I’m less interested in Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” than I am over the actual debate over the concept.

If you want to dig into the debate over the concept, check out the salvos from Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Seth Godin and Mark Cuban, and then dig into the more balanced takes on the debate from Mike Masnick, Valeria Maltoni, Alan Patrick and Michelle Greer.

Put the debate over “free” aside for a moment, I simply I won’t be able to do it justice better than Masnick, Patrick or Maltoni; I’m more interested in the debate itself and how “strategy by soundbite” wins in mass media.

The demand for answers crowds out great questions.
It’s impossible for everyone to understand every part of every debate: heuristics and stereotypes are a fundamental necessity for people to process information and create knowledge. Information overload is not a new issue; in fact, as individuals we have always lived in a state of information overload even though as a society we find ways to adapt to higher levels of data and increased rates of transmission throughout the world. Supply and demand change to establish new equilibriums between content and context.

But what do these equilibriums represent? Easy answers? Generalized strategies misinterpreted and mistakenly adopted as best practices and winning tactics? Do great questions lie unasked and unanswered in perpetuity, lost to the annals of history?

Polarized positions pay, nuanced thought loses.
Patrick, The Free Market for Snake Oil and the Age of Unreason:

The lesson for the future is obvious. The truth may out, but if its not populist it will need a frigging great megaphone to have a hope of being heard.

Right now, as far as I can see, in the New Media Age there is a big risk that the Age of Reason is slowly sinking, and we are entering the Age of Unreason, as the (largely unfunded) forces of Right drown in a sea of (largely commercially funded) snake oil.

I’m not convinced this is a new dynamic in the New Media Age: even though the distribution of megaphones remains highly uneven, does the simple fact that more megaphones are available and used increase or reduce the amount of snake oil in the world?

My comment:

I was thinking about how there always used to be inaccurate information spread within social groups, but since it was hard to dip into those groups we couldn’t “see” or “hear” about the inaccuracies and faulty logic; but now we can. I always try to think about if the behaviour is truly different, or if we’re just now more aware of what’s always existed.

I’m not sure; but I have little doubt that true reason is a difficult strategy for mass media to pursue. In an era where traditional printed media struggles to be the best way to aggregate and distribute news and analysis, how many printed media outlets reach a wide audience and are financially successful using strategies based on reason, discourse and non-polarized positions?

Can a shift in demand reshape the economics of media?
When easy answers sell, polarized positions become good business strategies and nuanced thought loses out.

But need these always be dominant strategies?

Technological change creates cultural change; the changing technology behind media and communication is obvious, but less obvious is how technological change has forced society to re-consider the role and meaning of media in our world. As our relationship to media changes, is there any wonder that we are confused over how to define a “journalist”, a “photographer” or a “professional”?

Can cultural shifts create more enduring changes than technology? For example, if we demand more nuance, more love, more discourse, more thought and more authentic value, can humanity reshape the economics of media?

This little jaunt won’t be a monster trip, but it will be fun. Catch you on the flip side of the world…

On change, systems, influences, uncertainty and defining goals…

• Seth Godin:

  I hope all of you are doing something that makes your grandparents uncomfortable

  (via Jay Parkinson, who is working on something making many grandparents uncomfortable.)

• Zoë Westhof (@zoewesthof), Why I’m Not Realistic:
  

  I choose to embrace change and uncertainty, because I don’t think any of us can rely on certainty anymore. If realistic means sticking to the conventions that are quickly falling into irrelevance, then I choose to be unrealistic.

• How are conventions, systems and institutions adapting to the new reality of constant disruption?

  Perhaps far worse than we thought.

• Continuing on the topic, whenever I read about complex adaptive systems, I keep thinking about the danger of over-optimization and the impossibility of perfection.
• Mike Bonifer (@bonifer), Three Moves (You Can Make Right Now to Change the Game):
  

  There are two issues with focusing exclusively on our goals. The first is that the people with whom we share our scenes usually have different goals from ours. … Focusing only on our desired outcomes can result in a tug-of-war for control of a scene, severely limiting the scene’s progress and potential. Not good.

  The second, and bigger, issue with being exclusively goal-oriented in our scenes, is that we diminish our potential for breakthrough moves. Breakthroughs reveal unexpected avenues for productivity. Breakthroughs can only happen if we are willing to let go of our expectations about what a scene needs to achieve. And what is a goal but an expectation for a scene?

