A lawyer agreed to teach law to a poor student without charging a fee on condition that the student will pay him when he qualifies and wins his first case. However, when the student qualified, he took up another profession. The lawyer sued him for his fees, on the grounds that if he wins, the pupil must pay and if he loses, the student has won and so must pay – according to the agreement between them.  The student, then, argued that he does not have to pay a cent, because if he wins he need not pay the fees, and if he loses he does not owe any fees – according to the agreement between them. 

The publisher, above, told my friend that all he is responsible for is the initial act of introducing her product to his visitors. He could not claim – or guarantee – success. My friend argued that his claim that he offers advertising on a “successful site” is false because success, in relation to an advertising campaign, is not measured by how many people were exposed to the advert – but by how many of these visitors followed the ‘call-to-action’ – in this case, clicking over to her website. Some publishers, who maybe have better access to their visitors’ choice-criteria, are happy to charge per click-through (when the visitor clicks on the banner), and even per conversion (when visitors, having gone through to the advertiser’s website, participate in transactions that generate income for the advertiser) – the publisher charged my friend “per exposure” – that is, each time her advert was shown on the website. 

Recently, the BBC carried the story of Trina Thompson, a 27 years old graduate who sued the college where she got her BA in information technology because she was unable to find work, based on her qualifications. Arguing that the degree she obtained at New York’s Monroe College is useless, she demands to be refunded the $70,000 tuition fees she paid.  Thompson’s definition of a successful outcome of her studies is a successful job application, while Monroe College’s successful outcome was achieved when she’s graduated with a Bachelor’s degree.

In another, more bizarre but not less emotive case, James Hattefield – a man recovering from a temporary memory loss – sued the Pittsburgh Pirates – his favourite baseball team,  because, said Hattefield, this isn’t the team that he paid to see: “I paid thousands of dollars for these seats at a beautiful ballpark and now I get to watch some Pop Warner ballclub throw a group of 20-year olds onto the field each week.“  Last el-bizarro example deals with a high-school student who sued Amazon.com because books he was reviewing for a school assignment (namely George Orwell’s “1984? and “Animal Farm” who were removed because they were not unauthorized for distribution), got deleted off Kindle. The pupil argued that the removal of the book obliterates any value in his school report – and he holds Amazon.com solely responsible for the damage caused to his academic standing – and school marks.  

The main thrust of the examples, above, is in the rebelliousness shown by unsatisfied customers, who were not afraid to plea, remonstrate, demand – and sue, if they felt that court action was needed.  These legal challenges are not, as lawyers for the defence often argue, without merit.  Each challenge is a way of testing an area of contention in the relationships between buyer and seller. Harvard Business School professor Narakesari Narayandas lists five qualities that products should have in order to “get a foot in the door”, as he sees it:: Modularity – offering a natural progression (or at least some connection) from one part to another, Healing power – offering a clear and present solution to customer pain.  High quality – the supplier must be confident of the product’s capabilities “[f]irst impressions are the last impressions if they’re not good ones”, Ease of use, customer should be able to evaluate the product easily, and lastly – Fair price – it must not be too expensive for the customer. It is interesting to note that all the cases above (chosen at random) emanate from the second quality – the ability of the product to offer a clear remedy to customer pain. In fact, it appears that the products above created, rather then eased, customer pain. 

A good way to sum up a piece on (questionable) service delivery is the old stand-up routine (not sure whose) about a guest who arrives late one night to a fully packed hotel – “you can stay the night in our hotel, but I’m afraid you’ll have to make your own bed”, says the hotel manager, “Oh, that’s all right, I don’t mind at all,” says the guest. “Good,” says the manager, “here’s a hammer, a saw, and some nails. The wood’s in the garage.”  

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Loux does not have a written transcription of his presentation, but he referred me to “a larger container of thinking on the synatpticweb.org wiki — it’s certainly a very early notion …“. The wiki Loux mentioned is The Synaptic Web – a blog he shares with a JS-Kit Evangelist called Eric Blantz, and JS-Kit VP of Product Strategy & Community Chris Saad. 

The Synaptic Web, according to the intro,”is about the evolution of the Internet from document delivery platform, to a platform for communication … and now towards something much more profound: a dynamic web of adaptive connections and information flows that give structure and meaning to otherwise chaotic steams of data.” Sites must now connect with other online entities and presences at light-speed, creating a myriad of connections and using these to exchange stimuli in a digital, automatic game of do or die – “Like individual neurons, “sites” must now maximize their connections in response to external stimuli or risk being pruned themselves.” 

