Subject: Risks of Doing Homework

At the faculty meeting at Bryn Mawr College on 12 Feb 2003, we were informed that a student at Haverford (our affiliated College) was arrested over the weekend when he was trying to do his homework assignment in Philadelphia. As part of the Cities project, he was taking photographs of SEPTA (our regional transit authority) facilities when he was arrested, detained for a few hours, and eventually released. Haverford administration is working to try to ensure that this event not be a part of the student's permanent police record. Apparently taking photographs at transit facilities is cause for arrest during "Code Orange" alert, the authorities explained. Faculty were advised to be careful about assigning "field trip" projects during such alerts.

Rights...

• What about photojournalism?
• A citizen's right and duty to oversee their government?
• Right to assemble peaceably in public spaces?

Technology...

• What do you do when everyone has a mobile phone and every mobile phone has a webcam?

Some wiseacre on HR Gateway.com is telling everyone that branding your business to potential employees is old hat and off the mark.

Staying ahead means forgetting about the ‘bizarre idea’ of employee branding. It is a matter of reputation management, fluidity and offering employees what they want:

"Employee branding is consigned to where it should be: the garbage can. You can brand your business, your products, your service, but not your people. They belong to themselves, not you. Remember they want to be themselves at work.

"My advice is: don’t stick labels on talent, they don’t really want it and they won’t thank you for it. If they feel good about your business they’ll let you know and they’ll tell others on their own terms, not yours," concludes Johnson.

Do I hear Gonzo Marketing in the wind?

I'm rolling through my email while TiVo plays back Gold Diggers of 1933. It's the Great Depression. Opening number has a young Ginger Rogers singing "We're In The Money". Third verse and chorus in another language. My ear furiously goes through the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic tongues. Then it hits me. Ginger Rogers is headlining a major motion picture in Pig Latin. With a straight face.

Surreal.

I wanted to share the surreal experience with you. But I don't have a way to get those 60 seconds of video off my TiVo, into my PC, and convert them to mpeg or mp3.

The first movie TiVo automatically recorded for me? Groundhog Day. If you know the film, you understand why it's the perfect TiVo movie.

Joichi Ito's political philosophy of the Internet, Emergent Democracy Paper 1.0, is up for comment.

The proponents of the Internet have promised and hoped that the Internet would become more intelligent, enable a direct democracy and help rectify the injustices and inequalities of the world. Instead, the Internet today is a noisy place with a great deal of power consolidation instead of the flat democratic Internet many envisioned.

... We are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet. This awakening will facilitate the anticipated political model enabled by technology to support some of the basic attributes of democracy, which have eroded as power has become concentrated within corporations and governments. It is possible that new technologies may enable a higher-level order through emergent properties, which will enable a form of emergent direct democracy capable of managing complex issues more effectively than the current form of representative democracy.

The outline:

1. Democracy
1. Competition of ideas
2. Critical debate and freedom of speech
3. The commons
4. Privacy
5. Representative democracy versus direct democracy
2. Emergence
1. Weblogs and emergence
2. The Power Law
3. Mayfield's Ecosystem
4. The Strength of Weak Ties
5. The brain and excitatory networks
6. Trust
7. The toolmakers
3. Where are we today?
4. Conclusion

Ito's conclusion in whole:

The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. The issues are too complex for representative governments to understand. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are also very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and their increasingly simplistic representation of the world can not provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers will build the tools necessary for an emergent democracy if the people support the effort and resist those who try to stifle this effort and destroy the commons.

We must make spectrum open and available to the people, resist increasing control of intellectual property, and resist the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must encourage everyone to think for themselves, question authority and participate actively in the emerging weblog culture as a builder, a writer, a voter and a human being with a point of view, active in their local community and concerned about the world.

I understand but am not convinced.

It's true: the net bridges distance, helps locate fellow travelers, shifts time, lowers communication costs, and helps some things happen faster.

Offline community happened first. People connect, form groups, form goals, coordinate action. Without the Internet. So many other forms of social organization happen in the off-line world. Non-democratic forms. Kleptocrats, warlords, dictators, and oligarchs rule more than a billion people.

What makes you believe that more/better/faster communication will tip those societies toward democracy? Even if democracy emerges in small groups, what makes you believe that democracy inevitably scales up?

I believe that the net, including blogspace, is a medium. People bring their offline values and cultural norms. If you respect authority offline, why would that change online? If you can get shot for offline public dissent, wouldn't you also expect to be shot for online dissent?

The personal computer revolution of the 1980s truly decentralized computing power. Out of the glass room, onto the desktop and into the home. It helped farmers plan swine feed rotations and gamblers calculate the odds. It helped drug dealers and restauranteurs manage portions. It helped police catch crooks and secret police make citizens disappear.  

What makes you believe the net is more democratizing than other forces?