It's economic commentary time. Generally I do not intend to post content on the economy but for this post I will make an exception. Two recent videos that have been circulating on the internet this past week nicely complement each other in helping viewers understand what is wrong with the American economy and how to fix it. The first video was uploaded by AJ+; it is titled "Killing the Middle Class". The video makes the argument that the greed of the top 1-10% is squeezing out the middle 40%, making it more and more difficult to sustain a traditionally middle class standard of living.
The second video was posted by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who argues that "deficit-hawk" austerity program is precisely the wrong prescription for a week economy; it will only make a weak economy even weaker, possibly throwing it into recession or worse. Reich identifies three essential points in order to understand what is necessary for an economic recovery. These three points are, waved in front of advocates of austerity measures, are like garlic when you wave in in front of a vampire; they make the enthusiasts for austerity measures shrivel up and blow away.
Together these two video clips provide a clear and concise explanation of what is going wrong and how to fix it.
This was, hands down, one of my favorite songs when I was growing up. This song captured the spirit of the times, when society seemed to be spiraling toward total breakdown and chaos and states squandered human and material resources on endless warfare. It was a period that did not inspire much confidence in political leadership or in the future. This song speaks to the sense of hopelessness and futility that many people have in their lives if they cannot see beyond the bookends of birth and death.
Another song that explored the theme of wisdom being silenced by fools was this popular song by Simon and Garfunkel:
As you can see, I was a very deep, if not melancholy, child (lol). I grew up in a time when we were afraid that truthful witness would be swallowed up in commercial absurdity. That sense that futility might triumph over meaning may not have been very different from any other period of history, really. Both of these songs mention the suppression of the words of "prophets". Both songs mention the all-pervasive "silence" that envelopes meaningful expression. It seems to me that people without faith, without hope and without love still live with the fear that meaning will be swallowed up by silence.
Philosophy writer Alain de Botton, an atheist, acknowledges what religions do well and tells his audience how to mine religions for what they do best.
This is what religions know, according to Botton:
We are forgetful: religions are circular systems where they constantly repeat and rehearse.
They try to arrange our time for us: every day is associated with a concept; important ideas must be parceled out over time. Spontaneity is way overrated.
Religions are fascinated not just with what is said, but how it is said: we are creatures of the senses, not just the mind.
Religions involve the whole body: they are ritualistic.
Religions appreciate the utility of art: religions approach art as a form of propaganda, which is supposed to point you toward what is good and away from what is bad. Art gives us visceral reminders of the messages from religion.
Religions are good at drawing communities together; religions bring together people who have nothing in common.
Along these same lines, one of the more insightful comments I have read, during a discussion about Islamophobia where people constantly confuse fundamentalist sects with Islam itself, was a statement along these lines, which I am paraphrasing here because I believe it applies to all three Semitic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism): The only way to actually know how religious communities with a text (the Bible, the Koran, the Torah) actually live out their religion, struggle with it and understand it is by actually getting to know members of that religious community. Religions are not abstractions and texts are embedded in communities.
In other words, the interpretation of religious texts, such as the Bible, the Koran and the Torah, cannot be done apart from the traditions of the religious community the text arose out of. As the commentator said, we cannot just read these texts and take them at face value. Even within our religious communities, we struggle with the texts' meaning and we struggle with what it means to live out the revelation that we find within the text and within the traditions of our faith.
Religion is an experiential matter. It is something that is struggled with, lived and experienced -- especially by members of faith communities.
Interpretation of the text is constantly being done in the process of living the text. This is where religious fundamentalists and literalists of all types get confused. A sacred text is not like a scientific textbook. It is not written, nor is it to be interpreted, in cold, objective scientific or technical language, quite apart from the day-to-day experiences of the faithful.
This is also why outsiders, such as Islamophobes, with regard to Islam, confuse the Koran's call for spiritual struggle with a call to violently impose the Islamic faith on non-believers. They are reading the text as an outsider, without the same frame-of-reference or historical background as a person in an Islamic community reads the text.
Richard Greene gives a TED Talk on the seven "secrets" to effective speaking. His seven principles apply to all forms of delivering content.
The first four of Greene's secrets are:
Words -- the content of your speech.
Voice Tone -- how you use your voice; how it sounds.
Body Language -- your motions; how you use your body when speaking.
Focus -- this is very important; it is to know what your main point is and return to it again and again
Great speakers don't give a speech; they don't think of what they are doing as giving a performance; instead they are having a conversation with their audience.
Along with this is speaking about your passion. Greene says that you have to speak from your heart about the things of which you are passionate. Share your passions with your audience. What is it that you absolutely must share with the world? Why is it important for your audience to hear this?
Greene defines visual language as being the language of energy; he sees Robin Williams as being exemplary of this language
The audio language Greene defines as the ability to take the details one is talking about and turn them into a story, a narrative. He says that Ronald Reagan is exemplary of this language.
The language of the audio-visual is the analytical and statistical language according to Greene. It is the language that gives one credibility because of one's logic and reason.
Kinesthetic language, according to Greene is the language of suave and deep vocal inflection, as exemplified by James Earl Jones or Barry White.
Most important of all, however, according to Greene, is to speak from one's authentic passion. Effective speaking depends upon a deep level of detail and authentic passion.
Greene's advice, then, is:
Have a clear sense of focus; a main point that you want to express. Be clear about this.
Share your passion with your audience; share your passions with the world.
Harness the details in your talk and organize them into a story that keeps us wanting to know what happens next.
Have a conversation with your audience instead of performing in front of them.
In a recent interview Will Smith discusses the importance of failure:
"When you lose the ability to lose you lose the ability to create. Fear is the killer of creativity. There is a misconception about failing. [Actually], you have to fail a lot; you have to fail early; you have to fail often and you have to fail forward."
Author Ta Nehisi Coates discussed the process of writing in a recent interview for the Atlantic Monthly:
"I have always considered the entire [writing] process [as being] about failure."
"Breakthroughs [in writing] come from putting an inordinate amount of pressure on yourself and seeing what you can take, hoping that you grow some new 'muscles' [in the process]."
The writing process "is not really all that mystical. It is repeated practice over and over again, and suddenly you become something that you had no idea you could [ever] really be."
"I strongly believe that writing is practically an act of physical courage. You get up and you have this great idea ... and you sit down to write it. Almost always what was brilliant before is somehow not so brilliant when you sit down to write it. It's as though you have music in your head," but when you try to get it out on the page it "is absolute hell. You fail."
