ‘Just do it.’ He also produced the music videos for Van Halen. He was a well-known creative director. Every week he would start off by telling us that our ideas were really horrible. But he would always say that ‘hard work is a waste of time if your idea sucks.’ Throughout that experience, I really learned how to get a thick skin. But more importantly, I really learned the value of solving the right problem.”

“Secondly I’d like to talk about one of my favorite entrepreneurs, which is Caterina Fake; she is one of the co-founders of Flickr, she worked with Chris Dixon at Hunch and she’s starting her new company now,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “One of my favorite quotes from her is along the same lines [as Mark Fenske], which is, ‘Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.’ It’s going along with the same sentiment, which is, if you’re not working on the right problem, it is a humongous waste of time.”

“The reason I bring up both of these people—one was a teacher I had, one was an entrepreneur I admire—is that, a couple of weeks ago, I read an article in Good magazine, talking about teacherpreneurs, which I thought was a really fascinating word,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “It’s basically people who work in the classroom, work within the education system, that would become future leaders. And so I said, that sounds kind of obvious, that makes a lot of sense. But the line that really stuck out to me was, as obvious as that sounds, that the ones who are teaching in the classroom should be leading the movement on education reform. That’s actually not happening today, and I thought that was really weird. How could we talk about education when the people in the classroom aren’t changing at all?”

“So I’d like to share two stories,” he said. “One, I’d like to share the journey I had as an entrepreneur and my experience as a student and how that shaped into building what we built, which was Skillshare.”

“Basically, what happens when an entrepreneur thinks about education? I’m not a teacher, so this is coming from my own personal experience and the problem that I saw. I went to the University of Virginia for [my] undergraduate [degree] and a lot of the talks you read in Good magazine and the Huffington Post talk about the value of a college education,” said Karnjanaprakorn.

“I enjoyed college and had a great time, but I felt that the problem college is set up today wasn’t really applicable to what I wanted to learn,” he said. “When I went to grad school, which was the VCU Brandcenter, it was the polar opposite, because I always felt I was a very creative individual and I never got an opportunity to really hone those skills. So here I really learned how to think creatively, work in groups, disrupt innovation, challenge the status quo, present publically, have Mark Fensky tell us how horrible our ideas were. When I graduated from VCU [Virginia Commonwealth University] it was really fascinating for me because I compare that to my undergraduate degree and look to my graduate degree and I was like wow, they could be farther apart from each other. “

“So that’s when I started thinking about education and how I could really impact and change it. Then, I’m pretty sure a lot of you have seen the show, The Wire. The Wire was an HBO show, there were about five seasons, and each season had a different topic, and I think one of the seasons was about education, and it really talked about how dysfunctional it was and how it was very interlinked to crime and every other problem they faced in society. That’s when I really started thinking of education, and how I could change it. Is there a way to change education, K through 12?”

“Then, I moved to New Orleans, post Katrina, and my roommate at the time was the principal of a charter school,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “They tried to turn an 80 percent high school dropout rate into a 90 percent college graduation rate. Just volunteering there and hearing all of the stories, I learned very quickly a) what they’re doing is very remarkable, but b) that was definitely not something I wanted to do. “

“That’s when I watched a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson about starting a learning revolution. At the end of the talk he said, ‘If you can build stuff on the Internet, you should really think about disrupting education, democratizing learning. That kind of really planted the seeds. I started really thinking about how I could take my skillset of building stuff on the Internet and really, really democratize learning. So I started thinking about that for a really long time. That’s when I played in the World Series of Poker. So last year I played in the World Series of Poker, which is one of the biggest poker tournaments in the world, and I ended up donating 100 percent of my winnings to charity. In exchange, I encourage other poker players to donate a percentage as well, and I got coached by some of the top poker players, so Annie Duke, who you see on the screen, and Phil Gordon and Phil Ivey and some of the world’s best poker players coached me for a span of three to six months.”