The Synaptic Web is the befitting platform to accommodate the rise of the Digital Natives, who are, to quote Harvard University’s Urs Gasser, a generation “born digital” – “those who grow up immersed in digital technologies,” he says, “for whom a life fully integrated with digital devices is the norm.” As they use The Synaptic Web, it will be the digital natives, “who decide with whom, what, when and where connections occur, not the platforms” say Loux and colleagues, “Social profiles are becoming streams. If the old profile was a neuron, the stream is a neural pathway or pattern. It is the connective tissue between applications and people that feeds information from one node to another. Profiles come and go, people express themselves using countless tools and technologies – the stream, however, is the consistent and persistent channel that matters.” 

Using the human nervous system as a metaphor for communication technology is not a new idea. Mass communications guru Marshall McLuhan offered a near-prophetic view of “the electrical network”, as he called it, which is – he argued – an externalisation of our own central nervous system:  “It is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single, unified field of experience… an organic unity of interprocesses.”  (p 380)   The legendary communication scholar, James W. Carey argues further that, following the American Civil War, “electricity as fact and symbol seized hold of the native imagination, envisioned as a precursor of a new form of civilization … Moreover, electricity was pictured as classless … a force invested with the power to transform the human landscape … it lent itself to speed, movement, distance and decentralism. It imitated, as many commentators noted, the very action of the brain.” (pp 37-8)  Replace ‘electric’ with ‘digital’ – and you get the preamble to the Synaptic Web. 

Electric and synaptic technologies have similar characteristics.  Here, in point form, are the characteristics of electric technology, as observed by Marshall McLuhan and James W. Carey. 

Electric and digital networks …

• are an externalisation of our central nervous system
• imitate the action of the human brain
• form a single, unified field of experience
• create an organic unity of interprocesses
• are a precursor of a new form of civilization
• are classless
• are invested with the power to transform the human landscape
• imbued with speed, movement, distance and decentralism 

This is the background against which Loux based his startling obituary to blog-comments, who, he says, are destined to die and cede their place to “Implicit information derived from content and gestures” – as we “observe a set of gestures and connect them together [we create] a dynamic profile of interests, intentions and friends that can be used for discovery and filtering.“ 

This conglomeration of information, relationships, contacts & connections form what Loux and his co-writers call “collective intelligence.”  Clearly, the multifaceted super-connectors forming the Synaptic Web will find the classic communication model, based on a system of dialog (one talks, one/some listen/s, one/ some send, one / some receive/s, etc.) quite limiting, and so, social networks strive to reconfigure themselves so that “[o]nly the connections between the people – the ‘social graph’ – and between their social objects – images, profiles, links and groups – matter.”   

Looking at Twitter & Facebook, arguably the most successful social networks we have these days, one can see how dialogue is conceptually impossible – unless one uses ‘side rooms’ – digital bubbles that offer direct messaging facilities. This, however, does nothing to stop or even slow down the flow of current communication streams flowing through social networks.

The issue of split and parallel dialogues in social networks brings us back to Moodle. I ToingToinged about Moodle, an advanced, free, a-synchronous Online Learning Environment. Moodle is conceptually based on principles guided by social constructionist thought, according to which “groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artefacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture like this, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture, on many levels”. Social Constructionism makes up the final layer of an emerging human communication, which is based on

1. Synaptic infrastructure 
2. Contextual meaning 
3. Hypertextual content, and   
4. Socially-oriented connections and relationships that are driven by Digital Natives

Khris Loux’s obituary is therefore fully justified. Comments, as we know them, are set to change, in fact, they are changing already, because communication is moving away from a linear, dialog based, send-receiver type interaction, to become multi-threaded, on-demand, asynchronous and omnipresent.

‘Traditional’ comments were based on threads of thought that were linked like branches to a major trunk. Synaptic thinking expands this system to include an ever-increasing number of trunks, where each trunk implies both content and relationships. Each idea serves as an independent unit of thought, as well as a reflection on other ideas. In a world were thoughts are built like Rubik’s Cube, a one-on-one dialogue may seem like a two-dimensional poor relative.

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According to US President Barack Obama; video games are a clear and present health hazard that is endangering the American people. While many still consider video gaming to be a geek-dominated, unsavoury fringe activity, Gamasutra.com offers in-depth analyses of the way games and digerate cultures interact.  Gamasutra is a website dedicated, as its masthead declares, to ‘The Art & Business of Making Games.” Created during the late 1990s, Gamasutra offers news, opinions, features, job connections and general information about and around video games.  In an evocative opinion piece, Gamasutra contributor Benj Edwards (himself an avid gamer) poses an intriguing question:  Can Games Become ‘Virtual Murder?’ 

A few years ago, Jack Thompson, a self-styled crusader who fights against the use of sex and violence in all channels of entertainment, came out with what he called “A Modest Video Game Proposal”, a public challenge for the video games industry, consisting of “creating and distributing a game, in which (Thompson’s arch-rival) Paul Eibeler, CEO of Take-Two Interactive … is to be killed in a disturbingly violent manner.” Thompson promised to donate $10.000 to Eibeler’s favourite charity organisation if this game were to be made.  The offer made quite a stink and Thompson backtracked, arguing that it was all a joke. A group of developers, however, did release a Thompsonesque game called “I’m O.K – A Murder Simulator”. According to Wikipedia “the reference to a ‘Murder Simulator’ refers to what Thompson regularly proclaims all violent computer games to be.” 

