Conclusion of the Summer Book Project

In May I began a project with two professors and a couple classmates to create an ebook over the summer. The theme was Digital Civilization. Summer is now over and we didn't write a book, but the project was a success in other ways. I learned a lot about both the subject at hand and content creation and collaboration. This post is a summary of the project from my point of view and contains (in the order listed):

• An overview of the team
• A timeline of the project
• The two comics I did as my final contribution
• Links to the most significant blog posts I made throughout the project
• Concluding comments

The Team

The two other students who were on board at the beginning withdrew early on because they were busy; here are pictures of the three of us who stayed with the project (with links to their twitter accounts).

Dr. Gideon Burton
(digital evangelist)

Dr. Daniel Zappala
(family history hacker)

Me
(excited student)

The Timeline:

I didn't record all of our meetings and team decisions. But here is a more-or-less accurate timeline of how the project progressed, with links to relevant blogs posts I did:

May:

The team assembles for an exploratory meeting. In attendance are Dr. Daniel Zappala, Dr. Gideon Burton, two other students, and myself. We discuss whether material created during the previous semester's Digital Civilization class can be refined into an ebook, whether we wanted to create entirely new material, and whether we want to commit to the project. 

We begin holding weekly meetings to discuss our target audience, specifics of the topic, and content.

June:

We begin toying with the idea of using a comic book format and targeting the the interested but uninformed demographic. I learn about Jaron Lanier and get really into his ideas.

July:

The work is mostly broken up into three comic we're each drawing on digiciv themes, which will be refined and combined--with more to be done later--into our finished product. I create drafts of two comics about the reality (or lack of reality) involved with virtual experiences.

Professor Burton allows me to accompany him to a lunch meeting with two businessmen who are in the webseries industry. At one point he invites them to see my comic, and they seem pleased with it. (This is not the purpose of that meeting, but I appreciated being included and getting a degree of social proof concerning my work.

August:

Fall semester at BYU starts soon, and we are all busy. The project gets shifted to the back-burner, then taken off of the stove entirely. But it had a good run.

The Products

Here are scanned versions of the two comics I drafted as my final contribution to the project. As mentioned above, my topic was "questions of identity and reality and the virtual world". The original plan was to send the drafts to some actual artist to make them look nice, but that never happened so you're seeing the unrefined versions.

Comic #1: "A Peaceful Dispute About Violence"

I cut out the material at the beginning of this one because I don't like it. We join the action as a woman has just expressed concern to her husband that his violent video games are harmful...

The daughter's comments in the bottom-left panels are illegible so I'll repeat them here:

"But you have experience in that country, don't you when you play that game? Your mind makes memories and develops patterns, especially because there's always a subconscious desire...that the game is real."

Comic #2: "A Virtual Date"

The Blog Posts

Everything I posted on this blog from May up until now was related to this project. In case you don't want to browse the archive, I've gathered links to the most important posts. First is the inaugural post, then some ideas that I got excited about and a couple comics I wrote.

The Project Begins Anew

Newsfeeds: Watch Your Diet

Technology Debate (Comic Concept)

My Chapter Ideas

Two of Jaron Lanier's Ideas

Our Moats (A Text-based Comic Concept)

The Words of Computing

A Final Word

This phase of my research and work concerning digital civilization is at an end, but I will continue to follow and study developments in this sphere. So watch this blog for updates!

Thanks to Professors Burton and Zappala for the chance to work with you. Among your gifts and generosities is the willingness to take the ideas of your students seriously. 

Words of Computing & "Defrag"

A few days ago my roommate and I discussed the importance of taking some time to unwind and relax. He said, "It's nice to just defrag once in a while you know" (or something like that.) I realized that "defrag" is a term that certainly was not used popularly before the PC era, but it perfectly describes a way that the brain operates--at least it describes a way that we imagine the brain operates.

Currently, the most appropriate metaphor for the human brain is that it is a computer . We can actually observe most of the functions of the human brain, but from personal experience and the limited reaches of science we have some idea about how it works. And so we compare it to a computer because that helps us imagine or visualize it. 

What was the most appropriate and/or popular metaphor for the brain before computers existed? Perhaps it was a steam powered machine. Maybe it was a printing press. I don't know. The point is, part of the New Aesthetic is not visible, it is vernacular. And popular technology helps people make sense of the world in new ways, asymptotically approaching the true essence of a thing.

