The Obvious?

Regent St. London Open Coffee Club Meetup,

Sam Sethi mentioned that Saul Klein was setting this up when I bumped into at the Nesta Uploading event yesterday. I am, at the last minute, going to be in Amsterdam and can't make the first one tomorrow but hope to get to some in the future

Is it just technology?

I am currently reading Lewis Wolpert's book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast in which he suggests that it was the need to develop tools and feed ourselves that caused the human brain to evolve the ability to think causally rather than the desire to be social as is commonly believed.

Briefly - and over simplifying horrendously - as slime develops into an organism that develops an eye to find food the eye needs somewhere for its signals to be processed. When you start to add ears to hear, mouths to taste and limbs which can touch you need an ever more complex brain to process these inputs to allow food to be found more effectively. Once you get to the stage of understanding causality you are on the way to the capacity for thought, language and social understanding that distinguishes us from the rest of life on the planet.

I started wondering what would happen if we applied these ideas to our assumptions about technology and in particular social computing and Web 2.0. We tend to be a bit squeamish about the technology and subordinate it to the social activities it supports but what if the technology was actually teaching us new behaviours? What if the development of new tools and new technological environments began to actually change the way we think and eventually to alter the way our brains work?

The Boss Delusion

I have just finished reading Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion and have to say I enjoyed it. There was little in there that wasn't familiar and little I didn't agree with. However his style can be counterproductive at times and he comes across as snide and arrogant which I am sure does little for his chances of reaching the faithful and making them question their beliefs.

What occurred to me though was how many of the ideas in the book could be applied to managers and the belief system that supports them. The parallels are no accident, given the emphasis on dogma and hierarchy that is largely inherited from religion, and the disfunction that they both bring about by making it easier for people not to think for themselves has serious consequences.

Uploading Innovation

Spent the afternoon at the above named event and had a great time meeting and listening to an inspiring bunch of people. One of the highlights was to finally get to meet Ewan McIntosh as our paths have been crossing virtually for some time.

Technorati Tags: nestauploading

More subtle than smacking each other

While passing USS Nimitz, one of the US's massive nuclear aircraft carriers, I had an overwhelming sense of being struck really hard in the face by a huge fist. I then commented to those with me that, while that was impressive, it was fuck all use in the "war" against terror.

While in Washington I had a conversation about the possibility of winning conflicts without having to resort to physical combat.

I then, independently, had the later conversation referred to below about the possibility of geek inventiveness being put to this sort of use.

Dave Snowden points today to a book by a friend of his from which the following line is taken:

Knowledge, rather than power, is the only weapon that can prevail in a complex and uncertain environment awash with asymmetric threats, some known, many currently unknown.

In the long term I prefer to work towards the idealistic goal of avoiding global conflict by realising that there is more than enough stuff, space and shared interest for us all to live together on this planet without making people miserable enough to start punching each other. However I am also realistic enough to realise that this will take some time and that in the meantime subtler ways of containing and managing conflict would seem a good idea.

Better IMHO than this insanity.

"Free public wifi"

I'd been wondering why these had been turning up on my wifi options.

Frozen Washington

 

This was taken from a moving taxi on my Noka N70 and sadly, given it's random and unplanned nature, is one of my favourite photos.

Rosen, Semple, Jarvis

Good company indeed. Andy Carvin has been posting various videos and still from our two days with NPR including this montage.

A good question

I've just been having a drink here in Washington with Doc Searls and J.J. Sutherland, a producer from NPR, who spends way too much of his time in Baghdad.

Doc and I were waxing lyrical about the web and it's potential to do good in the world and J.J. asked why even a little of the effort that has gone into the many, many open source projects could not have been directed to making it harder for the web to be used to spread terror.

We didn't have a good answer - do any of you?

When is an audience not an audience?

During our session here at the NPR Social Media Advisory Group Jay Rosen just pointed out that in a mass media world the audience is atomised. They have no easy connection to each other. In a connected world the costs of them connecting to each other is trivial and this fundamentally changes the relationship between broadcasters and their audiences. He is talking about applying "open source wisdom" with his site NewAssignment.net which he described as "Organising people horizontally using the internet to contribute and collaborate".

You would expect me to say this but this truth applies just as much inside organsations. Thus far most comms activity has been top down, one to many and in terms of ROI expensive. With social computing tools inside the enterprise "Organising people horizontally using the internet to contribute and collaborate" becomes trivially easy and cheap.