Edwards argues that, with superior technology taking over old, technically inferior tools and clunky designs of the past, “our computer simulations of the real world … (will) begin to effectively duplicate reality.” When this happens, he says, “the issue of video game violence won’t be a matter of artistic merit or censorship anymore. It will quickly become a matter of morality, ethics, and law.”  In ten to twenty years, computer simulations will be super realistic – making it impossible to distinguish between computer life and reality. While this may sound like an idea that will launch a thousand Hollywood-schlocks – it actually poses a serious challenge to future digerate societies, when “your virtual victims … could look, sound, and behave exactly like a real human would if you stabbed him in the neck or shot him in the gut. There’d be plenty of blood, screaming, and carnage to go around. You could watch as they bleed to death in agony. The funny thing is — and I’m just guessing — you wouldn’t want to do that in real life to a real human, so why would you want to do that in a video game?“ 

Existing technology protects us, to some extent, from mistaking fiction for reality by being far from perfect – TV, Movie and Computer screens are so obviously imperfect that we have no problem in mistaking what we are seeing as being the real thing.  What would happen, asks Edwards, when technology is so good, that it makes fictitious situations look real? 

In July 2000, a US Congressional Public Health Summit debated the issue of the impact of entertainment violence on children – and published a joint statement that – while listing sincere fears concerning negative influence of entertainment violence on children, was very careful to add the following afterthought: 

“We in no way mean to imply that entertainment violence is the sole, or even necessarily the most important factor contributing to youth aggression, anti-social attitudes, and violence. Family breakdown, peer influences, the availability of weapons, and numerous other factors may all contribute to these problems. Nor are we advocating restrictions on creative activity. The purpose of this document is descriptive, not prescriptive: we seek to lay out a clear picture of the pathological effects of entertainment violence.”   

Are we facing an ethical implosion that is inspired by gaming? I have been discussing this with virtual friends online and the general feeling is that ethical issues are somehow removed from our ‘gaming brains.’ We can live our lives without hurting a soul – yet have little problem with killing thousands of digital people gleefully while playing a game. Doesn’t this – asked an online mate – show symptoms of acute ethical malfunctioning? Why otherwise would anyone spend hours doing such horrible things? It was time to introduce my discussion partner to Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

Flow, according to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (cheek-scent-me-high-ee), consists of “activities in which there is a match between high challenge and high skills.” When this happens, he says, “the ego, or self-consciousness, disappears, after which people report feeling stronger and more vital.” In a fascinating book named Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi defines Flow further as “‘the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.’”  [Csikszentmihalyi quotes are from the article “Understanding Video Gaming’s Engagement: Flow and Its Application to Interactive Media” by Dr. Erik Gregory, available online here.) 

And so, when we achieve superior game-playing level, and as we observe the killing fields we’ve created so skilfully, we will experience a unique sense of elation & of well-being emanating due to Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. The interesting thing about the Flow, says Gregory, is that the conditions for flow have been observes universally – they are not culture based or location specific, age or gender related or attributable to any specific psychological background “over 8000 interviews from individuals around the world including Japan, Korea, India, Europe, and the United States were collected to validate the universality of the Flow experience and its characteristics” he says.  Flow exists in each one of the following conditions (or some of them, or all of them): 

• “Goals are clear–an individual is aware of what she or he wants to do
• Immediate feedback–an individual knows how well he or she is doing at any moment
• Skills match challenges–the skill level of an individual is in balance with the task at hand
• Concentration is deep–the individual focuses all attention on the task at hand
• Problems are forgotten–the individual is able to dismiss irrelevant stimuli that may interfere with concentration
• Control is possible–a feeling of mastery is gained
• Self-Consciousness disappears–an individual feels able to transcend the limits of the ego
• The sense of time is altered–an individual either loses track of time or time seems to pass with rapidity
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding—the experience is worth engaging in for its own sake”

Unfortunately, each of these conditions exists as we interact with video games, even the most horrifically violent ones.  

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So-called asynchronicity helps online students to concentrate on their studies without having to relay on the availability of course teachers and fellow students. This supports the “available on demand” character of online study. Universities, on their part, are able to offer courses globally – often incorporating other tertiary institutions. An interesting example is the master’s degree in Adult Learning and Global Change, offered by the University of the Western Cape (UWC.) This online programme is offered in collaboration with the University of Linköping in Sweden, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada, the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia and The University of the Western Cape in South Africa.`

Online-learning environments offer participants the opportunity to work with each other through dedicated, web-based applications. This is known as “computer-mediated collaborative learning.” My all-time favourite asynchronous collaborative learning application is Moodle, an open-source free web application that enables educators to create powerful online learning sites. Collaborative learning relies on a community-based activity that uses technology, such the web, to offer incredible learning facilities where students can discuss and present issues, watch videos, listen to podcasts, use PowerPoint presentations, devise wikis and blogs, link to social networks, submit essays and papers, write exams and even fill in attendance reports.

