Academic Freedom, Ethics, and the Military at U of T

Academic freedom is a tough topic. On one hand, the academy is (nominally) the place in which scholars and researchers should be free to explore the boundaries of knowledge, theory and practice without political interference. On the other, I maintain that there should be a cultural and societal standard of ethics that governs the pursuits of any institution within a civilized, and civil, society. This is the tension that must be managed in the contemporary university environment.

Last year OISE/UT experienced a significant and important controversy in which one of its research units sought to enter a research partnership with a commercial organization that develops software for military applications. Although the project itself was clearly focused on educational applications, it was equally clear that the knowledge obtained from the research would be used militarily. Advocates argued for academic freedom – that academic researchers should not be hampered by political concerns, particularly since the research itself was for (young student directed) education, and had passed the University’s ethical review protocol. Opponents argued (among other things) that the ethical review was flawed, that it did not obtain informed consent from one of the participants, namely OISE/UT itself, as an institution (noting that the Dean’s acquiescence in this matter did not constitute adequate informed consent of an institution comprised of many individuals whose careers and reputation are based on concepts of social justice, peace advocacy, pedagogy of the oppressed, and similar fields). How one appropriately approaches the issue of institutional consent is an topic worthy of a thesis, I think – one that extends the idea of institutional ethnography that itself was developed at OISE/UT.

So much for history and theory. The larger question of ethical review in these matters is now before the Governing Council at the University of Toronto. There is a petition being circulated that reads as follows:

I encourage Governing Council of University of Toronto to adopt the following two motions that were presented during the June 29, 2005 Governing Council Meeting. I fully support these motions.

MOTION 1
Be it resolved that there be an immediate moratorium on all future military-defence and military contractor research/institutional partnerships until fair, ethical, and democratic guidelines are put in place taking into consideration amongst others Human Rights, International Law, Conventions, Covenants and Declarations.

MOTION 2
Be it resolved that donations to and investment by the University of Toronto be made publicly available.

If you, or someone you know, is a member of the University of Toronto community – student, faculty or staff – I urge you to consider this issue, and the ramification of the current situation, that is, having NO GUIDELINES WHATSOEVER to govern the real ethics (as opposed to the prevent-the-university-from-being-sued ethics) of potential research partnerships with outside military agencies. Here is the Petition Against Military Partnerships At University Of Toronto.

People Against Militarization of OISE struggled in 2004/05 with OISE/University of Toronto administration which wanted to partner with the military and military contractor in an international research project which involved four Toronto Junior Public Schools. We won this struggle, but found that U of T had no ethical guidelines regarding types and lines of research and institutional and research partnerships. PAMO transformed into People Against Militarization of Life and was successful in presenting two motions at U of T Governing Council Meeting on June 29, 2005. These motions will be dealt with in October 2005. We hope you join us in making these motions a constructive reality. You can further support by asking U of T's Governing Council members, chair, and secretary about the status of these motions and show your support for Ethics at U of T. Canadian Federation of Students (ON) officially supports the two motions (CFS motion 2005/08:N23)

[Technorati tags: pamo | paml | militarization | university of toronto | oise/ut | petition | ethics | ikit | atlantis]

I Wonder If There's a Dental Plan...

An Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, is reporting on a story that appeared in the Dubai press, that

Al-Qaida has put job advertisements on the Internet asking for supporters to help put together its Web statements and video montages... The London-based Asharq al-Awsat said on its Web site this week that Al-Qaida had "vacant positions" for video production and editing statements, footage and international media coverage about militants in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and other conflict zones where militants are active.

I bet they go through interns like nobody's business.

This suggests an interesting reversal effect of the so-called war on terror(ism) that is being waged against friend and foe alike. While the nominal intention of the U.S.-led initiative is to wipe terrorism and terrorists from the face of the earth, the media law of reversal means that a simultaneous inherent property, or effect, of that "war" is to normalize terrorist groups and entrench them into the global political spectrum. This first gives them the patina of legitimacy, that later may evolve into commonly recognized political legitimacy. Witness, for example, the 30-year transition of Yassir Arafat's Al Fatah - who taught the world how to hijack airplanes in 1973 - to today's Palestinian Authority whose legitmacy in representing the Palestinian people is generally unquestioned.

Al Qaida posting job ads. An interesting question to contemplate is, how will the world consider today's major actors, thirty years from now?
[Technorati tags: al qaida | war on terror | reversal | ha'aretz]

Shanah Tovah Tikatevu

Regardless of whether you practice a form of religious faith, taking time to reflect on the passing of one year and anticipations for the next seems to me to be a worthwhile endeavour. In a world that has become far too busy and complicated to allow time for reflection on process as well as progress, pausing for a day or two of self-contemplation and rechecking one's place relative to one's larger community is something that I find particularly beneficial.

It is interesting to me that the traditional beginning of the year in Judaism occurs in the autumn, when most of nature (at least in this part of the world) seems to be shutting down for the proverbial long winter's nap. It is, to say the least, an odd season to consider the start of a "new year." Perhaps the lesson is this: New beginnings may best occur not in bustling activity, but in quietude, with time for reflection and contemplation of oneself in relation to others, and to the world at large.