“So when I got back to New York, all of my friends obviously wanted me to teach them everything that I learned,” said Karnjanaprakorn, “so the first thing I did was I went on my computer I created an event to teach my friends poker. As I was about to send that [invitation] out I just had that moment, where, like wow, I can’t believe this doesn’t exist. I can believe that I can’t teach people in my own community skills that I’ve learned. For us, I sent that link and one line to Malcolm, who is my co-founder now. And I asked, ‘Why not turn New York into a huge campus?’ Why not turn every address and every venue into a possible classroom and every single inhabitant into a student and teacher? That’s when we came up with the idea of Skillshare.”

“So from my experiences going from UVA to VCU to New Orleans to playing the World Series of Poker, I’ve always thought about education, and I’ve had this lens of how we can disrupt it through being a student. So we created this company called Skillshare, which is a marketplace for offline classes that we launched in New York a couple of weeks ago.”

“But what’s fascinating is that this is starting to really take off in New York, and the vision we originally had is starting to work and we’re expanding and people are teaching each other everything from baking bread to raising money for your startup to anything you can think of,” said Karnjanaprakorn.

“The reason I tell that story is because I really approach the problem from being a student, and I think what could be really, really extraordinary is when we start thinking from the lens of a teacher,” he said. “So what happens when teachers think like entrepreneurs? And really quickly I’ll show three great examples:”

“The first is Charles Best from DonorsChoose.org. He was a teacher who created a whole organization around getting people to donate money, for supplies for students and classrooms. That was a problem that he faced as a teacher and there are many teachers out here and watching on line. Rather than trying to go through and navigate the traditional educational system he just decided to use the Internet to change that. “

“The second, who I’m sure a lot of you have heard of is Salman Kahn,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “He’s not a traditional teacher, but he was a Teach for America teacher who created the Kahn Academy [as a result of] tutoring his cousin all of the subjects she was learning. One little flip that he did that I thought was really awesome was that, traditionally, you go to class and you hear a lecture. What they do is that you watch a lecture on your computer, these videos he puts up, and you go to class to work on the problem. So basically he puts homework in the classroom. And I thought that little tweak is really, really remarkable.”

“The third is Jen Schnidman [Medbery], and she started a company called Kickboard out of New Orleans,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “Much like Charles, she was also a Teach for America teacher, and she is also an engineer by trade. What she noticed is that every student in her classroom was different. For her, she wanted to create some type of metric to track the performance of her students and also understand that everyone learns differently, and what you could do to get your students to learn. So she created a whole company that revolved on tracking students. It was launched in New Orleans, and it’s different very well in different charter schools.”

“The reason I bring up these three examples is because I really believe that when we start having teachers thinking like entrepreneurs, we can really, really disrupt education and make it a better place.”

“For me, when I read that article [in Good magazine], it was truly fascinating that there weren’t a lot of teachers really leading the charge in how we change education. There are a lot of entrepreneurs like myself thinking about how you can change that, but I’m not going to be the expert on teaching, nor will I ever be an expert on how you can change K through 12 or higher education,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “But I think if you have teachers thinking entrepreneurially, we can really, really change education for the better.”

“So, going back to my teacher and professor at VCU, Mark Fensky, he was a man of many quotes,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “He would always tell us that, ‘Progress comes from mistakes, not success.’ And I think what he meant by that is that, one thing we really learned in grad school is that failing is okay. When a lot of people fail, what you do is to really drive innovation and you really drive change. When people ‘swing for the fences,’ that’s when that can really happen.”

“I’d love to close [by saying that Mark Fensky] was one of the guys who created one of the biggest brands in the world,” said Karnjanaprakorn. “Even though he’s not one of my teachers, or I don’t talk to him every day, I still read ads from brands that he created and I’d love to close on one of my favorites [quotes of his]… “

And with that, the sentence ‘Yesterday you said tomorrow’ appeared on the screen, and Mike Karnjanaprakorn yielded the stage to the next speaker.

Whether such radical acts such as converting teachers into “teacherpreneurs” can turn things around in American education is anybody’s guess. Certainly the best ideas should emerge from those actually in the classroom, who should be free both to innovate and to hold students and their parents at least partly accountable for what is happening.