"If you are doing [the process of writing] correctly, the translation of what you hear in your head will almost always come out badly on the page," during the first draft. "You have to give yourself a day, go back and revise over and over and over again until you get to something that is at least 70% of what you [originally] wanted. You try to go from really, really bad, to okay, to acceptable, and then you know that you've done your job. I never get to that perfect thing that was [originally] in my head. I always considered the entire process [to be] about failure."
In terms of writing as a profession, which is not for everyone, Coates said that there are limited slots and that it is hard to make a breakthrough but it is important for the aspiring writer to keep going. He said that the longer one sticks with the craft the more one's initial competition thins out. In the meantime, he said, one develops a "skill set" that other people won't have if they are new to the profession. It all boils down, he said, to perseverance.
Anyone who has lived through the past 30 years knows that the rise of digital technology has changed much of what we once took for granted about jobs and economic opportunity. What is unclear is how sustainable these new modes of social and economic interaction will be and how to capitalize on (not strictly limited to monetizing) these new tools.
Early on many of us went through a phase when we thought that digital technology would be the big leveler that would deal a death blow to discrimination that marginalized us based on race or gender, despite our knowledge or skills. Employers would no longer care what we looked like, so long as we were good at designing web pages, or teaching online, or coding. In fact, many of us saw the emerging digital economy as being something that might free us from having to deal with employers altogether. The prospect was that we could become our own employers. The only people we would have to cater to would be potential customers, clients and constituencies.
Consumers wouldn't care what we looked like either because they wouldn't even see us -- they would just interact with the content that we generated over the internet. For those of us who were culturally isolated to varying degrees, digital information technology and social networking over the internet held the promise of linking us to the mainstream -- even creating a new mainstream -- and socializing the previously marginalized so as to be more effective in interactions with dominant cultures.
Not only did this optimism fire the hopes of individuals in technologically advanced countries, it also fueled optimism marginalized populations within the international economy. These hopes fueled speculation that digital technology would lead to the rise of a "new Africa", which would lift nations out of poverty and link them to a global economy with opportunities that were previously unimaginable.
Although that narrative of optimism is certainly out there, not everyone today is so sure that digital technology will be the panacea that many had hoped it would. There are some indications that this technology has made hyper-exploitation easier than it was before, increasing economic disparity while providing few opportunities for social mobility. Kentaro Toyama says that expectations are exaggerated and that the digital economy has not delivered on its promise to reduce levels of poverty or increase social mobility, and has -- in fact -- sharply increased rates of wealth and income inequality.
But on the other side of the debate, Paul Mason is coming out with a book to proclaim that the end of capitalism has begun because digital technology and the information-based society have made old economic relationships obsolete and people have non-monetary motivations to do work. This non-monetary motivation, Mason argues, coupled with the free flow of information and ideas will make the ability to set prices and assign monetary value to goods and services impossible, thus destroying the capitalist system of economic social relations. Mason holds the so-called "sharing economy", "collaborative economy" and the "gig economy" as forerunners of a post-capitalist economic system that he believes is emerging more-or-less organically and driven by the way human beings interact with the technology that we use.
Source: UK Guardian July 17, 2015
In 2008 Bill Gates promoted his idea of "creative capitalism" which seemed to foreshadow what Mason would argue later, with the difference being that while Mason came to the conclusion that non-monetary motivation would lead to the end of the capitalist system, Gates saw it as offering potential to humanize capitalism and make it more responsive to global problems that defied profit-oriented solutions.
Gates argued that knowledge workers are not just motivated by a large paycheck, but also by the image of the companies they work for. He said that they want to work for companies that are widely perceived to be involved in solving some of the world's most difficult problems.
The idea of the "share", "gig" and "collaborative" economy has come under criticism by those who have taken a close look at some of its signature companies, especially Uber and Lyft car-sharing enterprises. Rather than fostering new networks of more democratic economic relationships, Oliver Blanchard argues in his piece "Stop Calling it the 'Sharing Economy'. That Isn't What It Is," what is actually occurring is a highly profit-oriented corporate flanking action to avoid hard fought-for regulations that were put in place to protect both the workforce and consumers.
Picking up on this theme, Nancy Cook, writing in The Atlantic, argues that the activities are called the "sharing economy" are not really examples of the sharing economy at all. An authentic sharing economy, she argues, would look more like a public lending library rather than the apparently hyper-exploitative model used by Uber and Lyft.
However, arguments based on the ability to rely on the creative impulses of humanity and that, freed from the necessity to earn a living the old fashioned way and having access to an infinite amount of free information and ideas, people will be even more creative and productive reflects observations that people have made from their own experiences with digital technology in the fields of education, social media, and online collaborative efforts.
The concept of what it means to live in a time of information abundance, for example, in contrast against previous periods of information scarcity, was the main point of a talk that Diana Laufenberg at a TED conference. The abundance of information, however, means that along with the increase in access to quality information that is out there, one is also flooded with great deal of information that is garbage. Laufenberg says that the challenge for education in the age of information abundance is not gaining access to scarce information, but how to sort through the plethora of information of various quality, and what to do with the information once one has it.
And Chris Anderson explained, in a TED conference, how access to an abundance of information creates what he calls "crowd accelerated innovation" which consists of three things: 1. A Crowd, 2. Light or Open Visibility, and 3. Desire. When the crowd is no longer the local neighborhood, Anderson says, but is the entire globe, all bets are off. The visibility level and the desire or motivation go off the charts. This, he says, is what motivates people to give away their work for free. Working for free becomes synonymous with "openness", which is the life blood of the digital "ecosystem".
Clay Shirky also picks up on this question of what motivates people to create and post content on the internet (essentially "working") for free. This, he says, is what helps to create the abundance of information or "cognitive surplus" that we now benefit from. Human beings have always been motivated to share their knowledge, he says, but global digital technology allows us to share our knowledge more quickly and on a much larger scale than at any other time in history. Shirky says human beings like to create and we love to share. Shirky recognizes, the problem that Laufenberg alluded to: along with good, useful and high-quality information there is also a lot of silly content that is produced and spread. You cannot, Shirky points out, have one without the other. This question of non-monetary motivation and the pleasure that humans get from sharing what they know with wider and wider audiences was the focus of both a TED talk he delivered and an interview he did for NPR.
But all of these arguments don't seem to reflect the realities on the ground. The fact that the millennials are trying to scrape by in the "gig" or "share" economy means that many millennials are financially insecure. It is not at all clear how this propensity to work for free will translate to greater economic opportunity to go along with greater freedom for creative expression, as this video from AJ+ points out:
Progressives may very well find that the end of capitalism will not come about through marches and organized protest movements, but through the development of automated production coupled with abundance of information which becomes available -- through information technology -- for next to nothing, at least that's Paul Mason's theory about the "End of Capitalism".