To all of you who celebrate at this time of year, my friends, colleagues, readers and random visitors, I wish you and those whom you love, l'shanah tovah tikatevu - may you be inscribed for a good year, a year filled with good health, happiness, prosperity, success, and most of all, peace.
[Technorati tags: rosh hashanah | shanah tovah | new year | judaism]

Man Bites Do... err... Woman Sues RIAA

It does have a sort of "man bites dog" quality about it. In Oregon, a woman wrongfully accused and sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for allegedly downloading copyright material belonging to its members has turned around and filed a RICO (anti-racketeering) suit against her accusor. Among the woman's claims against the cartel,

Settlement Support Center [RIAA's collection agency] also falsely claimed that Ms. Andersen had “been viewed” by MediaSentry [RIAA's agency that hacks into computers to search for copyright material, whether it was legally obtained or not] downloading “gangster rap” music at 4:24 a.m. Settlement Support Center also falsely claimed that Ms. Andersen had used the login name “gotenkito@kazaa.com.” Ms. Andersen does not like “gangster rap,” does not recognize the name “gotenkito,” is not awake at 4:24 a.m. and has never downloaded music...

As fully set forth above, the record companies hired MediaSentry to break into private computers to spy, view files, remove information, and copy images. The record companies received and transmitted the information and images to Settlement Support Center. As the record companies’ agent, Settlement Support Center then falsely claimed that the stolen information and images showed Ms. Andersen’s downloading and distributing over 1,000 audio files. The record companies falsely claimed that Ms. Anderson owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to coerce and extort payment from her.

Good for Ms. Andersen! The RIAA lawsuits sure seem like extortion on a massive scale to me, aided and abetted by certain representatives in the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. justice system, such as it is. Here in Canada, at least, we have a Supreme Court with a clue, that did not allow CRIA, the RIAA's Canadian cousin, to file the "John Doe" lawsuits that enable this sort of immoral, not to mention marginally-if-at-all legal activity. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people like Ms. Anderson who are coerced into settling bogus lawsuits that amount to thousands millions of dollars because fighting the RIAA in court would cost more, making the RIAA's racket nothing more than a far less interesting version of The Sopranos. Perhaps more counter-suits like this one will finally put an end to this nonsense. What would be even more effective would be industry cartels and large corporations losing their sense of entitlement to obsolescent business models that must change in the face of societal, cultural and technological change, as well as environmental realities.
(Seen at Slashdot)
[Technorati tags: riaa lawsuits | rico | andersen]

Twyla Gibson on Hippocrates' Oath

For those who may have missed Twyla Gibson's opening lecture in our fall lecture series, What is Life?, there is another opportunity to listen to one of our most insightful and brilliant scholars who connects ancient tradition with contemporary societal and cultural applications.

Twyla Gibson lectures on "Hippocrates' Oath: The Code of Ethics in Bioethics" on Wednesday, October 5, 2005, from 4:10 - 5:00 p.m., in the Great Hall, Joint Centre for Bioethics, 88 College Street.

Hippocrates' Oath has for twenty-four centuries served as the keystone of professional ethics in medicine and the template for revisions to the ethical code of conduct. This study examines the oral traditional origins, context, and history of the Oath, and explores the relevance of its principles to bioethical debates and clinical decision-making today.

No reservations required.
[Technorati tags: twyla gibson | hippocrates oath | what is life]

This is Wild!

Really! National Geographic has set up a webcam at "Pete's Pond," a watering hole in Botswana, that captures wildlife... well, in the wild. It makes for fascinating viewing as critters large and small stop by for a drink. Or a bath. Or whatever.

Linking the live WildCam Africa Internet video camera from one of the most remote locations in southern Africa to a satellite hovering 22,500 miles (36,200 kilometers) above the Earth’s equator was the easy part. The challenge was how to keep baboons from messing with the camera, prevent insects from slithering inside the computer, and protect the whole setup from curious elephants. National Geographic spent weeks looking for someone who had done it before. Trouble was, nobody had. But Cameron Murie came close enough.

Murie, who calls himself a “geek in the bush,” operates a computer and information system business in Musina, South Africa. He is also responsible for designing a radio-based computer network linking the various camps at Mashatu Game Reserve. “Things that are commonplace in an urban environment are difficult to achieve in the bush,” says Murie. “A project like WildCam—with a satellite hook-up that provides streaming video—has never been done in this area. Getting a good quality connection here is expensive and challenging at best.”

“You have to animal- and insect-proof everything,” says Murie. “Otherwise, it’s a real problem. In this place if you get a bug in the system, it really is a bug.”

(Seen at BoingBoing. Note: RealPlayer browser plug-in required.)
[Technorati tags: national geographic | botswana | wildcam]

Reality TV Shows are Obsolesced

This is the observation made collectively by the participants in one of my "playshops" this morning at the Högskolan för lärande och kommunikation i Jönköping. These first-year students have just begun their studies in media and communication, and have had one introductory lecture, and one playshop. The observation was that since ubiquity is a sign of obsolescence, then the explosion of so-called reality TV shows may suggest that they are in their obsolescence - consider Survivor, Fear Factor, the Idol shows around the world, Big Brother, America's Next Top Model, So You Think You Can Dance, Paris Hilton goes to a Farm, Farmers go to the City, and so on and so on.

Well, if reality TV is being obsolesced, what are the other aspects? The tetrad fills in more or less like this: Reality TV is obsolesced by "real" reality on TV in the form of scenes from the Iraq war, scenes from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and other sundry disasters and plane crashes. When pushed beyond its limit, "real" reality becomes "unreal" reality in the form of crime dramas, for instance. What is retrieved from the past is another famous war appearing on TV, that being Vietnam.

