“Say something funny,” he demanded.

“Belly button,” said Bean.

“Come back tonight,” said the owner. Bean did, performed his act, “and I killed. I was the house comic for the next nine years.”

There are as many theories of comedy as there are theorists. Plato thought that the basis of comedy is “foolish false conceit” in that people fancy themselves as more virtuous than they are. Aristotle thought that comic attitude is “not vituperative but ludicrous.” Elder Olson defined katastasis as the equivalent in comedy of catharsis in tragedy, easing the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires, concerns and disturbing emotions.

At the “twitter + Comedy” presentation at the #140conf Tel Aviv 2010, comedians Benji Lovitt (@benjilovitt) and Charley Warady (@charleyw) spoke of the impact twitter has had on comedians and humanity’s comic sensibility.

“As I was telling Benji, this is everybody’s standup comedian’s nightmare—following a magician!” exclaimed Waraday. [Laughter] “Couldn’t they have had a guitar act before we started? There seems to be one theme in comedy and twitter that came to my mind. The definition of comedy is ‘tragedy plus time.’ Thanks to twitter that time ‘thing’ is becoming less and less. The question that I posed to Benji Lovitt is, ‘These days, how soon is too soon?’ You know, it’s an interesting concept because what immediately came to my mind was the recent incident with the flotilla. [Referring to the ‘Gaza flotilla raid,’ a military operation by Israel against six ships of the ‘Gaza Freedom Flotilla’ on May 31, 2010 in the Mediterranean Sea.] Benji got into trouble—he was bashed by tweeting… what was it, Benji?”

“Tortilla sounds a little like flotilla, so I tweeted, ‘Tortilla Grande: the newest entrée at Taco Bell,’” said Lovitt. “It’s funnier in America. But like everything in the world today, twitter is totally changing what it means to be in the media. In the States, Saturday Night Live for the last 35 years has been the ground-breaking, envelope-pushing show that gets the first crack at satire. And now there’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and funnyordie.com. So, twitter is the latest mechanism for every comedian to use to take a crack at something.”

Warady chimed in with, “So, in the case of the flotilla, I immediately I tweeted that it’s also the A&W Root Beer’s latest selection of their ‘Root Beer Float-illa.’” [No laughter.]

Lovitt knocked on the microphone with his hand, “Is this still on?” he asked the audience. [Some laughter.]

Warady went on anyway: “A friend of mine told me they had onboard entertainment on the flotilla—it was Lady Gaza.” [Laughter.] “And people kept tweeting ‘The Gaza Flotilla’ which is too long for a 140 character message, so I began referring to it as ‘The Gazilla.’” [Laughter.] He also tweeted, “I can’t believe we keep talking about this Flotilla thing when CELINE DION IS PREGNANT!”

“Twitter is really where every comedian is these days,” said Lovitt. “Has anybody here heard of Jim Gaffigan? He’s one of the biggest comedians in the States, and has a quarter of a million followers on twitter. Actually, he was here in Israel a couple of months ago and did a couple of shows in Jaffa and Jerusalem. He’s a devout Catholic. But basically, you don’t have to wait for comedians to come to your town, because they’re all on twitter. What’s great about it is that, well, if you’re a marathon runner you’re compelled to run. Whatever job you have, you’ve got to do the dirty work. But with twitter comedians can write and perform at the same time. It’s great. It’s really changing everything.”

“Twitter is forcing us to edit,” said Warady. “It forces comedians to do a ‘setup’ and a ‘punch’ all in 140 characters. For a person like me, I tend to stand on stage and tell long stories. For me to compact each one into 140 characters takes a lot of discipline. But another nice thing about twitter is that it is immediate in nature. You have your audience out there and you tweet to them and it’s just like doing a live show. There’s immediate gratification. We’re now determining our own self-worth by the number of our retweets. I’ll tweet something that I think is really funny, then I’ll wait two or three minutes, and they I’ll wonder why nobody has retweeted it—they obviously don’t understand genius. [Laughter.]”

“I did a show on the Fourth of July, and so I tweeted a lot of joke beforehand and used the best ones that were retweeted the most often,” said Lovitt.

“Even so, if you do that, by the time you actually do the show the material can become dated,” said Warady.

“Then there’s the guy Justin Halperin, who tweets about the stuff his old dad says around the house every day. He wrote it down and it became a bestselling book and then the first TV show inspired by a series of tweets,” said Lovitt.