According to Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas, the application’s power comes from its Constructionist operational philosophy -”Constructionism asserts that learning is particularly effective when constructing something for others to experience. This can be anything from a spoken sentence or an internet posting, to more complex artifacts like a painting, a house or a software package…   Social constructivism extends constructivism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture like this, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture, on many levels.”

Over the last few years, e-learning gained complexity, experience and depth. According to a paper published by the University of West Georgia Distance Education Center, “almost 3.9 million students were enrolled in at least one online class during the fall of 2007. The 12.9% growth rate for online enrollment is much greater that the 1.2% growth overall of the higher education student population.”  The paper argues, however, that 2009 online students are much more likely to drop out of their studies than campus based students. “Age was found to have a significant unique affect on dropout in both programs with older students more likely to dropout.”  Other factors influencing dropout include “Issues of isolation, disconnectedness, and technological problems” (source: Sloan-C.) Karen Frankola, Internal Communications and Creative Services Director at Deloitte, lists eight reasons (free registration required) for high dropout rates among online students:

• Students don’t have enough time
• Lack of management oversight
• Lack of motivation
• Problems with technology
• Lack of student support
• Individual learning preferences
• Poorly designed course
• Substandard/inexperienced instructors

Is there a detectable disillusionment form asynchronous courses? According to Frankola ‘’e-learners who took only the asynchronous course were much less likely to complete it than e-learners who also participated in live sessions.”

High dropout rates for online courses, says Frankola, is a “problem a lot of people in the e-learning industry don’t like to talk about […]  a recent report in the Chronicle for Higher Education found (PDF) that institutions report dropout rates ranging from 20 to 50 percent for distance learners.” Administrators of online courses seem to agree that “dropout rates are often 10 to 20 percentage points higher in distance offerings than in their face-to-face counterparts.”

These figures may seem unusual, when looking at the total dominance of the social network model: none of Frankola’s eight points keeps people away from Twitter or FaceBook.  Sloan-C’s observation that “Issues of isolation, disconnectedness, and technological problems” may point to the problem with online learning isn’t indicative, either – social network denizens are neither isolated nor disconnected.   Vast communities offer real-time one-to-one and one-to-many communication opportunities. Participants mostly feel supported by their online peers (with some over- publicised exceptions), their needs are being met, their personality (real or assumed) accepted, bolstered and respected, their opinions heard.

It is unlikely that online learning will disappear, rather,  off-line places of study will see people who prefer face-to-face learning and can afford (financially and geographically) to attend courses on campus, while online learning will remain the domain of those who live far from campus and / or can’t afford the costs involves in campus-based studies. When questioned, people listed financial considerations, the educational and technical competency of online instructors and improvements in online technologies as factors that will most significantly affect the success of online programs.

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 On the opposite side, Prensky identifies what he terms Digital Immigrants. These, he says, are “older folk [who] were “socialized” differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.”"

As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past.” According to Prensky, the “digital immigrant accent” can be observed as Digital Immigrants turn to the Internet for information as a secondary choice, or read the manual for an application rather than expect “that the program itself will teach us to use it.” 

Urs Gasser, Executive Director at the Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society is another Digital Natives scholar. He focuses on “key legal, social, and political implications of a generation “born digital” – those who grow up immersed in digital technologies, for whom a life fully integrated with digital devices is the norm.” Recently, Grasser introduced delegates at the Amsterdam Corporate Social Networking Conference to a thought-provoking observation of Digital Natives – “By age 20″ said Gasser, “kids will have spent 20,000 hours online -the same amount of time a professional piano player would have spent practicing.” (Source – senior Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang). Interestingly, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping point, Blink) introduces his “10,000 Hour Rule” – arguing that each and every successful person, every expert, had to invest at least 10,000 hours in practicing his area of specialty. Gasser estimates that the average Digital Native would have spent double that time online. Somehow I don’t find it surprising, as this serves to support the notion that Digital Natives are a breed on their own. 