ENH "Real" reality (war, destruction)	REV "Unreal" reality (crime dramas, e.g., CSI:Everywhere)
RET Vietnam ==> social revolt	OBS Reality TV (Survivor, etc.)

Not a bad analysis for a group of beginners (with just a little help from their friendly, neighbourhood prof).
[Technorati tags: tetrad | laws of media | reality tv | jonkoping]

Impact of Digital Photography? Expert thinks it may be a "new type of dark age"

I guess I'm the so-called expert. Yahoo News picked up a story done by Canadian Press journalist, Angela Pacienza on my "Memories" talk that a did a couple of weeks ago.

Someone more expert on photography than I makes this observation:

Stephen Bulger, who runs the Stephen Bulger Gallery in downtown Toronto, says photos that we hate today might become prized possessions in 20 years. "What's happened over and over again is that people using analogue (film and paper), invariably there's something that causes them to go back to a particular roll of film they shot and somewhere on that contact sheet there's a photograph that didn't strike them as being very significant until well after the photograph was taken," said Bulger. Had those photos been on CD, the quality would have deteriorated significantly to the point of being unreadable. "CDs don't last forever," Bulger warns. "It won't last as long as film will last."

So next time someone says to you, "Take a picture. It lasts longer!" you can reply, it ain't necessarily so.

Update: Here's an item from BoingBoing that cites a Library of Congress report about the loss of culture that is occurring from the future unavailability of our sound recordings. From the article:

Evidence uncovered in this analysis suggests that a significant portion of historic recordings is not easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public for noncommercial purposes. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one appears to be a convergence of two factors. The first is that the physical barriers created by recording technologies change often and have rendered most such recordings accessible only through obsolescent technologies usually found only in special institutions. Second, copyright law allows only rights holders to make these recordings accessible in current technologies, yet the rights holders appear to have few real-world commercial incentives to reissue many of their most significant recordings. The law has severely reduced the possibility of such recordings entering into the public domain, at least until 2067.

[Technorati tags: digital photography | memories | archive]

The Next Project: The Future of Corporation

I'm in Sweden this week, doing my annual lecture series at Högskolan för lärande och kommunikation i Jönköping. I lecture and do playshops with first year students in the school's media and communication program, focusing on the theory and practice of Marshall McLuhan. The ground is, of course, one of developing a critical sensibility to media study and media theory, directing the students to its application to social justice praxis. For those of you who have been asking, here is an exceedingly brief outline of the thinking the underlies my next research project.

Despite the best efforts and intentions of organization development practitioners to create a more humanistic workplace, a credible and critical argument can be made that such practices are intended to yield more productive – perhaps even placid – workers to fill the jobs that have been created according to functional requirements. Contemporary communication technologies enable workplace social network dynamics that lead to seemingly progressive organizational initiatives such as ad-hoc workgroups, “teleworking,” and “virtual organizations” of global scope. However, these dynamics are invariably constrained by the structure, metrics, power dynamics and psychology that defined the so-called modern corporation of the 19th century – its fundamental structure and operating philosophy arguably unchanged since its inception – in an almost quixotic quest for organizational effectiveness in the 21st century.

As Price observes in his 1968 work, Organizational Effectiveness: An Inventory of Propositions, a comprehensive theory of organizational effectiveness is elusive at best – and perhaps even unattainable – since the management literature has not yet discovered a way of aligning critical business issues and measures such as performance, success, survival, recovery, and turnaround with the amorphous notion of effectiveness. Even Quinn’s widely cited “competing values model” of organizational effectiveness merely acknowledges that management must balance the tensions among dichotomous forces that define aspects of an organization’s “culture.” This model as applied, however, does not necessarily address, measure or evaluate the totality of effects that an organization intends to create in the context of its total environment – one that necessarily has global reach and effect because of ubiquitous and instantaneous communication technology. Is it possible to conceive of, and design, new structures, dynamics, and operating philosophies that are both consistent with the extreme acceleration of world-wide contemporary industry, and will align with the effectiveness – that is, the overall desired effects – of an organization relative to its integral environmental context? Further, is there a mechanism whereby the articulation of the overall desired effects of the organization is itself an emergent – one might say, organic and aware – process?

Essentially, I submit that the various management schools of thought that have attempted to mitigate the dehumanizing effects of Frederick Taylor’s 1911 Principles of Scientific Management have each ultimately proven to be ineffective in accomplishing that end. In spite of sometimes lofty goals and idealistic objectives, the organization itself inevitably manages to subvert and co-opt more humanistic practices to serve the nominal aim of organizational efficiency. The consequences are well-known – overwhelming numbers of employees on the brink of burn-out, the subversion of corporate responsibility and governance mechanisms by unscrupulous executives and managers, and the dissonance among corporate and humanistic objectives.

Drawing from the work of Marshall McLuhan, I have observed that accompanying each communication nexus “point” (of approximately 300 years’ duration) throughout the history of Western civilization, there have been fundamental reversals in the effects of society’s major institutions, including those involved in the collective organization of work and enterprise. This, then, suggests a final probe: Is it possible, to conceive of a new theory of organizations that eliminates the Tayloristic ground, and are enabled by modern technologies that create ubiquitous connectivity, pervasive proximity, and their consequential emergent effects?

