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This morning I received a mail from Copenhagen. It was very moving, and describing a situation of chaos, strong commitment, and braveness. It told the story of people fighting with non violence, and shouting that they want change.
And I am afraid all this is useless. I feel once again what I felt looking at Iran insurgency. But stronger.
Let’s focus on Copenhagen. The sensation is that there is a lot of people on the street asking for a strong carbon tax. Count me among them. But there is more. I am afraid people have ideas, and those ideas are not being heard. And then people assume the worse, and assume the world leaders, the ministers, and everybody who is inside is on the pay check of some big corporations. And then they demand change. But now they do not focus any more on the small change. The key point. Now they want a huge change, that will not happen. And then there are rallies, and people pushing, and the police resisting. And violence. Yes police violence should not be there. And I feel this is not the way. It is not by shouting “Shame on you”, that you win the heart of the police men. It is not by shouting to people that you get yourself heard. As it does not change if I write this in normal letters or in CAPS LOCK. It is the content that matters And when you are shouting, when you are polarized, you are already making violence. This is not the way.
Now, there are people who work hard to negotiate among different positions. The Center for Non Violent Communication is probably one of the best. It was created by Marshall B. Rosenberg. One of the student of Gandhi (or so I remember from his book. The wikipedia page does not seem to mention it). Now Marshall has worked in the past as a negotiator between groups, and I am sure there are a number of very good negotiator working inside the conference to negotiate between the key people. What I don’t think there is, are negotiator between the people in the conference and people outside.
It is like all the effort is concentrated in getting the communication going between those big players. But no work has been done to get enough communication between the inside of the conference and the outside. The assumption seem to be that either there are no good ideas outside or it is just impractical to engage them. I think both of those assumption are wrong. Yes, we still need to develop the tools to make an efficient brainstorm with millions of people. But the idea of having everybody writing their own ideas, and voting on the ideas they like is already a good start. Why is there no system like this to harvest the ideas from the people?
I was just looking at a youtube cnn conference where people sent questions, and voted on the questions. Again there is the assumption that normal people are just ignorant. This is not true. Not anymore (if it ever was). Not with the internet that let anyone study any topic.
In all those situations we need to set up systems where people can chip in their ideas. While it is happening, can read each other ideas. And the most voted ideas emerge from the noise to the people who are making the discussion.
The two talks I gave at the: International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences, this summer, are now available at videolectures.net.
Not the best talks of my career, and hopefully not the last either. But the guys at VL did a great job in recording them.
One of the talk was about Tags, and the second about Democracy of the 21st Century.
In the one about Continue reading My first 2 talks available online: Tags & 21st Century Democracy
The problem is not that there are too many elections for Europe, but too few. And the people feel they are not controlling a process that is bigger than them.
When people vote No at the battlecry: when in doubt vote No, how else would You interprete it?
Now, it can be that the United States have given a help, under the table, to finance the advertisments against the treaty. After all they have all to gain from being the only superpower. But the advertisments found a fertile land to sprout.
When 95% of the irish parliament said to vote Yes, and the clear majority of people voted for No… something must mean.
Calderoli for one time (the only!) is right in noticing how from when Europe had to ratify its constitution have lost every time.
Now, here, they want to call again for a second referendum, and again, and again, until the Yes wins. Strange that the constitution permits it.
I am not against voting again, but I think it should be done right.
When there is a referendum, and the result expressed is more than 20% different from what the parliament has suggested, it is obvious that the parliament is no more reppresentative of the people. And so it should be considered automatically delegitimised. New elections should be called immediatly, to renew the parliament. And after this a new referendum should be called. Referendum at which the new parliament should give indications of vote. And again if the results are more than 20% different, we should vote again, and so on. Until the fracture between the people and its representatives has been healed.
This would mean that the power truly belongs to the people, and the parliamentaries truly represent the people.
With the new technologies we could have one new election every other day, and a new referendum in between. Within one week we would have a new parliament, and a result of the referendum, that agree with each other.
Some time ago I remember reading a comment.
La Repubblica, one of the first italian newspaper, holds a big internet website. As part of their initiative they have La Repubblica TV, which is a sort of television, just recorded for the net. You can download it when you want, and see it at your leisure. It includes everything: advertisments, opening music, interviews, etc.
