IdeaFestival

Henry Jenkins: media philosopher

Courtesy of Putting People First, here are the contours of the new media landscape as suggested by MIT Comparative Media Studies director Henry Jenkins. He describes the culture-shaping and anthropological dimensions of this space as "innovative," "convergent," "everyday," "appropriative," "networked," "global," "generational," and "unequal" - and driven in part by an emerging gaming culture, a force that he along with the Serious Games Initiative believes can be used to problem solve.

They are certainly not the only ones interested in appropriating games. During his sit down at the ideaFestival last month, John Gaeta discussed at length the film industry's search for a creative form that merges unpredictability of gaming and its "never ending possibility" with the very human magic of story. 

This combination of expansive culture and creative license is also the subject of a book I'm reading. In The Mind's Provisions, French philosopher Vincent Descombes argues for a distributed cognition best understood in anthropological terms, a holist view of thinking that may be applied to any society with tool making skills. As its inhabitants shape their tools, they are shaped in turn.

Our digital tools now make, distribute and consume media.

So I don't think it's a coincidence that a philosophy of information has emerged in the past 10 years or so. Much as the ancient Greeks thought deeply about nature, and thus paved the way for empiricism, I think the media-verse we inhabit offers grounds for a more complete understanding of the mind.

I hope to blog more about Descombes' book soon.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Media studies, Philosophy of Information

The fall of physics

Describing two books critical of String Theory - The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next and Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical ­Law David Lindley at Wilson Quarterly also touches how we learn in his review, Strung Out:

The problem with string mania, [Lee] Smolin [The Trouble with Physics author] concludes, is that it suits the wrong kind of mentality. He makes a nice distinction between scientific ­seers—­people such as Einstein and Niels Bohr, his heroes, who deeply pondered the working of nature and were by no means brilliant ­mathematicians—­and craftspeople, who are enormously adept at intricate calculation but don’t seem to think much about the larger meaning of their ingenious manipulations. Seers are always in short supply, and the technical demands of mastering string theory are such that ­would-­be researchers of a more philosophical stripe can rarely meet the price of ­entry.

Both authors plead for universities and granting agencies to consciously find room, every now and then, for the mavericks and eccentrics who might bring ­much-­needed new ideas into the excessively closed world of theoretical physics. Fat chance, unfortunately, was my instant reaction, given the way the scientific world, like academia in general, rewards careerism more than ­brilliance.

Lindley's review is an illustration of the problem of knowledge I've referenced a couple of times and the need for the unorthodox - and frequently unnerving - take on old issues. I'm not qualified to offer an opinion about whether String Theory will turn out to be the most accurate description of the physical universe. But I'm in complete sympathy with Lindley's point: technical problems will sometimes yield to the artist's vision long after the engineer has exhausted all the options.

If you're interested in diving a bit deeper into the issue of science and knowing, the December 2005 article in Physics Today, "Albert Einstein as Philosopher of Science," describes how Einstein reasoned his way past accepted limitations to formulate his theories. I highly recommend it.

Wayne

Wikipedia: String Theory

What's your reasoning style?

Citing this Mixing Memory post, Cognitive Daily suggests that participants in Western and Japanese culture view causality and consequences differently.

Wayne

The Beatles Return...Sort of

2004 ideaFestival presenter Sir George Martin and his son Giles have collaborated on a "new" 26 track Beatles album entitled "Love"....which also is the soundtrack for a new Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. This highly innovative endeavor employs some of the latest technology in a remix of original Beatles songs.... now recombined with remarkable results. With this new release Sir George is quoted as saying that he is likely to take an early retirement...he is nearly 81. We hope not.

Kris

Phenomenal capitalists

I love this business writing at the beginning of "A More Powerful Path."

Business changes the world - at every moment, in myriad ways, for good and ill. Decisions in boardrooms or on factory floors set in motion both staggering progress and far-reaching disasters: Microsoft tweaks its software and rearranges the virtual desktops of millions of people, shaping how they work every day. BP apparently shrugs off maintenance, and oil pours from a corroded pipeline into Prudhoe Bay. Wal-Mart shifts its gaze, just slightly, and drives organic produce to folks whose income once limited them to preservative-laden processed food.