And one big P.S. on my part: As Zac Bissonnette writes in his book, Debt-Free U, nobody should have to go into immense debt for decades to pay for college, especially those poor souls we told to become teachers, because experts (and the U.S. government no less) said we would need many of them and they would be highly valued members of society. Personally, I think students should get a free education initially, and then send one percent of their income back to their alma mater until they retire.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Hybrid Vigor and Synchronicity

A superstar and sometime emcee of Jeff Pulver’s “Small Town” editions of his 140 Characters Conference is an Oklahoma lady named Becky McCray (@BeckyMcCray). She’s an energetic small town business owner who, from her base of operations in the mammoth metropolis of Hopeton, Oklahoma (population 30), commands a retail store, a cattle ranch, a couple of websites, and a consulting business.

It was Becky, with her background in animal husbandry, who introduced to the world of 140conf the concept of the synergy and “hybrid vigor of ideas” that occurs when various normally unrelated people are suddenly brought together in a room (and online), and who present their ideas and start interacting with each other, leading to an inevitable rise in the intellectual temperature of both the room and in viewers at home, complete with “eureka moments,” new friendships, alliances and a cascade of brainstorming and other concomitant mental fireworks.

“Hybrid vigor” is the casual name for the more scientific-sounding “heterosis” or “outbreeding enhancement,” the improved or increased function of any biological quality in a hybrid offspring as a result of genetic inheritance. In the case of the 140 Characters Conferences, of course, we are talking about a metaphor, “social media-related heterosis” and not ways of actually breeding more interesting conference attendees—although I should mention as an amusing aside that the adjective derived from heterosis is the deliciously titillating word, heterotic.

In a world of ideas, some folk may ascribe much of hybrid vigor to mere luck, coincidence or “serendipity.” But there is much to be said about serendipity, for it leads us to the more profound and practically mystical heart of the matter, synchronicity, a phenomenon that gained respectability after it was described in some detail by the great psychologist Carl Jung. Synchronicity is the conscious experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance but are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner.

We’re all familiar with simple coincidences. You misdial a telephone number and are connected to somebody you haven’t spoken to in many years. Synchronicity, however, is quite a bit more involved.

Yours truly has spoken about this elsewhere, but first I’ll give Carl Jung’s most famous example of a synchronistic event, given in his 1952 book Synchronicity:

“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.”

Now let’s imagine an even more “synchronistic” version of this environment: Jung’s secretary walks into the room at that moment, holding a birthday gift for her husband, a small brass sculpture of a scarab beetle. Moreover, among the books on Jung’s shelves is a book of old lithographic prints of insects, principally of scarab beetles.

Note that in this scenario, from the standpoint of the material world, there is nothing interesting going on here: There’s bug at the window, a secretary holding a sculpture, a book on the shelf made of paper and ink, and a patient who is accessing her memory of a dream.

However, from the standpoint of human consciousness, of meaning, there is one very interesting thing that unites everything in the room—the idea or “archetype” of the scarab beetle. It is as if there were an attractive field of force present—not a magnetic field that brings together and arranges iron filings, but a more mysterious “information field” that brings together and arranges objects, events and ideas of related meaning. Jung felt that synchronistic events revealed an underlying pattern to the world, a conceptual framework encompassing and yet greater than, any system exhibiting the synchronicity.

To quote the Wiki entry on synchronicity: “Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and [physicist Wolfgang] Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise but also having elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an ‘intervention of grace’. Jung also believed that synchronicity served a similar role in a person’s life to dreams with the purpose of shifting a person’s egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness.”

Thus, hybrid vigor generated by 140 Character Conferences is not simply a genetic-like mating of ideas, but is in fact yet another way in which the conscious universe exhibits creativity via synchronistic interpersonal coincidences. Each speaker and attendee is not just carrying a missing jigsaw piece to everyone else’s personal puzzle—indeed, each person can be a catalyst that sparks both new ideas and revitalized versions of old ones. It demonstrates how social media—not to mention live meetings—can, with a diversity of perspectives, nullify the isolationism brought about by today’s on-demand media. After all, the opposite of hybrid vigor is what’s called inbreeding depression.