Well the comment was discussing how that internet TV is quite dumb. Not really using up the powers of the net.
It took me as a really smart comment, and later I thought that also the lessons from the universities who are being recorded and released are still part of the old way of doing things.
And today I saw something which I thought might be part of the new way: The lessons on history from Lars Brownworth,
12 Byzantine Rulers.
Lars is a professor at a private high school, and if I got it right not even a professor in history, but history is his passion, and so in his free time he started investigating the middle ages. His lessons in pocast format really had success, and now his podcast is among the most followed on the net.
Why do I think his podcast is part of the new wave of education, and not part of the old wave:
- The lessons are not produced by a University. He did was not advertised as being an expert, and yet his succes came because of how interesting they were. How often have we followed a lesson at the university (or at high school), thinking the professor was not that good, and probably some students were actually better. Universities need to cover every class. But with podcasts there was no class to cover. He was an expert in something, he spoke about that.
- There is a great desire for real high quality content. We all recognise the power of the internet, but experts that blog about their area of expertise are still few. It is easy to find blogs and discussion forums where many amateurs discuss a topic. We are moving toward a time where the real experts start to use the internet to share about their topic. This will take away space to the amatour (it was nice to be the expert in a Taoistic forum, but am I really an expert), but real knowledge will start to flow more easily.
- It uses podcasts, and website. Cheap but high quality technology. Available to everybody
- His expertise was so great that he manage to induce an interest even in people who had no natural interest for the subject
And the conclusion of all this is that more and more material will start to flow. Up to now we have mostly seen amatours discussing subjects. While the experts would write books in the old fashion way, copyright them, and make themselves unavailable. Essentially putting a higher and higher distance between them and their public. Now an expert can teach, and if he is really good he can share not only his knowledge, but his burning passion too. The tools are available, and soon the best lessons on a subject will not be from the universities, but directly from the expert website. At that point universities will start pointing to them, and this will induce a great change in society. Maybe we might even reach the point that some website will offer lessons worth a certain number of credits. A fully decentralized university.
We have all heard the news that do-no-evil Google has accepted to comply with Chinese laws and ban some words from the search results (Google testimony here). More than that China is censoring media, editors, journalist, blogs, and practically any form of free expression. According to this article this censorship is not having the desired effect from the government. The only reason they give is that there are simply too many blogs.
Well, I have a different idea, I think that censorship is not useless as a strategy for China’s government. It is counterproductive. It is making the the chinese blogsphere stronger. Let me explain why do I think it is so. Continue reading Small China
A fast note to point out that Phil Edwards took the ball and translated the previous post. The post was an answer to a post from my father, and as such in Italian.
Phil uses the post as his launch pad for a very interesting one on how he sees the long tail having effect on the society and how he sees this not happening. I don’t think I agree fully on what Phil writes, but I need some time to gather my ideas, and answer properly.
What follows is Phil translation of my post. The translation is incomplete, but correct and faithful to the original spirit (although I am not convinced I would translate classe dirigente as ruling class), as such I am happy to copy it here. Continue reading Ruling Class translation
Hello everybody, I’m back.
The vacations were very good, and soon I’ll pull all the pictures on the moblog, with the descritpions and the embarassing details. Now I’m back to work in Jena.
One of the things that is happening to me at the time is that my computer is physically falling to pieces. It is an old laptop of a brand I don’t wish to nominate not to increase their visibility since it gave me all sort of problem freezing about one time a week at least. Having to look for a new model I started thinking about the products around, and I reached the conclusion that we are ready for another big jump. And generally a new product which will make a new base in the economy of Pda. (Yes I am looking for a laptop for me and I end up writing about PDA. So what? Sue me).
It seem to me that there are 4 different products on the market which really need to be integrated and when they will be integrated there will be a big jump in terms of potentiality. I am speaking of:
- Smart Phones (with Camera)
- PDA
- GPS
- IPod
Right now no product that I know of that is on the market have is really all four at the same time. There are some shy tentative to do the integration but no one has really managed.
Let’s look why those 4 instruments should all be present in one tool and what extra do we get. The smart phone will give the possibility to phone and more important to be in touch on the internet all the time. The more we go on the lower the tarif will be. In Italy is already possible to have a flat rate of 20 Euro a month that let you connect to internet anytime between 6pm and 8 am and during weekends and holidays (It is through TIM, if you are looking for it). It is very good. I wish here in Germany there was a similar possibility. With time the prices will inevitably drop. What all this mean is that the tool, that from now on I will call eBase, will have the possibility to be in contact with the internet pretty much all the time.
