Notable » Across the pond

Power shift through sharing – Web 2.0 leveraged

Christine Sætre — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:50:11 +0000

A revolution doesn’t happen when a society adopts new tools, a revolution occurs when a society adopts new behaviors.

This applies as much to an organization as it does to society at large. The well-made UsNow video introduces the power and utility of social media to the unfamiliar, but will appeal to the well initiated as well. Need to demonstrate or explain why the Web 2.0 functionality adoption in your next recommendation is not about the technology, but about ideas and cooperation? (not to mention tapping into resources and systematizing informal knowledge) Start with the just first few minutes of this video.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Some additional quotes from the opening few minutes:

More people can say more things to more people than ever in history, and that is still growing enormously. … So if you can create an encyclopedia with millions of people you never met … what else could you create? … These tools have lowered the cost of doing things to the point where our desire to engage with one another is enough to get things to happen on a large social scale rather than a smaller family scale. … The web can create large communities of informal knowledge, systematize that and make it very useful.

No jingles to take the edge off

Christine Sætre — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:35:40 +0000

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s guest appearance on the Daily Show was immensely entertaining. Far beyond the typical academic, Goodwin is a great story teller, who just draws one in. Ever ask where are all those who would be statesmen? Or sigh and shrug in disgust thinking politics is dirtier and more shallow than ever? Ha! Apparently we are right on par with the smear campaigns of the 19th century. What we don´t have is the songs.

… They used to have these great songs, like “I like Ike cause Ike is easy to like”. Oh and my favorite one is “Get on the raft with Taft”. Now Taft weighed 350 pounds and if you get on a raft with Taft, you’re gone. … Van Buren was corrupt, so the jingle was: “Who would for gain, his country sell, deserves the lowest place in hell. Van Buren.”

[ ... This campaign is ] no where near as dirty as the old campaigns. [...] When Thomas Jefferson ran, the other side, the Adams people, said he was a howling atheist …

About Doris Kearns -From doriskearnsgoodwin.com
Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, which was a bestseller in hardcover and trade paper. She is also the author of the bestsellers Wait Till Next Year, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Ms. Goodwin serves as an NBC-TV news analyst and lectures around the world.

Bearded nuts on the sidewalk

Christine Sætre — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:04:57 +0000

This year´s U.S. Presidential election is over, and whilst the world seems to draw a collective sigh of relief that President Elect Obama can speak complete sentences, comedian´s admit they are wondering what they will do after taking a fortnight´s worth of pause. This almost certainly goes for political pundits, as well as nightly news reporters en masse. What will they find to sensationalize next?

And I do mean sensationalize. Even here in this far northern corner of Europe, Norwegian reporters are getting more and more masterful at whipping up controversy and creating crisis. Rather than turn their backs on folly and those practices so evident on pseudo-journalistic shows like Bill O´Reilley´s No-Spin Zone, Norwegian media seems keen to embrace these questionable hype creation practices.

Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, studying political debates in conjunction with her doctoral thesis, stated recently in an NRK interview that debate programmes in Norway are staged and sometimes even misleading.

Political debate programs in Norway today, are characteristically very popularized and pretty tabloid. Producers want politicians who step it up a little, without too many reservations, who don´t refer too often to dry resolutions, numbers and statistics. It should be very simple, concrete, and it should pertain to the public.

We get a debate that is often more constructed than it is possible [for us] to be aware of. Journalists want a debate with high temperatures, and politicians know what journalists want, and ensure that their message is formulated in such a way as to get into the studio. — Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud. [ » Read the original interview Debatter kan lure seerne, 30.10.08, NRK.no]

In a speech many years ago, delivered to a crowd of California university students, Michael Crichton went so far as to say that there is no value in following the media coverage of today:

We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. — Michael Crichton [Speech entitled: Why Speculate, April 26, 2002]

Crichton’s speculative intellectual excercise is entertaining and witty (as his writing often was; and we can agree to disagree with him about the lack of evidence for global warming). While President Elect Obama’s honeymoon phase has provided a respite from the biting form of media speculation that reigned for the last decade, but not a reprieve from speculation entirely. As the world anticipates the Obama administration’s installation in January, the speculation is simply of a different character: upbeat and hopeful, like the man himself. (Actually, it is seldom one reads European news coverage and commentary concerning America’s roll and responsibility in the world, that is so harmonious and propitious as that of this last month.)

No one but McCain really envies President Elect Obama the challenges he is facing. The honeymoon will end —as they inevitably do—and when it ends the media climate will be a deciding factor in whether the new administration makes headway or not. Polarization, or the lack of it, will matter a great deal. Crichton put it this way:

Endless presentation of conflict may interfere with genuine issue resolution. There is evidence that the television foodfights not only don’t represent the views of most people-who are not so polarized-but may tend to make resolution of actual disputes more difficult in the real world. At the very least, they obscure the recognition that we resolve disputes every day. Compromise is much easier from relatively central positions than it is from extreme and hostile, conflicting positions.