 Digital Natives, said Gasser, are not determined by age but by the type and extent of their exposure to digital technologies.  In other words, Digital Natives are fully digerate persons. According to Gasser’s, Digital Natives …

• 1. Are always online
• 2. Have (or may have) multiple identities
• 3. Are engaged in extensive disclosure of personal data
• 4. Foster and support the culture of sharing
• 5. Are creators, rather than passive users
• 6. Have (and/or cultivate) developed information processing habits
• 7. Engage in peer collaboration and online activism
• 8. Learn through browsing  

In “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives “a book Gasser co-wrote with John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, one finds an intriguing observation of Digital Natives – (this quote is taken from an excerpt of the book, offered on the book’s website): “They [Digital Natives] are joined by a set of common practices, including the amount of time they spend using digital technologies, their tendency to multitask, their tendency to express themselves and relate to one another in ways mediated by digital technologies, and their pattern of using the technologies to access and use information and create new knowledge and art forms.” 

Gamer Jinx Milea said that one of the best lessons children learn through video games is that standing still will get them killed quicker than anything else. The need for restless existence turns previous generation (older siblings, parents, grandparents) into observers, and, often, into terrified witnesses. American Former migratory worker, longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer argued that “in times of radical change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” 

In trying to come to term and then interact with new generations of digerate people, Hoffer’s learned (aka Prensky’s Digital Immigrants) are facing an unenviable task. Judging by the media, ‘coming to terms’ may mean anything from grudge-acceptance to total capitulation. While parent seem to relax their muscles (TimesOnline reports that “Parents have become significantly more willing to allow their children to own a mobile phone … Widespread acceptance of the technology is allaying the health fears and concerns over bullying and inappropriate use that previously dominated debate on children’s use of mobile phones.”) schools and places of learning – those last bastions of conservatism – stay tightly put  in a last act of hopeless defiance. 

Are we losing touch with our Digital Natives?  

Search marketing expert Gord Hotchkiss offers a fascinating assessment of the question. Digital Natives, he says, are brain-wired differently. Over the years, our brain creates a myriad of pathways, based on our perception, understanding and interpretation of the environment in which we live. As we grow he says “our brains go through wholesale rewiring; we push against the constraints of our environment, including the boundaries set by our parents. It’s all part of growing up. The process is called pruning.”  Form birth, we accumulate new behavioral pathways and discard – or ‘prune’ – old and irrelevant ones, “concentrating on strengthening the ones we use more often. We focus on the mental skills most important for survival.”  

Our kids, argues Hotchkiss, are being exposed to new environments; their parents will not have any knowledge or perception of these environments and, therefore, no similar shared pathways “What happens when we expose our children to something we weren’t exposed to during this same pruning period? They simply become better at it. And they do it in a way that we can never duplicate.” (My emphasis). 

The result of what can only be described as upwards pressure by Digital Natives on Digital Immigrants is a marked change in existing bastions of the pre-digerate world: in a clear case of “If you can’t beat them…” it was announced that primary schools in England will drop studies of Victorian history and the Second world war, but will study Twitter and the Blogosphere.  

“Today we face a widening digital divide – not one based on the gap between the technology haves and have-nots – but by one resulting from the vast differences between how we grew up and how today’s generation(s) are growing up. Coming from another land and time, we are immigrants and foreigners in this digital landscape, speaking digital as second language. Some have us are better than others at adapting to the ways of this new land, but like all immigrants, most of us retain some degree of our accent.”  Ian Jukes “Understanding The New Digital Landscape, Kids & the New “Digital Divide” ” (accessed online here (PDF), 4 June 2009) 

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Darren Libonati, president of Las Vegas Events and director of the Vegas Sam Boyd Stadium alludes to inherent shortcomings in turnstile-type payment systems. Speaking about a Vegas festival in which 50,000 daily visitors were expected, he said “if we can turn the turnstiles and fill up the seats, we know the business model will take care of itself. I do know this is an affluent group of people because [...] people will have had to spend $1,000 already to get here.”  Libonati identified the main flaw in using the turnstile based business model for content: making sure that many people pass through your turnstile and pay the required fee is not enough; visitors need to have both the intention and the ability to spend much more, over and above the basic entry fees they pay at the turnstile.  Often (and this is crucial) turnstile fees are actually waived in order to support “further spending.” 

Turnstiles are great, says Walter Isaacson, former Time editor and the current President and CEO at the Aspen Institute. Turnstiles worked for Apple’s iTune, who commoditised a basic information unit (a file including a single track) and now we can all hear Appledom’s turnstile erupting in jubilation to the sound of revenue streams. 

The New Your Times’ opinionator blog is referring to a speech entitled “A Bold, Old Idea for Saving Journalism” presented by Isaacson at the University of California Riverside, quoting Isaacson as saying that “the key for attracting online revenue, I think, is coming up with an iTunes-easy, quick micropayment method. We need something like digital coins or an E-Z Pass digital wallet – a one-click system that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog, application, or video for a penny, nickel, dime, or whatever the creator chooses to charge.” 