“Twitter is so much a part of my life, I get news from it and every day I try to figure out how to make it funny,” said Warady. “Particularly here in Israel, where there’s no end to the material” [Laughter.] It used to be that a day or two would pass after a tragedy or major event before people would have the opportunity to comment on it. Now, in the age of twitter, people start making fun of it a lot sooner. As a comedian, you don’t want to be the last one. So what you wind up doing is hitting on it immediately. And there’s controversy involved. And that’s wonderful, because if everybody loved the things I tweet, then I’m not doing my job.”

Now that the era of the 140 Character One-Liner is upon us and everyone can “riff” among themselves, some professional comedians may find that they can boost or even completely rehabilitate their careers with twitter and other forms of social media.

Or just the opposite. On January 30, 2012, The Sun reported that two British travelers, Leigh Van Bryan, 26, and Emily Bunting, 24, were questioned for five hours and then barred from entering the U.S. after posts on twitter indicated they had plans to “destroy America” and “dig up Marilyn Monroe.”

Bryan told officials the term destroy was British slang for ‘party,’ and the reference to dig up Marilyn Monroe was a joke from the TV show Family Guy, but the two were reportedly held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes,” spent 12 hours in separate holding cells and then were put on a flight home.

“We just wanted to have a good time on holiday. That was all Leigh meant in his tweets,” Bunting told The Sun.

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

James Surowiecki recently wrote in the The New Yorker (January 30, 2012) that, “the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President.” Conservative candidates—of all people—are portraying private-equity firms, those formerly shining showcases of capitalism such as Romney’s Bain Capital, as predatory, vulture-like creatures that use both their own money and borrowed money to acquire companies in leveraged buyouts, only to suck them dry of funds by having the companies borrow even more and then use that money to pay themselves huge “special dividends” or “management fees.” This enables them to recover their initial investment while keeping the same ownership stake, but sometimes they load the debt on to the point where the acquired companies fail to meet their obligations to creditors and so go out of business, thereby destroying jobs. The private-equity firms then blame the dissolution of the companies on unforeseen changes in economic conditions and “market forces.” (But of course by using this technique with borrowed money, the private-equity firms themselves make money no matter what.)

In his New Yorker piece, Surowiecki notes, “As if this weren’t galling enough, taxpayers are left on the hook. Interest payments on all that debt are tax-deductible; when pensions are dumped, a federal agency called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation picks up the tab; and the money that the dealmakers earn is taxed at a much lower rate than normal income would be, thanks to the so-called ‘carried interest’ loophole. The money that Mitt Romney made when he was at Bain Capital was compensation for his (apparently excellent) work, but, instead of being taxed as income, it was taxed as a capital gain. It’s a very cozy arrangement.”

Of course, although there are leveraged buyout companies that do indeed suck their companies dry as described by Surowiecki, there are also private-equity companies that bestow upon their companies equity money—but not debt—and, in the best spirit of capitalism, assist them and nurture their growth. Thanks to lobbyist-inspired quirks in the U.S. tax system, however, an increasing number of private-equity firms find it easier to rely on what are essentially government subsidies, with many acquired companies suffering as a result.

As the political scene continues to devolve and the economic gap between the rich and everybody else widens, some amusing scenes from the plays of George Bernard Shaw come to mind…

From Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905):

BARBARA. Oh there you are, Mr. Shirley! [Between them] This is my father: I told you he was a Secularist, didn’t I? Perhaps you’ll be able to comfort one another.

UNDERSHAFT [startled] A Secularist! Not the least in the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic.

BARBARA. Sorry, I’m sure. By the way, papa, what is your religion—in case I have to introduce you again?

UNDERSHAFT. My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

BARBARA. Then I’m afraid you and Mr. Shirley won’t be able to comfort one another after all. You’re not a Millionaire, are you, Peter?

SHIRLEY. No; and proud of it.

UNDERSHAFT [gravely] Poverty, my friend, is not a thing to be proud of.

SHIRLEY [angrily] Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. What’s kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income.

UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr. Shirley.

Ironically, all of the characters in Major Barbara, even the sardonic, arms merchant millionaire Andrew Undershaft, believe that the greatest crime against humanity is poverty. Undershaft’s views were later echoed by that flamboyant American minister, electronic evangelist, and self-professed heretic, Reverend Ike (1935–2009), who proclaimed that “the best thing you could do for the poor is not to be one of them.” For, as Undershaft says, it the power of money that moves governments and determines our destinies…

UNDERSHAFT. The government of your country. I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and a half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders and burning questions and the rest of your toys. I am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune….

