So as much as we would like to see participatory culture flower into an new era of revived civic responsibility, as much as we have put great faith in the ‘wisdom of the masses’ and the reinstatement of the Commons for the common good, it seems possible that instead we will collapse into a free-fall free-for-all. And I’m not placing blame on the disenfranchised youth, or on Joe, or on Facebook or Twitter. As Geoff rightly says, it is not social media’s fault that people are on the brink of revolution. It is mad King Lear who realizes the perennial fault of the powerful, as he howls:

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.      (Act 3.scene IV)

The problem is that the powerless are thrashing about aimlessly in their powerlessness and anger and targeting the only dog they can beat: the small businessman. Sorry, folks, but that’s the wrong person. The problem is there is little wisdom or clear vision arising from mob mentality; there is no Big Picture perspective. And there is no sense of ethical behaviour. The small businessman is not your enemy. The mom and pop convenience store franchise is not fair game. It only looks that way because the mom and pop corner store has become a faceless replicant of a global behemoth.

In the meantime, flash robs and other revolutionary innovations will serve to convince the governments of the world to shut our freedoms down further, for in the current age the free market economy is more greatly valued than democracy. And when we are collared and tethered it will be even more difficult to revolt. So think and act wisely. What is the real price of that slab of beer or packet of chips you’re making away with?

It used to be that Bali seemed like another world. Even the frogs seemed foreign. Now the men in their checkered sarongs sitting outside the banjar gates idly check their mobiles while the band plays inside. At breakfast, all the other tourists (mainly women – why?) have their netbooks open to one site – Facebook. These days, with free wi-fi everywhere, you are never more than an update away from your network, family and friends. But thirty-two years ago, when I was first here at this time of year, I set my first post restante collection here in Ubud, at the suggestion of the first Lonely Planet book, Across Asia on the Cheap – a thin little robin’s egg blue book with about 5 pages per country. And you waited around for half an hour to see whether you had some mail from back home. I hadn’t.

Some things are unrecognisable; some things are pretty much the same. The electricity comes and goes, as always. But the beautiful Balinese girls, in their unbecoming oversize t-shirts instead of kebayas, now have  facelights from their phones as they wait for someone to serve. As ever, they sit and wait, wait without activity, talking to one another or staring out at the road. I wonder what kind of smss they get, and from whom?

I can only imagine how hollyweird has bollinised Ubud, with the Balinese as stereotypical spiritual non-entities providing colourful foil for the Western love interests. Kudos to Peter Weir for not doing this in The Year of Living Dangerously – though he had his own stereotypes to portray for a very different storyline. But Ubud, that artists village, where Walter Spiers, Arie Smit, Miguel Covarrubias and that madman Antonio Blanco were inspired to set up easel and waft about the paddies and river gorges of Campuan, has now turned into a kind of San Miguel de Allende of Southeast Asia, full of spas and organic soaps and yoga retreats. Gag! Not that I don’t like organic soap, it’s just the unbearable pretension of those willowy neocolonial boomers who set these kinds of things up everywhere as if they are the self-appointed missionaries of their new-age old-age god. And something gets lost along the way. The Balinese, as all colonised people of all times, are the ones to lose out even as they think they are winning: trade in your hours for a handful of dimes.

I sure wish I could save the world from itself.

I am now becoming more involved in research and development in virtual worlds, so expect some explorations in this area.

But I want, with this first post since finishing the formalities, to link to what I uploaded for the One Day on Earth project. Here is my page on the ODOE site. Here is my edited video footage on vimeo. Today would have marked the closure of uploading for the ODOE project, but they have extended it for another week – and longer for those who have already uploaded anything at all. I would have rather they had stuck to the original plan and given people a month only. Why? Because there is a certain integrity to having a plan and sticking to it. But it must be that they feel they don’t have enough (good) material to pull off a whole feature film. Well, I’ve given them glimpses into the beautiful Dandenong Ranges forests on a beautiful Spring day. They used one of my still images as a feature shot on their rotating images of about 30 or 40 from the homepage: ancient forest. I’m glad of that. Not for myself, mind you, but for the forest. I do hope to be able to represent, to represent for my local patch of beauty.

It is also my hope that the film is representative of more than human endeavour or the human experience – as this is only a part of the story of a day on Earth. I decided months ago that my contribution would be to film nature, or at least the natural beauty of the earth. With no access to my homeland mountains or sea, the next best thing was to go into the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne and film there.