Don't be surprised if political activists beg to differ with Mason, seeing his work as an attempt to pacify and derail movements for economic democracy and social justice when they are needed most. Nonetheless, it is important to entertain the possibility that Mason has a point -- is it possible that emerging technology, and even the technology already at our disposal, will make our current economic relationships obsolete? Mason says that Karl Marx anticipated this, and that transcripts of Marx's late-night brainstorming drafts emerged in the 1960s, giving us new insights into his thinking, which call into question the usefulness of organizing a political vanguard. Is this an unintended consequence of information technology? Have some political strategies and tactics become so outmoded as to be an impediment, rather than an asset, to the what they are intended promote? Does one, to paraphrase R. Buckminster Fuller, change the future by developing technology that makes the present obsolete?
Many progressives have been quick to celebrate SCOTUS' ruling this summer to uphold the right to same-sex marriage on the basis that the right to dignity is implied by the constitution and that same-sex marriage gives these couples dignity. Justice Thomas got into trouble saying that denial of citizenship rights did not deny slaves of their dignity, nor did granting former slaves these rights suddenly confer on them dignity they did not already have. At the heart of Thomas' comments is the notion that dignity is something that people cultivate within themselves, regardless of what the political, economic and social system around them assess about their worth as human beings.
Raised eyebrows at Thomas' comments were understandable, but what Thomas was saying was that the reasoning behind the decision was not on solid constitutional ground. Dignity, moreover, is not something that governments can withhold or confer. If same-sex marriage could not be argued on the basis of the 14th amendment then the argument in favor of it should not stand at all. Once dignity is made a rationale for a decision about constitutional rights one has moved away from constitutional law and entered the divination of the inner workings of the psyche -- and such divination, in place of sound reasoning, has heavy costs and consequences.
Continuing this discussion, constitutional scholar Jeffery Rosen does not begrudge progressives the outcome of the ruling, but questions the reasoning behind the decision in his piece in The Atlantic, "The Dangers of the Right to Dignity". Rosen cautions that celebrations may turn to mourning once this newly discovered and highly ambiguous "right" is used by the other side to justify decidedly non-progressive causes, such as the "dignity" of one's identity that comes as a result of having an assault rifle, or the dignity that comes from one's identity as a cigarette smoker who insists on his right to smoke in public spaces or in buildings where smoking is forbidden. The dignity argument could already be used by confederate battle flag enthusiasts who see this symbol of white supremacy as the banner of their dignity and Southern heritage -- which is their argument to keep it flying over state capitals and monuments.
Rosen argues that logic behind this ruling is an over-reach by the court and that even progressives will likely come to regret the precedent that it sets.
Speaking of unintended consequences in the social and political thought of today's progressives, professor Shamus Kahn, writing in Aeon, argues that the "born this way" premise of the same-sex rights movement promotes an underlying assumption that progressives in the past have explicitly fought against: biological determinism.
Kahn argues in "Not Born This Way" that biological determinism is a highly reactionary idea to base one's "liberation" upon and that many people, both progressives and non-progressives, misunderstand the concept of the "social construction" of race, gender or any other social category. To say that an identity is socially constructed, Kahn argues, is not to say that it is not real, nor is it to say that there is not a biological element to that identity -- rather, it is to say that whatever biological element there is to our social identities, that element is not determinative, and to argue otherwise is to open a Pandora's box to potentially highly regressive social policies.
Two of these articles, Rosen on the "right to dignity" and Kahn on biological determinism, challenge readers to re-think their assumptions and not to be so focused on their desired outcomes that they embrace underlying premises that they will live to regret. The third article, Mason on "the end of capitalism", challenges readers to re-think their notion of how progressive social change is likely to come about in the post-industrial age. The cost of fighting one's battles on the field of intellectual honesty and flexibility is never as deep as the cost of fighting based on intellectual laziness, dishonesty and outmoded ways of thinking that either can be used against one with a vengeance or that render one cognitively impotent and incoherent.
June Cohen describes what makes a good TED Talk and comes up with these key points:
1. Tell Us Something New: What are the new ideas? What are the different ideas? What is a fresh take on an old topic or idea? What is a new angle on an old topic? What is a new way of telling the story?
2. Evoke Contagious Emotion: Are these talks spreading? Do they have a viral nature? Are people sharing this content with each other? What teaches people something new?
3. Tell a Story: take the listener on a journey. Take the listener somewhere.
4. Be Personal: the talk should tell the audience something about the speaker. The listeners want to feel the speaker inside of the story. What is your passion? What did you learn in childhood that brought you to an insight later on?
5. Don't Lose the Audience (lose your jargon instead): speak to an audience of general intelligence.
6. Start Strong: start with something that is really compelling and interesting.
7. Focus: you only have time for one idea.
8. Rehearse (but Sound Spontaneous): practice and get your phrasing right; use hours and hours of practice.
In another talk that gives pointers a TED curator focused on these four points:
1. Tell us about one great big idea.
2. Give us an accessible explanation of a complicated idea.
3. Tell us about something that's new -- something groundbreaking.
4. Tell us a story that lets us know what it means to be human. Give us a story about the human experience.
Now we go from hearing Ira Glass discuss the art of story-telling to listening to Chris Anderson explain the art of delivering a good 18 minute talk -- a TED Talk.
Anderson identifies at least 7 questions and points a person should consider while drafting a TED Talk:
1. Do you have something to say? Do you have an idea that the world really needs to know about?
2. Have you figured out a way to make this idea accessible to your audience?
3. Is there a journey that you can take the audience on during the time allotted?
4. If the journey, or the scope of your work, does not fit within the allotted time, what is the angle or piece of the idea, that you can realistically cover in your talk?
5. To figure out the angle, or what your most compelling story is, think of a potential headline for your talk. Thinking about a good headline forces you to think about a good angle for your talk.
6. Remember, "less is more": strip out the inessentials so that you go into greater depth on the essentials of the journey.
7. Think about the few things you can unpack during the allotted time that will make what you are saying understandable and believable.
What a good talk is, in a nutshell
It is a journey
The speaker has scoped the extent of the talk so that it does not cover too much territory and fits the allotted time with greater detail and depth than would an unmanageable talk that tries to tell everything.
The speaker takes the audience with him or her each step along the way.
Points to keep in mind in order to make the talk more accessible
Build your talk step-by-step for the audience, and let them see the next step ahead so that they don't feel as though they are in a fog.
Use accessible language; do not use jargon.
Give examples. Talks cannot advance original ideas without populating those ideas with examples. Without examples the people will be left behind.
Show vulnerability; let your audience know that you are taking a risk by sharing these things with them, and that you realize you are making yourself vulnerable by doing this and are entrusting yourself to them.