And from Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919):

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.

MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you make a hundred thousand a year.

MANGAN. I don’t boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand to him and call him brother.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?

MANGAN. No. I can’t say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only.

These days, of course, the “99 percent” of us are “poor relations,” increasingly distant from the sources of economic and political control. With social media reinventing social activism, however, the State of NOW and the 140 Characters Conferences can make voices heard and bring about grass-roots-powered change.

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

Berry noticed the blog posting because he had used the term teacherpreneur himself—his article, “Teacherpreneurs: A More Powerful Vision for the Teaching Profession” appeared in the March 2011 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. The article was adapted from the book (and initiative) Teaching 2030, where Barnett introduces the works of a team of a dozen innovative educators and their thoughts on the future of teaching. This “TeacherSolutions 2030 Team” includes Jennifer Barnett (Alabama), Kilian Betlach (California), Shannon C’de Baca (Iowa), Susie Highley (Indiana), John M. Holland (Virginia), Carrie J. Kamm (Illinois), Renee Moore (Mississippi), Cindi Rigsbee (North Carolina), Ariel Sacks (New York), Emily Vickery (Florida), Jose Vilson (New York) and Laurie Wasserman (Massachusetts).

Given that, “Better teaching helps all students achieve more, it gives us a foundation to build a school system worthy of American Ideals,” CTQ and Teaching 2030 want to elevate the voices of those accomplished individuals working on the front lines of the teaching profession.

At this point, the cynic whispers in one’s ear that American ideals are incessantly jeopardized by two of the more base aspects of human nature; to wit, greed and hypocrisy, and that anyone who has read Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, recognizes the timeless bemoaning of businessmen and political candidates, echoing down to the present day, for more workers with a “practical education” suited to their capitalism-run-amok, China-wannabe needs.

Despite today’s somewhat bleak and menacing social and cultural background, the CTQ and Teaching2030, with its financial support from MetLife, boldly professes ideas for overhauling the sorry mess of American education, describing how the teaching/learning experience should appear in the year 2030, and what we can do now (in a sort of “means-ends analysis”) to get there.

One thing that critics and so-called reformers of education forget is how students themselves have changed, thanks in great part to technology. First, there is the “Googled Learner.” In the past, the salesmen from Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book would terrify parents into purchasing copies of their respective multi-volume encyclopedias, instilling the belief that their children’s whole future was at stake. Today, of course, there is no physical limit to what can be stored on the web, and search engines such as Google and Bing can bring it all up for scrutiny.

Second, in the more mobile, cosmopolitan world of 2030, 40 percent of students will be “second language learners.” Third, students will have to compete for jobs in a global marketplace, with communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative problem solving as the new “basics.” Fourth, digital tools will be used to enable students to monitor their own learning, even if it’s on an informal 24×7 basis. Sophisticated tools will be deployed to determine whether students meet academic standards, and they’ll tweak and “fine tune” instruction if things go awry. Fifth and finally, teaching will have to be connected to a broad spectrum of community needs. Increasing economic turmoil creates instabilities in families and thus in the greater society, which means that health and social services will probably merge in some way with academics.

Barnett Berry and his Teaching 2030 team would like teaching to be “a well-compensated professional career with differentiated pathways into the classroom, but with guarantees that every child has a well-prepared team of educators, led by the most accomplished teachers whose expertise is spread in and out of cyberspace.” Moreover, they believe America can muster “a leadership force of 600,000 ‘teacherpreneurs,’” which they define as “classroom experts who continue to teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession,” and who will “blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them.” It’s quite an ambitious proposal. Detractors reading this are now no doubt muttering that it’s a great idea to implement in a “creeping socialist” place—you know, those crazy places where teachers are respected for what they do rather than how much they earn.

Whether teachers can meet the educational demands of the 21^st Century remains to be seen. America, unlike many of its competitors, needs to adjust its priorities in many areas, not just education. But education is fundamental in that it enables the populace to determine what priorities need to be adjusted and why. Perhaps Barnett Berry and his team of uber-educators are the people to accomplish all this. We wish them the best of luck.

