It's just me, the ghost in the machine, playing with bits of code again.  A little HTML here, a little OPML there...just what the average mother of two does to amuse herself when the kids have gone to bed. 

Sorry, no real content until tomorrow morning -- or unless the Muse strikes me in the middle of the night. 

9:47:16 PM    comment []

Bridging the gap – revisited

Looks like the Dean Team has a challenge ahead of it on the topic of minority outreach.  Several of us from venues across the U.S. have noticed weighting of the attendees at MeetUps towards middle-class whites who are politically active for the first time in their lives.

Being a person of color myself (who looks white), I’m in a rather awkward position.  I can readily see the problem, but I’m having a little difficulty getting the point across that there’s a hole that must be bridged, a hole that requires stretch from these newbies.

I’ve been contacting my friends of color from different segments of the population, to see if they can offer any feedback on how to solicit minority participation.

The following is extracted from an exchange between myself and a good friend; she was born in Hong Kong and became a naturalized U.S. citizen.  She’s a manager for a Fortune 100 company now, having worked her way up from the bottom to the lower rungs of upper management over 25 years with the company.  So how do we promote minority participation, I asked her.

“…getting minority to participate in political issues have been a challenge with exception on targeted representation for specific candidates (e.g. African-American issues etc).  Asian are typically NOT engaged other than perhaps, San Francisco in community areas. Last time in LA,,, we got Al Gore in trouble.  That being said: thinking of where you are and presumably targeting [my state's] audience:

1) What's the offer (from Howard) and how do they relate to minorities and our goals ?

2) What's the ramification if minorities don’t engage? (further gap in salary; lack of participation / representation)

3) Remind us of the opportunity as American to mold the country policy as well as the obligation/ responsibilities that come with it (you'll be surprise how much minorities other than AA abstain from voting ) 

Asians are generally a group of very affluent (even ones with lower education), and in the professional group...high achievers. Think about which group you want / how to target... and figure out how Dean’s offer can match up. Don’t think wild hair idea would scare Asian off... remember we and our ancestors had to encounter much difficulties and exercise alternative solutions / options to get where we are today. We are highly adaptable. We have to be convinced (conservative) but we are the first to engage (building the railroad) to achieve our goal. 

Hopefully this gives you some ideas to build your plan…”

Next feedback I’m expecting will be from friends who are black female Americans.  I’m looking forward to compiling all this feedback into a game plan!

7:00:50 PM    comment []

(Read the this morning’s installment belowif you want this rambling bit to make any sense at all, although that’s not guaranteed to happen whether you read the morning bit or not.)

I might have spent too much time within earshot of NPR this morning; the local station featured an interview with Julian Paul Keenan on the nature of consciousness and self-awareness.  Keenan’s recent research suggests that our sense of self, indeed our very selves, lie within the right hemisphere of our brains.  Keenan suggested in previous writings that science itself has a bias for nearly two millenia towards the left brain; earlier theorists proposed that the most important half of the brain was the seat of language, the left brain.  

Perhaps the roots of our conflicts about blogging as a form of communication lie in this schism.  Our left brains talk a good game, but we’re not there; we’re where language may not reside.

Wow, that’s a bit of a leap, you might think.  Is it?  Consider the nature of the internet and its applications; email and webpages are static, unchanging and purposeful, push and pull transmissions of data.  Blogging, on the other hand, is not just a place to accumulate information and language, but the opportunity freely express our creativity, freely express ourselves.

Free.  Freedom.

We’re continually at war with ourselves, each half of the brain acting with a degree of independence.  Each half needing to express itself to realize its own agenda, fulfill its own missions based on its expertise.  It could explain adoption of different types of communication as we swing between right and left brains: left, making happy with cell phones and email, right, now happier with blogging.  Each half now more free to realize its potential – empowered, as Microdoc argues today.

Yet both halves of the brain ultimately work toward a greater mission on part of a greater whole: the development and emergence of the human species, the growth of its hardware and software, genome and menome (by which I mean the aggregate knowledge of the human species not hardwired in its genetics).  It is the freedom of the human genome and its corresponding menome that is in question as we ask why any communication methodology becomes successful.  We know that through a number of theoretical methods that nature resolves challenges through continuous tweaking of genetic material.  We became agrarian; our teeth changed.  We left the trees; our legs accommodated our need to move quickly, upright.  The genome is fluid, ever changing.  It is free to move as it will; when restricted, it finds away to get around the restriction.  It will be free.

The menome supporting the genome must also be free to change and move in the same manner; it cannot be restricted for long or it too, will find a way around and over impediment.