More 140conf speakers, attendees and viewers equals more interpersonal interactions, and that leads to more synchronicity. In this respect serendipity and synchronicity are helped by the so-called law of truly large numbers, a term coined by Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, which states that, given a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. This law’s “stepchild” is Littlewood’s Law, which asserts that a person experiences about a million discrete conscious ‘events’ every 35 days (one every second) and so you can expect something miraculous to occur to you at the rate of about one per month.

Whatever the mechanism, it is clear that conferences such as 140conf act as “hubs” for people and ideas, hotbeds of notions, inklings and epiphanies that can change your neighborhood, school, the world—or perhaps just you personally. As the magician, mathematician and psychologist, Robin Robertson, wrote, “Synchronicity marks the points at which the personal and the transcendent come together in each of our lives.”

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2011

A Paean to Pepsi, Coke and Humanized Branding

Before Yours Truly went on a diet and lost 90 pounds, I was known far and wide as the telecom magazine editor with a stupendous Pepsi addiction, one that took the form of my guzzling a six pack of 16-ounce bottles every day. It was my only vice. Public relations folk who knew me would sometimes ship to my office whole cases of Pepsi, partly as a gag, partly to get on my good side. (It generally worked.) Those unfortunate PR people who hadn’t done their research on me would instead send cases of assorted bottles of fine California wines, which I always gave away to my eager and grateful co-workers.

However, prior to my college days I was an imbiber of Coca-Cola. When I entered college (the much-esteemed Rowan University) the soft drink vending machine outside of the Bureau of Student Publications in the Student Center dispensed Pepsi, and the principal editors were Pepsi addicts, so I switched to the more fizzy, sweeter cola. Whereas Coke had an orangey base and relied on corn syrup for its sweetness (mostly as a result of skyrocketing sugar prices), Pepsi had a higher percentage of real, honest-to-goodness sucrose sugar and a bit more of a “bite” to it. It immediately became my new ambrosia.

Just as in my own case, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola have battled for the public’s taste bud approval for over a century now. Both beverages were formulated by pharmacists in the American South, and both in their day were proffered as a medicinal cure for every malady imaginable, from peptic ulcers to headache, neuralgia, hysteria, and melancholy. Actually, Coke probably did have the ability to assuage melancholy back in the old days, since it was invented as a “coca wine,” a mixture of wine and cocaine. There was also a competitor called Metcalf’s Coca Wine, a fluid containing a compound now known as cocaethylene, a stimulant almost as powerful as cocaine. In the case of Coca-Cola, its inventor, John Styth Pemberton, in 1885 concocted a pirated version of another wine spiked with coca leaves, Vin Mariani, a favorite of Queen Victoria, Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, Emile Zola, Hendrik Ibsen, the Russian Czar, Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Leo XIII and later Pope Saint Pius X.

Toward the end of 1885, however, Pemberton’s home town of Atlanta, Georgia and Fulton County passed prohibition legislation, and “Pemberton’s French Wine Cola” became Coca-Cola as the alcohol and cocaine were replaced with syrup, coca leaves and caffeine-rich kola nuts, along with a later secret ingredient (probably a mixture of oils) called 7X.

The Coca-Cola company later convinced U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Coca-Cola was somehow important to winning World War II and projecting American business and culture abroad, and so by the end of the 1940s there were Coca-Cola bottling plants in at least 30 countries. Coke become the single most recognized brand named in the world. This exasperated the rival Pepsi-Cola Company, which began backing its own political candidate, Joe McCarthy. Nicknamed “The Pepsi Cola Kid,” McCarthy helped pass a bill that ended sugar rationing following World War II. Indeed, during the years 1947-1949, McCarthy accepted kickbacks totaling $20,000 in exchange for his aid in circumventing post-war sugar rationing. McCarthy, of course, is better known for masterminding witch-hunts for Communists in the 1950s than he is for his support of the soft drink industry. But he did inadvertently cement a political phenomenon in place: When a Democrat (liberal) occupies the White House, Coke vending machines are present everywhere. When a Republican (conservative) president moves in, out goes the Coke and in come the Pepsi machines.