The "Disc Defragmenter" image is from http://www.helppconline.org/tag/defrag/

The Words Of Computing

TechCrunch ran an interesting article about the nouns that our society uses to describe virtual world actions (Copy and Paste, the magnifying glass icon for zoom, streaming.) They wonder why we use outdated actions to represent computing functions and when we'll be comfortable using entirely new words to describe actions and nouns in the digital world. The whole article is interesting, but these sections sums up the point:

The simple fact is that there is a shared visual orthography in which some things are acknowledged worldwide, and this overpowers the logical suggestion to constantly update it. Many reading this would, 20 years ago, be unsure whether the icon represented saving or accessing the A: drive. Nowadays, many will never encounter portable storage in their life. Yet the diskette is firmly associated with saving changes, certainly more so than it is with removable media. So logic has nothing to do with it. Language has less to do with logic than it has to do with a shared interpretation of symbols. These symbols are widely used because they are widely understood, and they are widely understood because they are widely used... 

Maybe I lost you there. What I am saying is that every action we create in the virtual world has by necessity an analogue in the real world. And by common consent, to represent those actions we go back to certain shared experiences that will not be misinterpreted. Lately it’s been hydrological phenomena. Cloud storage. Bittorrent. Streaming. Thunderbolt, to an extent. A few of you may remember that Zunes squirted. NFC is data osmosis, though of course no one calls it that.

I also like the last point made in the article, which is that the most innovative changes in computing may be identified by the difficulty we'll have finding a good metaphor for them. If we can't easily assign a term from the physical world to it then we're stepping into new territory of action.

Perhaps this is all abstract hot air. But perhaps not.

Ominous Quotes

I ran a Google search for the phrase "the imponderable bloom" which is a phrase E.M. Forster used to describe the valuable element of direct experience that virtual intercourse cannot provide. (The quote and concept come from his short story The Machine Sleeps.) Forster must have coined the term himself because nobody else is claiming credit.

Through that search I came across a website with a small collection of quotes about virtual experience that are science-fictional and pleasantly ominous. Thank you Wikipedia user MarkLMI.

Two of Jaron Lanier's Ideas

I watched a couple more Jaron Lanier addresses today. His vision and intelligence and humanist optimism is fascinating. He is offers powerful arguments contradicting the openness movement and other dynamics of modern technology development. Here are two of his interesting remarks:

On Privacy

The Facebook model is that your lack of privacy is precisely the product that's being sold to some hypothetical advertising customer who hasn't yet appeared in a giant ritual of human erasure to make computers seem smart.

 My dad and I had an interesting discussion recently in which we wondered if the next big search engine to gain popularity will be one that has a plain, simple, predictable interface (like Google used to have) that promises to collect no data from you or use data collected by other parties to personalize your results. It would retrieve "stupid" search results (no different from anyone else who uses the same keywords). Then the burden of using knowledge to find the ideal search result would be shifted back onto the user instead of the software. People could just get better at using search operators , retain their personal information, and still get the search results they desire.

Historical Evidence and a Big Idea

I heard Jaron Lanier demonstrate the effectiveness of expounding a thesis with a historical example. I'm still thinking about the actual ramifications of his thesis here, but because he used the metaphor he did, I have a better chance of understanding it and accepting at least parts of it. (I bolded the middle sentence.)

"Language started out as what we call a multi-modal phenomenon in the brain where the control of the throat and the lungs and this creation of sound and hearing tied in with meaning and semantics and this new center of expertise was created in the brain, kind of between areas that were specialized for these other things. It's my opinion that something like that is waiting to be enjoyed within the brain is waiting to be enjoyed for somatic* intelligence...My suspicion is that this capacity is already there but underutilized...This is, I think the big picture of user interface research. User-interface is not just about decreasing hassle and increasing pleasure. It's a voyage of discovery about who people are and who people can be...The metaphor I'd like to make is to the age of the discovery of continents. But in this case the continents are parts of the brain that are underutilized, or combinations of parts of the brain that are underexplored.What we're doing is we're travelling across the cortex--hopefully with better intent than the conquistadores--and we're discovering new continents of human potential.."

Our Moats (A text based cartoon conceprt)

Anyway, isn't it reasonable to figure out how to do the most good
that we can with the technology that's emerging?

Sure. I'm a practical guy.

Alright then, so you'll listen to my plan?

Are you going to talk about copyright law again?

Sort of...and education reform, and a new era

of participatory government, and---

Well, fine. Just don't be boring.

Technology Debate (Cartoon Concept)

Bibliography In Progress

Here's a beginning bibliography of content related to our project chapters and overall concept:

Education

• "Changing Education with Web 2.0 Tools" a powerpoint by Cindy Wright, an IT specialist with a school district; nothing groundbreaking and a 6/10 for presentation, but makes a good point about educating children for the future and not the past. Oriented toward teachers.