Ask them to go with you on this journey; do not just smugly assume that will go along.
Seduce them, as much as you can, with humor so that they will be more receptive to what you are saying when you get to the core of your talk.
What does it mean to take the audience on a Journey?
A journey of discovery: you reveal something, and that "something" leads to something else, and then something else, and on and on it goes -- it feels natural as the journey unfolds.
A journey of persuasion: go through it step-by-step -- making your argument one piece at a time.
The detective story: this is a story that starts with a riddle. It starts with a question or a problem. For example, you can share with them how your learned that everything you thought you knew about a certain topic was dead wrong.
Show the audience the clues you came across. Show them the "aha" moment of revelation. Allow the receiving brain to put the pieces together: clue, clue, clue -- conclusion.
You don't get inspiration in your talk by targeting it directly; you get inspiration by being authentic and by showing how you expanded your own sense of possibility in the world.
Other things to keep in mind
Think journey -- think story.
Start where your readers and audience is and meet them there. Give them a reason to come with you on this journey.
Mix story-telling and inspiration with analysis and issues.
Give them authenticity and vulnerability -- let them see that this is your passion that you are telling them about -- let them see that what you are talking about really matters -- let them see that you know you are taking a risk in trying to share these things with them.
The TED Essentials
TED is interested in ideas worth sharing and in minds being shifted.
What is the core idea that you have that is fresh and unique and worth sharing?
Why should someone else go along on this journey with you? Why should what you are sharing be important to them?
Why should they believe what you are telling them? Why is what you are saying so?
In part one Glass identifies two key blocks to build effective stories:
1. You must have a sequence of facts, actions or events (one thing leads to the next thing, which leads to the next thing -- creating a sense of suspense). You must raise a question from the beginning, and then answering those questions. The shape of a story is that you are throwing out questions, to keep people listening, and then answering them along the way. This is called the anecdote.
2. You have to have a moment of reflection in which the reader or audience finds out what this sequence of actions means. The moment of reflection also Both the sequence of actions and the moment of reflection should be compelling in order to have a good story.
You have to have an interesting anecdote and you have to have a moment of reflection. These are the two fundamental building blocks for a good story.
In part two Glass talks about how hard it is to find a good story. More than half of your time, if you're really good, will consist of looking for a good story and trying things out that don't work. You also have to be willing to kill the crap when the story doesn't work.
Glass says that it's useful to think of a story as something that is trying to be crap. It is trying to be unstructured, pointless, boring and digressive. It is your job to actively work against this tendency at every stage of the way and to prop the story up and make it work.
Do not take for granted that the story will work on its own. It won't.
Glass says that the storyteller must be merciless in killing off the boring parts of the story. He says you have to record and get rid of a lot of crap if you are going to produce something that is really, really good. Stories that work, he says, are good because the storyteller was willing to be tough in ruthless in cutting all of the bad parts out of it.
The reality, he says, is that most of what you produce just won't work. That's natural. That's what you have to go through each time, in order to come up with good material. Failure is part of success. If you are not failing all of the time then you are not going to get into the situation where you are likely to get lucky.
Finally, Glass says much of finding a good story is pure luck. The more you work, the more you write, the more crap you throw out, the more likely you are to get lucky -- and luck is everything in this business -- but you have to work for it.
In part three Glass talks about your skills will be mediocre, at best, when you first start telling stories, but your taste in good stories -- the thing that got you into this game -- is still good enough so that you can tell how bad you are. Use your good taste to strengthen your weak skills.
Unfortunately, he says, a lot of people never get beyond the point of having mediocre skills and good taste because they get discouraged and give up.
The most important thing you can do, says Glass, when you get discouraged because your taste tells you that what you are putting out there is not as good as you hoped it would be, is to produce a lot of material. Put yourself on a deadline so that you know that every week, or every month you will complete a project.
It is only when you do a huge amount of work that the work you are putting out there will be equal to your ambitions. It literally takes years of work to hone your craft.
In the final part Glass discusses the importance of finding your own voice while, at the same time, being interested in the stories of other people.
Ira Glass spent a hour talking to Google employees about his popular radio broadcast, "This American Life", and what it takes to make that program actually work.
In one of my favorite TED Talks of all time, Ben Dunlap, former president of Wofford College in Columbia, South Carolina, discussed what it means to be a lifelong learner. This video is found on my YouTube playlist "Being Wrong and Other Insights"
Dunlap opens with the insightful comment that cognitive diversity is at least as threatened as biodiversity on this planet today.
Dunlap defines the Hungarian spirit as being "people with a complex moral awareness, with a heritage of guilt and defeat matched by defiance and bravado."
Dunlap defines his passion as being an insatiable curiosity, an irrepressible desire to know, no matter what the subject, no matter what the cost -- it is an indistinguishable, undaunted appetite for learning and experience, no matter how risible, no matter how esoteric, no matter how seditious it might seem.
In a Hungarian spirit he concludes, "This is our task; we know it will be hard."
Perhaps this Aaron Schwartz meme sums up Dunlap's message
In this lecture Coleman warns of the danger of the combination of oversimplifications of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, and neutrality as a condition of academic integrity -- she sees these things as being dangers to a functioning democracy because they yield the playing field of civil engagement and the big questions -- about who we are and what we should value -- to the fundamentalists.
Coleman's main point is this: There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators.
Coleman begins with this question: How do we, as a society, provide an education that is worthy of free men and women?
The problem, according to Coleman is this: True liberal arts education no longer exists in the United States -- we have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for citizenship that is their signature.
Coleman says that in the past century the expert has overthrown the liberal arts generalist so as to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. The price of the dominance of expertise, she says is enormous.
Coleman says that the progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest except one, and within that one to continue to narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of all things.
As one moves up the academic ladder, she says, questions dealing with matters other than technical competence are moved off the table.
Questions such as What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making? are treated with greater and greater skepticism and are set aside, she says.
As we do this, Coleman argues, the guardians of secular democracy have, in effect, yielded the connection between education and values to the fundamentalists, who you can be sure have no compunction about using education to further their values: the absolutes of a theocracy. [I would add here the absolutes of any ideological system]
Educational institutions are not helping either, she says. "When the impulse is to change the world, the academy is more likely to engender learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment."
Coleman says that this brew of oversimplifications of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, and neutrality as a condition of academic integrity is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connection between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom.
Coleman reminds us of the cautionary words of Thomas Jefferson:
Coleman says that the reality of the 21st century is this: No one has the answers to the challenges facing us in this century -- not even the experts -- and everyone has the responsibility to try to find answers and engage in the civic process. Everyone has the responsibility to participate.