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

Indeed, not just the public but a good portion of the mentalist community as well are completely unaware of Manor’s many contributions to the art—that is, classic tricks actually invented by Manor himself. Take “The Invisible Touch,” for example,  which he devised in 1987, now performed worldwide by the world’s top talent. As its name implies, a volunteer is brought on stage and, in plain sight of the audience, feels the mentalist touching him or her lightly, and yet one can see that the magician’s hands are nowhere near the person.

At his presentation at 140conf Tel Aviv 2011, “Magic and the Real-time Web,” Manor revealed that he had started out with a university education in mathematics and computer science. “There is a strong connection between math and magic, and if you want to be a good magician, you really need to know math,” intoned Manor. “When I fly around the world, because I learned computer science I can talk like an engineer. I will stand in a trade show booth of a big company like Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft or smaller companies such as SolarEdge, or mid-size such as Adobe, and I will attract people by doing a presentation which has some magic inside it. So people have fun and get the message too.”

“A fly a lot,” said Manor. “In this month alone, I was in Europe, in Rome, England, the United States, Australia, and so forth.”

“Despite my travels, I used to have only five good friends,” said Manor. “But thanks to Jeff Pulver I got on Facebook and I now have many more.”

Manor did one trick involving mathematics. First a person in the audience picked a card, the 2 of Diamonds. Then Manor  displayed the name “Pulver” on the screen:

Manor then selected a person out of the audience and asked them to think of a four digit number. “Now multiply it by 7,206,” said Manor, “divide it by any three digit number. Now multiply it by a two digit number, now divide it again by a three digit number. So what is the result? Ah, it’s .0071312.”

With that, he turned the image on the screen upside down to reveal the number written backwards (Hebrew style) and then flashed an image of him holding a large version of the 2 of Diamonds card that had obviously been taken beforehand:

He also mentioned, amusingly that “Two plus 131 plus seven equals 140, the name of this 140 Characters Conference.”

Psychologists are just beginning to explore experimentally the techniques used by magicians: Psychological (not just physical) misdirection, cognitive illusions (e.g. since our minds think ahead of events, a coin can be made to vanish after it is apparently passed from one hand to the other, when it has in fact been palmed), and “mental forcing” where a volunteer believes that they have a free choice in (for example) picking a card from all 52 cards, but in fact they have been influenced into making a particular, pre-arranged selection.

Today, vision scientists study visual art and illusions to figure out the human visual system’s internal workings, and cognitive scientists now study the cognitive illusions of magicians and mentalists to elucidate the foundations of human cognition.

In medieval and ancient times, of course, the clergy would simply accuse a magician (or any clever inventive fellow, for that matter) of being an authentic supernatural sorcerer in league with the devil, and burn him or her at the stake. In his 1961 book, Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clark wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Back in medieval times, however, any science could be construed as magic. As the late Joshua Trachtenberg wrote in his great book-length elaboration of his Ph.D. thesis, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (1939), even physicians were not immune, particularly non-Christian ones:

In the field of medicine in particular was the reputed Jewish magical skill called upon to perform miracles. According to the popular view, demons and magic were often responsible for disease, and medicine was therefore the legitimate province of the sorcerer. Jewish physicians, though by no means free from the general superstitious attitude, were among the foremost representatives of a scientific medicine in the Germanic lands. Their wide knowledge of languages, the availability of Arabic-Greek medical works in Hebrew translation, their propensity for travel and study abroad, their freedom from the Church-fostered superstition of miraculous cures, relics, and the like, these often conspired to make of them more effective practitioners than their non-Jewish competitors. Paradoxically, their scientific training, such as it was, made them superior magicians in the popular view, and every triumph of medical science enhanced the Jew’s reputation for sorcery.

In those days it was, in the words of the old adage, “smarter to be lucky than lucky to be smart.”

Now, however, smart fellows with great powers of observation such as Lior Manor both entertain and inform us.

# # #

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

The uncle replies: ‘And you wonder why you’re not invited to more parties’.”