This is perfectly logical, Mr Isaacson, but where is the money to be made here? Can you and your former colleagues at NYT survive on nickels and dimes they’d get from occasional content seekers? The example Isaacson uses is valid – but not applicable to previously-printed media. iTunes offers music tracks, while virtual money used on social networks and digital games buys, yet again, Items of a high desirability value. Does Isaacson believe that people would be motivated to buy the latest WSJ information in the same way they feel compelled to get the latest Coldplay track or swap Nintendo Wii gaming points? 

And even if News Corp finds such avid turnstile spinners for the digital version of the newspaper, will there be enough of them to make a dent in Murdoch’s enormous shortfall?  Not a chance. Murdoch is not likely to recoup his losses through a turnstile because turnstiles rely on a high number of people paying low attendance fees.  Let’s assume that an average piece would cost US 20c per turnstile spin. Murdoch will require over a billion spins to make up his quarterly profits shortfall. How many WSJ information seekers are needed in order to affect one billion turnstile spins?! 

There is no doubt that Journalism can benefit greatly from micropayment – using mobile accessibility, online bit-by-bit communication (aka ‘Twitter of the future’) and existing online content channels (RSS could do greatly here), content providers could make money – bit by bit, digital coin by digital coin, spin by spin. This is likely to leave Mr Murdoch and his shareholders with a staggering shortfall. 

Sponsored turnstiles may offer a light at the end of Murdoch’s tunnel – let the great spenders sponsor content channels, so you and I can get the content for free. It works in Las Vegas – it may work elsewhere too. Or will it? I doubt it that Coke, Nike, British Airways or Toyota will be interested, for example, in sponsoring investigative journalism? They are much more likely to go for high-turnover, hyperactive traffic makers and consumption-biased content. Once content is determined by sponsored turnstiles, what chance does an award-winning movie like The Children of Darfur have against Hannah Montana? 

Are we facing a media doom-and-gloom scenario? Yes, if we are a massive conglomerate like News Corp. but probably not,  if we are a lean and mean content machine. Smaller operators might be able to get by – and some may even do well, with a combination of written content, podcasts and flash-pointers designed for the web, e-mail, social networks, mobile devices, RSS, SMS and Twitter-like platforms. Suddenly, after many years of living in the shadow of mammoth-sized content provider, smaller operators may have a better chance of surviving. 

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Murdoch’s powerful hegemony over world media was hardly dented by the ongoing financial crisis – but his finances took a massive beating. According to The Guardian, News Corporation‘s quarterly operating profits took an astounding 47% nosedive to $755m, the newspaper division quarterly profits plummeted from $216m to $7m year-on-year and TV profits plunged from $419m to $4m. News Corp had to sell assets and retrench 3000 employees in 2008. 

Does Feinstien’s maxim work both ways, in other words – will a less successful genius exhibit signs of insanity?  According to CNN’s Business site, Murdoch argued that “The current days of the Internet will soon be over” and that the existing Internet business model was “malfunctioning.” Murdoch then said that his company’s Web sites will charge for content within the year. Referring specifically to the Wall Street Journal, CNN reports that Murdoch said that soon users would pay “handsomely” for WSJ content. 

Let’s run this tape again, frame by frame. We have two intriguing facts: 

• 1. “the newspaper division quarterly profits plummeted from $216m to $7m year-on-year”
• 2. “CNN reports that Murdoch said that soon users would pay “handsomely” for WSJ content.” 

Having lost 96% in year-on-year profits on his media assets, Murdock is determined to turn his loss making assets around by charging online readers. Does he really believe that that those who did not buy, say, the printed version of The New York Post, will fall over themselves and each other for the privilege to pay for NYP content online? Why would any person pay for online content when it is available elsewhere for free? If Murdock hopes that forcing people to pay for content on his publications would pressurise other online content providers to follow suit (thus creating a change in people’s online information consuming habits) – he’s sorely mistaken.  The Internet is moving away from paid content – and that move is irreversible. All that would happen, if News Corp. follows their CEO’s folly, is that content seekers will move over to content-for-free publications.  It is insane for Murdoch to believe that revenue models that applied for over a century to print media would simply and naturally continue to apply to online publications. 

Murdock may be right in assuming that specialised content – the kind that cannot be bought elsewhere, for example – some of the WSJ’s content – can be sold to focused content-seekers, people who look for specific content. Murdock can also charge (and receive) fees for archived and searchable content. I doubt, however, if that is what he has in mind when he says cockily that soon users would pay “handsomely” for WSJ content.  Charging for focused content and archived material is definitely not going to turn around a $209m slide in profit.   

In a Wired article (Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business), Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson argues that “[o]nce a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.”  

Freeconomics, as Anderson calls it, is here to stay. 

What happens, then, if Murdock discovers that insanity brings little money and turfs all his media assets? It is reasonable to assume that other content providers will move in quickly to fill the void – they will operate with smaller profit margins, offer massive content selections for free and thrive on various cottage industries surrounding their content repositories.   