In tandem, the hardware and software, the genome and menome of the species have reached a place of ultimate freedom; they reject restrictions of place and time whenever they arise.  To what end do the genome/menome move?  We cannot say – but move they will, as freely as possible.  They move towards the greatest degree of freedom; in the case of communications, towards that which is most freely available and distributed, affords the most freedom to either the genome or the menome. 

Hence blogging.  Unrestricted by time and space, unconfined to objectives except by choice, now unfettered by the requirement of coding knowledge.  Vox populi.

(Hence my disgust with AOL Journals, which allows the least freedom of blogging platforms with which I've tinkered.)

Can we not model outcomes as new communications methods like blogging are introduced?  It seems as if we could, especially with computing power available and our understanding of cellular automata.  We should be able to see a repetition of the same pattern each time a new communication methodology or technology – a new vehicle of movement for the menome – emerges commercially.  Can we predict the rate of adoption, rate of growth, length of success as a dominant methodology, based in part on the brain half that is favored by the methodology?  Or based on the kinds of data that are transmitted?

There’s still something here in all this blogging mess, from MT to TypePad to Radio, Blogger to AOL Journals, etc.  Can you see it?  Do you have some expertise in social software, psychology and human emergence from which you can direct me?  There’s something here I can’t quite get my hands around; my right brain continues it’s insistence that there’s more to all this than mere economics. 

Unfortunately my left brain refuses to discuss the matter any further – at least for the moment.

12:42:18 PM    comment []

Clay Shirky and Tom Coates have some estimable thoughts on the phenomenon of blogging and its impact on the internet and publishing.  Worth reading every bit of their seminal posts on this topic.

I’m not certain I can subscribe to blogging merely being another novel function of economics, a value-breaking/-resetting activity as it spreads through out the internet.  There’s something more to this than competition with other outlets for the written word; there’s a fundamental underlying process we’re not analyzing as we move closer to the universal ubiquity of blogging.

In past metablogging on the topic, I’ve maintained that blogging is an extension of communication.  It fills a gap not met by chat, email or threaded conversation (BBS, what have you).  There is a need for something that’s not real time like chat, as dismissively short or hyper-functional as email, as cumbersome as threaded conversations.  Like other forms of communication, it’s only natural that all humans will participate or get access to participation if they find a new form of communication an improvement over other forms.  Blogging may be that new form (until something better comes along).

Why is this so fundamental to communication?  What is it that is so essential to the free flow of information that we cannot stop the vehicles that suit communication best?

Cell phones spread in much the same fashion as weblogs.  Once only a handful of people had them; now they are omnipresent.  You can’t swing a stick without hitting someone using a cell phone any more, let alone hit multiple people who own one or more.  At the time they were introduced they weren’t thought of as a replacement for plain old telephone service (POTS).  They were for communications between people who could not access POTS, by virtue of distance or by virtue of mobility.  Cell phones are now usurping POTS, making POTS less and less appealing and at some point more expensive than cell phone service.  It wasn’t just the coolness and new-toyness of the technology that encouraged the popularity of cell phones; it was the freedom they offered their users, even at a premium to widely available POTS. 

As in blogging, the business model for cell phone service gets a little shaky.  How does a company make a profit in an industry that is in a constant state of flux and still competes with a fallback methodology?  In parallel, where is the money in blogging, if other forms of communication are still viable – does this really differ from the cell phone business model?

Enter AOL with its Journals into the blogging fray.  Talk about mass amateurization!  It’s as if AOL deliberately sought a methodology to ensure amateurization, the propagation of mediocrity through its uber-interface.  Sure, we can rant (and I have, ad nauseum) about the quality of service that Journals offer.  We can hash about the mediocrity of the community Journals will launch (has launched, if you’ve looked).  We wring our hands: what a dreadful blow to the business of writing, this massive flood of amateurs of biblical proportions, trampling the value of writings, heaping mountains Journals on top of mountains of blogs.

Bah.

We’re missing something fundamental here about the nature of communication, else we would have seen and predicted the hardware/software parallels in emergence between technology like cell phones and blogging.  Sure, the economics at work mirror the maxim, information wants to be free, but there’s more to it than the freedom of data to move from point A to point B.  It’s the freedom of the humans at Points A and B to make, transfer, receive information that is fundamental.  Data of its own has no value; communication of empty bits and bytes is worthless.   It is the interpretation and perception of the information communicated by humans that gives it value.  It is the freedom of the humans to gather and interpret information that is in question.

Is it the freedom that blogging offers us that makes it so appealing, so viral?

There’s more to be said, but I’m still mulling it over.  I’d be glad to hear your two-cents on this.

9:16:25 AM    comment []