So went down to the awesome E Street Cinema with @sassysbgal and The Boy Who Is Not On Twitter to a showing of the classic cyber-film "Hackers" starring a young Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller (dude, that laptop is SCREAMING with a 28.8 BPS modem!!). 

It was cool and nostalgic and I love it when Miller and Jolie were tossing out "PCI Bus" and "RISC" like they were deeply meaningful. 

@FutureTenseNow was ther organizer and @zephoria was kinda like the special guest star - danah was also nice enough to take some questions afterward and one was from someone who asked if she thouht that the term "hacker" could ever be reclaimed and reconditioned to have some meaning, if not benign then at least a little more nuanced than what we have now. I didn't get a chance to answer that question but here is what I was thinking.....

No. Not happening. Not anytime soon and here is why...the denigration of the term hacker has to be placed along a spectrum that I'd argue, started with Pearl Harbor, was amplified by the atomic bomb, was cooked into our national psyche by Vietnam and which was granted horrific status by 9/11. All these points have been hammer blows to the collective American ideal that no matter how hard you hit us, we'll get back up. (Read: Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture)

Taken together, Pearl Harbor and the US's two atomic attacks, showed that America could be surprised and that if an opponent had atomic weapons...that surprise might not be something we could recover from. Vietnam showed we could be horribly wrong about how to prosecute a war and that we could actually "lose." 9/11 showed that our enemies didn't even need to have atomic weapons any more to do us serious damage. 

These have been hammer blows to the American psyche and I think, have permanently done away with our capability to allow room to consider something like hacking to have any kind of innocent, rebellious youth quality. I don't think our considerations of national security have room for that anymore. Its sad. Its a loss. The consequences have just been shown to be too high to have room for much forgiveness. I think 'hacking' is now permanently equated to criminal or terrorist activity. The RIAA and MPAA also bear blame here for making real-life criminals out of 13-year-old girls who have downloaded some songs or a movie. 

So I'll keep thinking well of Defcon and Black Hat and wearing my "Got DeCSS?" t-shirt (thx Jon Lech Johansen)...but I don't see a slew of future heroes emerging from the ranks of the l337 haxx0r. I'll hope though and remember, Hack The Planet! ;-)

A few days ago I tweeted a question about why Peter Senge never seemed to be mentioned in learning circles along with folks like Bloom, Gagne, and Kirkpatrick. : #crowdbooster told me that I was RT'd 7 times on that tweet and reached a potential audience of about 18,000 people. Exactly zero replies though. I mean I can attribute part of that to people saw the tweet and just didn't know what to say or that I am generally very easy to ignore. Either way, it was a point of interest for me. 

I don't work squarely in the learning and training field anymore and am quite happy being in the social media for the enterprise space and working for an awesome company like Socialtext. I still think though about L&D from the standpoint of social being the glue that brings together vectors like HCM, L&D and more. I also have 10+ years of experience in L&D and can't quit looking at some things through that lens. 

So I have to ask - why no Senge? I have been to conference after conference in the L&D world and I don't think I have ever come across a single session on Senge, the Fifth Discipline or his ideas of a "learning organization." I am confused by that. I have seen session after session on how to think about adult learning, cognitive overload, game-based learning - full disclaimer - I've done quite a few of those presentations myself. 

Here is what I'm confused by - why haven't we been talking more about "learning organizations"? Have we and I've just been missing it? (entirely possible) Its just seems to be that approaching this discussion from a holistic standpoint make so much sense. It puts L&D in a strategic role across the organization - places L&D in a central role of generating a competitive advantage - this seems to be a much stronger organizational position that fighting for some loosely defined and poorly appreciated ROI. 

 While we're at it - where is Chris Argyris and Overcoming Organizational Defenses - the subtitle of which is Facilitating Organizational Learning - I mean am I just being a rube here? Did I miss some big discussion that went on before I got here in which we all agreed that these people wouldn't be brought up? Because honestly, I almost want to believe that happened as opposed to the other idea which is that we've just ignored this stuff. 

So this is a little plea to go along with my tweet - wassup y'all? 