I was out in the Sherbrooke Forest in Selby by 8am in a wonderful morning fog inside the temperate rainforest of Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) and ferntrees. The only disappointment here, and throughout the day, was the constant hum and sometimes roar of traffic racing through an otherwise beautiful forest. Throughout the day, I also filmed: Puffing Billy chugging along the tracks, the Kallista Village Fair, the industry of honeybees in a massively flowering crabapple (Malus floribunda, in fact) and other Spring delights in my perennial favourite Pirianda Garden, tourists in the massively flowering National Rhododendron Gardens, deep into the Olinda National Park and the forests along Olinda Creek, and finally the William Ricketts Sanctuary. Of course, along with traffic, people were everywhere except along Olinda Creek, so the filming will be in part about the inescapability of humanity.

But the other part of my filming, capping the beginning and end, were some machinema in Second Life. This is part of the earthly experience, as far as I’m concerned. My avatar meditating in the garden at dawn, and overlooking a tropical ocean at sunset. It was, after all, 10.10.10: numbers that are also the language of the digital world, and there are places of *natural* beauty in this world too.

The challenge will be to now take this footage, along with the 100 or so still shots I also took and blend them together into a short film of my personal One Day on Earth. It is almost immaterial whether the actual film uses any of my footage. I participated in the global event, and I will upload my footage for the project, but it was also enough to simply have been a conscious witness to the day. It was a good reminder that we should, indeed, be conscious witnesses of every day on Earth.

And now for a crash course on iMovie.

So it struck me, at 3 in the morning the other night, staring into the dark, that the move to the CMS has radically altered where things were going with web design. Now we have a situation where those who create the pages of the site have the inevitable, universal, word-processor-based  WYSIWYG editor to make their pages with. The design has been relegated to themes (where the real creativity sits), but most of us now just struggle with a dumbed-down Word to build our pages. It is a particular paradigm that is altogether linear and delimiting. And it’s unfortunate, because it means that some of us who tentatively ventured into code and grappled with the fluidity of div tags and classes and ids and so on will no longer do so. We will select a theme instead, and just write in a box, painting a word or two with bold or building a bulletted list, but that’s all. What about all that magic of placement, that awareness of working with a new kind of palette, a new set of tools? That has now been taken one step back, behind curtains of code that many of us now no longer venture past.

There’s something lost in the WYSIWYG editor – even though it means that Everybody can contribute to the web. What is lost is that foray into a modern alchemy for those who would wish to create for the medium. Now the medium is simply mundane. And worse: it enforces a kind of simplification and uniformity that may well be frighteningly monocultural.

But what I am writing about here is the value of friendship on Facebook. What does it mean to take part in the Wall of Noise that is Facebook? And what does it mean when you don’t participate? How do you feel if your popularity on Facebook is so low that no one has tagged you in a photo? Or why is it that some of your best friends haven’t befriended you on the social networking site, yet someone thrice removed from you has? Is Facebook redefining our concept of what constitutes friendship, or popularity, or meaningful interaction? What happens when your girlfriend or boyfriend, your husband or wife doesn’t want to become friends on Facebook? Does that mean you distrust them? Are you somehow a lesser human being for not wanting to share your thoughts with all your friends all at once? What are you hiding? Are you hiding something? And like the tree that falls in the forest: if you don’t have a profile on Facebook, do you even exist?

It’s interesting to experience the three modes of online instruction offered by these three models. The MIS is, of course, the most formal. Most of the course (apart from INF506, the Social Networking subject) has been encased in a traditional LMS (Sakai) and, while we have used most of the system’s tools over the various subjects – forums, wikis, chat, blogs – it is still inescapably formal: formal essays and reports and processes and procedures – as one would expect of an accredited postgraduate course. All very…well…institutional.

I have found myself struggling to stay attentive with the PLENK MOOC. While I am interested in the topic, the course material is so widely web-distributed as to be, in a sense, a course about PLEs in which you must design a PLE in order to stay on top of it. All of which is fine, but it may be putting the cart before the horse for many. And then the daily aggregation of the massive PLENK-hashed blog posts and tweets is enough to make one feel somewhat discombobulated – like a spring-loaded mad professor wobble doll in the back window of a bug. I just don’t know. Perhaps if I had more time to rip it all apart with my teeth, toss it on the ground and growl at it. But I don’t.