—Woody Allen, Getting Even

Normally I’m not the kind of fellow to add a soupçon of schadenfreude to our uplifting, inspiring blog here at the State of NOW / #140conf community, but you must admit things have been pretty intense lately, given the world’s uncertain economic future (and high U.S. unemployment), the crazy, oversexed representatives of a long list of special interest groups (the super-wealthy topping the list) masquerading as statesmen-like Presidential political candidates, an ocean liner bigger than the Titanic recklessly piloted to a crash/sinking within 300 feet of a rocky shore, bankruptcy hitting Kodak (makers of the greatest photographic film of all time, the now-extinct Kodachrome), and Iran’s nuclear ambitions pushing us to the brink of World War III. And to top it off, the founder of Cracker Barrel died.

Maybe it’s just because most people feel isolated, cut off from the “cultural commotion” provoked by the world’s big events. It’s a feeling that’s said to be acutely felt among people living in small towns and rural communities, places with no stoplights that, iconically, encircle a big intersection of a bunch of roads out in the middle of somewhere.

Perhaps, however, the media, with its relentless replay of daily events, exacerbates the situation, instilling the wrong mindset in us all. For example, at #140conf NYC 2011, in the presentation, “How the Real Time Web has Bridged the Gap between Towns of 1000 People and Cities of 10 Million,” liquor store-and-ranch owner Becky McCray (@BeckyMcCray) of Oklahoma asked LogicMaze’s VP, Cody Heitschmidt (@codyks) of Hutchison, KS, his theory of how “the whole world is really like a small town.”

Heitschmidt commented that, where he lived, other than members of his family, the next person could be found two miles away. And yet, he said, because of social media and the Internet, “the whole world has changed in that my kids are now communicating with people all over the world, as opposed to this little niche that, without digital communications, we were kind of stuck in for so long.”

Moreover, by being plugged into the world in this way, small business now becomes big business.

“In small towns, out of a necessity, customer service became the only competitive advantage a businessman had in a small town. The reason is that, if you do something good in a small town, news about it travels fast. If you mess up and do something bad, that too travels just as fast in a small town. There are pro-and-con sides to it. And because of this ‘State of NOW,’ this concept that Jeff Pulver wants us to explore here, the whole world has become a small town. If you do something good or bad, the whole world can find out about it very quickly. That’s the theory. The State of NOW has made the whole world a small town because of communications.”

“That’s great,” said McCray, “because for small business owners, customer service really does become your only, sustainable, competitive advantage in this world.”

So that’s one of the great things about social media: The little guy not only has a voice that can be heard at the highest levels of government, but he or she can grab a piece of the economic pie too.

# # #

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

Social media, from its first stirrings in SixDegrees.com (which operated from 1997 to 2001), to Friendster (founded in 2002) to MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), and Twitter (2006), has added an even greater participatory dimension to communications, to the point where the journalist is simply a sort of “first communicator among equals.”

At the #140conf New York City in 2011, Today show host Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) gave a talk entitled “Journalism in the State of Now.” What she spoke of, however, was something far more fundamental and far-reaching than news reporting.

In speaking of social media—twitter in particular: “We are the early ones in,” said Curry. “There are lots of people making mistakes with it, and a lot of people doing good things with it, and finding a betterment of their own life through it. But we’re sort of early in trying to figure all this stuff out. It’s exciting to be in something that is really where no generation has ever gone before. That’s where we are. That’s cool and what I would say to you is that, in the course of the last year since I spoke to you, I’ve seen a real uptick in people trying to use social media, specifically twitter, as a way of ‘selling’ themselves. Everybody’s now getting the picture of how powerful it can be—and dangerous as well—but certainly how powerful it can be. Being in the kind of world for more than 30 years where I have been trying in that time to give people information and knowledge that might as a result give them power, I can tell you that the truth is always the first victim. It is, more than anything else, the thing that people fight over and try to control, because everything else comes from that.”

“So, what I’m starting to see with twitter is that people want to use it—use it to sell things, to sell themselves,” said Curry, “to capture this and create the truth that they want, to satisfy whatever motivation they have. Usually it’s driven by money. What I really hope is that this thing that I’ve seen as a deep part of the character of twitter and Facebook—deep in twitter and Facebook—is this wish to have meaning, to do good, to be a part of something that brings meaning to your own life because you’ve done something to help somebody else. It really is, I think, fundamentally a human wish. We want our lives to matter. And the way to matter is to matter in some way that has been generous to other people. I’m old enough to tell you that, when you’re in your last days, or you’re already gone from this life and people are talking about you, sure they’ll talk about how you were a success in your business or how you were a great father, mother, sister, brother or friend. But in the end your legacy really is the fact that you did something with your life that mattered for others. That is the thing for which you will be glad at the end of your days and that your family, the people who love you, will be so grateful to hold onto you as they mourn you. It is a thing I hope will stay present in how we use this new frontier.”