I've seen some other arguments about why video games are not "art" but this column from Jonathan Jones is just stupid. There have been lots of comments on the Guardian's own site and on Kotaku and I'm sure, in countless other places and I might not add anything ground-breaking to the discussion but I just had to get a few ideas down here. 

I'll get to Jones' contention that video games aren't art but let's not let his first assertion slip by unnoticed - that there is some combination of age and intellectual development past which, people should not praise video games nor should they be playing them.  I don't really have a crtique of this argument past the fact that given that, one could quite reading Jones' article there since his bias is so clear we know which way this article is going to go. You know what? That's OK - it's his column and he is entitled to his opinion and he is certainly entitled to not play any games - it's just that I feel sad for him. I don't think everyone should play games all the time but I do agree with people like Jane McGonigal about the positive impact of games, and with other studies that detail both the positive cognitive and motor skill improvements that acrue from game-playing (not to mention the social benefits as well).  So I'll hope that perhaps someone will get Jones' a couple games for the holidays and that maybe he'll take some time and play a little - it's a brighter world on the other side. 

An interesting note is that Jones' disagrees with MoMA's decision to display video games as art. The interesting part is that his column in no way talks about the process that MoMA went through to arrive at that decision. Nor does he address in any way, how whatever collection of what I can only assume are suprememly qualified judges of art at MoMA have arrived at a decision that someone like Jones' can so clearly see is wrong. 

Finally we come to the heart of Jones' argument - I think it goes that because games are a collective product, they can not reflect a personal vision  - no one "owns the games" so there is no artist.

"A work of art is one person's reaction to life." -Jonathan Jones

This argument confuses me to such an extent that I have to shake my head a bit at first. I want to ask Jones what he considers art? Clearly paintings - he references those. Sculpture? Music? Film? Photography? (I won't EVEN bring up comic books - I can only imagine how Jones feels about those!) How many people can be involved in the production process before it becomes non-art? 

Jones also argues that even the greatest chess player in the world wasn't an artist. Again, this argument much like his cognitive/age cutoff for playing games - just makes me sad. To be able to watch Bobby Fisher play chess without recognizing that as art, well it just makes me think that Jones' world is a dim place indeed. 

Why only one person? Why can art not be a collective reaction to life? Why the solitary aspect? To be sure, there have been great artists who were so possessed by incredibly strong personal visions that they made some great art but I utterly reject the notion that art BY DEFINITION requires some hermetic-like solitary act of creation. I reject that because I reject the idea that there IS a solitary act of creation. Van Gogh's reaction to life was a deeply personal one to be sure but one intimately colored and affected by interactions with others. He did not cut an ear off because he was an island unto himself. 

Every artist is part of a collective. A collective of experiences. I collective of the production process. Art is by my definition, a social product in that it is mediated through one's own experiences with others. To deny that is to deny that humans are social creatures. To call out video games as non-art because their collective nature is more transparent than some other art forms is just plain wrong. 

Look, social media likes you a lot. Really. I know you have feelings for social media too. The harsh truth though is that social media is not just going to see you exclusively and you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking you'd  be able to handle SoMe on your own anyway, they're too much for you. 

I mean think about it, you can't even handle your email. There's no way you can stand up to Twitter. So stop thinking its you against the world. Get some Zen. Go with the flow...feel the Force...be the ball....focus on building your network. 

You don't have a 1:1 relationship with social media - what you should be building is a many to many relationship. Social media is a network and you need to respond to the output of that network with your own network. I've got a strong network that kinda looks like a patchwork quilt. 

Part of it looks for #socbiz. Part of it watches #swchat and #lrnchat. (shhh part of it even looks for mentions of my name). Pat of it looks for UX and part looks for jokes that are, frankly, NSFW and so on. It's my responsibility to architect the right network. The cool thing? Me and my network are also part of other people's networks - at absolutely zero incremental cost to any of us. 

This is what can move us past the Tragedy of the Commons. So stop thinking like a subject-matter expert and start thinking like a Subject-Matter Network. 

