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A Metaplace townhall on April 30 with Louisiana State Legislators
We’ve just returned from a fascinating townhall in Metaplace, featuring Louisiana State Representative Nancy Landry, Louisiana Superintendent of Education, Paul Pastorek and Metaplace founder and President, Raph Koster in conversation with a group of Louisiana middle school students. The event was organized by 3D Squared and F. Margret Atkinson.
The conversation covered an enthusiastic and informed cross-section of topics including how politics work and the future of digital education in Louisiana. Raph Koster began with an important point: “I think the thing that most strikes me about an event like this is the fact that citizenship is the same whether it exists in the real world or a digital framework.”
Coincidentally, the Louisiana State Legislature and the Office of Governor Bobby Jindal is discussing this very week the future of Louisiana’s digital education investment strategy. The legislature has added language to support and augment the work of 3D Squared and LITE (about which Rita J. King wrote recently in VentureBeat). But the funding is not guaranteed. Based on the powerful, transformative experience we just had attending the Digital Workforce Initiative, we believe that the kind of work that 3D Squared and LITE are doing is critical in helping to prepare students for work in a 21st Century Economy. The concept is so powerful and visionary, we believe it can serve as a template for national and global economic and educational transformation.
There are a couple of key Louisiana legislators who will have an impact on whether LITE and 3D Squared receives funding for next year. We encourage you to contact them and tell them to vote in support of renewing funding for LITE and 3D Squared.
Rep. Karen Carter Peterson
larep093@legis.state.la.us
Mike Michot
Louisiana Senate Finance Chairman
mmichot@legis.state.la.us
Rep. Paige Cortez
pcortez@stomas.com
Steven Moret
Louisiana Secretary of Economic Development
moret@la.gov
Raph Koster offered these words at the end of the discussion: “[A]s our society’s tech capabilities grow, I think it’s wonderful to see that our society — and legislators — and principals and school superintendents, and teachers — are willing to invest in that literacy so that future voters, citizens, will be able to participate to the best of their ability using this new technology.” (Raph also blogged about his experience here.)
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It's not Facebook, but ... Images from NATO's new marketing campaign in Washington, DC.
By Joshua S. Fouts
Posters like the above appeared throughout the DC Metro system today featuring NATO troops working with Afghanis with titles highlighting themes like “Working for Peace,” “Defending Freedom,” and “Securing Afghanistan’s Future.”
NATO has launched the marketing campaign, ostensibly, to celebrate their 60th Anniversary Summit this April 3-4, but also to recast its image in the eyes of the US public.
NATO poster "Securing Afghanistan's Future"
I caught up via email with James Snyder at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Snyder is NATO’s Information Officer for Denmark, Norway and the United States. “This [Public Diplomacy] campaign … is the first time we have ever done something like direct marketing — which is standard operating procedure for corporations, governments and NGOs and IOs alike.”
Snyder explained that NATO wasn’t planning on including any kind of new media outreach program just yet, “We’ve talked a lot about new technologies and engagements,” he said, but since NATO has no real collective presence on either Facebook or LinkedIn, we shouldn’t expect to see them reaching out communities in anything other than the physical world.
NATO's "Working for Peace" poster
After a year immersed in Muslim-focused communities in the virtual world of Second Life, we believe it is critical that organizations with the size, scope and importance of NATO consider a comprehensive outreach effort targeting not only the mainstream policy types in Washington, DC but also a new generation of social leaders who are cultivating growing and influential communities far off the beaten path of the DC Metro. These communities have the power to augment and influence opinion in a highly focused way.
Walking the streets of London this week, we noted again and again how geopolitics play into cultural identity. When one is in Europe, one feels much more connected with the world than one does in the US. Part of this is geography: The US is effectively an island divided from the Europe and Asia by two oceans. Part of it is cultural: The news media in the US reports as though the US population lived on a planet all its own. But this is not the same in virtual worlds. Access to cultures, languages and communities is instant and transformative. NATO is often at the frontlines of cultural engagement — especially in their peacekeeping movements. The communities NATO troops encounter, though in the physical world, often have members who have connections to some digital identity and community. As the world transitions into a new global culture and economy, this will only increase. To do their job effectively, they must engage both the physical and the digital. We commend NATO for taking this first step toward outreach in the US and hope that they will move swiftly to expand their efforts to the vibrant digital communities around the world.
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Dead Sea Newspaper by Inju.
By Rita J. King
“Society doesn’t need newspapers,” Clay Shirky wrote in his remarkable essay,“Newspapers and the Unthinkable.” “What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.”
It should be noted now, as the process of transformation gets underway, that it must include transitioning the news-gathering public from a passive, anonymous crowd into a savvy team of operators, willing and able to actively respond to challenges and opportunities for meaningful action. This is where digital media has the clear advantage on tree-based news distribution, and where the most potential lies for attracting funders.