My Ph.D. research will focus on articulating an integral, emergent model for organizations in the 21st century that radically departs from the fragmentary, mechanization-model of the 19th century. The approach itself will be radical, as I intend to apply principles of feminist theory, critical ethnography and institutional ethnography to discover exemplars of apparently revolutionary and counter-intuitive practices that are, nonetheless effective, organic and aware, in the context of their total environment. My research program seeks to make what I hope will ultimately be considered as a seminal contribution to management praxis for the 21st century.
[Technorati tags: future of corporation | PhD | management | organization development]

Role* and Career Counselling Tests

I have the proverbial friend-of-a-friend who is contemplating a job change. The person is a long-time airline employee, who apparently worked as a reservations agent. This person knew the old-fashioned airline reservations system, complete with its arcane codes and complex database pathways inside out and backwards, able to work wonders for passengers with complex itineraries, challenging connections and unique needs.

Turns out that the person went to one of those career testing centres – the ones that test for aptitude and skill – with the hope of being given some guidance as to what would be the right career move to make. (Given the turmoil in airlines like Air Canada, and the challenges facing the industry in general, any move might indeed be the right move.) The testing showed that the person had an aptitude for the sort of logic that such a mentally-demanding job of juggling a reservations system would demand. From the testing, a number of possibilities that would capitalize on those learned skills were suggested.

What’s wrong with this rather simplistic, linear and deterministic picture? (Oops! Gave it away…)

Over the many years that the person has been an employee of the airline, the tasks of the job would have undoubtedly had an effect on the person’s cognitive abilities that would give preference to jobs that were analogous to reservations agent, at least with respect to skills. Hence, the “career testing” – usually skills and attributes based – would have given high marks for the sort of instrumental tasks that a job of, say, billing coder, would demand. This means that the person may be skilled for that job; it does not necessarily suggest that the person is suited for that job.

Suppose the person is motivated by such technical intricacies that a coding system demands. A job of billing coder, among many others, might well be a viable, satisfying alternative. If, on the other hand, the person is motivated by a type of “heroics” in response to confused or distraught passengers, the ability to work the magic of the reservation systems via the intricate codes is simply a means to an end, and would not be motivating in and of itself. Remember, by taking a “Role* view” of the employment world, it isn’t what you do that counts as much as the interactions and dynamics you create while doing it.

One of the risks of conventional career (job) counselling is that the client becomes “labelled” with an apparent skill aptitude relative to tasks. And in a sense, jobs are a collection of tasks. But roles and careers are made of much more than mere tasks. I could go so far as to say that the specific tasks of any white-collar worker (and many others, as well) are the least important aspects of one’s involvement in the workplace from the point of view of the person themselves. (The company is another matter altogether; to them, the workers are often no better than interchangeable parts in a corporate machine.) The danger of labelling is captured in McLuhan’s aphoristic warning: Love thy label as thy self. By “putting on” and wearing the assigned label, we run the risk of suppressing personal agency in favour of adopting tacitly-imposed behaviours.
[Technorati tags: rolestar | career counselling | job testing]

Motivation, Career Counselling and Life Coaching

This is an category archive index, with a static link on the right side.

Here are recent thoughts on intrinsic motivation, career counselling, life coaching, and finding the passion in your work and your life:

• New! RoleStar Research - The Serious Stuff - 2 December 2005


• RoleStar at CSTD - 9 November 2005


• Role* and Career Counselling Tests - 23 September 2005


• Role* and Creativity - 6 September 2005


• Life Coaching, Career Counselling and Role* (RoleStar) - 21 August 2005


• If Role* Was a Magazine - 21 August 2005


• And While We're Talking About Motivation - 14 Aug 2005


• The Method of Role* - 10 August 2005


• Enthusiastic Employees? Well... yes, but... - 1 August 2005


• Role* - Discovering the Passion in Your Work and Life - 23 July 2005

Is a role* discovery conversation for you? Are you facing an important career decision, or concerned about your career progress to date? Are you considering a new career at mid-life? Or, are you seeking a deeper understanding of what motivates and demotivates you, to figure out why you are sometimes totally engaged and passionate about what you do, and at other times, completely turned off and apathetic?

If you are interested in a brand new approach to career and life coaching, you can download a brochure [pdf] that describes the process, as well as its underlying theory, in detail. Afterwards, please contact me. (My email address is federman-at-sympatico-dot-ca. By the way, the discovery process works equally well face-to-face or over the telephone.)

[Technorati tags: motivation | career counselling | life coaching | rolestar | natural mode]

Help a Guy with His Thesis

No, not me. Aaron Braaton is doing an MA in economics at the University of Alberta, and collecting data on blogging via an online survey. I can't say that I find the survey questions particularly interesting, or that I expect the results may be all that useful (I'm not from the positivist camp), but I'm not against helping out a researcher.
[Technorati tags: research | blog survey | aaron braaton]

Asshole

One thing that's nice about having my own (borrowed) piece of unreal estate, compared to being the amplified and extended voice at the McLuhan Program, is that I can be a bit more explicit about my politics. Like this great bit of mashup: You're an Asshole.
[Technorati tags: asshole | film strip international | politics | bush | cheney | rumsfeld | rice]

So They Finally Listened to Me (Sort of)

Friday's announcement that Bell Canada and Rogers Communications - Eastern Canada's two major telecommunications providers - have teamed up to provide wireless broadband access across the country is a step in the right direction. They will be 50:50 partners in a venture called Inukshuk Internet Inc. Based on their mutual existing infrastructure,

The network will cover more than 40 cities as well as 50 rural and remote communities, some of which are still waiting for high-speed Internet access. There are two target audiences: underserved rural communities and people who want wireless high-speed Internet access beyond their homes. In addition to high-speed Internet access, Bell and Rogers could offer other voice, video and data applications over the network.