“There is so much—you don’t need me to tell you—that the world needs: a lot of love, and all the things that that brings,” said Curry. “We see it constantly. I always feel with twitter and Facebook, and as a newswoman I feel this ‘pressure’ where I want to tell people what they need to know, because I know from these years of being a reporter that if I tell people what they need to know about the world, that they will care. Some people will care a lot and those people might actually have a voice in changing human suffering. It’s been the one thing that has been constant in all the sufferings and disasters and difficulties and struggles and disease and genocide, and all those things that I’ve seen as a reporter. The one constant has always been this ‘beautiful outrage‘ that I’ve seen in you, the American people, the big-hearted American people that want to do more, that want to step up, want to at least care, want their elected officials to do something, want to donate to Haiti, constantly pushing. Why? Because, I think deep down, we all want to be forces for Good. Even we don’t have the money to contribute, at least we are outraged and we talk about it and we care. “

“And I think that this power is huge, when it connects with others, and we become this wave of voices that soothes the fire that is raging on virtually every shore,” said Curry. “I think that this is so powerful. It is never to be underestimated, and I think in it are the deepest and most beautiful possibilities of social media. I really hope that as we continue in this adventure towards this unknowing future, in this world that we’re now able to experience, well, it’s kind of better than being in Star Trek. I mean, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But there is a sense of not seeing the edge of this universe, and wondering what will be, and I would simply encourage anyone who can listen to me here to remember the good that it’s capable of, the good that it will do, the good that you’re capable of doing, and as a result the force of good that you can be. As a result of that, think of the meaning that you will have in your lives, so that at the end of your days you will know that you have done something of some service to other human beings.”

“It [social media] may be a way for us to connect with other people who think like this,” said Curry. “They may not be in your family. They may not be among the people you go out and have beers with, but maybe in this way we can connect with each other all over the world, wherever you are, people who want to contribute to our human family.”

In Ann Curry’s new world the journalist is perhaps more of a guide or moderator—perhaps appropriately, the French word for ‘moderated’ is animé, which suggests someone animating the major currents of the whole social informational process. Any particular individual’s real influence on the community will generally be more qualitative than quantitative, aside from such circumstantial factors as financial resources and media exposure. There can be as much creativity, humor and other lighter phenomena in social media as there can be social justice, but certainly everyone should agree that a healthy dose of Curry’s “beautiful outrage” is a good thing.

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

Strangely, although the state ranks second in civilian scientists and engineers as a percentage of the workforce and number of patents issued to companies or individuals per 1,000 workers (thanks partly to the presence of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, one of the world’s largest chemical companies), Delaware has never attained the corporate “startup incubator” status of Silicon Valley, Boston, Texas, or New York.

Well, folks, perhaps that’s about to change.

On the afternoon of January 11, 2012 our own Jeff Pulver had a meeting in Dover, Delaware with Governor Jack Markell (@GovernorMarkell), to discuss how to make Delaware the innovation and startup capital of the U.S. On his way to see Markell, he stopped by the studios of WDEL 1150 AM News Talk Radio and explained on-the-air what was happening to Rick Jensen (@Jensen1150WDEL) and his audience.

Jensen: Jeff is here “in town” today for a very special reason; trying to make something good happen…

Pulver: I’m here because I was invited to meet with Governor Markell, to talk about innovation. I have this idea to make Delaware the Innovation State for America, to create an opportunity for people to want to come here, live here, to have their dreams come true. I really want to help make Delaware the Innovation State for the United States and at some level, bring back The American Dream.

Jensen: Jack Markell is one of the few governors in this country who really is totally committed to social media such as twitter and has at least one assistant who I know of over there—Felicia Pullam (@FPullam)—who works on that, as well as a lot of other communication duties. So I hear you also got to know Markell by chance through a dinner in New York City.

Pulver: Yes, since November 29^th I’ve been looking forward to be here to spend an hour with the Governor and to share some ideas, and to see whether or not it makes sense to try to make Delaware the “innovation hub” for the United States. So many people who are doing tech startups go to New York City where I’m from, or they go to Boston, or Silicon Valley. Why not Delaware? You know, many companies in the world, not just in the United States, are Delaware “C” Corporations. And yet, the companies are not actually physically here in Delaware. I want to do something to make it fun, to bring back some excitement, and then to tie together different economic interests, whether you’re into biotech, or energy, or some other kind of high-tech. Why not bring all of these different people from across the United States to Delaware to be mentors, to advise and to encourage people to seek out their dreams?