When I was in Prague at the European Go Congress I bought a small PDA, used, for 20 euro. It works fine and it permitted me to simply record all the official game I did. If the tool was already online I could have sent them to internet immediatly. But wait, if the tool is on internet I can also play go online directly from the PDA. Imagine, you are on your bus and you play online with someone, far far away, in a distant galaxy. And because more and more of the work is moving on internet, with del.icio.us, calendars on line, office on line, and so on, this would mean that you get all your data all the time. And this on a PDA. So on something that is big enough to actually do some work, read some web pages, and generally be useful.
And now the first critic will be, but what about making phone calls. Will not that be unconfortable? Oc course an eBasa have to be bigger than one of those miniaturized phones that are available right now. On the other hand I see more and more people using those bluetooth microphone to speak. You can still keep your eBase in your pocket while you speak.
Now PDA and phone integrated are already around. And they work quite well. In fact many smart phones are in a sense a PDA plus a phone. I use to be quite skeptic about those tools. Especially about how easy it is to write on the screen itself, but after my last PDA I had to change my mind. It works very well.
But now the last two elements, the IPod and the GPS. Already many smart phones have an mp3 reader inside. But the real novelty in the IPod is not the mp3 reader, but the memory. The fact of having 40 gb of memory means that everybody can carry ALL the music he likes with her. No smart phone that I know of offers this service. This is fundamental. If eBase have also to be a working tool it has to have a huge memory. 40 GB is the minimum. But what else would mean to have an IPod fully integrated with a PDA plus a smart phone. Well, for once it means that you can get your podcast directly on your phone. And since (see above) your phone is supposed to be on internet pretty much all the time you are getting your podcasting all the time from internet directly on your phone. Yes, we had reinvented the radio. And since this is going to have a bigger screen than a mobile (apart that flexible screens are coming out in an case), we can even consider having video podcasting with us. Essentially to have it we just would need some of the smart phone that we already have around and pack them with enough memory, and a flat rate connection to internet. Nothing too incredile.
And the last one is the GPS. We already have that too. Some smart phone have GPS included, and many can have it outside. It seem that until things are not integrated in the base object people don’t use them. It it was for me I would have never bought an external camera to use with my phone. But the model I needed had also a camera included, so I had to take it. And it ended up being what I use most, and I have the most fun with. I think the same goes with GPS. Wait until all phone have GPS. Wait until any phone can tell you the road to anywhere you want. Both in terms of streets, and in terms of physical distance (3 miles in direction 121 degrees). Wait until every picture that you make comes with the exact coordinates of when and where it was taken. And then you will have the possibility to put a picture on internet and everybody can find that exact spot (and of course you can obscure that possibility, to protect your privacy). Wait until you can make a search on internet on all pictures around a certain place. And then the integration of the internet and human beings that wish to be part of the internet can be really strong. And then you can search a post in your blog by where it was written, more than when it was written. And any document we write will not only have the date but also the location. And we start refering to places with their coordinates. Like we do now with time.
Think about it. Before the invention of the calendar people would refer to time by relating with big events. Two years before the flood. 3 years after the king got into power…
Now we have some universal ways to refer to time. 5th of October 2003. We still refer to things respect to an event (’3 months after the twin tower’,…) but mostly we use the western coordinates. And the fact of giving to each user the possibility to know what time it was (the invention of the watch) made it possible and practical for people to refer to time in a precise way. As soon as we have some simple object that is with us all the time and that tells us our spatial position we will start to use this coordinates in the same way.
So I think those 4 objects should come together. And they will. And whoever will do it will get a big share of the market (and maybe this is why it had not happened yet, as each company keeps hold of its own patents to avoid the other being able to make the integration themselves).
I only gave here a sketch of the possibilities of such a tool. In a sense something like an eBase could be enough for a person to interact with the social coomunity. Would be enough to let someone discuss with others and participate in the emerging democracy that we seem to have finally started creating.
I am sure this object will come out. The question is not ‘if?’, the question is ‘when?’, and ‘what should I buy in the meantime?’.
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