This is monumental for several reasons. First, Bell and Rogers are fierce rivals, viewing each other as direct competitors for service, coming into the home through either the phone line or the cable. Each one had aspirations to "own the customer," a rather perjorative view of their clientelle, given the colloquial meaning of "own" among the technologically... ahem... leet. For the longest time, each one viewed themselves merely as common carrier channels for the same content, and thus viewed the other as a bitter enemy. If ever there was an example of convergence, these two exemplified it, as the phone company and the cable company began to converge on each other with services and offerings: Satellite:Cable, Wireless:Wireless, Broadband:Broadband, Voice:VoIP.

As with many reversals in the contemporary era, the customers are becoming less concerned with the packaging, and more concerned about the products and services, and with the identities that they embody. In music, people are less interested in the plaastic-covered aluminum disks, favouring instead a focus on the music or video itself. In communications, people are less concerned with the specifics of how a signal gets to its final destination (usually a screen of some shape or size) and more about the quality, reliability, coverage and speed of that signal, in addition, of course, to what is coming across that signal, and what it says about them.

Here, Bell and Rogers finally figured it out. They are in very different businesses, and thus, not direct competitors in the identity market at all. They may express it somewhat differently: "We're going to build a common plumbing system, and we're going to fight like mad to sell our own version of the water," said David Robinson, vice-president of business implementation at Rogers. But this is the essence of the "what business are you REALLY in?" argument that I have been talking about for some time now. Good on them!
[Technorati tags: bell | rogers | what business are you really in]

If Corporations are Obsolete, What is Their (Reversal) Successor?

Our so-called modern corporations (and governments, and universities which I consider corporation-equivalents) are artefacts of the mechanical age. They were designed in an environmental ground of factory mechanization, peaked in effectiveness and efficiency during the early part of the 20th century, and then headed towards “extension beyond the limit of their potential” – in other words, towards reversal into a new form, with the current one being obsolesced. The evidence is unmistakeable: rampant corruption and theft of capital for personal benefit rather than concentration of capital for the benefit of the shareholders; gross inefficiencies in production, service and the flow of information; the rational, hierarchical organization of functions resulting in a reduced ability to perform those very functions compared to the prior looser organization; power and control being the overriding objective rather than enhancing shareholder wealth (which in itself is a problematic objective, but I’m being nominal for the time being, not critical).

There may be all sorts of rationalizations for “what went right and what went wrong” (to quote a current corporate leader of a once-great nation) in any given situation, for any given corporation. Fixing the particular dysfunctional circumstances may prevent the same thing from happening again, but this approach is akin to always fighting the last war – something the U.S., for example, is pretty good at. The problem is that adversaries, be they military or hierarchically systemic, never fight the last war, or even the last battle: they invent the next one. Corporate managers are forever playing figure catch-up, because of their inability to perceive the fundamental tectonic changes in the ground. Consequently, all sorts of bizarre things crop up as the now obsolescent corporate structure fights desperately to retain its past glory, its diminished ability to produce wealth (as society’s understanding of sustainable wealth has become more enlightened), and its now-impotent drive for control above all else.

A series of posts on boingboing regarding TiVo and intellectual property highlights a relatively miniscule consequence of what I perceive as the corporate structure’s last hurrah. In the first post, TiVo owners report that their PVR device would not allow them to retain recordings of the animated television programs King of the Hill, and The Simpsons. By transmitting a “protected bit” through the TiVo system, content owners unilaterally restricted viewers from retaining recordings beyond a pre-set period. The owners feel that their intellectual property rights are being violated. However, the content owners, aided and abetted by TiVo are in fact breaking the law in the United States, as the Copyright Act (upheld by the Supreme Court in the famous “Betamax decision”) permits home copying of broadcast material, and sharing for non-commercial purposes. (If I make a recording, I can hand it to you.) In Canada, our Supreme Court actually said that this is a user right (as opposed to a defence). In their apparent zeal to foil the so-called pirates, the content owners technologically defy the law of the land.

On the second front, that international bastion of the content industry’s vested interests, the World Intellectual Property Organization, “is once again considering adding "webcasting" to the upcoming Broadcast Treaty. This would allow a webcaster (anyone who sends you audiovisual material over the Internet) to have a 50 year monopoly over what you do with the material you receive from him -- even if he's sending you Creative Commons-licensed work, GPL'ed Flash animations, or stuff that's in the public domain. It would also make it illegal to break any DRM used in connection with webcasting.” What this means is that an independent content creator, like you or I, could post something to the web under Creative Commons, and a re-webcaster could take it, offer it on a streaming server, and automatically acquire a unique intellectual property right in the work. Now if that sort of hijacking of rights isn’t piracy, I don’t know what is, and it is proposed, supported and will be perpetrated by the same people who are screaming piracy today.

