Xark!

New Charleston

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New. 

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

The Big Pool of Money experiment

At last night's meeting of the Columbia chapter of Social Media Club, I mentioned something I heard suggested in an off-hand way at the Infovalet Conference in May. What if every American paid a fee as part of his or her monthly ISP bill, and then that money were divided up among content creators?

Of course, what I found ironic about this back in May was that the people suggesting it weren't suggesting that ANYONE be able to share in this revenue. The idea was that only content creators who happened to also own printing presses and/or FCC licenses would be eligible. That's absurd on its face, which is probably why that idea hasn't gone anywhere. Try selling that politically.

But as I drove home to Charleston, I reconsidered the idea. Which is why I want you to play along in a thought experiment with me.

What if we all paid into a fund that could be distributed among EVERYONE who creates content, of any kind, that can distributed online? Bloggers, filmmakers, musicians, reporters, pornographers, comedians, ANYONE.

How would it work? How could it be administered? 

The folly of metrics

Here's the most basic thing I learned from studying mass media over the past few years: Advertisers love metrics.

For instance, there are only two particularly interesting numbers involved in buying print advertising (circulation and the price of the ad), whereas the metrics for a Web ad (traffic, rotation, cost per click, click-through rates, impressions, uniques, etc), give staffs of ambitious white-collar employees endless things to do with spreadsheets and Powerpoint. This has nothing to do with the relative value of print-v.-Web advertising, but it's a definite selling point for the Web guys.

Which is actually a problem, because as our stockpile of numbers grows, so grows our illusion of control. And the stronger our belief in illusions, the greater the likelihood of catastrophic errors.

Not that I fault people for measuring. The digital world gives us ever-expanding stockpiles of data, and analyzing it for trends and indicators makes perfect sense.

The question is, how many of us really understand what we're counting? Because if you've made one or more fundamental yet erroneous assumptions at the start, your staff of business-school-educated apparatchiks is going to generate reams of statistics reinforcing those assumptions.You'll make hundreds, thousands of decisions based on those fundamentally flawed but exceedingly precise projections, removing layer after layer of redundancy and inefficiency, re-shaping your organization into the perfect delivery system for your product or service.

And on the day that those projections stop working and everything collapses because you followed the metrics right down the rabbit hole, everyone will look at each other, shrug and say "Who knew?"

I loves me some data, but I remember that what I don't know about a topic usually exceeds my mastery. I understand what the apparatchiks can't afford to admit: We aren't in control. For all our planning and power, we are all ultimately just winging it.

It's why hiring the smart, experienced veteran is better than following the metric and hiring only cheap, specialized appartachiks. Unless you're doing discovery informatics, spotting and interpreting patterns is an art, not a science. Seriously: It says so right here, with 0.01 statistical significance.

The 21st Century in Retrospect

(...joined at 21:37...)

ALLENDE: From a conceptual basis, then, what year marks the beginning of the 21st century?

WANG: I don't know that I could pick one year that encompasses the entire shift. But I think we can definitely state the exact moment that the 20th century ended.

ALLENDE: Yes?

WANG: Nov. 4, 2008, and it ended sometime between the moment Barrack Obama stepped onto the stage at Grant Park and his first words to the nation as president-elect.

ALLENDE: So it was a political shift?

WANG: Not at all. It was a shift in possibility. The 20th century was predicated on material possibility, which included a mechanistic sense of weight and inevitability. A president like Obama wasn't supposed to be possible, because people believed the message that "the system" would never allow it. Electorates, agencies, corporations -- people understood them to be flawed, but people accepted the inhumane and inefficient authority of these institutions out of an ambient belief that high levels of friction, waste and corruption were inevitable in human society.

The flu will test who we are

"Flu is a highly political issue, to put it mildly," Terry Jones wrote this morning, and that's what I'm going to talk about -- not the science of it. Because science is only part of what we'll be facing in the coming days.