I'm re-reading Starship Troopers. I just love this book. This book talked about an army of Iron Men years before Stan and Jack introduced us to Tony Stark. It covers everything from racism to gender equality to how society establishes the voting franchise for its citizens. Oh, and then there are the armored suits with shoulder-launched atomic weapons, drop capsules and bug hunts. Those are all analogies too but they're also wicked cool. Anyway, this got me thinking that re-reading something like Starship Troopers (having never watched more than 10 minutes of that disgraceful movie) might be some sort of cultural marker of being a geek. That got me wondering, what other markers might I have lurking in my background that might indicate a certain geekiness. Let's see what I found. 

I am a second generation member of the Science Fiction Book Club. I cut my teeth on Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, Anderson, Sturgeon - HARD science fiction as it was called, FTL drives and event horizons (then those new guys Vinge, Gibson and Stephenson got into the act). None of this vampire love story crap. Hari Seldon is a hero. I know Asimov's pen name that he used to write the Lucky Starr series. 

I started out usually as an Elf (got a thing for bows), Lawful Neutral. When PC games hit, the ones I bought came in ziplock bags with mimeographed instructions and 5.25 disks. My first programming experience was BASIC on an Apple IIe. Wrote a whole branching text game using that. That was after my dad had showed me how to use his  FORTRAN flow chart template.  

I've built crystal radio sets on Christmas morning, put together desktop computers from the chassis out, while debating which power source was better than another. I remember when modem speeds jumped from 14.4 and dreamed heady dreams of 28.8 days to come. Remember when the first 1GB hard drive came out and we all thought - what the hell would you ever need that kind of storage for?

I date most things in my childhood development as either happening before or after 1977 because that's when Star Wars came out. I subscribed to Star Wars monthly and use the posters as wallpaper. I watched every episode of Space 1999 and to me, Battlestar Galactica stars Lorne Green. I know what all the buttons on the steering wheel of the Mach 5 do and my favorite was always the robot bird. I knew what every round in Logan's gun did (there were 6 different ones). I dreamed of becoming a Ninja Hacker Overlord or maybe the Kwisatz Haderach or maybe just a Stranger in a Strange Land. I devoured every issue of OMNI magazine and wish I still had them - it'd be cool if WIRED featured sci-fi writing like OMNI did. 

There is a first edition of Seduction of the Innocent sitting on my bookshelf and I can say things like Excelsior! and Wonder Twin Powers Activate! with complete confidence. There is a table in my office that is actually just boxes of comic books with a table cloth on top of them. I used to mark major changes in the economy by increases in the cover price of my comics. When I went on a tour of the FBI building (when they still used to do that), I'm pretty sure I was the only one in the group that recognized Jack Kirby's artwork on the wall. I have a Flaming Carrot action figure, love the Tick, Arthur and the Man-Eating Cow. I think Demon in a Bottle is possibly one of the best story arcs ever and yes, I still have my pull list at local comic book store. 

Wizardry was a constant companion from Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord to the Crusaders of the Dark Savant. I remember being in a open field to the west of a white house. I finally found the Coconut of Quendor while upstairs in my fraternity house's computer room while there was party going on downstairs. I'll never forget that when I typed "get Coconut"  - my inventory was too full.

I've had pets named Jason (of the Argonauts not Friday the 13th), Romulus, Remus and Loki. I have a dog named Gambit and used to have a dog named Remy LeBeau.  Saw Videodrome, in the theater. Could watch Scanners right now. I love Peter Jackson because he made the movies we all saw in our heads when we read Lord of the Rings. I got my hands on a bootleg VHS copy of Highlander from Japan because it had like an extra 3 minutes on it (the part about where he got his secretary). 

Winsock, Telnet and Pine - that's how you got to email. Mosaic? That was one sexy beast. I remeber when most of the places I went online started with alt.binaries. I've owned a C-64 and a TRS-80. Atari console? Sure. Activision? No doubt. Dreamcast? Yeppers (worst controller ever). PS1, 2 and 3? Done, done and done. 

There for a while, I never used to have to spend quarters in the arcade because I had the high monthly scores on Tempest and Red Baron. I also rocked Robotron 2084 and Galaga, was pretty good at Joust but some kid was better. I was also in the KISS Army and yes, had all their solo albums. 