  … When the goal is in our head, it has, in effect, already happened, and what we’re doing in our scenes is trying to re-live history, a very personal and private history that our scene partners likely do not share. When we let a scene define its own goals, we give ourselves and our scene partners the potential to make history together. Creating a shared history is what branding is all about.

• Noah Goldstein, Changing Minds and Changing Towels, via Sean Howard:
  

  We found that by simply changing a few words on the standard sign, guests who learned that the majority of their fellow guests had reused their towels (the social norms appeal) were 26% more likely than those who saw the basic environmental protection message to recycle their towels.

  … So, does this mean that we’re just sheep? Not necessarily. But we’re definitely more likely to follow the herd when we’re uncertain about how to behave. And it turns out that we’re also more likely to follow the herd to the extent that we perceive the herd as sharing our circumstances.

  The takeaway: be very careful how you define your systems, environments and goals; incentives, influences and social proof are very powerful forces. Remember, change or be changed.

Video: Sander Duivestein, Penny For Your Thoughts with Umair Haque from the VINT Symposium.

Since I couldn’t find a transcript, I decided to do it myself; click here to view the video (embedding not allowed); or read my transcript below (all errors are mine, not Umair’s…)

Penny For Your Thoughts – Umair Haque from Sander Duivestein on Vimeo.

Umair Haque:

What’s really different about the world today is the fact that we’re much more interconnected. And when we’re more interconnected, we’re more interdependent.

And so the question is, in this radically interdependent world, how do we have to behave to create real value, to create authentic value. Because until we can answer that question, we’re going to see the crisis that we’ve got today, actually intensify. What it really is a kind of a crisis in the way that our organizations behave. So what that means is, we see across industries this pattern of kind of self-defeating, or self-destructive, or value-destructive behaviour, because they don’t know how to do, how to behave any other way.

And we don’t seem to be able to overcome that pattern; and so until we can overcome that pattern, I think that the crisis that we see today, even if we bail ourselves out of it, by bailing out the banks, by bailing out the automakers, the crisis will keep on repeating itself, across industries; it will keep on going on until we answer that problem, of very very self-destructing behavior; and so they’re kind of zombies.

They know that they have to behave differently to create real value, but they don’t know how to do that, because they haven’t been organized and built in a way to do it.

It’s kind of in their very DNA, because the question is not one of strategy, not one of competition but one of institutions. And unless you realize that institutions are what you have to change, you wind up as kind of as a zombie.

Why do we see these patterns of destructive behavior going on? I think the reason is actually very simple: capitalism in the way we built it today kind of undercounts costs and overcounts benefits. Many of the costs that we’re now becoming more and more familiar with – social costs, environmental costs, human costs, the costs of unfairness – and it overcounts benefits, that’s kind of a structural flaw, the heart of the way that we built capitalism itself. And what that translates into is that we see this pattern of behavior of where I strive to make myself better off but I’m indifferent to whether you are better off. And if I can do that, then the result is very, very small amounts of real value that are being created, and today we’re facing that fact.

The way that we should think about it in the 21st century is that we create the world through out action and through our behavior.

So the world is kind of a function of what we do. And when we act in one way, we create one kind of industry, one kind of environment, one kind of world; and when we act in another way, we can create a very different kind of environment, or industry, or world. And so I think the question of “how do we respond to the world”, we have to think about the fact that we are responsible for the actions that we take, because those actions then go on to create the kind of world that then comes back to effect us. And so the challenge in the 21st century is learning to create authentic value, real value.

So my question would be is how many of your innovations are really not innovations, how many are really unnovations.

So I think the most important question companies can ask themselves today is are we innovating, or are we doing exactly the opposite? Is what we are doing really an improvement?

(Hat tip to Jon Bischke for the pointer to the video.)

—

More Umair101:

• Beyond the massconomy, humanity wins.
• A collection of my favorite posts and insights from Umair using delicious, tagged “umair101″. Tag your own links and insights with “umair101″ to help us get an understanding of which posts and insights were most “mind-blowing” to you.
• And, for a more curated and collaborative look at “Umair 101″ insights, check out the wiki on Core Edges and contribute with the posts and specific insights that were most important for you in understanding Umair Haque.