Coleman calls for a transformation of liberal arts education in which "the continuum of thought and action are its life's blood." She says that education should become more problem and project-oriented; instruction should become more interdisciplinary; and activity in the classroom should be more closely linked to the world beyond the classroom environment.
Coleman defines history as being the laboratory in which we see played out the actual as well as the intended consequences of ideas.
She sees education centered on civic engagement and problem-solving as having the effect of undercutting self-righteousness, radically altering the tone and character of controversy, and dramatically enriching the possibility of finding common ground. Through this approach, ideology, zealotry and unsubstantiated opinions, she says, simply will not do.
What we learn, in the process of trying to make principled but non-partisan and non-ideological effective change, is that the hard choices are not between "good" and "evil", but between competing goods.
Coleman says, "There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators."
Coleman says that being overwhelmed is the first step if you are trying to get at things that really matter on a scale that makes a difference. But what does one do when one is feeling overwhelmed? Coleman offers this advice -- she says you have two things: you have a mind and you have other people; start with those and change the world.
Tan says that the questions that bedevil the creative writer as he or she is writing, is how do things happen; how does one thing lead to another. As she is writing, Tan is constantly trying to figure the story out. She is constantly asking:
Why do things happen?
How do things happen?
How do I as the narrator influence what happens?
In writing, says Tan, there is a lot of "dark matter"; there are a lot of unknowns. Those unknowns, she says, help to generate the creative process.
You are constantly searching for what experiences mean. Tan cautions against focusing on what the story is "about" while you writing it, otherwise you will not write the story and you will not make discoveries -- you will only write about what it is about, not about the characters in a situation of moral ambiguity. You will no longer surprise yourself as you write.
Tan describes the situation that her characters typically find themselves in: they go through life and they see a situation; they have a response and they have an intention associated with that response, but there is some ambiguity between what they think they should do, as a matter of principle, and what they think they should do as a matter of practicality. When they respond things do not turn out as they expect and things go wrong. When things go wrong, what do they do? Do they now own the problem or do they let the problem go saying, "that's not what I intended"? When things go wrong to we stay with the problem and take further action to try to justify the initial action? Do they let it go and say, "I cannot be held responsible for all of this?"
Tan says that once you identify your question you will get hints and clues everywhere you go. Identifying the question will give you a focus, she says. Once we have a question, a focus, we become aware of things that we weren't previously aware of. We may also be faced with moral ambiguity about whether we should take action, and perhaps be sucked into the problem ourselves -- perhaps making the problem worse -- or do we stand aside and say "it is not my problem"?
Tan believes that moral ambiguity is essential in order to be a good writer, even though we find this disturbing. The reason it is essential, according to Tan, is because it gives the writer something to explore.
Moral ambiguity: what should I do? Should I get involved or should I stand apart? These questions lead to an identity crisis: Who am I? Why am I here? What am I here to do? What is the meaning of life? What is my place in the universe?
Tan says that how the writer creates something out of nothing and how the writer creates something out of his or her own life is through the process of questioning and starting from the premise that is no such thing as "absolute truth".
In this vein, Tan, as a writer has to believe that there are no absolute truths -- there are only specifics of time and place. This is what the writer must write about.
The writer writes in terms of particles of truth, not of absolute truths. So long as there is absurdity and partial answers there is always something new for the writer to discover in the process of writer.
For Tan, when the writer enters the strange world of his or her characters the author must suspend his or her own beliefs and take on the beliefs the characters. This, again, brings one back to the theme of ambiguity. It become ambiguous whose beliefs are operative in the world, determining what is happening. When the writer sees events through the cosmology of the writer's characters the explanation of why and how things happen as they do changes. This, again, gives the writer something to explore and opens the possibility for empathy.
Writing, for Tan, is a path toward empathy. To put oneself in the story and to feel the story is, for Tan, the path to compassion.
The creative process does not always behave rationally. The way creative people experience this process feels paranormal in many ways. If we see ourselves as being at the center of this process -- the main agent of it -- we drive ourselves mad when the creative juices don't flow. What is a healthier way to think about this process and to save our sanity?
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, discusses the creative muse and how creative people can work in spite of the immobilizing pressure that social expectations place on them. This is the video that first drew me into TED Talks.
What happens when we shift our focus, in the creative process, from the expectation that our creative work flows from within us to something that resembles a dialogue between our mysterious creative muse and ourselves? What might this do to eliminate the creative block?
The creative person needs to rediscover a safe distance from themselves and their anxiety about the reaction to what they are creating will be. We used to have a mechanism for managing the emotional risks of creativity. Gilbert suggests that we need to re-discover something like that once again.
Perhaps we need to see our creative performance, once again, as being a glimpse of God. Perhaps we need to see our creative inspiration as something that does not come from within us, but something that is on loan to us -- that visits us for awhile and returns from whence it came.
Epistemology Realism: this is the sense that there is a purely objective existence of the world. Perhaps Kathryn Schultz would take exception to this -- or at least with the idea that we can know the world in a purely objective manner. Schulz suggests that it is big mistake to go through life avoiding thinking about the possibility that we may be wrong.
She says we are trapped in the bubble of feeling that we are right all of the time. One of the problems we have is that the way we feel when we are wrong is exactly the same way we feel when we are right, until we actually realize that we are wrong.
Trusting too much on feeling of being on the right side of anything can be dangerous. The feeling of "rightness" is not a reliable guide for what is actually going on in the world.
The problem with feeling that you are right means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. This creates a problem because it means that we are forced to generate a narrative to explain all those people who do not agree with us. That narrative that we generate is usually embedded with an unfortunate set of assumptions:
1. That they are misinformed, and once we educate them they will see things the same way that we do.
2. That they are idiots -- they have all the information we have, but they are too stupid to put it all together so that they will see the world as we do.
3. That they are malicious -- they know the truth, but they are refusing to admit for their own malevolent purposes.
This feeling of rightness prevents us from avoiding preventable mistakes and causes us to treat each other terribly, says Schulz. It also misses the whole point of what it means to be human.
A key moment in this video clip is when she says, "The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is, it is that you can see the world as it isn't."
"We can remember the past and we can envision the future -- and we can imagine what it would be like to be some other person in some other place." This, says Schulz, is what makes the human mind miraculous. It does not just reproduce a dead-panned copy of an "objective reality".
We see the world through the lens of subjectivity and through emotion, which is something that is discussed in an online journal called "Raptitude".
The same attribute of our mind that enables us to be creative is the attribute that necessitates our getting things wrong. We should not try to deny, or futilely to suppress, it -- we should embrace and celebrate it. This is who we are; it is what it means to be human.