Intellectual Property

• "Creative Commons In the Classroom." A quality powerpointby Jessica Croates.

Government

Open Education Cartoon Concept

Chapter Ideas

Chapter and Thesis Ideas

Extremely Huge and Incredibly Complex:

Big Data leads to the overpersonalization of the Internet.

                -But is is a huge opportunity for a new kind of artist/communicator, visualizers

                -maybe a bare-bones interface (Google of old) with a promise of a “dumb” search will catch on

Proximity, Privacy, and Identity

Questions about our identity arising in the Internet age are the next phase of a process that began with feudalism and urbanization.

                -Turkle and the projection of our identity

                -How our privacy expectations are correlated with how much we interact with people

                -Our image-consciousness is related to how much we look at other people and affects our    sense of identity

Tool vs. Pellet Feeder

The happiest and most productive users of the Internet use it to complement their natural world goals.

                -Digital Addictions

                -Principled use

                -Lack of vision

Intellectual Property

Support liberal licenses that circumvent copyright so that we can have a healthier and more natural digital diet.

                -What we eat is used to build our bodies. So with digital consumption? 

                -Thenewest lexicon: pop culture, the newest set of grammar rules: memes

                -disruptive innovation

Facebook vs. 3D Virtual Worlds

A few months ago I wondered whether the two-dimensional social networks the world has adopted were only waypoints on the road to a three-dimensional Internet. (See the blog post here.) I took a look at Second Life and thought, hey, maybe this will be the next big place for people to hang out online--it just needs better graphics and less stigma. But a recent Wired article soundly refuted my arguement.

I'm okay with that, especially because the author--Mark Wallace--acknowledged that he was of the same opinion in 2006. He wrote a book about it. But now he sees differently, and I think he's right. The gist of his arguement:

Facebook’s near-universal appeal — and virtual worlds’ near-universal failure — has as much to do with presentation as anything else. The very concept of a virtual world works against its acceptance. If I’m your great-aunt and I need a place to post pictures of your cousin’s bat mitzvah, I don’t necessarily mind joining a network in order to do so. But do I really want to join another world?

Yes, Facebook often feels like the downmarket version of the original internet dream. In term of the free exchange of ideas, it is more of a nightmare. And it was not Zuck who brought us a new kind ofinterconnected commerce. But being downmarket about the dream (instead of demanding and exclusive) is what brought critical mass to the new mode of social connectivity in a way that virtual worlds were never going to do.

It's cool that I asked a question on my blog a few months ago that was relevant enough to the global tech conversation that Wired happened to address that very question soon after. My initial hypothesis was probably wrong, but who cares about that? This is an iterative process, right?

Culture and the "New Aesthetic"

"Lawrence Levine has argued that culture is less "a fixed condition" than "a process: the product of interaction between past and present." In Levine's view, therefore, cultural persistence depends less on the ability to defend the status quo than the capacity to "react creatively and responsively to the realities of a new situation.""

-James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, preface

Isn't that what the new aesthetic is? Artist acknowledge that the status quo has a legacy but that we aren't bound to it. They react creatively to this new situation of digital connectedness.

By the way, we're going to have to come up with a name that won't sound so silly in fifty years, or a couple of aesthetics from now.

Newsfeeds: watch your diet

Dr. Burton mentioned a conversation he saw on the internet about the validity of Twitter as a communication medium. One man railed against twitter, saying that in 140 characters it wasn't possible to communicate much more than junk. Dr. Burton observed that feeds from services like Twitter, Facebook, +Google, etc. are subjective. They output material based on the qualities of the network you have built on the service. Possibly that man's Twitter feed was good for nothing but junk, but get the right network and that same feed can become a vibrant watering trough where people share big ideas, links to current event coverage, and other positive things.

The Project Begins Anew

Last Thursday I met with Professors Gideon Burton and Daniel Zappalla (who taught my Digital Civilization class last winter) and another student from that class. We talked about our motivations are for writing this ebook (because that strongly affects how much effort we'll invest in it.) We also talked about the direction we want to take with the book. Most of my posts on this blog will not be a meeting recap, but this meeting may be the most important and the discussion was so interesting that I want to record it.