Horses Think, French Photo Hoax:

Paris-Match awarded their annual Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant this week to two French students who submitted a photographic story that apparently presented images documenting the precarious lives of students today and the things they must do to survive.

When the two winners, Guillaume Chauvin and Remi Hubert, both art students at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Strasbourg, stood up at the Sorbonne to claim their trophy and prize money, they announced the true nature of their work. The images were not photojournalism but staged images featuring many of their peers.

See the images for yourself.

Speaking to Le Figaro, Guillaume Chauvin [one of the students] confided that they “wanted to enter the contest in order to show the codes used too often in photojournalism and to prove that something real could be translated into something staged.”

Were any rules broken? According to the British Journal of Photography, no:

However, terms and conditions don’t forbid faked reportages – a situation that is likely to change next year. Already, Paris Match has withdrawn its cash prize, offering it, instead, to the two student’s university of decorative arts in Strasbourg. The weekly magazine, which is now warning readers that the images have been faked, has also announced that next year’s cash prize will be increased to €10,000 as a result of this year’s ‘fraud’.

What to make of the entire affair? I think Chase Jarvis nails it:

I think what they’ve done is not to make brilliant photojournalism, but to make brilliant art. There was certainly a significant price to be paid for that art, or perhaps many prices: the reputation of the award, the reputation of the judges, even their own reputations perhaps–and only time will tell–but they’ve surely made some brilliant statements about the nature of such imagery, called into question the cliched nature of the traditional canons recognizing that work, and made us all pause, even if just for a moment, to consider what photojournalism really is. By blending genres (PJ + perhaps advertising photography?) and creating staged images that were stunning enough to win a Grand Prize (hard work in it’s own right), I’d argue that they’ve achieved their end goal. And they’ve done so in an incredibly creative way. Subversive and meta.

Coverage:

• Horses Think, French Photo Hoax.
• British Journal of Photography, Two students con Paris Match’s photojournalism prize.
• Chase Jarvis, Fake Photojournalism Wins.
• Jörg Colberg in Conscientious, Fake photojournalism wins prize.

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs.

Without introspective thought and relevant context, art that is easy to digest gets promoted and consumed even if it’s not really that filling. Supply meets demand.

But so what?

A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says “this is good, this is bad” without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we’re innately convinced we’re right.

Critics are born, not made. I don’t know why I became convinced that I had more to say about art than other people, and an opinion that mattered more than most. But I did decide that – and persuaded others to listen.

It’s impossible for everyone to be a knowledgeable critic, and I don’t reject the notion that a single, authoritative critic can be a valuable filter; but I believe that it’s impossible for any single critic to be able to render meaningful judgments for the diversity of audiences, tastes, styles and preferences in the world. It’s really not a question of whether the critic or the crowd is a better filter and judge of quality, but in how to leverage the positives and negatives of each method.

In my comment on Do people value great photography?:

Great photography always stands out; it just doesn’t stand out to everyone :)

Quantity [divides quality into segments] more than it dilutes [quality]; it’s unfair to expect everybody to be able to judge greatness. Any widely available cultural activity will always encounter this dynamic: it’s impossible for *most* of the participants to judge greatness; and that’s neither bad nor unexpected.

… The point is that “great” is a matter of personal perspective; the real question for any industry is to identify the preferences and taste within segments of the population and create content that fits the segment.

Art is a democracy, open to any to create and critique, more now than ever. And that’s the beauty. Its asynchronous nature means anyone can create, watch, follow, read, engage, critique; but anyone can turn it off, ignore, dislike, not share. It’s a choice, mirroring the broader world of media and social media. Yes, little of what is created probably passes the “I’d rather be watching Porn” test, but as long as content and creators find an audience, medium, environment and community that supports them, that’s all that matters.

(via Horses Think)

Related:

• Taylor Davidson, Oct 2008, Messages and Messengers, about developing thought and an eye by asking questions rather than making statements.
• Taylor Davidson, May 2009, Expanding on the role of middlemen in stock photography, about editing, filtering and searching through the vast depths of stock photography.