During the 1960s, Don Masse, “the voice of polo in the East,” as he was known, was working as an announcer at the polo grounds near Purchase, New York, about 45 minutes from New York City. His boss asked him to take a VIP visitor on a tour of the grounds, one Richard Nixon, who was between jobs as Vice President and President (or political crook and figure of evil, depending on how you look at it). Masse dutifully complied. Later, his boss came to speak with him.

“Well, Don, I’ve got some good news and bad news,” said the boss. “The good news is, Nixon loved the tour of the grounds. The bad news is, he was scouting out locations for his client, PepsiCo. They’re going to buy this place, tear it down, and convert 114 acres into the new PepsiCo World Headquarters. Looks like you’re out of a job, Don old buddy…” And so he was. (I later briefly dated his daughter Meg, who told me the story.)

Since both Coke and Pepsi have presumably analyzed each other’s drink recipes using the most advanced scientific instruments (gas chromatographs, etc.) one wonders how the brands could possibly distinguish themselves. Colas in and of themselves are not particularly exciting. After all, it was the late Steve Jobs who lured John Sculley—inventor of the successful 1975 ‘the Pepsi Challenge’ marketing campaign—to Work at Apple with the condescending pitch, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?”

In an interview with Leander Kahney a year before Jobs’ death, Sculley said he “described to him [Jobs] that there’s not much difference between a Pepsi and a Coke, but we were outsold nine to one. Our job was to convince people that Pepsi was a big enough decision that they ought to pay attention to it, and eventually switch. We decided that we had to treat Pepsi like a necktie. In that era people cared what necktie they wore. The necktie said: ‘Here’s how I want you to see me.’ So we have to make Pepsi like a nice necktie. When you are holding a Pepsi in your hand, its says, ‘Here’s how I want you to see me.’”

“We did some research and we discovered that when people were going to serve soft drinks to a friend in their home, if they had Coca Cola in the fridge, they would go out to the kitchen, open the fridge, take out the Coke bottle, bring it out, put it on the table and pour a glass in front of their guests,” said Sculley.

“If it was a Pepsi,” said Sculley, “they would go out in to the kitchen, take it out of the fridge, open it, and pour it in a glass in the kitchen, and only bring the glass out. The point was people were embarrassed to have someone know that they were serving Pepsi. Maybe they would think it was Coke because Coke had a better perception. It was a better necktie. Steve was fascinated by that.”

“We talked a lot about how perception leads reality,” said Sculley, “and how if you are going to create a reality you have to be able to create the perception. We did it with something called the Pepsi generation.”

“I had learned through a lecture that Dr. Margaret Mead had given, an anthropologist in the 60’s,” said Sculley, “that the most important fact for marketers was going to be the emergence of an affluent middle class—what we call the Baby Boomers, who are now turning 60. They were the first people to have discretionary income. They could go out and spend money for things other than what they had to have.”

“When we created Pepsi generation it was created with them in mind. It was always focusing on the user of the drink, never the drink,” said Sculley.

“Coke always focused on the drink,” said Sculley. “We focused on the person using it. We showed people riding dirt bikes, waterskiing, or kite flying, hang gliding—doing different things. And at the end of it there would always be a Pepsi as a reward. This all happened when color television was first coming in. We were the first company to do lifestyle marketing. The first and the longest-running lifestyle campaign was—and still is—Pepsi.”

“We did it was just as color television was coming in and when large-screen TVs were coming in, like 19-inch screens,” said Sculley. “We didn’t go to people who made TV commercials because they were making commercials for little tiny black-and-white screens. We went out to Hollywood and got the best movie directors and said we want you to make 60-second movies for us. They were lifestyle movies. The whole thing was to create the perception that Pepsi was number one because you couldn’t be number one unless you thought like number one. You had to appear like number one. Steve loved those ideas.”

Sometimes, as in the case of long-standing products such as beverages that closely resemble one another, the only thing a company can do is to create a new brand. Today, with social media, people are becoming silent partners in the development of brands, rather than just being bombarded with advertising.

