"Evolution" Image credit: Barabeke

Nothing illustrates the tenets under which Dancing Ink Productions was formed and is working today than two new recent stories involving our pal Cory Doctorow. Congratulations to Cory for making it into the Establishment Zeitgeist. (Or are they now the Opposition Zeitgeist?) Either way, congratulations to Cory for making it into Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan Speechwriter Peggy Noonan‘s column today, “Remembering the Dawn of the Age of Abundance.” Noonan cites Cory’s February 17, 2009 BoingBoing post, “How are you coping with collapse-anxiety,” as an example of the transformation of our culture and economy. Noonan says:

The best report on how the young are experiencing it all came this week from the Web site Boing Boing, from the writer Cory Doctorow, who asked readers, “How are you coping with collapse-anxiety?” He wrote, “For me, I think it’s the suspense that’s the killer. What institutions will survive? Which ones are already doomed? Which of the items in my calendar are likely never to come to pass? Will my bank last?” He continued, “What are you telling yourself? How are you all sleeping at night? Are you hedging your bets with canned goods and shotguns, or plans for urban communal farming? Are you starting a business? Restructuring through bankruptcy? Moving back in with your parents?”

His readers wrote back, creating a stunning thread that said, essentially, all of the above, and more. They went from the wry—one reader is “drinking more . . . feeling disconnected from reality . . . watching more TV and movies”—to the tough—one said, “When the world turns crazy the crazy turn pro.” A number were moving in with relatives. In fact it sounded like the old days, before the abundance. Some were planting gardens. One said he was learning the ukulele so he could be a wandering minstrel. Mr. Doctorow told me the reaction was “stupendous” not only in terms of numbers but in terms of seriousness: These were people truly sharing their anxieties.

Cory’s post has a little over 220 comments on it at this time.

Cory also has a great new column in Information Week called, “Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium” that I’ve been meaning to blog about. It explores the current downturn in traditional media vis-a-vis the Internet. From the article:

Big-budget movies (BBMs) require a lot of capital and rely on studios controlling the rate and nature of distribution of the finished product. If you’re going to recoup your $300 million box-office turd, you need to move a hell of a lot of DVDs, TV licenses, foreign exhibition, Happy Meal toys, and assorted “secondary” revenues.
Let’s be realistic here: Nothing anyone does is going to make it harder to get movies when you want them, where you want them, and at whatever price you feel you should pay for them (including free). And the harder you crack down on Internet movie-downloading, the more attractive you make buying pirate DVDs from criminals on the street — a virtually zero-risk transaction that directly displaces DVD purchases.

As we have written extensively, the transformation of a new global culture and economy is setting up new opportunities for meaningful work based on a more authentic sense of self. We have used virtual worlds as a device for highlighting and exploring this evolution. The two items above are great examples of this.

Six years ago I sat down for lunch with Jesse Ausubel of the Lounsbery Foundation to explain to him an idea I had to explore the potential value of virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games for public diplomacy and cultural dialog.  I had recently left the State Department where I had spearheaded a number of new technology and public diplomacy projects.  I had noticed how collaborative acts of creativity and cultural dialog were appearing in new and exciting ways in online spaces, especially video games and virtual worlds.  And I wanted to help government understand that.

I was at USC at the time where I had just launched a foreign policy think tank and I told Jesse that what I wanted to generate was hard, quantitative data to prove the value of these spaces to policymakers.  Jesse offered me some words of advice that I’ve kept with me since then:  He told me that the Lounsbery Foundation was an activist organization and that the project, if it was to be supported by them, should focus on actions that demonstrate the value of the space.

He then shared with me a story about working with Will Wright on a version of Sim City called “Sim University” … Instead of learning about how to run the the university, which was the intent of the project, the players all attempted to bankrupt it.

Go to the players he said.  And so, instead of hiring students to collect data, we held a contest, called the “Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds Contest.”  We challenged players and game designers alike to explain to us how these spaces could be used for cultural understanding.  The winner of that contest,  Asi Burak, who designed the game “Peacemaker” is here today.

Fast forward to the design of the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project.  When Rita J. King and I decided to collaborate on this project, I described a series of activities we could create to help elicit ideas and data from the space, this included bringing US members of Congress into virtual worlds to discuss Islam.  Within weeks those ideas had already been done by various organizations and, Congress even had a  Hearing on Second Life.

I have a better idea, Rita told me, “Let’s make this a quest.”  For Rita, an investigative journalist by training, this was a natural approach.  She had just completed three grueling years worth of quests: A major investigative report exploring corporate profiteering in the Gulf Coast immediately after the devastation of hurricane Katrina in which she drove around the region in a rental car and described scenes that sounded to me like nothing short of a real life Lord of the Flies.  This was followed by a civil rights quest through the deep South.  And finally a quest into the virtual world of Second Life where she chronicled the development of IBM’s virtual universe community.

Rita’s expertise is in telling stories.  To be a good storyteller, you have to first be a good listener. And this project, at its heart is about listening and telling stories.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama launched the first public diplomacy campaign of his presidency by granting his first international interview to a non-US satellite television news station, Al Arabiya.  In doing this he effectively went over the leaders of the Middle East and spoke to the people .  And what he told them was that he wants to listen  “because all too often,” President Obama said “the United States starts by dictating … so let’s listen.”

This project at its foundation is about storytelling which is about understanding something new about the human condition.  Public Diplomacy, Cultural Diplomacy or Strategic Communication as it is also known, are efforts by governments, NGOs, and civil societies to tell their story to foreign publics. Too often public diplomacy is criticized for being too preachy and not listening.