   


]]> http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/29/art-is-a-democracy-even-if-being-a-critic-isnt/feed/ 0 http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/29/privacy-is-a-cultural-context-not-an-immutable-law/ http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/29/privacy-is-a-cultural-context-not-an-immutable-law/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:31:31 +0000 Taylor Davidson http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/?p=2981
Watching, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006

A couple related notes on privacy:

• Joseph Bonneau on The Economics of Privacy on Social Networks:

  The most interesting story we found though was how sites consistently hid any mention of privacy, until we visited the privacy policies where they provided paid privacy seals and strong reassurances about how important privacy is. We developed a novel economic explanation for this: sites appear to craft two different messages for two different populations. Most users care about privacy but don’t think about it in day-to-day life. Sites take care to avoid mentioning privacy to them, because even mentioning privacy positively will cause them to be more cautious about sharing data. This phenomenon is known as “privacy salience” and it makes sites tread very carefully around privacy, because users must be comfortable sharing data for the site to be fun.

  … The privacy fundamentalists of the world may be positively influencing privacy on major sites through their pressure. Indeed, the bigger, older, and more popular sites we studied had better privacy practices overall. But the desire to limit privacy salience is also a major problem because it prevents sites from providing clear information about their privacy practices. Most users therefore can’t tell what they’re getting in to, resulting in the predominance of poor-practices in this “privacy jungle.”

  (via Alan Patrick, We support privacy, but not in public)

• Jan Chipchase, Practices Around Privacy:
  

  Increasingly, the choice of whether to adopt, or opt-in to a technology is one of whether to opt-out of society.

  Privacy, lest we forget, is a cultural context, not an immutable law.

  All of us are defining our shared privacy rights by what we reward with our attention, through our actions online and offline and the technology we use, in how and what we discuss, what we write, link, share and like, every single day. Supply has an odd habit of meeting demand…

• Me, April 2009, Our misplaced notion of privacy (or, why social media has a major perception problem).:
  

  The login page to Facebook might be the biggest contributor on the web to this mistaken notion of online privacy.

  Really, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine data about our online actions being aggregated and structured, we’re not stupid; the real issue is that we just don’t have a real reason to care (yet). The issue isn’t about privacy, it’s about control.

  Vendors: give me a way to give better data to you, to have more control over our “relationship” and to scale that across multiple vendors, and I’ll give you even more data about me.

  Better yet, Facebook: let me make my entire profile public. Seriously. Nothing would stop people more from posting information they think is private (but isn’t) than by owning up to reality and making everything public.

  Or perhaps, merely giving people the option to make everything public…

• Which is a bit of a hot topic at the moment: even if Facebook is only testing and has yet to become public by default, consider this story about Zuckerberg from Jeff Jarvis’s book What Would Google Do?, via Fred Wilson:
  

  At Davos, Mark told the story of an art class he took at Harvard. He was busy starting Facebook and didn’t have time to attend the class or study. The final exam was a week away and he was worried about flunking. So he went to the Internet and downloaded images of all the art that he knew would be on the exam (not sure how he knew that – Jeff leaves that part out). He puts them all up on a web page and adds blank boxes under each of them. Then he emails the web page to all of his classmates and tells them he just put up a study guide. The class responds by marking up the page, editing each other, and getting it perfect. Zuckerberg aces the exam, of course, but also the professor told him that the entire class had done much better than usual on the exam.

  Old habits die hard :)

   


]]> http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/29/privacy-is-a-cultural-context-not-an-immutable-law/feed/ 0 http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/28/relaunching-projects/ http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/28/relaunching-projects/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:26:51 +0000 Taylor Davidson http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/?p=2962
Awareness, Arlington, Virginia, 2005

Relaunching old work.
I started this blog in September 2006, but I’ve been publishing mixtures of pictures and written thoughts on the web since 2002. Crude code, images and writing, but real thoughts, even if it does feel like it’s from a different era.

Most of the pre-2007 projects are tucked deep away, out of plain sight. But I’m slowly bringing some of them back, making some slight modifications, keeping the original designs, leaving the thoughts intact.

