Gravity Medium

I’ll be recommending the following video to my Board in Anchorage soon. Thanks to Robert Paterson for pointing it out. This is pure Internet gold that’s worthy of broadcast on PBS itself.

The point? It explores YouTube (and related sites) from an anthropological standpoint and explains the many ways in which “Web 2.0″ technologies are fundamentally different from traditional media. Blew me away with the depth of analysis and the many moments of self-recognition. It’s so reassuring to know there are others out there struggling with issues of authenticity, identity and community in the online world. Old media and new media are even more radically different than I thought.

The only downside: it’s a full 1-hour video. So you have to reserve it for a time when you’ve got that much time to watch it. No snacking here — this is a full meal.

Here’s a fast and tight 25 minutes of thinking that everyone confronting the disintegration of mass media should view. It’s Mark Pesce speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum just last month (June 24).

I’ve certainly felt an increasing pull of networked social structures in the 21st century. There’s something new happening today, something unprecedented. Pesce puts words to that feeling and it sounds largely right. Plus it dovetails nicely with Clay Shirky’s ideas in Here Comes Everybody, a seminal work for broadcasters getting shoved around in this new media world.

My concern, however, is that other factors will derail these social network developments. For example, even given all the cell phones in the world, there are still tremendously autocratic / dictatorial leaders that the masses, supposedly connected, have not yet overthrown. Even in our own country, one of the most connected, we’ve been unable to defeat or marginalize a President that has acted repeatedly against our own national best interests.

Pesce’s ideas also seem to ignore the upheaval I’m betting we’ll see with the end of cheap oil, partially due to depletion and partially due to global warming controls. Seems to me a fundamental upheaval like that would disrupt the social order that’s supposed to be disrupted by the network effect. And what about global warming effects — with predicted mass extinction events (starting with ocean acidification) that will have unknown effects on the rest of our ecosystem?

In any case, it’s a fascinating talk. Well worth the time of mass media folks trying to understand why they’re no longer the center of the universe.

I hate the word “community.” It’s a catch-all word that means so many things it feels like it means nothing. When I use it I feel a little silly.

Yet there’s not really a good replacement for the word. Or at least I haven’t found one I like.

Check out a thesaurus — is there anything that can both refer to a geographically-bound collection of individuals while also referring to a group of individuals that are naturally cohesive around a shared affinity?

Society has too many connotations of snootiness or political implications (”The Great Society”). Association is usually attached to the name of a lobbying group. Neighborhood is nice and informal, but it’s too geographically-bound and too small-scale. Nothing else quite matches “community” in terms of flexibility and meaning, right?

If anyone has a better term, please share it in the comments. I really would like to find another word I can use interchangeably with this term.

Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. Same thing with Congress, right?

Well, maybe not. Be sure to check out two things to discover how the web could very well change the nature of how we practice democracy.

• Lessig Launches Change Congress: Political Reform a la Creative Commons and Wikipedia — Andy Carvin
• Change-Congress.org

The Internet, with its (mostly) ubiquitous presence and many-to-many relationship model could be the platform for transforming the way we handle our politics and community policy development. That alone is worth reading about.
But if you also believe our representative democracy is neither representative nor a democracy, then this is a movement you need to know about.