Jensen: I would think Governor Markell would be open to this. He’s been successful in bringing in a company to run the Delaware City Refinery. He’s been successful on a number of different levels… His 30,000 foot view is indeed to try to bring innovation and jobs to Delaware, and that’s what you’d like to do too. Tell us about the format of what you’re looking at…

Pulver: Well, I want to start small, perhaps do a contest. People who have ideas for businesses would apply to come to Delaware to be here for 12 or 14 weeks at a time in rotation. Perhaps there could be a TV reality show format, I’m not sure. But it would happen at an industrial loft building somewhere in an up-and-coming part of a city in the State of Delaware. It will be a place where the business community embraces it and we’re able to leverage the state to help put a “spotlight” on what’s happening. We’ll bring people together who have the dreams, the ideas, the incentives to make things happen, and match them with mentors who have experience. And at the end of the day what are we really doing? We’re giving people the chance to live a dream, to follow their inspiration and to innovate, to truly take the word “innovation” and bring it to the people. Maybe somebody will or won’t have the next Google in their head, but at least we’ll create an environment where people can try out ideas.

A friend of mine explained to me that most great ideas and discoveries start out as serendipity, as somebody else’s “good mistake.” In our lifetime, unless you’re doing deep research in science, most of the things we discover we stumble upon. What I want to do is to bring back the America where people again have an environment where they have the chance to stumble upon great ideas. And because Delaware is half-way between New York and D.C., I think it could work. I think if we could do something in Delaware, it will be a model for other cities, towns and states to embrace.

Jensen: To formalize Delaware as an incubator for entrepreneurship and innovation—I know that’s something they’d like to do.

Jensen and Pulver then speculated about how to monetize such a project.

Pulver: This is the First State. People do things first here. One interesting idea would be to do a tax incentive for everybody on a state level by perhaps creating a program where you could fill out a form and the first $5,000 you owe in taxes can go toward a startup. That way you get a credit toward your taxes, but you’re also investing in innovation. Everybody wants to invest in a dream, and everybody could be involved in this. Of course, the process would be vetted to keep out the scam artists. But could you imagine what the economy would be like with 10,000 startups and, once the word gets out that this is happening, the very deep-pocketed venture capitalists will start coming to Delaware to check out what’s here and invest too.

Jensen: So you’re not looking for any extra extraction of money from citizens in taxes or anything like that.

Pulver: No I’m actually trying to do the reverse, to create wealth, to create prosperity and to bring jobs to the city and state and every local level. But really, what I’m trying to do is bring people back to the level of inspiration that they once had, and to dream again. Whenever someone has a dream to do something but their life doesn’t allow them to follow it, if it’s in high tech, I want them to pursue those dreams. I’ve had a very fortunate life in that over the last 20 years I’ve done over 20 startups myself, some not successful, some very successful. But I’m always around people, and I’ve discovered that one of the best things you can ever do in your life is to believe in somebody. I do that all the time now; I focus on finding people who have ideas and I try to connect them with other people who can help them make things happen. I’ve learned a lot by traveling the world and seeing how other countries do this, and I think it’s about time we tried this in America. It can’t hurt.

Jensen: And why not Delaware?

Pulver: Yes, why not Delaware? Let’s give it a try right here, the First State of the Union. It could become the First Innovation State for the country, maybe for the world.

At this point I could go on at length, picking up on Jeff’s contagious enthusiasm and conflating various superficially-related ideas into an exuberant sales package for making Delaware the Innovation State. Fortunately, I’m sure Jeff and many other minds greater than mine will be doing just the opposite, “de-conflating” (or perhaps I should say disambiguating, after the philosopher Jeremy Bentham who first used that word extensively) the whole big multi-faceted idea into a series of smaller, realizable, measurable steps, all leading to the great goal that is the Delaware of the Future, the preeminent locus of American innovation.

And if you too, Dear Reader, are interested in helping to make Delaware the Innovation State, please feel free to contact Jeff Pulver (jeffp@pulver.com).

# # #

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

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.

# # #

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

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.

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!

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