I recently stayed in New York City for a ten day vacation. I really enjoyed it. But why? I repeatedly caught myself observing that it was “just like in the movies and on TV”. When something did not corrospond with the image I had from the media it “Wasn’t really New York’ though obviously is was. This made me think of Jean Beaudrillard’s book ‘America‘ compiling travel notes from trips to USA. The book reflects on America from a European point of view, and is in essence subjective, but it offers some really interesting insights for any first-time visitor to America. Among other thought provoking statements Beaudrillard concludes that for an outsider whose main impression of American reality is constructed through the media, Disney World is the most ‘real’ place in America. Read it and wonder.
Everywhere I went I was met with unparralleled service and professional hospitality from the ‘ticket queue’ security check at JFK to the Lyic Diner at east 23rd street end 3rd avenue where I had several of my breakfasts. I caught myself choosing music venues, resturants, parks and sights after how ‘typically New York’ they were - how ‘real’. This was, of cause, staged. Everything was service, and I don’t think i saw a single business that wasn’t in some way providing service or trading shares in companies in the service industry. I even leaned that the old New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn where they used to biuld battle ships and air craft carriers was converted into movie studios and a plant that produces Sweet n’ Low (artificial sweetener you put in coffee and tea in restaurants and cafés).
Seing New York (Which is, I was told by a native waiting in queue for the men’s room at the Lincoln Center, not a part of USA but rather an international zone) as a tourist made me want to come back and find the REAL America. Is everything service and setting or is there more? Is it real and to whom, or is Jean Beaudrillard right when he classifies USA as a theme park? I intend to find out.
August 2, 2008 at 4:32 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but I have been off the air for quite a long time. The reason - there is, of cause, a reason - is that I have started a new and equally exiting job at connecting cubes where we help companies and organizations who have seen their single string value chain explode into a supply- and value chain network communicate and manage relations and organization. However, I have a few posts on the sketching board including one about The Economist’s report on web 2.0 and business and some windy reflections on my recent trip to New York.
My friend Timme and I had some interesting discussions about his article (in progress) for the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. He chose not to include my input about link typologies and their connection to conversion of social capital between offline and online arenas (and vice versa), but I think its worth publishing an early draft here for critique: The article is a study of linking in the Kforum business network for communication and marketing professionals in Denmark. On the Kforum network users categorize their relations to others in four types of relations. From the perspective of an ego-user the four types of links are:
Inbound - unconfirmed: Link is established by other user with no confirmation by ego.
Inbound - confirmed: Link established by other user confirmed by ego.
Outbound - unconfirmed: Link established by ego with no confirmation by other user.
Outbound - confirmed: Link established by ego confirmed by other user.
These four types of social link relations are visible to all other users on each profile. This means that both social inclusion and exclusion is visible to all other users in the network whenever and wherever a user chooses to navigate unconditioned by mutual confirmation as on Facebook and linkedIn. However, even though more visible on Kforum, these four basic link types are prevalent in most online networks.
As illustrated in the table, the different prevalent link typologies represent different mods of conversion of social capital between online and off-line arenas. People with mostly inbound- links are typically either persuing a defensive strategy passively protecting their offline social capital by simply not linking (inbound - unconfirmed) or attemting to construct online social capital to be converted to offline arenas by contructing new relations through confirmed links (inbound - confirmed). The resulting strategy, or behavioral modes, for networkers with mostly inbound links are passive or constructive.
Networkers with mostly outbound links are typically either actively linking to people they know already from offline arenas, converting their accumulated social to the online network (Outbound - confirmed) or spamming the network hoping to create new relations at random thus acummulating new social capital through ultra-weak ties (Outbound - unconformed). [Inconsistency in the table to be rectified shortly. Sorry..] The resulting bahaviours are here called converting and signaling.
So, what kind of networker are you? Passive, constructive, converting or signaling?
From his own rather complex history Ilya Prigogine, the Russian born Belgian national residing in USA has developed a Nobel Prize winning theory of complex physics. He was one of the pioneers in disproving the deterministic newtonian world view. In this clip he explains how the physical world, much like music and arts, follow strict rules and at the same time display an astonishing degree of unpredictability and complexity way beyond that of deterministic linear systems.
Enjoy how he in an amazing Russian-Franco-German English with remarkable ease explains complexity theory so any high school student with an msn account gets the idea.. Because the world is like music.
January 9, 2008 at 2:19 am · Filed under P2P dynamics
Network enterprise. Peer production. Crowd sourcing. Any of these concepts sound familiar? If not they will, and in a shorter time frame than you should think. As men, women, children and even pets move online, so do businesses of all shapes and colours. Distributed business models are still young but they are gaining more and more inflence. First the music business suffered severe punishment for not converting their business model to a distrubuted marketplace, and now software, t-shirts, and even cars are developed through different degrees of distributed production.
But so far the jungle of distributed business has been uncharted territory. But theenthusiastic people of the P2P Foundation have started an exciting new meme mapping project for P2P Business. Plaese go there and help out if you can. The outset for the project is this still rough but informative outline of a P2P business meme map:
Because many people doing each a little bit of the work are more efficient and flexible than few people doing all the work.
Jonas Andersen's site of dedication to all things connecting people. Here, 'things' and 'people' are connected in systems, and are not really things but complex processes, that are changing communication, business, politics, and society.