My Reflection On the Class

I feel grateful to have been involved with the Winter 2012 Digital Civilization class. Thanks again, Ariel, for helping to persuade me to take it. Thanks to Professors Burton and Zappala who went above and beyond the requirements of their jobs to answer what they seemed to feel was a higher call of duty. Duty because once you begin to see the principles of openness, feel the legacy of history, and look out on society's landscape you cannot be content sitting on the sidelines of social development. Who knew what could be done when a literature professor teamed up with a computer science professor?

Sometimes this class was at the front of my mind, sometimes it necessarily took it's place on a burner farther back. But I honestly feel like the principles I learned and experiences I had in this class will help shape my entire future.

Privacy Questions and the Fifth Dimension

This post is more of a note to myself than anything else; it's a question that I think has merit but that I haven't significantly developed yet. Is the grip that we are losing on personal privacy (often without concern) related to the urbanization process that society has experienced over the past four centuries? This question led me to a hypothesis about a fifth dimension (seriously).

Event Report (or What I Did To Get People To Come To The Thing)

Here is a report on what I did to invite people to our event. (By the way, congrats everyone on a successful evening!)

I invited a total of five people, though one was my mom.

Media Digestion

As my group has been refining the our chapter for the Digital Civilization book I have been trying to articulate the answer to a question: What is it about the copyright system that is so wrong? Why is it wrong to let someone protect their creative expressions for a century? They created it, so they should be able to reap the financial benefits of it, right?

Except that that's not how culture works best.

Validation From a NYT Columnist

David Bornstein, a regular contributor to the New York Times' Op-ed page, founder of dowser.org, and recent TEDxBYU speaker was in the Brimhall building Friday, and I talked to him. He had just finished a workshop, talking to journalism students about the importance of injecting possible solutions into their articles, when I caught briefly caugt up with him.

He was being hurried along by an attendant from the Ballard Center so I only had time for one question. I asked him about how he comes up with big ideas. I had a hunch that reading lots of good books was a part of it (I've thought this for years), so I asked if that was a factor. He looked me right in the eyes and said that I was right, he reads good books and that helps. He mentioned how reading biographies of courageous people in history helped him have the courage to take action. He said that besides reading books, just associating with people who think big thoughts is important. Those weren't his exact words, but that was the gist of his response.

So that's good. Maybe no surprises for anybody, but I thought it was cool.

Map Your Tweethis!

Here's a concept illustration I made for the IP & CC thesis. Of course the one in the ebook would be a little more refined. I think it'd be cool to get really close to the map style of Tolkein.

The purple line is the path we are advocating, which involves rapid innovation and alternative media licensing. Creative Commons is represented as a way station along that path (to help the weary traveler.)

The red line is the typical path that businesses, artists, and media producers take. Mount Patent Law and Mount Copyright loom daunting on that path. It's red because of the many dead and wounded enterprises that litter the trail.

My IP & CC Annotated Bibliography Contribution

I researched the leading books and figures on this subject mostly tonight. I had researched Lessig's arguments and contributions previously which helped. Google Plus didn't work well for me in the process of finding thought leaders, but enough poking around through google searches got me to some worthwhile information. I was surprised that many key writers on this topic don't have easily accessible blogs.

Pop Culture, Our Newest Lexicon

How Pop Culture Is a Lexicon

In my last post I wrote about Larry Lessig's assertion that an outdated legal approach to Internet share/remix culture is hurting the children raised in that culture. According to Lessig, we can't stop kids from using using digital tools to run wild, create derivations, and express themselves. Since we can't beat them  (and maybe we don't want to squelch such humanity anyway) and the demand is only going to increase, we might as well redesign our creative infrastructure to accomodate this new way of communicating.

Here's what the debate between copyright holders and renegade remixers boils down to: What kind of media use is communication-based and what kind is for personal consumption. Lessig refers to Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute for a summary of how remixing content is often a fundamentally social activity:

And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art. 

The coup-de-gras of his argument is that remixing is "about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience."

Remember the Louisiana Purchase?

In the 1800s the United States tripled in size. But with expansion came dangers; Great Britain's mismanagement of their American colonies had resulted in rebellion, a costly war, and the birth of a new nation (and competitor.) Congress didn't want the same sort of thing to happen with the Western territories, so they passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, an effort to effectively manage growth.

Here's how The Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History summarized the act's significance:

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the most important acts passed by Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It laid out the process through which a territory could move to statehood, it guaranteed that new states would be on an equal footing with the old, and it protected civil liberties in the new territories. This ordinance was also the first national legislation that set limits on the expansion of slavery.

Among other things, the act guaranteed limited self-government to a territory as it grew, and promised that once it reached 60,000 people it could write a state constitution and apply for full-fledged statehood.