When Chris Anderson says that “a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want – and free, increasingly, is what you’re going to get” — is this genius or insanity?   

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Beyond the wonderfully positive effects of the Harry Potter series (for example, the reported growth in the number of book readers, notably – of children, worldwide), an auspicious downside may be the diminishing in importance of “fake” muggle magic, as opposed to “true” wizard magic. To my mind, the best living magicians are those who pull a trick a few centimetres away from the tip of your nose, and still you cannot detect how they did it, even through they openly admit that their tricks are just that – tricks and nothing but tricks. I feel that humans who claim to have (or imply that they have) special magical powers are probably faking it (read James Randi’s fascinating story on the now legendary 1983 “Project Alpha”, created to provide an answer to Randi’s question “[w]hat would happen if two young Conjurors posing as psychics were introduced into a well-funded university parapsychology laboratory?”) 

Stuart Lightbody and The art of magic 

I saw Stuart Lightbody – a sleight of hand artist – performing on two different occasions (here and here). I was therefore able to see some of his tricks performed twice. You may be aware that magicians are usually reluctant to repeat a trick in front of the same spectators, in case people would figure out how the trick was done.  No such danger with Stuart Lightbody: even though I knew – and anticipated – the ‘punch line’, I was twice totally unable to see how he did the trick. 

Right at the start of his show, Lightbody stresses that he has no supernatural powers. This is an important admission, because some of his tricks are spectacularly unbelievable (try to figure out how he guesses which nine – hidden from him – cards were selected by nine different members of the audience, or how he manages to make a full deck of cards vanish right before our eyes, the guy is mesmerisingly good!) Lightbody specialised in misdirection – and his craft is impeccable. 

Best of all, Lightbody – a graduate of Cape Town’s famous College of Magic – allows people like me to enjoy the way my imagination drives my brain. I can see things happen because he makes them happen through sleight of hand and misdirection. This is the stuff my dreams I made of and I insist on retaining the privilege to be tricked by an inspired – and inspiring human artist.   

The bard said: “If this be magic, let it be an art“, Lightbody’s art is true magic, just as his magic is true art.  

Visit Stuart Lightbody’s website

“Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires…The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning…along with the houses in which they were hidden.”

Like another dystopic masterpiece, George Orwell’s 1984, Fahrenheit 451 deals with a future society that is devoid of intellectual challenges and lacks any from of empathy, compassion or care. In Bradbury’s dystopian society (the USA, facing a war at home) all books are forbidden and punishment for those found in a possession of a book is severe. Montag, however, starts questioning society rules – he hides some of the books he is supposed to burn and tries to memorise their contents.

Reflecting on his book twenty-odd years after its publication, Bradbury said:

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist / Women’s Lib / Republican / Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever. … Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.” 

Bradbury’s opening sentence above –  ”There is more than one way to burn a book” is a mantra to a host of organisations and individuals who have been fighting what is perceived as attempts to curtail civil liberties and freedom of expression. Images of Nazis burning books in mass rallies have been haunting us for more than sixty years. 

Another, extremely popular, way of preventing certain books from being read is to have them removed from public libraries. 

The ALA

The American Library Association (ALA) sets out to be a “leading advocate for [t]he value of libraries and librarians in connecting people to recorded knowledge in all forms, [and] [t]he public’s right to a free and open information society.” In 2006 the ALA council resolved to focus on seven specific Key Action Areas, namely:  diversity, equitable access to information and library services, education and lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, advocacy for libraries and the profession, literacy and organizational excellence. These action areas form part of the Association’s current strategic plan, ALAhead to 2010. 

Each year, the ALA records hundreds of attempts by individuals and groups to have books removed from library shelves and classrooms, it then publishes a list of banned and/or challenged books for that year.  The ALA has also argued that “at least 42 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been the target of ban attempts.” The ALA listof banned and/or challenged books from the Radcliff 100 is a shocking indictment of modern day intellectual bigotry. It includes literary masterpieces such as The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Ulysses by James Joyce, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding and1984 by George Orwell — and others. 

Index on Censorship 

Index on Censorship is a leading British organisation focusing on the promotion of issues related to freedom of expression. It was created in the early 1970′s in order to identify areas where freedom of expression is curtailed or prohibited outright.  Recent issues tackled and commented-on (check the website and the blog) include a look at Ireland’s new blasphemy law, reflections on the effect a new Privacy Law may have on the free press, and a challenge of Obama’s reported ‘Cuban Changes’- are they real – or spin? Other discussions revolve around The US Supreme Court rule that broadcasters may be fined over the use of swear words on live TV, and , finally, good news, a bill proposing that people caught downloading music illegally three times should be cut off from the Internet is rejected by French politicians. 

irrepressible.info 

A mutual Amnesty International / Observer campaign called irrepressible.info allows users to carry, on their personal blogs and websites, snippets from a variety of censored online publications. The snippets point to irrepressible.info, enabling readers to learn more about Internet-related repression.  Visitors are also invited to sign a pledge on Internet freedom. 