It is also what is at the heart of a good story and a good joke. A good joke and a good story is premised on thinking one thing and having reality turn out to be something else.
To error is human, says Schulz. In fact, Saint Augustine once wrote -- centuries before Descartes -- "I error, therefore I am."
Schulz says that the root of all of our productivity and creativity is that, "unlike God, we don't really know what is going out 'out there', and unlike all of the other animals we are obsessed with trying to figure it out."
"I thought this one thing was going to happen, and something else happened instead." -- we need this, says Ira Glass of This American Life radio show.
"If you really want to re-discover wonder," Schulz says, "you need to step out of that tiny, terrifying space of 'rightness' and look around at each other, and look out at the vastness and complexity of the universe, and be able to say, 'wow, I don't know -- maybe I'm wrong.'"
Hey, I can't guarantee that these notes will be entirely original. I jotted them down back in February of 2013. It is now the summer of 2015. I was taking a Coursera MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) at the time, which required that I review a whole lot of online material. Some of what follows may be original -- some of it may not be. Looking over my notes years later I found these bits on creativity interesting, that's why I'm posting them:
I recognize many of these notes as having come from Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing
Technology is changing the rules of the game in every aspect of our lives.
Genius is mastery of content and its dissemination.
To create is merely to choose wisely from the existing pool of content. What becomes important is what the author (composer, artist) decides to choose, Success lies in knowing what to include and --more importantly, what to leave out.
Suppression of self-expression is impossible. The act of choosing and re-framing occurs even when you are copying.
You are a mash-up of what you let into your life.
Creativity is the art of re-purposing, choosing and re-framing.
It really isn't plagiarism if you study instead of skim, steal from many sources instead of stealing from just one, credit sources you steal from, transform the content you are working with, and remix the whole thing rather than to simply rip it off.
The thing that distinguishes my work from yours is how I make my way through the thicket of information, how I manage it, how I parse it and how I organize and distribute it.
There is no harm in appropriation of content, so long as you acknowledge the source and transform the content in significant ways.
You ask if we are witnessing the destruction of authorship, but what is "authorship" and originality in the digital age anyway?
In the digital age words and images are interchangeable.
Culture is really a matter of orientation. Culture is not a matter of having read certain texts, but of being able to find your bearings within texts as a system. It is to understand the relationship between one text and another. It is to grasp texts as a body of work. You have to know that texts form a system and you have to be able to locate each element in relation to the others. The interior of a text is less important than its exterior -- what counts in a text are the texts along side of it. The text is less of a text than it is the whole discussion about it. We must pay attention to that discussion in order to talk about a text.
Digital Natives: describes people who grew up using digital devices and are presumably quite comfortable with them, in contrast to digital immigrants, who only learned how to use such devices after they were adults.
Digital Tourists: some digital immigrants have noted that they actually have learned more about the internet, and learned to do more things on it, than digital natives they know. These digital immigrants are unimpressed with digital natives whose internet usage is limited to Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, and who use their cell phones for texting. Rather than distinguishing between digital natives and digital immigrants, these people suggest, perhaps it is more useful to distinguish between digital tourists and digital residents.
Sampling, Re-mixing and Mash-up: the digital age has made us more aware of how much creativity is the product of toying with content that has already been created and "re-purposing" it for new uses. King Solomon told us, many centuries ago, there is nothing new under the sun.
Hyperlinks: reflecting this crazy and nearly chaotic world of the internet hyperlinks allow people who browse the internet to create their own mash-ups in the rapid sequence of their viewing choices. We move rapidly from content to content. This raises concerns, however, that browsers have become even more superficial in reading and viewing content than they were in the analog days. They raise concerns that we have become even more impatient with depth and reflection -- seeking constant and rapid stimulation instead.
Memes: the name of the game on the internet is to get your content replicated. He who has replicated content wins. The term "meme" applies to anything that is imitated or replicated, whether it is behavior, ideas, images, fashions, or what have you. The internet is all about easy replication.
Long-Tail: because digital content on the internet is easily replicated, and because almost infinite amounts of it can be stored cheaply, almost forever, retailers can now go after niche markets (the long tail of the bell curve) rather than focusing almost exclusively on a mass market (the center of the bell in the bell curve). Due to lack of scarcity of shelf space your content now can stay on the shelf for as long as is necessary to find its market -- and it can potential generate revenue, or have influence, by reaching small and highly specialized audiences over many years of global potential. One is no longer confined to the short-term and the local. One no longer needs to be obsessed with mass appeal -- at least that's the theory.
Early Adapters: when you create content for a niche you should not expect it to spread just because you want it to; first you will need some pioneers -- some early adapters -- who have a passion for the kind of thing your content represents. Your first audience should be the early adapters, whom you want to take a "risk" and try your product out. It is by word of mouth, through the early adapters, that your content will have any chance to go viral.
Susan Blackmore sees human beings, who she says have set cultural evolution in motion, as being something akin to Pandora and her box -- once you let it out of the box, and you begin to see its effects, it is too late -- you cannot put it back into the box.
She believes that her serious application of the concept of memetics provides a useful way of thinking about what is happening on the cultural landscape generally, and perhaps in the cosmos as a whole.
She says that memetics is founded on the principle of universal Darwinism: If you have something that varies, and if there is a struggle for survival among those somethings that vary so that nearly all of them die, and if those few that survive pass on to their offspring that very thing that helped them to survive then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all of this happened than their parents were.
In other words, if you have variation, selection and heredity you will get design out chaos -- design without the need of a designer. She says, "If you have something that it is copied with variation and it's selected then you must get design appearing out nowhere." It cannot be stopped.
Universal Darwinism, as applied to information, Blackmore says, means that any information that is varied and selected will result in design.
Richard Dawkins, Blackmore notes, called the information that is copied "the selfish replicator", not in the sense that it has selfish emotions, but in the sense that it will get copied if it can be copied, regardless of the consequences. It doesn't care about consequences because it can't care -- it's just information, hence the reference to being "selfish".
Blackmore notes that generally we think about genes as being that which is copied with variation and selection, but there is something else that is copied: information. We copy information, she says, from person to person by imitation. We do this by language, by telling stories, by behavior and even by the clothes we wear.
All of this, she says, is information being copied with variation and selection; the very description of a design process.
The core definition of meme, she says, is "that which is imitated." Another way of saying this is to say that a meme is information that is copied from person to person -- it is not equivalent to an idea or anything else, she says emphatically, it is that which is imitated.
Memes, she says, will get copied if they can and it is human beings who do the copying, therefore she sees human beings as "meme machines"; we are being "used" by memes to ensure that they will be replicated.