My first credit as a published author is a chapter in The Cyborg Handbook entitled "From Captain America to Wolverine: Images of Cyborgs in Comic Books." I had another piece published in grad school that talked about the cultural meaning inscribed on PEZ and have about 300 of those sitting around (the ones without the feet are the older ones). 

While I was in the Pentagon, I delivered briefings with images of Johnny Mnemonic and DOOM. I have this tendency to decorate my office with blown up maps from XKCD, like the one of IPv4 and one of my favorite things that sits on my desk is a little solid metal statue of Gort. Whenever I shop, I shop smart at S Mart and I will leave Jack Burton out of this. I have a son who is using Netflix to work his way through all the Dr Who that's available and earlier this year I got him the complete set of Ultraman episodes. 

Now things change to be sure. They always do. But as I sit here typing this post in a hoodie from 2012's DragonCon, I reckon that I can still hang with some geeks...On the Bounce and By The Numbers!

OK kids...The Wounded Warrior Project...understand that we are living in a time during which the U.S. is home to the greatest number of combat veterans in our country's history. The WWP is doing some amazing work helping those veterans adjust both mentally and physically and they've got some amazing results.

Now as it turns out, I'm running in this little race called the Tough Mudder that so far has donated about $3.5 million to the WWP. I'm trying to help them kick in a little more.

If you go here you can easily (and anonymously if you want) donate to the WWP. I'd appreciate it and we all know these folks who have given so much, deserve it.

If you can't give, that's cool too, please feel free to share this and pass it along. Thanks and now back to our regular programming.

Why are sites/services like Coursera, edX, Udacity, Academic Earth, TED-Ed and Khan Academy (feel free to comment and add all the ones that I've left out) really important?

World-changing content? Maybe.

Stunning new technology? Um, no.

Then what is it?

They are cracks in the dam. They are canaries in the mine. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, wrote in part, "...We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic." Spot on Clay. Higher education, take note, its your turn. Oh, to all the folks in corporate learning and training who just breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't their turn...you need to keep reading.

Ever hear of  Common Craft? Lynda.com or Stormwind? How about Bloomfire? Code Academy? Quora? Snapguide? Instructables? Open Sesame? No? Look 'em up. Why? Well, I talk a lot about how we can look to the consumer market for features that will be included in our enterprise systems in the future....well look to the consumer market for new business models and production models too.

Do you remember Fletch? Of course you do. Everyone loves that movie. Remember the scene in the doctor's office? No, not that part, the part where the dialog goes like this:

Dr. Joseph Dolan: You know, it's a shame about Ed.
Fletch: Oh, it was. Yeah, it was really a shame. To go so suddenly like that.
Dr. Joseph Dolan: Ahh, he was dying for years.
Fletch: Sure, but... the end was really... very sudden.
Dr. Joseph Dolan: He was in intensive care for eight weeks!
Fletch: Yeah, but I mean the very end, when he actually died. That was extremely sudden.

That's what where we are headed. Everyone keeps cranking out instructional content based on seat time and levels of interactivity EXCEPT anyone not already in the industry. Those folks are the ones finding alternative models. Why? I believe its because the logic that once held that system together is breaking down. 

Waaaaay back in 2005, Bill Gates gave a speech to the National Governor's Association. Part of what he said was:

America’s high schools are obsolete.   

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.   
By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. 
Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.      
Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age.  Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year.

I believe he was spot on. Summers off? Built for an agricultural society. Desks in rows and columns? A factory model of control and surveilance not education. You can't fix it though because it's not broken. Its an outdated design. 

Wonder why all the companies I mentioned above are popping up? Why institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and so on are even experimenting? They feel the problems in the model. Do we? We keep pushing ADDIE like its some kind of magic charm. What happens though when we deploy a social media system first - that would make the "I" first...and we do that before any analysis because you can't analyze something that you have no data for...and then we tweak the design...whoa...now we're all out of order. I don't know if ADDIE is right or wrong but I know its too rigid. We don't operate in linear fashion we operate in a realm of simultaneity. Now what's your design concept look like? 30, 60 90, days to develop an hour of instruction? Really? 