Then we come to the UWVW (another bug?). Ironically this will be the most demanding of my real time in some ways: we meet every Friday for three hours (well, Friday for me, Thursday night – city-of-my-birth-time – for most of the others (apart from the few Grecians and East Coasters)). We have not yet managed to warp time the way we have warped space and meet together as pixel people in the UW Virtual Biodome. Here’s Xantho (in the centre) on the first day of class, fidgeting in his chair:

No, the real-time element to all this is ironic. At least we can telecommute, because really, if I had to fight the traffic from Melbourne to Seattle, forget it! (The information highway’s bad enough at times! In Australia it ain’t no autobahn! And Stephen Conroy still sits smug in his ministerial seat, which is a worry.)

We had something of a traditional lecture (chalk-and-talk?) this first day (with brief meet-and-greet), but Ran, the lecturer, ran the thing with aplomb; despite the failure of the comm call (oh, technology!) we all had text and voice and we all became friends and got inspired (pumped!) for the course. It truly felt like it will be an immersion in an immersive environment on the cusp of something wonderous and great and transformative. The pretty penny was shining. And I have to say that this most traditional environment was impressive: listening to someone who is passionate about his subject and engaged, and engaging his students to be the same and to stretch themselves and their capabilities – well, you can’t really fault this, can you? And when you hear things like: “Second Life is like Kleenex or Jello or Coke. It is just one of the virtual worlds out there”; or: “the avatar is the cursor of the 21st century”, it’s hard not to be entertained and thought-provoked.

It should come as no surprise that the strength of social networking lies in contextualised communities, communities of practice (CoP). People develop particular interests or expertise and like to share this with a community of people who are similarly inclined. Ning makes more sense to me than Facebook, for example: when you create social networks around areas of interest and communities of practice, the postings are much more focused and relevant to a particular aspect of one’s life.

Here is a personal example. I have been involved in an active, international email list around the practice of Zimbabwean music since 1998 – well before Web 2. This was perhaps my first online social network. It is still strong, however; it is strengthened by our common practice. It is a good example of Wenger’s CoP, with a healthy mix of experts, mentors, and beginners. In fact, the platform of engagement doesn’t matter as much as the level of engagement, the social capital. And the social capital will build if people find it worthwhile belonging to the group.

It’s interesting, however, the idea that if you build social capital you will also build your community base. I’m not sure this is true. There will always, for example, be many people responding deeply to the music of x, y, and z. This is always going to be the case. There is a Long Tail of consumers/enthusiasts/die-hard fans for most anything these days: put something out there with your own unique scent and you can bet that a significant number of the billions of people on the planet will ‘friend’ you. I’m starting to realise there’s nothing unusual or significant in that. We gather around gravitational forces (and by this I mean creators who are ambitious enough to believe in themselves and hawk their wares) like so much magnetic dust.

References

Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. New York: Hyperion.

Bernoff, J. (2010). Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder. Available http://forrester.typepad.com/groundswell/2010/01/conversationalists-get-onto-the-ladder.html.

Downes, S. (2010). PLENK2010: Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge 2010. Accessed 24 September 2010 from http://connect.downes.ca/index.html.

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the  21st century. Available http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Raynes-Goldie, K. (2010). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook, First Monday, 15(1), 4 January. Available http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775/2432

Sessions, L.F. (2009). “You looked better on MySpace”: Deception and authenticity on Web 2.0, First Monday, 14(7), 6 July. Available  http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2539/2242

Wittenberg, K. (2007). Credibility of content and the future of research, learning, and publishing in the digital environment. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 10(1). Available http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;cc=jep;rgn=main;view=text;idno=3336451.0010.101

With respect to employee’s use of social networking sites and social media spaces on the organisations’ computers/network and time, the following guidelines would be recommended:

1. Care should be taken to not access or post inappropriate material or sites that would compromise the employee’s or organisation’s integrity.

2. Confidentiality should be considered when posting any information about the organisation on a social media site or about any other sensitive internal information, including personal information about oneself or other employees in relation to the organisation.

3. Organisational logos or other promotional material should not be used on personal sites or profiles, and the employee should be aware of any copyright, attribution or intellectual property issues with regards to any material they post online.

4. New organisation-based social media sites (for example, a new Facebook group or blog) should be registered by a central unit so that the organisation can keep track of them.

5. Use of social networking sites during work hours should be primarily for work purposes and not for private purposes.

Of course, employee’s use of Web 2 tools and platforms is only one aspect of a social media policy. It is also important to consider how they use them (which I couldn’t help addressing in part here). If you are not going to forbid people to use these platforms (and why would you) then you can only recommend how that they use them thoughtfully, and, for personal use, on their own time.