But unlike the chaos-theory-butterfly, business is not an uncalculating force of nature. It can behave with intention.

FastCompany hands out its social capitalist awards in the December|January issue.

Much has been made - and rightly so - of the application of science and methodology to business, but the one deep discovery available to every business person, everywhere, is intention.

Be the change.

Wayne

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Phenomenology

Balls and stats

Malcolm Gladwell intervenes in a basketball statistics debate and in the process makes a crucial point. Decision trees and algorithms are not designed to produce the right outcome all the time, but to elevate the broad middle, to make the average decision - and decision maker - better.

Wayne

Convergence

In a previous post I alluded to an interesting idea that has emerged from work surrounding the ideaFestival (IF). This idea centers on our concept of "convergence"...defined here as "the finding, combining and recombining of diverse knowledge and ideas into a coherent pattern of thought and application". It's clear that successful innovation involves not only the acquiring of information but also the ability to effectively integrate, combine, retrieve and apply this knowledge. One of the things that led to the creation of the Festival was our "observation" that much of the dynamic innovation we were witnessing worldwide in science and technology, business, the arts, design, philosophy, education etc. was in fact arising from the successful integration and application of different areas of knowledge. Another key assumption here is that the act and process of convergence...which occurs on both a conscious and pre-conscious level....can be "learned". The notion of "learning" in this context has some interesting neurobiological implications. The idea of convergence has begun to influence a lot of our thinking about IF and where we want to take it in the future. I will be discussing much more about this concept as it continues to take shape.

Kris

Bruno Giussani on European Futurists Conference

Bruno Giussani is covering the European Futurists Conference at his blog, Lunch over IP. Posts thus far include emerging global challenges, the open source car, ambient design, which seeks to pair "meaning" with technology, and how the BBC conceives the media future.

Bruno has also tagged his work EFC07 at Technorati.

You may also wish to check out Bruno's substantial post on Gannett's reformulation of the newsroom while you're at Lunch over IP. His description of Gannett's digital re-do reminds me of the work sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation on emerging media - it strikes me as an attempt to understand how we learn, not just what we learn. The medium has become very much the message.

Wayne

Art, stocks: finding the numbers

What makes a piece of art worth $30 million as opposed $1 million? According to the New York Times (free registration required), University of Chicago economist David W. Galenson has developed metrics to gage the value of art for sale. Galenson believes he has found a link between an artist's age and the selling price for her paintings.

Related, Bill Miller at Legg Mason Fund has beat Wall Street for 15 straight years finding unity in disunity. Miller, chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, uses complexity theory and group behavior to make winning picks, what CNNMoney.com calls a "dogs breakfast" of stocks that his peers wouldn't touch, but which have routinely outperformed the market.

His due diligence runs far afield:

Miller's group is just as likely to be discussing the functionality of ant colonies or river systems as P/E ratios. The man runs a required book club for his investment team, for which he assigns works like "Deep Survival," by Laurence Gonzales, and "The Landscape of History," by John Lewis Gaddis....

His success depends on generating insight, no matter the source. Michael Mauboussin, who serves as Miller's "intellectual search engine," puts it this way:

Whether it's psychology or science or literature, it's a never-ending search. Bill's currency is ideas. You want to turn him on, give him a good idea. He doesn't care where it comes from. If a Nobel Prize winner gives him a dumb idea, he'll flag it Dumb Idea. And if a junior person gives him a good idea, he flags it Good Idea."

If you visit CNNMoney.com check out the right side column, "Bill's Braniacs," for a list of people that offer Miller counsel.   

Wayne

Wikipedia: complexity science

Thankful, thoughtful

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, thank is related to think. Both share the same root in a Proto-Indo-European language of roughly 5,500 years ago.

Here, home, Kentucky, it's Thanksgiving Day.

Wayne