This one looks at the material redefinition of information in the digital participatory age.

An interesting and effortless opportunity to practice personal sustainability, care of EcoIron and Rising Phoenix Design.

Consider a simple calculation:

1. According to the U.S. Dept. of Energy, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.
2. At 200 million queries per day, Google (white), is displayed about 550,000 hours per day.
3. Black Google would save 750 megawatt-hours a year.

http://www.blackle.com

If Google is your homepage, try using this instead.

Promote energy-efficient web design. Go black.

As of this writing, you can walk the streets of New York City, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami–maybe more. The automated stitching of panoramas from different days and times makes for some high-tech surrealist photography. Continuing the twisted translation of reality into the Googleverse…. Just wait until these are fed by realtime surveillance/web cameras and the most-recent geotagged Flickr photos.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

To echo Roy Pea, who sent me the link, this is perhaps the best example of using a YouTube video to educate that I’ve ever seen. The video is a work-in-progress and you can give your feedback directly to the creators at their blog.

“Americans have one third fewer close friends and confidants than two decades ago, and the number of people who have none has more than doubled.”

Are Americans more disconnected now than they were twenty years ago? Have they retreated into their selves? (or their cells? (or their cell ph.s?)) Has the connection dwindled? We know people can and do form intense and authentic emotional bonds over digital media like IRC, the web and World of Warcrack. Have the close confidants of a large segment of the population (teens and younger, mostly) moved to a “virtual” category that didn’t have a bubble on the General Social Survey?

Probably.

While the data showed a drop in confidants who are friends or who are family members, there was a far greater drop-off in friends. So close friendships are dwindling — or is it consolidating? All we know is: networks of trust and kinship have grown more sparse.

What are the ramifications of such dramatic social change? Bradley Heinz suggests

We’re becoming more self-referential by relying more on family. In our growing isolation, I see a genetic analogy: our waning social exposure is like inbreeding…

To take the analogy further, fewer social contacts equal a reduced mutation rate of family belief and value systems. Children more closely resemble their parents sociologically. Back into the family fold.

But if the real reason for this anomaly in the GSS data is due to the rise of virtual confidantes, then the mutation rate might actually be on the rise due to globally expanded social exposure. Children raised from birth with internet access whisper secrets into ears thousands of miles away.

So where do you fall? Who and where are your confidants?

Tonight I attended what I consider to be an historic meeting of minds: several rockstars in the long, strange and entangled common history of 60s counterculture and commune life, mind-expanding chemicals, personal computing, virtual communities and Web 2.0.

Stewart Brand: founder of the Whole Earth Catalog — a series of books that single-handedly educated a generation of countercultural do-it-yerselfers — and the WELL — arguably the first virtual community.

Kevin Kelly: founding executive editor of Wired magazine and CoEvolution Quarterly, journalist and author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World — which told a better tale about emergence and complexity science than the Santa Fe Institute ever could.

Howard Rheingold: the great tech-culture journalist and “freelance instigator”, educator on participatory media in journalism and learning, author of Smart Mobs: the next social revolution, the Virtual Community, and several other works. Howard is also lately becoming my collaborator around the idea of using participatory media in the classroom.

Fred Turner: Stanford professor of Communications and Digital Media, one of my mentors, and now celebrated author of the superb work of scholarship and story-telling that brought all these free-thinking intellectuals together tonight: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

I have much to share with you about what these folks shared with me tonight, but it’s 4:42am and will have to wait.

The official story

U.S. President George W. Bush intended to visit the Stanford University campus yesterday to meet with members of the Hoover Institution, a neo-con think tank in Hoover Tower. But Mr. Bush never made it to Hoover Tower. Why? I was there and I’ll tell you why.

The mainstream press is reporting that Stanford protesters blocked the only road leading to Bush’s meeting so that it had to be re-located, and that three Stanford students were arrested. This is simply not true. Grassroots journalism by people who were actually there is giving a different and much more revealing account of what really happened. I’ll give you my own summary of what occurred based on being there myself, interviewing others who were there, knowing the protest organizers and being acquainted with the students who were arrested.

The “real” story

The presence of one thousand and more protesters, accompanied by the Stanford Band, caused Bush to relocate his private meeting at Hoover Tower to former Secretary of State Shultz’s house on Delores Street (about a block from where I live). However, contrary to what the press is reporting (see “How the secret was spread“, below), the road to Hoover Tower was not blocked by protesters. Law enforcement had set up barriers to ensure clear passage long before the protest began, and these barriers were respected by the crowd. However, around 4pm, police in riot gear appeared and attempted to move the crowd by force from its position on Serra Street, East of Hoover Tower. Strangely, they did not attempt to inform the crowd of the reason why.

Students resisted this move and sat down in the street. That’s when law enforcement pulled a very strange maneuver of questionable legality. They brought in a fire truck with sirens wailing and claimed (falsely) that there was a medical emergency at Hoover. After a lot of verbal abuse from police and firemen, only three protesters remained blocking the truck and these were dragged off (as shown prominently in the photo coverage), arrested, and taken away in a paddy wagon. They’ve since been released on misdemeanor charges. Absurdly, the fire truck then turned around and drove unhurriedly away, sirens off, and the protesters were allowed to fill the street again. Presumably, it had been during this confrontation that Bush’s meeting was re-located.