Now, there were problems about how Congress kept these promises. Sometimes political reasons (mostly related to slavery) caused them to drag their feet in admitting some states when they were technically qualified. However, the feeling of fair treatment and promise of eventual statehood that was fostered in the territories by the Northwest Ordinance were crucial in avoiding the creation of splinter countries in those areas.

(It should be noted that the US did experience one major attempted breakaway, which resulted in the Civil War, but that was primarily a dispute between already existing states, so it's not really relevant to the example at hand.)

The lesson we can learn here for our digital world is that inevitable growth needs to be effectively managed or else it can become a curse. A Larry Lessig TED talk discusses the inevitable expansion of today's youth into the frontier of remix culture.

It is technology that has made them different, and as we see what this technology can do,we need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, "pirates." And is that good? We live in this weird time. It's kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that's what I -- we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law.That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better.

Now is the time to figure out how we're going to manage the content flood we're already witnessing. The counter-culture that our current, antiquated system causes isn't healthy and could cause serious rifts in society.

*Photo credit: Public Domain image found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United-states-territorial-acquistions-midcentury.png

CC's Cool Mission Statement

So far my assignment in the Intellectual property and Creative Commons group is to summarize what Creative Commons (CC) is. I like the way they describe themselves on their About page:

"Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity."

The way they try to achieve that mission is they create licenses that content creators can choose instead of traditional copyright licenses. CC licenses are much more share and remix-friendly than traditional copyrights.

I like their vision because it provides one answer to the question I posed in my last post: is the digital public as entitled to share, remix, and redistribute media as they seem to feel like they are? Creative Commons' answer seems to be: "No, they aren't entitled to break the rules of the traditional copyright model. However, wouldn't it be awesome if we could make that model obsolete,? Move past it? Wouldn't it be cool to fully develop the openness culture we're just starting to experiment with? Because it's possible."

I like their approach.

Right to Consume; Right to Remix

Public demand for the opportunity to consume, share, and remix media is at an all-time high. (Consider how pervasive copyright infringement is.) What is causing this appetite? And is this sense of entitlement to media harmless?

Here's an example from my own life abiout of how people's attitudes about media availability are shifting:

When I was in middle and high school, I understood that you had to pay for music or you were breaking the law and stealing from the music artists (or at least, the record companies.) I didn't question the validity of such a system. When I was in high school I loved to get iTunes gift cards. I was excited about how easy it was to buy any song I wanted. But later, Pandora and Spotify changed me. Now I expect to get my music free and legally. And I do. I may not ever go back to buying CDs (or iTunes songs.)

My experience is a small example of the sense of entitlement to movies, songs, pictures, etc. that members in our digital society are developing. The powers who make money selling their media and the growing masses demanding the right to use that media on their own terms are warring over the borders of the public domain.

Are we really entitled to us other people's work?  Under what conditions?

The unspoken argument in favor of asserting someone's right to use media regardless of copyright is,
"Because we can."

They're right that we can. But isn't it possible that technology may have temporarily outrun our collective morality?

A Reflective Post

It's time that I record my thoughts about my learning experience in Honors 212.

I find myself more interested in philosophy than emerging technology. One textbook I've been reading (to learn about Control) is Dr. Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. She described the development of personal computers using the opposing concepts of modernism and postmodernism.

modernism: looking at the world as a series of definite systems that can be reduced to simple processes and understood by scientific inquiry.

postmodernism: admitting that the complexity of the world is beyond human comprehension but learning the gist of how things work by exploration.

I've been a sort of postmodernist for years and didn't know it because I didn't know there was a definition for it. (That's one of the cool things about reading books: you can learn things that you didn't intend to which are really cool.)

I've been applying the postmodern view more explicitly. A couple weeks ago my friend told me about a book she's reading about a Chicago doctor that worked in a hospital that treated the local poor. He also lived in a house among those same people and wrestled with questions about how much to get involved helping the people around him. I told my friend that that was a postmodern approach to caring for the poor; the doctor didn't have a detailed plan to end poverty in that area. He just jumped in to the situation and learned what would help by experience.

I keep meaning to get psyched about digital concepts, but I get sidetracked by philosophy.

And physics. This class has also fanned the flames of my mostly neglected interest in the history and development of modern physics and cosmology. I like learning about how P.A.M. Dirac used mathematics to predict the existence of neutrinos, left the idea because he thought it was outlandish, only to have his theory proven correct a few years later by scientists operating a cloud chamber who were trying to do something else. I like reading one physicist's argument that human's shouldn't rule out the existence of a closed universe. I like Issac Asimov teaching me about the composition and motion of a comet by helping me imagine that I'm riding one as it flies past Earth.