To be sure, part of Blackmore's project is to turn our understanding of what it means to be human on its head. Rather than seeing ideas and language as being tools humans use for their own benefit, Blackmore sees humans as machines that memes use for their replication.
In fact, Blackmore sees all gene-replicated species as contributing to this end. Humans are useful to memes, according to Blackmore, because we replicate biologically -- we replicate genetically. The evolution of other genetically replicated creatures was part of risky path of development to arrive at the point where we are today: with gene-replicated creatures who are also capable of replicating memes.
There is no reason, however, to think that things will stop at this point according to Blackmore. Memes can be replicated without the human species then they will be -- as to the fate of the human species, memes really don't care.
For Blackmore, the most important thing about the universe is not that its nature is intelligence, but that its nature is the generation of idea replicators to transmit that intelligence. She sees different levels of replicators in the universe, each one feeding upon the one that came before it.
She defines the first stage of replication as being the emergence of human beings on the scene.
The second stage of replication, she says, is the variation and duplication of memes that occurs outside of human brains, such as through language, on clay tablets and more recently, through the use of computers.
She thinks we are now entering the third stage of replication in which memes are sent beyond the sphere of the earth. She sees the emergence of the internet as being part of the third stage of replication.
So, to sum up:
Blackmore points out that the development of each new phase of meme replication "machines" is fraught with danger, at least from the standpoint of the biological host. The development of meme replicators, to contain and transmit the memes, is a risky business. Again, whether or not human beings survive the process, according to Blackmore, is not the primary concern of memes -- just so long as they can be replicated.
For now, she believes, that memes need us because we are both self-replicated gene machines and idea replicating meme machines -- but she thinks we are approaching the time when we may no longer be indispensable for the replication and transmission of memes.
While this is an interesting way of thinking about ideas in relation to human beings and the internet, just how literally, seriously and useful one should take her argument I will leave to the reader to decide.
Nonetheless, Blackmore's contribution to the overall discussion of how human beings interact with digital technology is that it throws into question the whole idea that creativity is based on originality, as opposed to imitation and interaction, and the role of human beings as "meme machines" is a way of thinking about, and exploring the question of why people are motivated to collaborate and create content on the internet.
So, what exactly does one mean by creativity and self-expression in the digital age, when intellectual property itself is called into question?
I suppose the struggle against plagiarism is at least as old as the teaching profession itself, but I have to admit that I was caught off guard during the early days of the internet when, by about 2004, I noticed an uncommonly high number of impressive papers my students were turning in, but when I asked them to tell the class about what they had written they seemed barely able to read their own paper. Slowly, ever so slowly, it began to dawn on me that the reason they were having difficulty discussing their own work was because it wasn't their work at all. Up until that point it had never occurred to me that students might actually use the "copy and paste" function of their browser to plagiarize their assignments. When I was growing up we didn't have this option available to us -- in fact, there was no such thing as a "personal computer". In retrospect, I now see that I was hopelessly naive.
I was so scandalized by the practice that for years a waged a holy crusade against it. If students couldn't be bothered to take the time to write their own papers, I reasoned, why should I be bothered to take the time to grade them?
But my students grew up within a different cultural ethos from the one that I grew up in; and they had a different understanding by what one means by "self-expression". They grew up in an age when "sampling" has become an art form and re-purposing texts leads to prolific content. The believed that even if someone else created the phrases and images, if they took them, re-arranged them, and gave them their own meaning in order to express something other than was intended by the original artist or writer, that the content was fair game. These, of course, were the best of the students -- those who did not plagiarize their work wholesale, merely removing the author's name from the content and inserting their own.
Still, I was personally affronted by the notion of using someone else's work, even if it was "re-purposed," without attribution.
Recently Maria Popova, in her insightful site "Brain Pickings" reviewed a book by Kenneth Goldsmith, who actually encourages his students to plagiarize, called Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith tells his students to have at it -- go ahead and try to plagiarize; his thinking is that one cannot avoid being self-expressive, even when one is appropriating someone else's work. The key is that students must work with and process the text that they are plagiarizing.
Goldsmith believes that digital technology is rife with mixing and mash-ups of content and that this practice is not really a radical departure from what was being done during the analog days. The difference in the digital age is the in the ease and speed with which the process can be done.
Rather than blaming today's content-producers, especially students -- for being "unoriginal" in contrast with students in the past, Goldsmith believes that we once had a false notion of exaggerated originality that today's digital culture is disabusing us of, enabling us to understand that creativity is, and always was, something that pieces together the bits and shreds of many ideas and much content that floats freely in our cultural environment, and that we pick from the air in order to give voice to our own need for self-expression.
We were never as purely original, Goldsmith might argue, as we once thought we were.
This Copyright Criminals trailer gives a concise sample, if I may use that term, of the controversy over sampling, creativity, the nature of culture and the nature of human progress:
Clay Shirky, social media guru, talks to NPR about his concept of "cognitive surplus" and how it is changing the world. Shirky argues that we live in a world that is more conducive to fortuitous accidents because more of us are connected and can see what each of us is posting and are able to connect the dots for ourselves. We can see more of what people are putting out there and we are able to contribute more easily to the growing wealth of knowledge, perspectives, ideas and information that is now available.
In fact, that is how Shirky defines the term "cognitive surplus"; it is the ability of "more of us to see more of us, and more of us to be able to connect the dots for ourselves." Cognitive surplus is "the ability of the world's population to collaborate, contribute and volunteer on large -- sometimes global -- projects."
The focus of both Shirky's TED talk and his NPR interview is on non-monetary motivation behind human behavior, and he finds that non-monetary social motivation is often more powerful in modifying behavior than contractual overhead. Shirky says that people have a lot of free time and talent which they can commit to shared projects, and that this has always been the case. The thing that has changed in recent years, according to Shirky, is that people now have tools -- particularly in the form of mobile devices -- to move beyond being mere consumers to being creators and sharers of content. This, Shirky says, generates what he calls cognitive surplus.
In a society of cognitive surplus people increasingly devote time and energy to projects that they enjoy doing, even though these projects entail a lot of work, without monetary compensation. People are compensated, instead, by other things such as a sense of autonomy, a feeling of competence, a sense of group membership, a feeling of appreciation, and so on. It is not that people, who do things for free, are motivated by altruism and purity of heart, rather, their selfish motivation is different from that of a person who is motivated to invest in a project because they are paid to do it or their boss told them to.
So long as we ask the question, Shirky says, "Why are these people working for free?" we will never understand what is happening. The question we have to ask, he says, is "What are the non-financial motivations that draw these people out of themselves and to get into groups or to collaborate together?"
