Steven Johnson was talking at Demos this evening.
He was using an Apple PowerBook. So were all the Bloggers in the audience...
Also interesting to note that he was using Keynote rather than PowerPoint.
Since he was talking around all his books he thought he'd title it "Everything Emergent is Good for You"
Everything from here on in is pretty much in Note Form - I'll endeavour to tidy it up later... probably...
Steve's real theme was the move from Print to WebLogs.
What we've lost:
* Sustained Argument
* Quality
* Consensus
* Authority
What we've gained:
* Responsiveness
* Context
* Participation
* Collateral Problem Solving
In the early days of the Internet people figured out that they needed all this stuff organised. People figured they needed to find a bunch of Librarians to figure out what's important on the Web... Err, or maybe they could just use Google's PageRank...
This is democracy. Google effectively "outsourced" the Librarian function to everyone who uses the Web. This sort of Democracy is on the rise. Wikipedia is a very interesting example. Wikipedia's material on the 2004 Tsunami was incredibly Timely.
Part of the strength here is the level of Participation.
Why do people contribute? Well, People are very comfortable with the "Gift Economy". There is this Myth of the "Slacker Mind", but the evidence is that people are happy to seek out intellectual engagement. And you don't need many people to be engaged if the numbers are big enough. 1% may be enough.
Context Matters
* Print Thinking is Linear
* Web Thinking is about Connections
An interesting aside:Emergent behaviour only really works when you can see who is pointing to any particular page on the Web. This sort of analysis is done partiularly well by Technorati.
The Key Ingredients for all this to work are:
* Volume (= lots of users...)
* Technical Literacy
* Standardised Vocab
There is now sufficient information out there to find out everythhing there is to know about:
* People - Who
* Products - What
* Events - When
* Places - Where
* Policy - Why
* Procedures - How
Local Knowledge matters - and makes a difference.
* Check out New York 311
* Note that Local Interest leads to Global Perspective
* Geo-Tagging is becoming increasingly important.
* "My Neighborhood Statistics"
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com
Questions
* Free is important: Free as in "Speech" rather than "Beer"
* Skimming allows people to focus in on what we really want to know.
* Paul Miller, from Demos, asked about the future of Education...
* Chris Yapp from Microsoft asked how Einstein might have coped with a Blogging culture.
* Steve talked about the power of WebLoggers to come up with tools
that fix problems on the Web. eg: NoFollow, GoogleShare or the Lazy Web.
* Is the Web World diverging from the Real World? How should we deal with that?
* Does the Web leave enough time to do anything Real?
* Do Web tools encourage Peer to Peer grouping and thus allow people to disengage from the wider Society.
* Frank Geary from The Poetry Society. Can the Web help with Literacy?
And finally, from Steve Johnson:
Are we both more connected and more narrow than we've ever been.
Conclusion:
Can we find 1% in the Education Sector that can make a difference in terms of Public Benefit... We need to look at the Gift Economy.