How do those concepts relate to Digital Civilization? Well, on the surface, they don't really. But I could compare innovation in physics to innovation in digital concepts. (Maybe there's a connection to be made between the revision that needs to take place in copyright law and the efforts of Bohr, Schrodinger, and others to redefine atoms.)

I want to contribute to the class project. Either I'll pick a group and hope that I gain an enthusiam for the concept as I study it more or I'll lobby for a chapter in the book dedicated to digital philosophy and psychology. We could study how DigiCiv is changing the way people think. And how science has changed the way people think throughout history (think about Galileo destroying he contemporary view of what revolves around what in the heavens.)

*Image for copyright symbol came from this webpage.

Developing My Thesis

I had the good fortune of running into Hwanhi Chung at the library today and we had a quick conversation about my thesis. She asked a good question about its relevance. Later I thought of another concern, too. I will address the issues in this post.

This is my thesis: 

Assumptions about government, business, learning, etc. can be redefined by digital leaders. This is an opportunity to upgrade society.

Hwanhi asked whether all generations have a feeling that they are on the cusp of something big. Perhaps the excitement accompanying changes is a part of every generation growing up and trying to figure out its place in the world. She makes a good point. In just the United States, movements that redefine society seem to take hold at least every 30 years. History teachers might balk at the oversimplification of the following list of examples but here it is anyway:

1770s: American Independence
1800s: Western Expansion/Manifest Destiny
1830s: I don't know...probably something
1860s: Civil War
1900s: Modern physics develops/ beginning of atomic age
1930s: Great Depression
1960s: Cold War
1990s: Pokémon

My thesis in Tweet form

I'm only going to say this word once, as an illustration: "tweethis." I'm on  the bandwagon for this word not being adopted as standard digital lingo. Sure, it's convenient, but it's also a phonetic abomination.

I examined my blog history and came up with my tweet thesis:

Assumptions about government, business, learning, etc. can be redefined by digital leaders. This is an opportunity to upgrade society.

We Brained Up A Storm!

The brainstorm in class today helped me stir up some thoughts I want to develop. Here are the highlights:

The digital divide in America is a topic I could get passionate about. There must be a way to address these problems:

• An entrenched underclass among American minorities
• An emerging underclass among white Americans
• The learning gap created by lack of technological tools or understanding and a lack of good teachers/mentors
• The achievement gap encouraged by a lack of engagement with the world

With these tools:

Unspoken Control and Gender Expectations

Dr. Sherry Turkle's book Life On the Screen illuminates the relationship that our society has developed with computers. Her observations about the influence of gender roles on computer culture show that control is not always explicit. Sometimes simple cultural expectations exercise control over technology, creating situations where people tend to stay within boundaries even though there is no official rule.

Dr. Turkle asserts that computer programming has a history of being dominated by principles associated with masculinity: totally planned coding, imposing the will of the programmer on the computer, terms like "abort" and "killing" programs. The alternative programming style: tinkering and rearranging lines of code without a strict plan, cultivating an intimate relationship with the computer, cooperating with it in a creative process are associated with femininity in our culture. The masculine programming style was the canonical process for the first decades of digital computing.

Next-gen of Internet: Virtual Reality

In DigiCiv class about a month ago someone mentioned that humanity is still realizing the potential of the Internet. It can do things that we don't realize yet. (Imagine if the Jedi in Star Wars wrote off Anakin as simply a good podracer.) So here's a question: what will succeed the World Wide Web? Right now the most likely candidate is virtual reality.

By virtual reality I mean digital representations of environments complete with trees, horizons, and human avatars. The current leader in the virtual world industry is Second Life. Imagine a virtual landscape similar to World of Warcraft, then imagine that it's not a game at all. There's nobody to destroy and no quests to fulfill. Your character just hangs out and does whatever you want. That's Second Life.

The Millenium Eye, a working Ferris wheel in SL modeled
after the real-life Eye of London.

Second Life goes out of its way to allow users to create their own structures, services, and products. If you want to build a church and invite others to come meditate with you, you can do that. If you want to build a city straight out of a zombie novel, you can do that. If you want to design and market a line of virtual fashion, well, you get the idea. The creator of Second Life, Phillip Rosedale, described it's content as the average of all of our dreams.

Plus, you can fly.

Final Project Exposure Ideas

Ted Talks. You know them; you love them. Did you know that TED has local conferences all around the world where communities have their own TED-style presentations? One's happening at BYU this March, and if we can get our DigiCiv final project exposure there, we just might get exposure everywhere.