As Clay notes in his essay, journalism is always subsidized, one way or another. Funding models are changing, but that can be extremely positive given the lack of focus on critical issues such as climate change, pollution, social hazard and injustice that occurs when reporters, editors, producers and publishers are beholden to advertisers.
Digital media allow for a mix of perspectives, the ability to update, delete, correct, streamline, post fragments, ideas, immersive and participatory media across language, geopolitical, socioeconomic, generational and physical barriers. This new opportunity to share important information in real-time can mean the difference between life and death, which, ultimately, is a journalist’s main mission: to inform the public about burgeoning trends, issues and ripples before full escalation of violence or societal breakdown occurs, or–at least–so the process can occur more mindfully.
Experiencing the Unthinkable Makes it Less Unthinkable
After years as a journalist, I made a switch in 2006 from print to digital. My company, Dancing Ink Productions, is now two years deep into our journalistic experiment. Our most recent work (short documentary forthcoming in April) is a major virtual newsroom project with the American University in Cairo’s Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research, led by war journalist, author and longtime Middle East correspondent Lawrence Pintak.
By way of background; I have been a journalist since 2000. My photographs, essays, articles, interviews and features about my work have appeared in multimedia around the world, including The New York Times, CNN, TIME, Wired, Boing Boing and NPR. My first major publication was in 2001, when my story, “Terms of Service: Sweaty Scenes from the Life of an AOL Censor” appeared on the cover of the Village Voice.
In 2006, I spent 6 months investigating post-Katrina corporate profiteering in the Gulf Coast, researching and reporting on widespread cronyism and corruption. This was a freelance gig in addition to my full-time job as a beat reporter on the old, leaky Indian Point nuclear power plant, over which terrorists flew on 9/11, and blueprints for which were found in a cave in Afghanistan.
I have covered scores of town and school board meetings in my day, and I’ve also interviewed dozens of people who have changed the world for better or worse, including George Plimpton, Ari Fleischer, Cal Ripken Jr. and my favorite interview of all time, Malik Rahim, a former member of the Black Panthers who served a stint on death row in the 1970’s after a shootout with cops at the Desire community in New Orleans. Malik Rahim is now instrumental in a segment of the rebuilding effort. Though he was shot at in Vietnam and did time on death row, nothing, he said, could have prepared him for the four days of renegade wilding that took place in the immediate aftermath of the storm and flood.
I’ve attended Congressional hearings on the nuclear industry and I even sprung a nun from the clink when she finished her prison stint for civil disobedience so I could interview her while the experience was still fresh in her mind. My career as a journalist has been one of the greatest sources of meaningful transformation in my life. I am committed to the profession, which is why I undertook a complete professional redesign in 2006.
There was never enough space in print to tell the whole story, and always an unsatisfying feeling of finality, that somehow, once the words were on paper and sent out into the world that there was no way to connect the people who might be able to take action to combat the very issue investigated on those static pages. On the other hand, not everyone has access to the Internet. The demise of print should catalyze an intense focus on widening broadband penetration and availability of equipment so that access to news doesn’t become an insurmountable socioeconomic chasm.
Yes, the industry saw the Internet coming, but more in the way a smoker is unable to completely envision possible emphysema one distant day while continuing to light up.
“When reality is labeled unthinkable,” wrote Clay Shirky, “it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.”
Sliding into the Digital Realm
I started off as a beat reporter in a two-weeklies town. In the beginning, my editor taught me how to use my old metal-body Minolta camera. He taught me how to get a feel for shadow and shine, a skill which soon became obsolete, more or less, when we switched to cheap little digital cameras with bad blurry lag. Soon after, The New York Times Travel Section put me on a photography assignment. I remember my relief, during that initial conversation with the editor, at having already made the transition to digital. I assumed that the Times had already done so, but I was wrong. Digital images were not considered acceptable. Only slides would suffice. That was only seven years ago.
Andy Carvin of NPR tweeted today that newspapers were in trouble the first time somebody copied and pasted an article and sent it out to friends.
The people who are committed to saving newspapers are demanding to know, Clay wrote, “‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”
It’s true that a general model hasn’t yet been developed, given the suddenness with which the diagnosis of print-death struck, but that doesn’t mean that nothing will work. After all, it was only just this year that the Pulitzers started to recognize digital publications on par with print, largely due to Dan Gillmor’s excellent guidance on the subject.
Tapping into HIVE MIND
“HIVE MIND” is a term John Hodgman uses to describe people who use the platform Twitter to connect in real time 140 character bursts from airplanes, bathrooms, parties, conferences, classes, restaurants, war zones, and private roof decks. From anywhere. Journalists can tap into HIVE MIND as a source now. The “death” of print, as melancholy as it is for complicated reasons mostly related to the ceaseless, rapid transformation of society at this time, will not kill the profession of journalism.