At BrandsConf 2011, Mary-Ann Somers (@masomers)—VP Marketing of the Venturing & Emerging Brands, an independent business unit of Coca-Cola North America, said, “We’re really tasked with doing some things that are different from the base brands. We’re looking to develop and identify what’s new and next in beverages. So I’m going to ‘helicopter up’ a bit, and talk to you about innovation and the way we see that brands are built today, and how ‘social’ fits into that. Social is a reflection of the things that we see as bigger changes. But it’s one part of the overall strategy.”

“So just to give you a little idea of the industry in which I work—beverages—does anybody have any idea how beverages brands there are today?” asked Somers. “I hear 485… 500 I think I heard… 1600… Okay, when I got into this business, I figured there were maybe 500 or so; maybe a couple of hundred and then I upped a bit more. There are in fact over 4,000 brands in beverages at any given time. It’s unbelievable. An incredibly dynamic industry, a lot of activity going on. And really you see people from developing products in their kitchens and going to sell it to the big brands like the Cokes and Pepsis of the world. So it turns the gamut.”

“Interestingly, what we did was to look at all the brands in the industry and looked at them more broadly than we typically do at some of the big companies,” said Somers. “And what we found is, we looked at the growth in the industry. We looked at a 10-year period broken up into two five-year periods. Half of the growth was driven by brands that barely existed beforehand. So these are brands that started small, had made it through and had done well enough that they were driving half of the growth in the industry. Within that, a third of the growth was from categories that barely existed today. So it might seem a bit conceptual. What do I mean by that? If you think about the brands that have been driven, these are some of the ones that have changed the category, changed the industry. They have developed new segments within the beverage industry and if you look at it, interestingly enough, there are some exceptions, like simply orange juice, but for the most part, the category disruptions have been driven by entrepreneurs and not the big guys, not the Cokes and Pepsis of the world.”

“So we really took that to heart and asked, ‘What does that mean about how do we create new products and develop and go to market with new products that these guys have learned?’ And we took some of our learnings, which we were humbled by, and we put together a video to think about how brands are built today. So if I can queue the video… hopefully this will work…”

The video then appeared on the screen along with its accompanying narration: “Ideas. The need for them has never changed, but how those ideas get to market has. Today, passionate entrepreneurs are creating innovative new brands and are achieving success. They’ve embraced a new way of building brands that is in step with our changing world, and we must to the same. We must learn the art of emerging. Technology had empowered consumers. They check a brand’s honesty with just a click. They distrust big business and celebrate their value as individuals. This independence has led them to prefer brands that are not sold to them. Rather, they seek the authenticity of brands they discover by themselves. And some brands seem to be better than others at getting discovered, better at engaging consumers in the right way at the right time, better at emerging.”

“The art of emerging,” continued Somers’ video, “is not brand-building as we’ve known it. It’s a new art, achieved by today’s product proliferation, and by blurred borders between traditional categories. Emerging brands are embraced by a small group of people who value the brand for how it meets their needs and whose sense of discovery makes them as passionate about the brand as the entrepreneur who created it. The art of emerging requires that we look at everything we do through different eyes. We have to see differently and touch differently. We have to let 360 degree high-touch brand building and be the forerunner to high science, mass market brand building, and we must be so intimately involved that we know the precise moment that one becomes the other. Emerging is organic. It is natural. It is slow growth built on word of mouth. Built on the opposite of ubiquity. It is nurturing a movement rather than swaying the masses. It’s more about storytelling then conveying facts. Salespeople, distributors, retailers, first consumers; emerging brands turn them all into ‘brand ambassadors.’ They are the brand. But building these brand communities takes time and patience. It’s about knowing the consumer, not just researching the consumer. It means applying familiar tactics in far more targeted ways tailored to the core brand idea”

“ Sampling requires a new, almost surgical precision to make sure that the product is not just in people’s hands, but in the right hand,” says the video. “It’s no longer a sales call, but a brand conversation. It’s not about the account that may sell more—it’s the account that you care about. It’s no longer about marketing—it’s strategic surrounding of those most likely to want to discover the brand. Emerging brands are fragile. Too much mass marketing too soon, and the magic is lost, the sense of community is lost, and the opportunity is lost. Few brands today can simply ‘arrive.’ They must emerge. The art of emerging is not doing things differently purely for the sake of being different; it is a new model of brand evolution through collaboration. It’s how the heroes of tomorrow will be created. It’s how the next billion-dollar brand will be built.”