Here's an example. One of the most viewed videos on the TED website is Brene Brown's speech called, The Power of Vulnerability. It has been viewed over 3 million times and it wasn't even delivered at one of TED's megaconferences. It was delivered at TEDxHouston, one of the local conferences, and it was so good that it caught fire in the TED community.

(Side note: using the phrase "caught fire" just now reminded me of Catching Fire, second book in the Hunger Games trilogy. That series is also about a young person realizing how much impact she can have on the world. "Catching Fire" is a term the author uses to describe her ever increasing influence and self-awareness of that influence. We could describe ourselves similarly.)

March 22 won't be the first TEDxBYU. Here's a link to last year's event. Professor David Wiley even has a video on the site of his presentation about the mass-personalization of education.

We could have someone represent us all in a talk. We could put together a video mash-up of us discussing our ideas, we could do interpretive dance. I vote for an on-stage pancake breakfast; maybe there's a way to make that educational.

Open Government and Pres. Obama's Change

So I've decided that Open Government is the aspect of digital civilization that I'm going to focus on--that is at least until we decide as a class what we're going to do our final project on.

As I began researching open government I noticed quickly that there seem to be two independent trends going on in the movement.

1) Different government agencies reaching out with openness initiatives, even as high up as the White House

2) People not affiliated with government theorizing about how to change our gov't system to make it more citizen oriented.

Essentially this is the question: If open government happens, is the change going to come from government employees, or will the public set the terms?

President Obama's administration seems to have done an admirable job building an openness movement within government. (Take the Open Government Initiative as an example.) After the deliberate misinformation campaigns of the previous administration I have to say that Pres. Obama's efforts so far are a breath of fresh air and in keeping with the populist theme of his 2008 campaign.

My question is whether the government will, of its own accord, go far enough?

Maybe they will. Austin Baughn helped me find this article about government and e-participation. It argues that 500,000 federal employees will reach retirement age in the near future and to the extent that they are replaced, they will be replaced with bright-eyed, social media savvy recent grads--not only of college, but of the new school of digital connectivity. A government in financial trouble needs to find creative cost cutting, but effective solutions. Perhaps this new wave of federal employees will be the link the public (and some in the government) have been waiting for.

A Wrinkle In Society

What's the shortest distance between two points?

Euclid, pioneer of two-dimensional geometry may have rolled in his grave when Madeline L'Engle answered: a wrinkle. 

Forget that "strait-line" business. In A Wrinkle in Time L'Engle explains that the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B is to find a wrinkle in the time and space separating them. Suddenly you're right next to something that used to be millions of miles away, because the fabric of space and time is all folded up on itself.

Maybe this seems like cheating. But remember, this is the universe we're talking about. It's big and it's a wild ride, and we don't know the half of it.

Maybe it's possible to exploit the existence of unseen dimensions to make wrinkles in space-time. I don't know. Probably you don't either. But I bring up this concept the idea is helping me understand things we're learning in Digital Civilization. I'm learning to see wrinkles in the fabric of our society;  they are very real, and they are exciting.

Redlining our Education

I liked the Austin Baughan's post about the challenges facing groundbreaking scientists, especially the quote he included from The Great Influenza:


"All real scientists exist on the frontier. Even the least ambitious among them deal with the unknown, if only one step beyond the known. The best among them move deep into a wilderness region where they know almost nothing, where the very tools and techniques needed to clear the wilderness, to bring order to it, do not exist. There they probe in a disciplined way. There a single step can take them through the looking glass into a world that seems entirely different, and if they are at least partly correct their probing acts like a crystal to precipitate an order out of chaos, to create form, structure, and direction. A single step can also take one off a cliff."


Ariel described those efforts as a sort of flailing,and I think that's sort of accurate. Deliberate flailing, maybe. And as I experiment with the themes of our Digital Civilization class I feel like I can relate to a scientist trying to settle a frontier.This new learning style requires a real change in my habits. It's exciting, partly because it feels so risky.

Thoughts on Democracy: Then and Now

This is my starter post on open government. First I'll examine the idea that modern technology makes pure democracy an option. I don't know if anyone is even advancing this idea, but I guess reading about Descartes makes me want to examine the fundamental assumptions of an idea before going on the rest of it.

In the late 1700s the founders of the United States decided that a perfect democracy was a bad idea because:

• The colonies were too spread out (there was no way to manage every body's input.)
• Most people were uneducated
• Even educated people argue bitterly about how to run society

Flash forward to 2012. Now we have the potential to overcome the first problem, managing everyone's input. We either have the software or could develop it quickly if we put our minds to it.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty What?