In order to thrive in this climate, an investigative reporting outfit needs to go deeper on reports, stop working from press releases and official statements, which are helpful, but not the end of the trail, dig harder for new sources, cultivate a new sense of what “news” is, and invest in serious investigations. It sounds like a lot, but it’s only the beginning. The most important new responsibility is to correctly identify the target audience to connect information with those most likely to take action and affect the situation or benefit directly from the knowledge, as well as to connect potential funders with relevant potential consumers and thus rebuild those lethargic critical relationships.
“That is what real revolutions are like,” Clay wrote. “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place…Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…”
The Evolution of Journalism
My prediction is that journalism, as a field, is going to emerge stronger than ever before, with better sources, smarter application of social media and more serious long-term investigation funded in innovative new ways. The models that have been floated most broadly so far smack of lackluster imagination and vision. The failure to create widespread adoption of half-baked ideas is not a harbinger of death for journalism, but rather a clear signal that innovation hasn’t peaked in sync with the crisis. The fact is, being a journalist doesn’t pay well for most, so the business model has been anemic for a long time. New funding models that recognize the dedication and danger of the profession as well as the necessity for support will energize the entire field.
It isn’t just a matter of the long hours spent in total isolation hunched up a keyboard, or the mind for mathematical analysis required to decipher complex economic factors or geopolitical conflict, etc., that sets hardcore journalists apart. Journalism can be lethal, especially for those committed to taking it all the way to theaters of war and destruction. Eventually, many journalists are forced to make a decision whether or not a story is worth one’s life. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, between January 1, 1992—December 31, 2008: 722 journalists were killed while working.
Journalists, as Clay points out, do a lot of society’s heavy lifting. One of the most significant pieces of the changing relationship in the field isn’t just between journalists and dying publications, but between reporters and the public they serve. An increased commitment from the public will benefit the development of journalism and will serve to attract conscientious funders.
The lack of willingness to spend on banner ads shouldn’t come as a surprise. When advertisers are offered the opportunity to sponsor exciting mixed media, mixed purpose content, such as data visualization maps that share important information in a groundbreaking and memorable way, they might be willing to come back to the table.
A Major Hint About the Future
“When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today,” Clay wrote, “isn’t the same as what used to work.”
No one experiment, Clay wrote, is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, “but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.”
The word “unthinkable” in the essay’s title also serves as a major hint, at least, how I interpret it, about the way journalism ought to function. Journalists aren’t supposed to sit back and wait for public approval ratings. Journalists are supposed to investigate the unthinkable, and report it along the way, whether there’s a news hook or not. Announcing that there’s been a complete collapse of the economy as we know it, with no focus on the red flags leading up to that stunning, sudden moment of collective awareness, is a complete failure of the entire journalistic machine, particularly for those outfits with the sway to have made a difference when it mattered. But would the public have really paid attention? Now, with a process of assessment underway, is the time to strike up an energetic, action-oriented framework for the rebuilding effort.
It’s likely that the profession will greatly benefit from the addition of new analytical thinkers and analysts as talent moves across boundaries in a shifting economy. For a clear example of what I mean, watch “Credit Crisis Visualized,” by the talented Jonathan Jarvis.
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Frank Rose this morning in NYC, where he interviewed us as he works on his book, "Welcome to the Hyperdrome."
By Rita J. King
Frank Rose, author and contributing editor at WIRED since 1999, is exploring what kind of storytelling is native to the Internet and reporting on people who are tackling that problem.
“I don’t think anybody has nailed it yet,” he said, pointing out that it always takes decades after the invention of a mechanism that makes a new narrative possible for people to use it to its fullest. 30 years after TV, the sitcom emerged. 30 years after cameras came feature films. The first novels didn’t hit shelves until 200 years after the invention of the printing press.
The difference now, in the digital culture, is that it is no longer clear where the line lies between the storyteller and the audience.
“It’s hard to conceptualize that,” Frank said, noting that games are becoming more narrative-based, and narratives are becoming more game-like: participatory and non-linear.
Because of Dancing Ink Productions’ work in the digital culture, I’ve come to see the physical world on some level as a game, which doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be taken seriously–quite the opposite. It means, among other things, that through participating in virtual worlds and game culture I’m learning to compartmentalize my dashboard to take quick inventory of areas of strength and weakness for rapid transformation in the face of challenge and collaboration. A collective narrative of participation will create a sense of fun and play around even the most serious issues now riddled with a foreboding, dense or at best, academic pallor. People might actually come to genuinely enjoy working long hours together on difficult, nuanced issues that affect the outcome of human history.
Participating in the new global culture and economy through the emerging collective narrative allows us to become protagonists in our own stories and, I believe, will contribute to the evolution of human consciousness by encouraging the development of more compelling content, which will translate directly back into an improved physical world. Play for a while, and it becomes clear that there’s nothing more empty than willingly taking on the role of a Non-Player Character in your own life and in the world.