Whether or not history records April 2009 as the genesis of a global pandemic, there are some things we can expect with near certainty: Rumors, reports, controversy, credibility gaps and fear. So please bear these things in mind and, if you agree with these ideas, help spread them. Because fear is a deadly virus, too, and just as networked media can help spread it, network media can also serve as an immune system response to fear IF WE KEEP OUR HEADS AND WORK TOGETHER.

KK4 V.I.P R.I.P.

So a funny thing happened on the way to the beer ticket window at Kulture Klash 4: A guy looked at our wristbands and redirected us to the VIP Lounge, where free beer and food awaited us.

How did we wind up with VIP wristbands? Well, the most likely answer is there was some kind of screw-up, and we later heard rumors that something had gone wrong and flooded the lounge with people who weren't so important after all. Which I think is just divinely sweet.

But here's the lesson I hope the excellent people behind the influential Kulture Klash series learn from this glitch: You're misreading our new culture when you add a VIP room to your party.

From Jefferson to America 4.0

I owe my patriotic sentimentality to my mother, a teacher from Iowa who encouraged me to read and spent the early 1970s prowling yard sales for age-appropriate books about American history, which I promptly consumed. It is because of her that I worshiped Thomas Jefferson above all the other founding fathers, carrying his ideal of intellectual egalitarianism well into my adult life.

Last week she sent me an email titled "Thomas Jefferson's sayings in light of today." My hackles rose before I even opened it, since poor red-haired TJ has become the Patron Saint of Liberty in modern America, cited by all sides as proof of their fundamental wisdom and Americanism. And Mom joined me in ambivalence: "Don't know how I feel about a lot of these ... but it is interesting!"

Interesting and deeply bothersome is how I'd put it.

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."
 
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work, and give to those who are not."
 
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle, which if acted on, would save one-half the wars of the world."
 
"I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."

And so on. In short, the collection presents an American icon as Ron Paul with a pony tail, a Libertarian genius standing athwart history and shouting "Stop!" For every anxious American worried about the future of the country under Democratic leadership, this collection reads like Jefferson's j'accuse from beyond the grave.

Which brings me, this Presidents Day, to an uncomfortable duty. I come to argue not only with one of my greatest heroes, but in doing so, to argue for a new understanding of this particular moment in history. Because I believe we are in the midst of the fourth America revolution.

WASSUP!?! (circa 2008)

Best. Video. Of. The. Week. Via Oliver Willis.

BONUS VIDEO: Hey, trying to figure out that whole 21st century media thing? Can't figure out why the old tricks just don't work anymore? Watch this video. Via Blue Ion.

AND FINALLY: We're huge fans of Michael Wesch. Interested in education? Watch this video and then read this post. Tell 'em what you think while you're there.

140

140 characters. This is the new standard for how we communicate. (76)
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I learned this weekend that this standard, which Twitter users know by heart, evolved from the original SMS protocols. (22)
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Which is how the future happens: Somebody says, "We'll keep it short, because who wants to type on a phone?" And literary prose changes. (4)
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How do we know this? We don't. But think: In the low-bandwidth past, we chewed on words, tasted them. We savored words like brandy. (9)
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In the high-bandwidth present, words and images and messages race past us faster than we can capture them. We pluck words from vast streams. (0)
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Our modes of communication change the way we think. You might as well argue with tides. (53)
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And so writers have to change, and me with them. (91)

Tropic Thunder's Defensive Politicking

Perhaps some of you have been following the controversy surrounding the film "Tropic Thunder." And it's not as if the cast and film crew were unaware that their work would raise some eyebrows, as their omnipresent media campaigning demonstrates. Robert Downey Jr's role as a white actor who dyes his skin to play a black soldier is discussed in just about every interview and set piece on the film that I've seen, with each focusing on how the point of the film is to mock Hollywood, not offend "real" people. And, given what I've seen of the film's reviews, their strategy seems to have worked. Stiller is given much credit for an entertaining film that turns Hollywood pompousness on its head, and Downey earns raves for following his Iron Man success with an iron-jawed, intentionally self-absorbed caricature. So, why is there so much controversy? Probably because the filmmakers and reviewers all anticipated the wrong controversy, and this error in judgment tells us a lot about the current state of identity politics and cultural politicking today.