Clearly, the ALA, Index on Censorship. irrepressible.info and similar bodies (like this one and this one), tend to preach to the converted. People who sought, for example, to ban And Tango Makes Three – a book about penguins (declared reasons- anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group) are hardly likely to be moved by calls for freedom of speech  advocated by anticensorship organizations.   

Judy Blume, writer and tireless anticensorship fighter had this to say about the evils of censorship: “… it’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.” 

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Describing the journalists of the future, Pulitzer said: “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.” 

The Pulitzer Prizes were stipulated in his will, creating awards for American journalism, letters and drama, education, and travelling scholarships. Over the years (1917 – 2009), winners included US President John F. Kennedy, Gone with the Wind‘s Margaret Mitchell and To Kill a Mockingbird‘s Harper Lee. Toni Morrison won it for her book Beloved, while ‘kings of musical’ Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II won it for South Pacific – an  adaptation of another Pulitzer winner – James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Rodgers and Hammerstein won another Pulitzer for Oklahoma! Two Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, received a Pulitzer for their investigative work on the Watergate scandal – resulting in the near impeachment and, eventually, resignation of US President Richard Nixon.  Current journalism prizes are awarded for Public Service, Breaking News Reporting, Explanatory Reporting, Local Reporting, National Reporting, International Reporting, Commentary, Criticism, Editorial Writing, Editorial Cartooning, Breaking News Photography and Feature Photography.  

For some of the newspapers just announced as this year’s Pulitzer winners, the news helped to sweeten a desperately tough year. The New York Times, who’s just won five Pulitzer Prizes (breaking news and international reporting, investigative reporting, criticism and feature photography), took the worst financial beating in 22 years, announcing a 27 percent drop in first-quarter advertising revenue. Mesa, Arizona’s East Valley Tribune received a Pulitzer in local reporting on behalf of his reporter Paul Giblin three months after having retrenched him. The Detroit Free Press, fighting for its very existence, received a Pulitzer for breaking and covering a story about a sex scandal that, eventually, brought down Detroit’s mayor. 

Traditionally, Pulitzers-for-Journalism categories have been umbilically connected to the world of print. Late in 2008, a Pulitzer press release announced that “[t]he Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honor the work of American newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced today. The Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.” Yet, not a single online publication got the nod this year. 

Addressing this issue during a Washington Post interactive session online, journalist and Pulitzer fundi Roy Harris said: “The Pulitzer Prizes have a decades-long history of having blocked out magazine and broadcast entries, and I think that slowed the organizations acceptance of online entries.” 

Harris admits that “the exclusion of Web sites that are part of magazine or broadcast enterprises is going to be tough for the Pulitzers to continue doing in the future. I’m guessing that a complete overhaul of the journalism awards is in the cards for the next couple of years.” Finally, he voices surprise that “an online-only winner wasn’t picked in some category, again, perhaps to send a signal. But the Pulitzers only have 14 categories now, and board members are loath to relax the standards. So I’d say they simply didn’t find anything to edge out what did win.” Translation – the judges did not find online anything worth a Pulitzer. 

In a way, the judges mirror the gut feeling of many offline editors and publishers, and it is clear that online publishers suffer from lack of recognition. The Houston Chronicle online were listed as finalists this year. As reported in the The Nieman Journalism Lab blog, the Pulitzer Prize Administrator “noted that the Chronicle’s entry was all-online – not a print clip in the lot.” According to the blog ‘[e]ditor Jeff Cohen credited the Chronicle’s “fully integrated” newsroom. “We cover news any way people need news. We cover it online, analog, digital, straight media – any way you can serve it up our staff is serving it up.”  When the Pulitzer administrator is amazed that one can achieve such great journalistic feat without using a single printed word, and your own editor lists that old schlock about 360 degrees media (‘We cover it online, analog, digital, straight media’) you know that your work is being assessed by media Neanderthals. 

Naturally, the future of the Pulitzers-for-journalism is tightly linked to the way journalism will brave – and survive – the migration from literate to digerate culture. Cohen’s “integrated pack” is eyebrows-raising stuff. What on earth does he mean by ‘online, analog, digital, straight media’? The digerate palette of future media is already defined – it is digital, social, mobile and streamed. There cannot be an integrated newsroom per se – only dynamic, integrated content writers who can produce content that can be delivered seamlessly through a myriad of channels to an assortment of content seekers – “tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, richman, poorman, beggarman, thief. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, copper, cowboy, Indian chief..” I have a strong feeling that in five years’ time the Pulitzer will be almost entirely digerate, covering relevant areas of excellence within the digital culture, its judges Googling furiously or scouring RSS links in search for the next winner/s of Joe Pulitzer’s dream award. 

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