Shirky says that it takes a leap to move from being a non-creator to becoming a creator. The gap, he says, is not between someone who is prolific and someone who is not, but between someone who has created nothing and someone who has created something, even if what they have created is about the stupidest thing imaginable. Once one crosses that hurdle on the internet from creating nothing to creating something their whole relationship to the internet changes and becomes more and more profound with each new thing they create. They have shifted their relationship from being a consumer to being, even in the smallest way, a producer of internet content and a contributor to the digital consciousness of humankind.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, also discusses with NPR the non-monetary nature of motivation to produce content on the internet. Wales talks about how millions of people are motivated to spend hours of their time in collaboration on project. He uses Wikipedia as an example of this dedicated free labor. One may go on an editing binge for Wikipedia and, unlike the feeling after a binge of playing video games, one feels as though one's time has been well spent, The motivation for their investment of time and energy is non-monetary, and this would seem to fit Paul Mason's description of the nature of activity in a post-capitalist society.
Chris Anderson discusses how the internet is driving innovation. The crowd, he says, accelerates innovation. Anderson says that a crowd creates an ecosystem that shines a light on talent and increases the desire of participants to step up their game because they are now in a much brighter spotlight than was ever possible before.
The crowd ecosystem provides a platform whereby people are able to showcase their talents and skills and learn from the best or most interesting moves of other "performers". In the digital age people are more easily connected with each other and learn from one another -- and the ecosystem is much larger than it was in the analog age.
We are also moving away from top-down silos of information in schooling to lateral and interdisciplinary learning. The learning relationship is no longer self-consciously hierarchical, from teacher to student. We are all learners so that teachers become facilitators of student-lead and student-centered learning. Students learn by teaching so that the roles of teachers and students are frequently reversed in order to encourage students to know what they are talking about and develop greater proficiency.
A global digital community, says Anderson, encourages networking, emulation and innovation on a scale that was previously unimaginable.
Diana Laufenberg applies the concept of the shift from an age of scarcity to an age of abundance to the field of education. In the old days, she says, there was information scarcity so that schools and libraries became repositories of information. People had to go to schools and libraries in order to gain access to this scarce information. Today there is an abundance of information. Laufenberg believes that the challenge today is not gaining access to scarce information, but learning how to sift through the abundance of information and apply it. The role of schools and libraries is being transformed from being repositories of information to being laboratories for learning how to collaborate and work with the abundance of information that is available.
An important part of this transformation, says Laufenberg, is for students to learn how to fail. Failure must no longer be terminal, nor should a negative stigma be attached to it. Students must learn how to fail their way to success; they must learn how to learn from their failure.
The accent now must not be on having memorized the "right" answer, but on how to learn from your failures in your efforts to find information and apply it in a practical way. The question must not just be "Where do I find information?" but -- above all -- "What can I do with the information after I have found it?"
Chris Anderson discusses the end of the age of scarcity and the dawn of the age of abundance, which he sees as being fostered by digitization. When the cost of generating and dissemination of content -- whether words, art or music -- diminishes to nearly nothing, and storage space becomes nearly infinite and is also reduced to nothing, this changes who the target market is for retailers and what the "payoff" is for the producer.
In such an environment it costs retailers nothing to "stock" content for fringe tastes and interests and the shelf life of content is limitless.
Abundance thinking, Anderson says, creates far more options for consumers and a strong incentive for retailers to target niche markets that previously would not have been profitable for them. It also, Anderson argues, encourages producers to pursue their passions rather than only producing that which would appeal to a mass audience at the center of a bell curve.
This means a shift from thinking in terms of scarcity and "hits" to thinking in terms of abundance and niches. It means a shift from focusing on what is common and non-offensive to what appeals to a more specialized taste, embraced by fans who are passionate about what you are offering them and who have a higher sense of engagement and identification with the product or service than is the case with products and services that attempt to appeal, inoffensively, to a mass audience.
Under this new paradigm the decisions are made by the client or consumer rather than the producer and service provider -- the producer no longer tries to guess what the consumer will want and filter out what will not appeal to the consumer, rather the producer throws an almost infinite amount of content out to the public, and allows that content to find its niche in the "long tail" at the extreme ends of the bell curve.
In terms of social implications, Anderson argues that this signifies a shift from a common but superficial culture of broad appeal to narrower but deeper cultures meeting the needs of specific tastes.
Anderson argues that in the past one would focus on 20% of potential content, which would account for 80% of total sales, while ignoring 80% of the other content that was out there. By contrast, he says, in the digital world there is an incentive to include the previously neglected 80% of content, that might only account for 20% of sales, because every sale is total gain for the producer and retailer and the interests of the fringe, on either side of the bell curve, may now be met.
Some of what Paul Mason is talking about, in terms of the info-capitalism, or the post-capitalist economy, is similar to the argument that advertising in the age of the internet differs from advertising in the pre-internet age because the key to advertising on the internet is to give information away for free in order to draw attention to your product or services.
Marketing guru Seth Goden describes this process, using a boxing analogy, as being "Jab, jab, jab, right hook". In other words, give quality service up front; take care of the potential customer or client and their needs and then ask them to purchase your product or services: "Give, give, give, ask." Goden says one has to learn to listen to clients and customers instead of talking at them all the time -- and be there for them. Another way of saying this is give them value, value, value, and then ask them to buy.
In the pre-internet age advertisements chased consumers; in the internet age consumers chase advertisements as they search the internet for information about things that interest them. They actively seek information that you are posting on the internet and by providing quality information to the public, without cost, one builds a reputation that one is able to monetize in other ways at a later date.
Perhaps this is where the concept of advertising by giving good information and other content away for free diverges from Mason's notion that the free flow of information is leading to an end to monetary value altogether, as he sees the combination of automated production coupled with free ideas and information reducing the cost of goods and services to virtually nothing. There is no "monetizing" end game in Mason's vision. The limitation to abundance, Mason argues, will no longer be limited by resources; value, he argues, comes from knowledge, which is in infinite supply and can be stored and disseminated for next to nothing in the information age. Limits on abundance in the digitized information age, according to Mason, is determined only by the effectiveness of those who attempt to cling to what he sees as being the outdated notion of private and individual or corporate "intellectual property".
For Mason this question of clinging to the notion of intellectual property is neither a moral nor a political question, it is a question of practicality. "Information wants to be free", he says. Knowledge thrives by flowing freely and by freely interacting. It is through this process of information in dialogue that more and more of it develops. Impediments to this free flow of information represent more than anachronistic politics and more than an illiberal morality -- such impediments represent obstacles to social and human development, which is why -- he believes -- they will ultimately be overcome.