Both of these illustrate the lengths to which vested interests will go to retain control, power, and financial monopoly, now that the mechanistic ground of their business has shifted. It is not only greed that drives them, although my friend Wade Rowland makes a strong case for this perspective. Corporations perceive that a change has happened, and they are fighting and clawing for their survival, even if it means defying the law, common sense, business sense, or threatening the survival for the rest of us.

In response to an outrageous propaganda campaign by an obsolescent government agency, namely the US Patent and Trademark Office, that supports these corporate interests in contravention of their mandate, Wendy Seltzer offers appropriate interpretations and understanding of the USPTO’s distortion of the law. It makes for fun and thought-provoking (not to mention creation-provoking) reading.

The obsolescence of the modern corporation, and its reversal into a new emergent form, is the matter of my current research. Developing theory that “predicts” the future of corporation by anticipating the present is the objective.
[Technorati tags: corporation | obsolescence | reversal | intellectual property | copyright | tivo | wipo | uspto]

The Obsolescence of Mass-Media Journalism

If I were teaching a course on mass-media or journalism this semester or next, the entire course would be focused on the events surrounding the tragedy on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as a case study. (As it turns out, I may well be teaching my Applied McLuhanistics course in the winter semester, beginning January, 2006, so there may be a couple of explorations on this theme.) Anyone who is even partially following this story as it evolves cannot help but be caught up in the overwhelming amount of information, coverage, official and first-person accounts, videos, photographs, pleas, denials, accusations and self-congratulation. But recall that Marshall McLuhan said that information overload reverses into pattern recognition. So one question that arises is, what over-arching patterns are emerging relative to the various grounds that comprise the dominant societal and cultural environment of this disaster?

Jeff Rosen’s PressThink entry, From Deference to Outrage: Katrina and the Press is mandatory reading, for a thoughtful appraisal of what is occurring in the mainstream mass-media. The observation from the non-U.S. journalistic corps is that,

“Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.The “timid and self-censoring journalistic culture” in the U.S. is normally “no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration,” [BBC commentator, Matt] Wells wrote. “But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.”

This observation, from my ground, represents a hope-against-hope that television news (and mainstream journalism itself) has not, in fact, been obsolesced. But I think it’s too late: Not only have the horses bolted, but the barn has burnt to the ground (after the doors were closed).

The figure of the contrast can be characterized in this excerpt from a New Orleans cameraman’s diary.

I’m only writing this because of what I watched on tv last night. It was the first chance I’ve had to see some of the coverage and what I watched was pathetic. I sensed it yesterday when, amongst the chaos of the unfolding disaster, you realized some of the differences between what is happening here compared to major calamities we’ve endured recently.

There are almost no news crews in the field trying to cover the story. Hundreds, if not thousands of media people are in the region - but I have driven back and forth through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city and you don’t see them. You don’t see the National Guard…..you don’t see ANYONE, except for the poor unfortunate souls wandering the streets looking for food or water. Many of them are on their last legs; they are literally not long for this world. It is surreal; it’s like a zombie scene from Dawn of the Dead. It’s disgraceful that in our times, we are seeing the complete disintegration of our ability to care for our own…

…I watched one of these news robots on the air last night standing at Camp and Canal Street - where it is safe - doing a national live shot saying that “everything is in place now” and “food is being distributed”, and “the National Guard is deployed in force….on the street” - it was pure fiction. This guy hasn’t left the safety of his air conditioned trailer complete with Subway sandwiches (from Baton Rouge) and Gatorade. It’s pathetic.

The evolving reportage from New Orleans, Biloxi, and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast demonstrate that the news-media no longer report the news, so much as make the news. Wherever the television camera is pointing, whoever is speaking into the microphone, whatever passes the editor’s oversight (and the editor’s overseer’s oversight) is the news. By definition. As most of America’s (and the rest of the world’s) press is locked out of New Orleans and environs by federally-controlled military and private contractors, the news is effectively made by CNN, Fox News and (to a lesser extent) MSNBC. And, given both the present and future value of Katrina Disaster Reporting in ratings-tied advertising revenues, none of these networks are about to do too many things in defiance of the administration’s power elite. And, if one were to watch any of these networks, the situation, while still desperate, is improving: progress is being made, families are being reunited, people are getting on with life… in short, the American spirit triumphs, and the underclass who have been front and centre throughout this debacle, once again disappear from the camera eye, and the collective consciousness.

Thankfully, the effects of emergent transparency – the ability to see through the hypnotic fog perpetrated by political power thanks to the emergence of patterns from a wide variety of massively-interconnected bits of information – are now dominant. The ‘net is filled with accounts that not only contradict the “serious-but-stable” prognosis fed by the conventional mass-media, but also provide direct evidence of the patrician attitudes that precipitated the disaster in the first place, and continue an ill-conceived response. The not-so-secret dirty-little-secrets of the United States of America are laid bare for all to see – systemic poverty, illiteracy, classism, racism, indifference to the point of negligence are available for the rest of the world to judge the self-appointed arbiter of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The mainstream mass-media is obsolete. This does not mean that it disappears – quite the opposite. But it no longer dominates in the ability to shape the public agenda. The sooner that political factions recognize this fact, and respond by embracing more appropriate forms of engagement, participation, and divesting itself of the mentality of command-and-control, the better off we all will be.
[Technorati tags: katrina | mainstream media | mass media| politics| emergent transparency| journalism]

Memories

There seems to be a subtle change in product marketing among some companies. Instead of taking the attitude of "I have a product, therefore you have a need," some companies are instead attempting to position their product relative to some of the cultural and social changes that are occurring as a result of our dramatically changing times.

