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.