I'm sure the folks at the Rocky Mountain News, which started in 1859, thought they would continue on forever too. I'm not here with all the answers, just trying to remind people that we need to be asking these questions now. 

So hi everyone. OK, not going to try and hide it - I'm totally jacked. Psyched. Pumped. Whatever. <Insert favorite "I'm very excited" superlative here.>

Today is my first day at Socialtext. If you want, I'll tell you all about them but if you've known me for a while, you've probably already heard me talk about them. If you want the 'human speak' version, they we make an outstanding platform that allows you to find the people you need to work with and then get your work done faster and better so you can get out when you need to and get home in front of traffic. I could throw in a lot of words like collaboration, enterprise, customer-facing, intranet, and so on but really - they we help you work better.

My job is going to be working with the customers of Socialtext to help make sure that their visions are realized and that they get the benefits they are looking for. I may even help point out some ways that our platform can help them that they may not have even thought of yet. I'm sneaky like that.

I'll still blog occassionally, tweet prolifically, post photos to flickr and keep trying to figure out the best way to use G+. I still have an about.me page and am still loving my Scoop.it site called It's All Social. Honestly, I also feel like I'm doing what I should be doing, helping people and organizations figure out the best way to use an outstanding piece of software to perform better.As always, thanks for reading!

File this under Tip of the Iceberg Dept:

I saw an email this morning about "measuring Learning 2.0." I've also seen a Learning 3.0 conference and is it me or does it seem that the semantic train is getting a bit far out of the station.

Keep in mind, when Tim O'Reilly coined the term "web 2.0" he was describing not a technical leap so much but a break in way we had done business...that is, we were entering a new mode of doing things. So from that standpoint, I'm not really sure what all the 2.0/3.0 talk is about.

I have more of a glimmer what all the web 2.0, 3.0 talk is about since those leaps are at least tangentially tied to technical leaps like social media, semantic web and so on.

What is all the Learning iteration tied to?

How is learning 2.0 different from 3.0?

Are people learning differently?

If not, then are we doing business differently?

If not, then are the iterations tied to technical leaps?

If not, then what the hell are we talking about?

As they tell the kids in elementary school, words are important and are using ours badly....again

I love Jay Cross dearly and love what he's done in terms of informal learning but I think he'd admit that the term "e-learning" has proved to be an inelegant beast at best. We categorically underestimate the "e" and don't change our design to incorporate or even acknolwedge it and its not actually "learning" - its training or education or content but learning is a personal construct. I'll stop saying that as soon as someone can sell me some learning. 

So could we just stop the hype please. That's what it really is. Everyone wants to be appear edgy and cool and if we did 2.0 last year we MUST do 3.0 this year. Shut up about it for a year, how about that? How about realize that a term like "2.0" is a literary tesseract - it is capable of holding so much content and change and by racing by it on our way to 3 and 4 and 5...we are once again missing the power and potential as we chase after the shiny. 

I read Julie Brink's recent article  on Game-based Learning for the Corporate World, and I just wanted to add to what I think Julie was trying to do - which is promote game0based learning as a viable and powerful option. This post is in no way intended to be snarky or derisive and I'm actually thankful to Julie for getting me off my butt and actually spitting out something on a topic I really believe in.

I'm perfectly in line with what I think the goal of this article is..to convince people that games represent a powerful medium for learning in a range of environments, including the corporate sphere. You bet. Spot on. Couldn't agree more. The article however falls into some predictable traps that even supporters trigger and that actually end up weakening the very case they seek to make. 

The very first listing of games, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Scrabble...immediately goes to a popular sort of game but what about Chess? Go? Games that have been around for centuries; or even making the point with games like poker and lacrosse and bowling - that games are games and that people need to get past this bias of the "gamer" name only referring to computer/console games. 

 The stats on the growth of the gaming market and the changing demographic of gamers is also interesting but I think of more interest to folks in the corporate space would be some admittedly dated stats now from Beck & Wade's 2004 book, Got Game? How the Gamer Generation is reshaping business forever:

• The gaming generation makes up 90 million individuals from the US alone.
• Approximately 56 million of these individuals are already saturating the workforce, from employees to upper management positions.
• About 12% are said to be managers already.
• In 2003, around 92% of kids age 2 through 17 in the United States access games on a daily basis.Of this 92%, only 80% are know to have home computers or some form of Internet access.