Such is the case with Lexmark, which yesterday introduced a new photo-printing appliance that allows one to create an archival CD of digital photos while it prints them. This is all accomplished without a computer, working directly from the camera and/or memory card. I was asked by them to offer the benefit of some of the research done at the McLuhan Program concerning the history of memory, archives, and the nature of the ephemeral artefact with which we are now confronted. What follows on the main blog page is an abridged version of my comments. For the full version, please go to the full post page.

I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be. But then again, the memory of our entire culture isn’t what it used to be, nor for that matter what it used to, used to be. Between two and three thousand years or go, give or take a century, the civilization at the heart of Western culture that was centred in ancient Greece, had a great memory. The mythic poems that have come to characterize that time – heroic epics like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – also characterize a culture founded on memory. Before the introduction of the phonetic alphabet to the ancient Greeks by the Phoenicians, all of human history had to be remembered. The Greeks, and indeed all ancient cultures, developed sophisticated technologies of form, structure and composition, to ensure that the past would be preserved. The very fact that we have such rich, historical records of the battle of Troy is testament to skill and training of the rhapsodes – literally, “sewers of song” – representing a long line of practitioners of the ancient art of memory.

There is a story that Plato relates in the Phaedrus, in which the Egyptian god Toth presents King Thamus with the gift of writing, one of his more creative inventions, and tells him that it is specifically intended for memory and wisdom. Thamus declines the gift, telling Toth that the effect will be the opposite – writing will cause humankind to be forgetful, as the exercise of memory would instead become written remembrances. Wisdom, he said, would be replaced by the appearance of wisdom without learning, as anyone could have ready access to the written knowledge itself. As Plato recounts, “men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, will be a burden to their fellows.”

I suppose Plato was talking about academics. But he was right. The introduction of the phonetic alphabet into an primary oral society literally changed everything. Memory, that had existed only within the mind, was externalized and made explicit, visual, and fixed in time. But paradoxically, even as writing fixed historical experience in time, it allowed that historical experience to travel through time to the future, in a relatively consistent manner.

A primary oral society is necessarily obsessed with preserving its past, as memory tends to be somewhat volatile without continual refreshing. But once a culture’s history can be fixed as with writing, that society can begin to conceive of, and to create, the future. People can begin to conceive of things and places that do not exist, and then set out to discover or create them. Just as oral societies live in their past, literate societies live in their future. As an oral society is dominated by the ear, a literate society is dominated by the eye. And, coming forward through the end of the 19th century, and into the 20th, the addition of electricity and other modern technologies to this visual dominance gives us photography, and cinema as new archival media – ways of preserving our history.

But, electricity has another effect. Electricity accelerates communication in a way that transcends both time and space. For example, the use of sound accelerated and extended by electricity enabled us to “reach out and touch somebody,” regardless of where they were, whether we used telegraph, radio, telephone, television, or something else. Indeed, communication accelerated by electricity has recently made the experience of the instantaneous relatively common in our contemporary world, be it instantly connecting with another person via mobile telephone, instantly connecting with information through the Internet, or instantly connecting with someone else’s immediate experience, vicariously seeing through their eyes and tapping directly into their memory, through digital photography.

We notice the difference between oral cultures and literate/visual cultures in the artefacts that they produce. Oral cultures produce cultural artefacts that tend to stay in place, so that their past will effectively remain throughout all time. Think of Egypt’s pyramids, the Sphinx, or ancient Greek temples. Literate cultures, on the other hand, tend to produce artefacts that travel well – books, works of art, as well as means of transportation – so that they can effectively control their future by the time they get there. But our culture that is beginning to experience instantaneity, seems to be increasingly concerned with the “here and now” – especially because in a world of ubiquitous and instantaneous communication, everywhere is here, and every-when is now. It occurs to me that the defining characteristic of artefacts of our time is ephemerality. An ephemeral artefact exists precisely in the present, and can only be experienced at the moment of its creation. I submit to you that the cultural artefacts of our time are experiential in nature and ephemeral in duration.

Here’s a quick example. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the cliché of the “Kodak moment” – a scene or experience that has to be captured as a snapshot so that the moment is preserved for the future as a remembrance. This sort of “moment” is a characteristic artefact of the literate/visual age. Contrast this with the “Bell moment.” Some of you may have seen the television advertisement that runs every Remembrance Day, in which a teenager, walking along a desolate beach, pulls out his cell phone to call his grandfather. “I’m not in Paris, grandpa,” the young man says. “I’m in Dieppe. I was calling to say, ‘thank you’.” The teenager is connecting and sharing his experience of that beach by “reaching out and touching someone” very close and special to him. The act of sharing that experience is a characteristic artefact of our time that is ephemeral in nature – it exists for the duration of the experience and no longer.

As our society increasingly turns to digital media, recording both our lives and our culture, the “snapshot generation” that captured experiences and created archival remembrances has changed to become a generation that instantaneously shares experiences, no longer paying attention to the archival characteristics of photography. Photographs, clippings, scrapbooks, and even works of art and sculpture as forms of cultural memory give way to ephemeral artefacts that exist for a brief instant in the span of time, as a sharing of experience itself. If they are captured at all, they are as arrangements of electrons buried within ultimately disposable devices.

