Foe has this from Oliver Goodenough’s talk at ‘The place of values in a world of facts’ conference/event last Saturday:

“According to Oliver Goodenough… people possess domain-specific capacities in their evolved psychology for tangible property, tied to their emotions. And culture and law have tried to expand the notion of property into other domains – e.g. intellectual property – that have much weaker links to the emotions. He therefore argues that intellectual property, although a good idea formally, is too new for people to respect.”

Goodenough’s talk was thought-provoking and delivered at breakneck speed… hopefully the LSE will post the papers soon enough.

In the the mean-time, I have some exceedingly rough notes from Richard Dawkins and Frans de Waals talks…
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From The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan

“PLAYBOY: How can you be so sure that this all occurred solely because of phonetic literacy–or, in fact, if it occurred at all?

MCLUHAN: You don’t have to go back 3000 or 4000 years to see this  process at work; in Africa today, a single generation of alphabetic literacy is enough to wrench the individual from the tribal web. When tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu.

This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separation and impoverishment of his  imaginative , emotional and sensory life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins categorizing and classifying data.

As knowledge is extended in alphabetic form, it is localized and fragmented into specialties, creating division of function, of social classes, of nations and of knowledge–and in the process, the rich interplay of all the senses that characterized the tribal society is sacrificed.”

I’m backing up quotes and things from stickies on the desktop to my blog, prior to leaving the BBC this friday.

This one is Alvin Toffler:

“I once had a class of 15-year-old high school kids and I gave them index cards, and I said, “Write down seven things that will happen in the future.”

They said there would be revolutions and presidents would be assassinated, and we would all drown in ecological sludge. A very dramatic series of events. But I noticed that of the 198 items that they handed in, only six used the word “I.”

So I gave them another set of cards, and I said, “Now I want you to write down seven things that are going to happen to you.”

Back came, “I will be married when I’m 21,” “I will live in the same neighborhood, I will have a dog.”

And the disjuncture between the world that they were seeing out there and their own presuppositions was amazing We thought about this, and concluded on the basis of just guesswork that the image of reality that they’re getting from the media is one of high-speed rapid change, and the image that they’re getting in their classrooms is one of no change at all. “

It’s originally from a Wired interview with Toffler, but I found the quote in an essay called: Human Redundancy by Coleen Gittin.

Tom Matrullo says to examine blogging specifically is to miss the point:

“21st century: demand for indigenous individuated authority and power threatens to usurp systems of producing authority and representation in both political and media arenas extending and disturbing borders of nations, media, and individuality.”

What technologies are historical aftershocks, and which are the epicentres? Is that a false distinction?

William Gibson, in interview:

“Social change today, I think you can seriously argue, is primarily technologically driven, one way or another, whether directly or indirectly. And the emergence of new technologies is not legislated – it just happens, it’s market driven. History has become market driven. And that’s a strange and very interesting place to be at the turn of the century.”

Picture of kid making mobile phone from clay in Africa from Newsweek, over at my moblog

From this week’s European edition of Newsweek, which is all about tech, kids use of tech and how our tech is changing our brains:

“Is the stimulation of new media preparing kids for a future high-tech world—or turning them into antisocial, superficial dolts? There are no definitive answers. Only in the past few years have scientists begun to plumb children’s brains to see what goes on during the hours they spend engrossed in videogames or surfing the Web. What seems clear is that children are developing a far different set of skills than they had before. They are growing adept at handling visual information and multitasking. And the messaging free-for-all may actually help some kids overcome childhood awkwardness in relating to their peers.”

» Newsweek.com: Bionic Youth: Too Much Information?
» Newsweek.com: Kids: Tuning in, Turning On
» Newsweek.com: Tech: Listening to the Kids
» Newsweek.com: Kids: The End of Make Believe

It’s coming up to 10 years since I first encountered the Internet, stumbling slack-jawed onto the superhighway with Gopher, NCSA Mosaic (which has already had it’s 10th birthday party) and Cello.

It’s making me think about what’s happened in the last 10 years: both personally in terms of going from studying to create one kind of architecture to practising another; and more generally – in terms of the hopes, hype and unintended consequences of the web and associated technologies.

So – in the assumption you have some of the same shared experiences as me, two [big] questions for you:

1. What did you think, 10 years ago in 1993 when you first saw graphical web-browsers, would be the consquences in 2003?
2. Bearing that in mind, what do you think are the major disruptive trends, technological or otherwise right now – and what will they make 2013 look like?

Not going to start with mine… but I’m going to try and throw up a Kwiki somewhere to capture the main themes, but for now, please use the comments form…

» Peteme.com: Movies in Context

Brad DeLong, on his charting the evolution of American corporations:

…neat, clean theories… are only partial and incomplete because they do great violence to historical reality and ignore complexity, contingency, just dumb luck, and sheer chance.

He could be talking about designing user interfaces.

» Notes: Intro to History of American Corporate Control

From John Gray’s “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern”:

“For Saint-Simon and Comte, technology meant railways and canals. For Lenin it meant electricity. For neo-liberals it means the Internet. The message is the same. Technology – the practical application of scientific knowledge – produces a convergence in values. This is the central modern myth, which the Positivists propagated and everyone today accepts as fact.”

I’m about a third of my way through. It’s compact [120-odd pages?] and it’s a cracking read so far.

For someone who works in technology, and has perhaps would be characterised as vaguely-progressive-but-healthy-sceptical liberal view of it’s beneficial effects; it’s a very challenging but valuable viewpoint to be exposed to.

With all the hoo-haa about the New York Times, the part that blogs played in the upheaval there, the constant bickering about blogs by pro/am journos etc; it’s fantastic to see that not all parts of the media are being forced to wise up to their ‘former audience’.

The caption below proceeds each weekly showing of “The Daily Show” on CNN Europe; accompanied by a thunderous James-Earl-Jones-type reading the text in voice-over:

It’s so patronising it makes me giggle very time. Often I wonder whether Jon Stewart and his crew of merry pranksters didn’t insist on it in their distribution contract. It’s half-disclaimer, half-comedy-warm-up.

Perhaps other scandalised big media should follow suit…