Beck and Wade also make some really interesting points about this "gamer generation;" for example that gamers believe that winning matters (counter to the stereotypical slacker image), that they place a high value on competence-on the being the expert, that they are risk takers and believers in open communication and creative problem solving. These kind of points I think loom very large (or should) in the minds of corporate trainers who think they will just be able to provide the same old training to a generation raised on games - but I know we were talking about games as learning vehicles and not as bifurcators of generations. So let's get into comparing "gaming" to e-learning.

First, comparing "gaming" to "traditional e-learning" is at best an apples to oranges comparison. Games require absolutely no technology. The dynamics that are inherent in games, including learning (see Raph Koster in Theory of Fun, Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, or Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois for some background on the rich history of humankind and games), are in games played purely with human bodies and imagination as they are in games that require the absolute latest in computer hardware and broadband connections. e-Learning is by definition a technologically mediated delivery mechanism...its not even a stand-alone set of principles

 On the theoretical front, we really need to get Skinner out of there. As one accessible example, if you read Donald Clark's recent post on Skinner (part of Donald's amazing learning theorists marathon) if really a weak frontman for the power of game-based learning and really makes it seem as nothing much deeper than stimulus-response is at work and that games are somehow graphically enhanced Skinner boxes. There are any number of better advocates for the power of game-based learning but two that leap to mind are James Paul Gee (eg What Video Games Can teach Us About Learning and Literacy) and David Williamson Shaffer (How Computer Games Help Children Learn and his work on pedagogical praxis) leap to mind...along with Eric Zimmerman, Katie Salen, and a host of others...the point being, there is an incredibly rich and growing body of work focused specifically on the power of games as mechanisms for creating incredibly rich opportunities...we should probably just leave Skinner to his mice. 

The authors about can also make the point better than I as to the differences between designing games for learning or training purposes and designing e-learning. The short answer is however that the gulf is enormous. Game design is a whole other skill set that starts from a different place theoretically and is informed by a radically different view of the user/learner/player than is e-learning design. Read Theory of Fun by Koster - very accessible and probably the single best explanation of how game design enshrines learning in a way that traditional ISD does not. 

The topic of when games are not the best tool is also a logical and valid point for discussion but hardly for the reasons mentioned in the article. Games are great at parsing out large amounts of information is contexts that actually allow people to remember it. Think back, how did you learn your alphabet? Numbers? Huge amounts of very basic data was transmitted either through games or play (which are related but are not the same)....games, I'd argue are actually much better vehicles than the NEXT BUTTON for transmitting data...it all comes down to design. As to the question of whether some content is to sensitive or personal to be played in game - depends on I think, if you really want to deal with the topic or just check the box. Let's look at some:

• Darfur is Dying: a game that teaches about the horror of genocide
• Foor Force: a game that teaches about famine relief
• Fat World: a game that teaches about nutrition and obesity

There are examples after examples of incredibly personal topics being taught with sensitivity and care via games. I'd argue again that games can provide a richer, more nuanced context to these sensitive topics than traditional learning. 

I think I've already touched on the demographics of the gaming population above and that's a great point - I'd argue again that we need to make that point relative to gaming in general and not act like all "gaming" is a video game. 

The cost front is also a moving target. The basic truth is that you can spend as little or as much as you want to build a game but by no means will price ensure quality; only good design will do that. My recommednation and its one that people have heard me make before, is head over to Kongregate. All the games there (as of 5/15/2010 there were 57,000 free games) are all built on Flash and represent an incredible array of designs and game elements that will give you a broader perspective on the possibilities - of course that means you'll have to play a lot of games. Sorry. ;-)

I also just want to ask, where is the point about the social aspect of gaming? That aspect is the one driving everything from Farmville to the new wave of 'gamification'...this is actually a key dynamic that has been granted new import due to the scale and reach afforded by technology - this aspect is one that could be particularly powerful in a globally dispersed yet integrated community like a corporation.  