When a hard drive fails, or the memory card is erased or misplaced, or when a future computer can no longer read today’s media – by then long obsolesced – our culture becomes a little more forgetful, and a little more forgotten. The consequence of our technological advancement is that, centuries from now, historians may well look back on our time as a type of dark age. Compared to earlier generations, very little of our cultural history is being recorded so that it will actually exist into the future. We will literally be a forgotten culture, because those who will come after us will have technologically “forgotten” how to read, or even locate, our ephemeral artefacts. Thus, if we want to be remembered at all, we must additionally create artefacts that will travel through time, as the writings, art, and photographs of our forebears have come to us.
[Technorati tags: cultural memory | orality | literacy | ephemerality | ephemeral artefact | lexmark]

Tetrads for Managers, and Dysfunctional Teams

Yesterday I did a brief McLuhan for Managers seminar with a group visiting from the Netherlands, all members of the Master Course in Management and Innovation at the University of Rotterdam and Nijmegan. Because the session was limited to one morning, I focused on basic vocabulary – medium, message, figure, ground, and environment – and the Laws of Media tetrads. The set-up for applying the four media laws – extension/enhancement/enablement, reversal, obsolescence and retrieval – were scenarios to which almost anyone in a medium-to-large enterprise can relate:

• Do you know of anyone in your organization who believes that ideas are mutually exclusive, that for my idea to be right, yours has to be wrong (also known as the “zero-sum gamer”)?


• Do you know of anyone whose thinking is entirely formed by their beliefs, that if they don’t believe it, they don’t see it (also known as “Believing is seeing”)?


• Have you ever been in a meeting with The Boss, in which the tacit (or even overt) presence of power limited the open exchange of ideas and alternatives?


• Have you ever been part of a group that behaved like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights, in which there is a total and exclusive focus on what can obviously be seen, without consideration for what is happening at the periphery, or in a contextual ground?


• Have you ever been in a situation precipitated by what some call “unintended consequences” that are better characterized as unanticipated because of bad planning, lack of foresight, or deliberate acts of ignore-ance?

As you might expect, there wasn’t a single person in the seminar who could not relate to each and every one of these situations. Such failings and dysfunction can happen in both tactical and strategic situations. It is often the case that some of these situations occur routinely in an organization, resulting not only in poor decisions, but even worse morale and motivation.

As a way of mitigating these ill effects, I introduced McLuhan’s Laws of Media tetrad as a combination analytic and facilitation tool. The dynamic of the tool is simple. Because it does not rely on dichotomous thinking (pro/con, advantage/disadvantage, upside/downside, etc.) no one feels the need to take a position and defend it. Moreover, because all ideas and observations can be place in the tetrad, everyone’s contribution is quickly acknowledged. Indeed, even the strongest proponent of a given position is encouraged to find situations in which the opposite position might occur. In short, each of the aforementioned dysfunctions can be easily addressed and constructively managed:

• Territorial conflicts over ideas are eliminated, and the “need” to defend one’s position is obviated by its inclusion in one of the aspects. The action of the tetrad is to acknowledge apparent paradoxes in figure as a way of revealing multiple, concurrent grounds.


• The dominance of preconception is also eliminated in favour of perception and observation.


• Hidden grounds are revealed so that attention and focus is shifted away from what is already known.


• The range of considered possibilities is significantly expanded, reducing the number of unanticipated outcomes. In fact, the tetrads are specifically designed to call out possibilities that no one had previously considered.

Using the Laws of Media tetrads as an analytic thinking frame is tremendously valuable for strategic planning, organization realignment, dealing with controversial issues, and tactical planning in almost any kind of organization. And, of course, you know who you can turn to should you need training or facilitation assistance!
[Technorati tags: laws of media | tetrads | strategic planning | tactical planning | mcluhan for managers | team dysfunction | leadership]

I Like the Bush Administration

I really do. There have been few other exemplars that provide me with so many teaching points! It's like one-stop-shopping for examples of lack of awareness, the effects of television as a hot medium relative to political manipulation, how figure without ground is devoid of meaning (and therefore you can say almost anything so long as you preclude context), and much else. But, unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and soon everyone - even the heretofore clueless ones - will realize that President George W Bush has been, shall we say, less than truthful (say it isn't so!) and that the ground is clearly evident... or it will be, once all the water gets pumped out.

[Technorati tags: bush | truth | lies | katrina]

Trusted Computing

Here is a great little video about Trusted Computing, a topic that all of us will (unfortunately) hear a lot more about in the coming years. The idea of trusted computing is a good one: only permit software to run on a computer that the user explicitly trusts (as opposed to software that installs itself, sometimes surreptitiously). The (industry) idea of Trusted Computing is less good: only permit software to run on a computer that the manufacturers explicitly trust. If, for example, Microsoft doesn't trust that Firefox browser you're running, they you won't be able to run Firefox on the same computer as your version of Office/TC. If, for example, that independently created music video isn't "trusted," then don't try to run it in the media player that came with your computer. And that one you downloaded to play the indy music? It probably isn't "trusted," either.

Makes you wonder who YOU trust...

[Technorati tags: trusted computing]