I like quantum physics. I'm not a physics major, and I don't know any of the math involved, but that hasn't stopped me so far from learning about the concepts. I find the ideas to be fascinating looks into the way our universe operates. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle  was brought up in class as a marker in the transition from classical, Newtonian physics to the modern physics we love and confuse people with today.

Don't give up! I know many people will want to because I said things like Heisenberg and quantum. But you can do this, and it's good food for thought. Also it's a handy way to impress dates. (Okay, so that last part isn't true. Physicists aren't known for their love lives.)

This is even going to relate to class by the time I'm through. Here's a cool youtube video to explain Heisenberg's uncertainty principle:

So essentially, science proved a limit to what science can do. We can know an electron's position and we can know its momentum, but not both at the same time. And the more we know of one, the less we can be certain about the other.

We're Gonna Compute Like It's 1995

One of the textbooks I was assigned to read is Life on the Screen, by Dr. Sherry Turkle. She's a psychotherapist and taught at MIT for twenty years, so she's uniquely prepared at address the subject. I began reading it, interested to learn if (and if yes, then to what degree) computers were sucking out my soul.

Near the beginning of the book she describes the psychology involved in playing online multiplayer games. I'm with you, Dr. Turkle, I think to myself. World of Warcrft, I expect her to say next. But no, the games she begins describing are TEXT-BASED. Incredulous, I turned to the front of my ebook. Copyright 1995?

I couldn't believe a textbook involving computers that was printed 12 years ago could still be relevant. Fortunately I decided to press on, and was rewarded to see that Turkle had identified important insights that have actually become more relevant. (She accurately saw the direction computer dedvelopment was going.)

Here's a point of hers that I found interesting:

 From the days of Babbage's analytical engine and into the 1980s people had viewed computers with the philosophy of modernism. By modernism she means that assumption the Western world has had since the Renaissance that everything in the universe (and certainly our world) can be categorized, broken into its component parts, and fully understood if studied properly. The world was a system of gears, pulleys, and levers waiting to be discovered, cataloged, and manipulated.

Forget Answers; I Want Questions

Lately I find myself reading for the sake of obtaining information. This appears to be a good idea, but in fact, I suspect it is not the most effective way to gain wisdom and knowledge. There is an abundance of accessible information in the world. Finding answers isn't the hard part, asking good questions is.

Here's an example. Right now one of the books I'm reading (I usually read about three at a time, cycling between them on whims) is Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. It's a non-fiction book about Orwell's experience as a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War/Attempted Revolution of the 1930s. Why am I reading it? Because the National Review listed it as one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the century and it's less than 200 pages, so I figured I could finish it quickly. The book could have been about nearly anything and I would have read it if it met those two criteria (another factor is that I obtained it deeply discounted as a discontinued textbook.) I didn't even know that Spain had had a civil war ever. I just figured whatever I learned reading this book would be useful to me.

I am right about that, I think. What I learn will be useful. And I find the book mildly interesting. But I can't escape the suspicion that I would be better off using what I already know to ask pointed questions about the world, or really, any subject. I could find sources with with to research the answer easily, and my reading would have more purpose. My current process is passive; the questioning process requires activity and effort. (Both, of course, are better than watching TV all day, so I can feel good about that.)

Hello Digital Civilization community. I'm Gabriel, but you can call me Gabe. I'm a late addition to this class, but glad to be here nonetheless. Ariel--we go way back--got me interested in this class. I'm not always certain that much of what people post on their blogs is worth anyone's time (it is so precious.) But I readily acknowledge that there are some posts that are valuable additions to the potion of humanity that they reach. I am not certain that my own posts will be worth your reading, but I they may well be. Uncertainty is before us. Anyway, I'm not the one in charge of your time. I'm just going to throw what I've got into our conversations and see what happens.

So, the 17th century...Good times. I don't know much about it specifically off of the top of my head.

So after a brief refresher by Wikipedia's 17th Century page, I still feel fairly uninformed about the subject. Colonization of the Americas--that was big. The North American colonies that would become the United States of America are a hopeful element In bitter contrast is the exponential expansion of the slave trade. It was bad in North America but nowhere near as bad as the South American mining outfits. Some great thinkers came during the 1700s. Sir Isaac Newton's laws of physics and articulation of the influence of gravity were, of course, scientific breakthroughs on a grand scale. Only within the last century--with the studies done in modern physics--are we beginning to see holes in his principles.