The idea for Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project was hatched with a very specific idea in mind:  How could we learn about other cultures in an authentic, experiential space – specifically, how could we learn about cultures that self-identified as Muslim?  We chose Second Life for many reasons among them that it is the best internationally – more than 70% of its users are from outside the United States.

Our goal was to to see what we could learn about Islam — not by inviting particular people with particular perspectives into Second Life, but rather to follow the trail of what was already happening culturally in the space that might yield new insight about Islam.

Our work was a bona fide listening effort. Virtual worlds add a twist to that effort because you become a part of that narrative.  We went into communities in Second Life that either self-identified as Muslim or were self-declared efforts to better understand Islam, and we asked people about their stories. IWhat people are doing is building new narratives to find ways to coexist. That said, we are not Pollyannas, and Second Life is not a utopia. We encountered numerous situations where tense, impassioned dialogue occurred. But the virtual nature of the space provided an opportunity for people to find new ways to work through differences.

We met people from England, the United States, Libya, France, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, the Netherlands, Germany, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Qatar, Portugal, Canada, Mexico, the Russian province of north Ossetia, Indonesia, South Africa, Morocco, Japan, Israel, Jordan, Italy, and Spain. They took us into their virtual communities, houses, and mosques, invited us to fatwas, took us on a virtual hajj to Mecca, and discussed their perceptions of extremism, integration, creative collaboration, and cultural values.

As they shared their stories with us, they knew that we were creating a story of our own that included them as characters.

Rita J. King, CEO and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Production is working on a new project on V-Biz ROI.  We have created a special group in our Ning community called V-Biz ROI, which we invite you to join. This discussion forum will be used as a source for an article on v-biz ROI for a major publication that Rita J. King is presently writing. She will contact you if she plans to quote you directly or needs more information. The goal is to create a lively and thoughtful discussion about the nuances and obvious boons and pitfalls of v-biz ROI. Tell us as much as you can about your own work and what you’ve discovered and ask questions. Your time and thoughtfulness are greatly appreciated.

Dancing Ink Productions (DIP) is a full-service creative content and strategy company dedicated to the emergence of a new global culture and economy in the Imagination Age.

DIP works across multiple social media platforms and within virtual worlds to introduce organizations to the idea of sharing meaningful ideas and collaborating on cost-cutting, solutions to amplify creativity and innovation while bringing together geographically dispersed members of the evolving global workforce, culture and economy. For clients taking their first steps in the digital culture, we streamline the experience and create strategic plans for participation.  For experienced clients, such as IBM, the American University in Cairo, Manpower Inc. and Linden Lab, we collaborate on identifying and sharing a brand’s core narrative through creative mixed-media including data visualization and documentaries.

• Is your business enterprise group looking to cut costs on travel and at the same time faced with the necessity to amplify innovation and unify members of a geographically displaced workforce? Dancing Ink Productions provides creative development for simple, straightforward, mixed-media events from small meetings to digital conferences attended by hundreds or thousands of people who can communicate in real time. Our business enterprise clients include Linden Lab and Fortune 500 companies such as Manpower and IBM. We do strategic media outreach and work with journalists and editors to ensure that the brand’s campaigns and events are reviewed prior to coverage. Our projects have been covered by The New York Times (which featured a project DIP produced for IBM), New World Notes, Time.com, BBC Radio, Press-TV the Huffington Post and CNN SLi-Report.

• We produce mixed-media, mixed reality events. Dancing Ink Productions creates and produces memorable mixed-media, mixed reality events with strategic partners such as “LIVE FROM DOHA,” which took place at the US Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar in February 2008, and “BEING IN COMMON” which will take place at Gunpowder Park in Essex, UK on March 21-22, 2009. We have also given dozens of mixed media presentations including the Global Knowledge Partnership in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. If your group is looking to move your brand mission forward across multiple digital platforms and communities, Dancing Ink Productions will create a memorable event or campaign with mixed media deliverables to document and promote your effort and brand.

• Is your media group looking to explore the ongoing evolution of journalism? Dancing Ink Productions’s leadership combines decades of hard-hitting investigative journalism and substantive foreign policy analysis. We recently designed the Virtual Newsroom at the American University in Cairo’s Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Research and Training in the virtual world of Second Life and produced the Inaugural Broadcast featuring James K. Glassman US Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy. The forthcoming short documentary about this project will be featured at the “Reporting in Virtual Spaces” conference at Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow School. We are currently working on development strategy for interactive, mixed media advertising campaigns.

• Cultural Intelligence: Context is Key. Is your think-tank, NGO, university or not-for-profit looking to conduct research cultural and/or economic research across the digital culture? Dancing Ink Productions provides strategic guidance for shaping projects and also conducts full-scale projects with mixed media deliverables such as the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project done in collaboration with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, which investigated new forms of cultural dialog and digital diplomacy around Islam through a short documentary, policy recommendations and a graphic book. Or “The Emergence of a New Global Culture in the Imagination Age,” which was produced for The British Council as part of their TransAtlantic 2020 public diplomacy initiative.

The Internet is one virtual world fed by countless tributaries–platforms–that arise and fall and feed into one collective body. Like water, the Internet reflects physical reality but also contains a life of its own. We work at the intersection of physical and virtual reality. For more information, please contact Dancing Ink Productions.

The subject matter…is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is all things as they are.

-Wallace Stevens

Learn more about the Dancing Ink Productions team on our About Page.

Learn more about some of our recent work on our Projects page.

Contact Dancing Ink Productions.