In closing (finally right?), thanks to Julie for writing her article or else I wouldn't have written this one and I like being reminded of the power of games to inspire and teach and I hope this post is taken in the spirit intended; one of amplification and pushing forward and not argumentative or snarky. 

I'm sensing something in the tabs. There is a shift in the flow of the infostream. Eddies of data are harboring tadpoles of nascent thoughts. I'm also listening to the Writer's Almanac every morning. Is it showing?

 This isn't feeling like a calm highway merging...this feels like a confluence...the rumbling, jumbled, hydraulic coming together of two or more rivers...there are multiple flows...multiple possible, potential directions, but which flow will dominate...which water will run on top and get featured in all those awesome Instagram pictures of rivers with artsy film noir filters and which waters will run deep, silent, unnoticed except that they will be the currents actually carving into the landscape, changing the river bed, they will be the ones creating meander scars out of entire industries...was this last great burst powered by the underutilized remains of the infrastructure of the dotcom bubble? Too many servers then, too many Aeron chairs...what is the excess capacity waiting to be used as a platform for innovation now?

 "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning," Oyl Miller

Is that what Sherry Turkle is warning us against in "The Flight from Conversation"? ..which ironically has spawned both connection and conversation...(Roth, Cormier,) ...and I must say, Dave C. , love your response. Is she warning us against these currents forming some sort of conversational fluvial delta with little or nor discernible direction except some vague 'that way'? What is Turkle's response to the great electronic saint McLuhan who said:

"If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent."  Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy

Do electronic cyborgs dream  of electronic conversations?

 In Alexis Madrigal's piece "The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future" ....he asks "now what?" are we just doing more of the same..more Facebooks..more FourSquares...more but not different....I sang the same lament when I was still in grad school studying history..the history of the last 5 years of the French literary underground..a movement built on writing but studied with at least a limited view toward context in Hatfield-McCoy level conflict with my anthropology where everything is connected, everything contextualized. Back to history.....now Commager-Steele, Tonybee, the Durants, Braudel...their works all had their faults but they were BIG. HUGE. Eleven, twleve volume histories of the World, or Civilization. Breathtakingly large. Remember the game manual for F-117a Stealth Fighter? 200 page monster that started with Bernoulli's Principle and ended with how to evade Russian-made SAM sites. We used to read The Stand...in paperback this beast was over 1300 pages. Now we're telling stories 140 characters at a time. There's nothing inherently wrong with that but does it lead us to the punchline of telling the story of an elephant one part at a time? I think this more when I see an article for  One sentence pitch winners.......the idea that we now have contests to reduce the essence of a new startup into one sentence...and celebrate those who have thought small enough to be able to reduce their idea to a phrase. Or are we enagaging that principle whereby constraints make for great creativity (see one of my fav stories, The Microcosmic God)? Paul Graham hands out "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" ...like replace email (ok)...replace universities (there we go)...couple that with the Atlantic's special report on "The Broken Promise of American Education" ....and a little ditty I just wrote and I start to think that maybe education really is in for it. 

 I remember that the kind of unspoken defintion of history is the record of change over time....are we possibly moving into a time, the singularity if you will, when things are moving too fast for huge leaps forward...we're into pattern recognition phase now...wonder if there isn't some corllary to when Man first made the shift from Hunter/Gatherer to Agriculure....are we waiting for our inherent human capabilities to catch up to this new environment? do we have to reconfigure our socio-economic systems to allow some in our tribe to stay home from the subsistence-level infohunts and work on flint-napping some knowledge out of all these stones?

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition” ― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

"When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns." Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!by Douglas Coupland

With Men spending less time together on the hunt because some were now back at this new thing called the village...did they lament the weakening of social ties or did they view it as simply the new status quo and invent new social forms, mores and rituals to shore it back up?

"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, p. 294 (that's what is known as "citing" someone...not just "quoting" them...see the difference?) 

 Are synthesizers the new flint napping shaman....are they the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group? Do they get to stay at home while the tribe hunts across the plains of Google and Twitter and Facebook? Is that where we start building the cognitive and cultural infrastructure for the next big leap?

 Wow...I didn't even get to the "New Aesthetic" ....next time people.....