Below is my response to this post/presentation by Stowe Boyd. Looking back, I feel my criticism is a bit pointed, but I guess I'm beginning to feel frustrated by conversations that layout the importance of new media for our collective future without providing any concrete steps that can lead us there.

Please understand, I think Stowe truly has his fingers on the pulse of Western culture. He is a keen observer of society and the associated intricacies and subtleties that impact they way we live and breath. I guess I just want expect pioneering thought leaders to do more. Let's stop talking about affordances, and instead show them. We've had plenty of time to assess the situation, the time is now for action.

Am I being off base here? Have I finally flipped? Am I just having a "bad day?" Perhaps. In the end, I feel that showing is often more important than telling -- especially for someone like myself who has heard this same story for many years.

I applaud your efforts and thank you for sharing your presentation.

I found the points presented to be on the mark, but you are focusing on new media affordances, on theoretical possibilities of a hyperconnected reality, and not as much on how to actualize said affordances. Perhaps that will be in the book, but so much of this has been said in so many different ways -- when are the social media heavy-hitters like yourself going to focus on practical applications, on social action, instead of talking about the need or possibility thereof?

I apologize if I appear to be overly pedantic. I guess I'm just tired of seeing the same ideas, the same promises, being replayed over and over for the past 10-15 years about the future and social software.

Your analysis is sharp and your observations are critical. I guess I'm also used to seeing citations for such statements as "We have learned that trust and reputation is personal, non-transferable." Who says this? What research are your referring to?

I teach educators and students how to decode new media, how to validate and evaluate information they find on the Web. I also teach people to understand that such skills are not individual, but cultural. So I think in many ways we are on the same page. I guess that's why I want to see not just a summary of where we are and where we need to go; but instead I want to see such an analysis with an accompanying road map for how to get there. What steps should we be taking to move ourselves in the prescribed direction? Should we be so prescriptive? Should we be constructing this new reality from the ground up? Or do we need help from the centroids, the hierarchies that are in place?

I offer this feedback as someone who recognizes your power and influence in new media markets. Since I am only reading your notes, I am sure there was much more presented in your talk that addresses some of my concerns.

Please know that as an edgling, I am one with you and all of the other edglings trying to make an impact on the centroids (that's why I am dedicated to working with the centroids' children and their children's teachers). But we need more maps, more sharing of what is working in addition to our understanding of what is possible.

Keep rocking...

Chris

 

"Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change."
                                        -- Economist Milton Friedman

Here is a trailer for a film by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

This trailer is quite powerful rhetorically, visually, and emotionally. The authors argue that through disasters, both natural and man-made, the immediate reciprocal "shock" caused by the disaster has the power to reduce us collectively into a child-like state making us open to suggestion and manipulation, and more likely to comply with leaders claiming to protect us.

When products and markets drive every aspect of our lives, we are in deep trouble as a society. The film suggests that through the adoption of Milton Friedman's economic theory of free market capitalism, we, as a society, are reduced to child-like states of helplessness in the aftermath of natural disasters and wars. In the wake of our collective helplessness and psychological stress, laws are passed to enable and extend corporate interests as opposed to the best interests of the people.

Luckily, there seems to be a glimmer of hope at the end of this film. And that glimmer rests in our ability to talk to one another, to communicate, to organize, to publish and share our often under-represented points of view. As Klein argues, shock is only a temporary state. And the best way to resist shock is "to know what is happening to you and why."

The free market is not about freedom and democracy; it's about the economically powerful maintaining control of their power. This is why noted personalities like Tim Berners-Lee (net neutrality) and Larry Lessig (digital rights advocacy) have clearly been arguing much more vociferously as of late. And with good reason. The softer we become to the free market's crusade, the more likely we are to have our rights as individuals and as a society stripped away.

So what can you do? How have you "armed" yourself? I'd be curious to know.