In summary: One of the top three universities in the United States spurned President Bush from coming on to campus; three Stanford students were arrested for disobeying a lie and obstructing a misappropriation of emergency services personnel. That part of the story has yet to ripple out to the mainstream press. You read it hear first.

Now let’s back up to see how this all unfolded and how the news is now being spread by mass media and digitally-mediated grassroots journalists.

How the secret was spilled

Until a few days ago, Bush’s visit was totally unexpected here at Stanford. That’s true even for the University administration, who had scheduled many important events for next-year’s freshmen visiting for Stanford Admit weekend. The single biggest event was scheduled to happen on the same day as Bush’s visit, in Memorial Auditorium across the street from Hoover Tower, but this was suddenly scrapped due to Bush’s sudden imposition.

In the couple of days leading up to Bush’s arrival, it was fascinating to witness how rapidly this potent local news meme spread through the student population over social and digital networks. On a college campus, these networks are so closely intermingled that a meme moves seamlessly through and between each. Someone reads an email who tells a friend who tells another friend who emails a group list, etc. I received five emails in three hours from different sources. All were forwards that already had a long lineage.

The earliest signs I heard of came over the Stanford Band’s email list two days before the visit. The Band immediately started preparing a musical protest, choosing tunes that reflected political sentiments, like “American Idiot” by Greenday and “Hey, Big Brother” by Rare Earth. I overheard the news in class the next day (one day before the visit). That night, campus email lists were abuzz with info about the president’s schedule and plans for a large-scale protest: meet in White Plaza at 1:30 to rally and make signs; march to Hoover Tower at 2:00. The campus newspaper didn’t carry the story till the day of Bush’s visit, but had some interesting details about snipers being posted in Hoover Tower.

On the big day, I just happened to be tabling in White Plaza from 12 – 1:30, promoting the campus Cooperative Community with flyers and musical instruments. I also set up a sound system there to be used by student groups for a sustainability event from 12 -1. After that, I “accidentally” left the equipment set up so that when the protest rally started at 1:30, there happened to be a sound system turned on and turned up, with a microphone plugged in and ready to go. I’m no activist, but I do understand the power of technology to shape collective action.

How the secret was spread

Also interesting, now that the momentous event has now passed, is to witness the ripple of news about it propagate outward to media outlets of varying proximity (Stanford Daily, Palo Alto Weekly, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, New York Times), and grassroots journalism sources like videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, and coverage on blogs. The chart below shows the number of posts that contain ‘Bush + Stanford + Protest’ in recent history.

Rachelle Marshall, a senior citizen member of the Raging Grannies protest group, said “It’s the greatest thing since I’ve been at Stanford. I’ve been here 50 years.” Perhaps with the rise of densely connected online communities at college campuses everywhere, digital tools for communication and coordination are going to be figuring more and more prominently in student activism efforts. Similarly, while the power of protest has seemed to dwindle in recent times due to lack of mass media attention, the rise into legitimacy of grassroots online journalism may be giving the punch back to protest. Interesting times, indeed.

Members of ThePeople.net agree to give 15 minutes of their time each week to do whatever ThePeople.net as a whole decides to do that week. So, for example, if the community decides that this week everyone will give $5 to a homeless person, that’s what you do. If the community decides that this week on wednesday at 12 noon everyone will stop what they are doing, stand up and announce “ThePeople.net” and then continue what they were doing as if nothing happened, then that’s what you do. It’s a new kind of social contract.

Now how does the community decide what the members of ThePeople.net will do each week? For this to be truly emergent democracy, we don’t want anyone to have control, we want the decision-making process to be truly bottom-up. So here’s what I propose: Any member can suggest an action to the community. The community members then vote on the actions that are most interesting.

I have my own opinions on how decision-making could improve on simple voting in this system, but I am absolutely enamored with the overall bottom-up idea. I really like the possibility of playful or humorous flashmob-type acts in addition to the usual do-gooding. But it makes me think that just one site is not enough. The greatest participation would come with those collective actions that most closely fit the values and desires of the community. I would rather see this system as a general purpose tool utilized by all sorts of communities for co-creating, choosing and enacting their collective will: church groups, war-protesters, elementary school classrooms, corporations, communes, et al. Just as a Wiki is a general-purpose tool for coauthoring documents, I’m talking about a tool for coauthoring collective action.

The wonderful thing I always bring up in regard to this hypothetical system is its inherent capacity for self-reflection and autocatalysis. Assume you have such a system. The team of people involved in building it plus anyone else interested in its development can use the system itself to generate ideas on how to improve it. Open source thought. In other words, use version 1.0 to design version 1.1. You have yourself a snowball.

Lacking nothing better at the moment, all I can do is make my own little snow-pebble and pitch it down the slope: let’s build this thing.