“So you see this speaks to some themes that you’ve heard earlier today,” said Somers, “but there’s a couple that I just want to point out: The idea that it takes time to build brands and make connections. Sometimes big companies like ours are not so good about understanding that and giving us the time to do that. If you think about your twitter account, it grows one by one. It’s not all of a sudden, boom, you’ve got a whole bunch of people following you. So what does that mean for our group? We both invest in entrepreneurial brands and we create new brands ourselves. But our strategy is really, if we’re thinking of what’s new-and-next for the future, we really live on the left of the adoption curve. We’re all about the early influencers, the people who are trying new things, and we focus on health and wellness. We call them LOHAS [Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability] consumer lifestyles, health and wellness, health and sustainability.”

“So that’s where we ‘live’ and we try to really get to know that consumer and specialize in that,” said Somers, “and then as it goes mainstream, it goes to the right [on the projected chart] and we go deep in the connections.”

Somers then quickly discussed one of the brands her group at Coca-Cola developed internally for health-and-beauty conscious Japanese women, called Sokenbicha (pronounced “SO-can-BEE-cha”), an unsweetened tea, the name of which (Chinese, interestingly) means “refreshing healthful beauty tea.”

“It drinks like water,” said Somers. “It’s very pure and clean and crisp, and yet it has the goodness of teas and natural botanicals. So we asked how we could build this brand knowing the things we know now about the way to connect to consumers. One thing is that, from an authenticity standpoint, we work very closely with a company called Nihando, which is the leading Kampo boutique in Japan. Kampao is traditional Japanese medicine [actually the Japanese study and adaptation and of traditional Chinese medicine, particularly herbal medicine]. So we’re looking at it from an alternative point of view and wellness overall.”

“We partnered with NIhando and they really developed the formulas for it [Sokenbicha],” said Somers. “The other thing we did was to partner with Mallika Chopra and her intent.com, and really had a full program with her. Here [on the screen] you can see the more traditional things where we have banner ads and certain kinds of advertising on her site but, importantly, one of the things that we did was to create an experience. We called it ‘Serenity.’ It was in Union Square in San Francisco. The way I like to describe it is, if you think about a flash mob of meditation, so that those ten seconds or however long we did those before, that minute that we did earlier, if you can imagine that for 10 minutes in the middle of San Francisco, where people just stopped and meditated. And we also had yoga going on there and we had a lot of people stopping by to see what was happening and it created a lot of interested. That was a live event, and then clearly what we did was to work with that from a visual standpoint and expanded the reach of it. As you can see here [on the screen] some of the different articles and blogs and other coverage that we got on the whole event. Even people outside of the U.S. wanted to participate. It was the start of something for us. So as we think about it going forward we can expand it even more and reach more people through digital means. We also created content. Mallika and her team created illustrated meditation guides. During your busy day you can think about ways to stop and balance yourself and ground yourself again.”

“These aspects were available digitally and they had a viral component to them as well,” said Somers. “People could share with each other. So that was something we were very excited about. We think that’s a way to build brands. We have big brand and we do a lot of mass programs, but there’s also new ways to build brands that are focused on health and wellness, and that’s what we do at Venturing & Emerging Brands.”

We don’t know if Somers’ branding of beverages with their Zen-like appeal to health and wellness ever match in popularity the sizzling, exciting and emotional appeal of those liquids promoted by multimillion dollar, celebrity-laden jingle fest marketing campaigns, but social media, like everything else, is having its impact, even on flavored water.

As for Yours Truly, I’m think I’m starting to acquire a taste for absinthe…

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2011