Recently relaunched:

• Inauguration 2005, Washington, DC, Jan 2005
• Happy Holidays, Dec 2005
• Views | Mine and Yours, 2006
• Panoramics, Oct 2006, a joint production with Jeremy Yuricek
• District Living, Washington, DC, Oct 2006
• Winter Camping, Dolly Sods Wilderness, West Virginia, Jan 2007

   


]]> http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/28/relaunching-projects/feed/ 0 http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/27/travel-london/ http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/27/travel-london/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:51:39 +0000 Taylor Davidson http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/?p=2906
Waiting, Chicago, Illinois, 2004

I found a challenge, but I’ll tell you about it later.
In June I asked for a challenge, and after a lot of interesting inquiries I found one. But I can’t tell you about it right now. All I can say is that it doesn’t make the most sense, it’s not the most practical, the outcome is unclear, but it’s a good, fitting project for me that I will love doing.

Until then, I’m going to embrace the lure of travel and the nomadic lifestyle and enjoy a little jaunt.

Drop me a line if you’re in London or Tokyo.
I’ll be in London this upcoming weekend, and then on to Japan for a couple weeks before heading back to London for a couple more weeks (more details); as always, drop me a line if you’re around. Seriously.

After London? We’ll see…

Follow along.
Follow the stories, photos and trivialities of this little trip: “A Little Jaunt”.

Should be fun…

—

The photo above is part 3,289 of my “Places In-Between” project, another long-running, unpublished project that lingers in my mind, refusing to leave.

   


]]> http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/27/travel-london/feed/ 1 http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/27/ambient-intimacy-2/ http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/06/27/ambient-intimacy-2/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:03:15 +0000 Taylor Davidson http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/?p=2665 Continuing on the subject of ambient intimacy…

Flooding space and time.
Leisa Reichelt in receiver magazine on Ambient Intimacy:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.

Ambient is for the lightness, the atmospheric, non-directional and distributed nature of the communication. These are communications that are one to many; they’re not quite broadcast and yet not exactly conversational; they flood over a somewhat defined space. Within that space is intimacy: the closeness, familiarity and warmth that this kind of communication can create and the ever-present network of friends available wherever you can access the internet, or even just send a text message.

Triviality is relative.
Continuing with Lisa,

… On its own, such a status update may seem trivial but to examine an update in isolation is to miss the point of the social system that is at play here. These apparently trivial updates are really critical to maintaining connection with a network of often loose ties – a network that can give rich social rewards to those who participate.

… Critics allege that the closeness we feel from this kind of communication is artificial and potentially damaging: that it causes cognitive dissonance, with our brain thinking it is experiencing closeness, when it actually isn’t.

… I’m the last person to suggest that ambient intimacy could, or should, replace the other kinds of intimacy we’re already familiar with and fond of. However, the virtual nature of the interaction doesn’t make it any less real. We may be getting to know people differently and sharing with them differently but something important is happening here.

Please, discard the rhetoric and value judgments: the tools are here, part of our lives, creating new, replacing the old, integrating with the existing, finding their place until they due to be replaced themselves.

Humans have always created massive amounts of triviality; perhaps the biggest change is that we’ve never been able to see if so starkly, in such volume, so easily.

Why?

Supply, meet demand.
Why do we participate in online communities large and small? Lisa references a presentation by Tom Coates on social software, pointing to four key reasons:

• Anticipated reciprocity
• Reputation
• Sense of efficacy
• Identification with a group

In short, we wouldn’t participate if we didn’t get something out of it, and even the greatest trivialities “pay” in some way; the key is to find the communities where the trivial matters.

To think about why we participate in online communities, consider: why do we participate in offline communities?

Humanity survives.
“It’s not about being poked and prodded, it’s about exposing more surface area for others to connect with” (link); but are we really considering what areas we are exposing and what connections we are creating?

The incentives behind creating groups are hardly new; social software provides new tools and mediums but fills the same fundamental human needs.

As we use online tools, reflect back to how we live offline; humans are trivial, petty, grandstanding, self-promotional, thoughtful, shy, mysterious, interesting, intelligent, idiotic. These do not change; to expect otherwise would be farcical.

And that’s ok. We’re human.

So love the ones we are with, pick our spots to challenge, discard our dreams of changing everyone, and find the right people to love. The transaction costs of connecting have never been lower. Pick your spots and engage on your terms, in your communities, for your reasons. Or don’t. But be happy doing it.

   


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