Firstly - if you have not seen Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last week, here is a link to the full speech. It will be 45 of the most inspiring minutes of your life.

Now, on to the post…

Barack Obama is multi-racial and multi-cultural, son of an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas (Dorothy’s daughter who ran away to Oz and stayed there, because there was no place like home, no place better than Hawaii anyway). Obama has been socialized into many cultures - American, African, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Harvard Law, Black Chicagoan, lefty unionist, and elected officialdom, among others. And he has learned from each of these, learned to speak the language of each of these cultures, to see the world through the eyes of the Law Partner as well as the laid-off machinist, the single mom (like his own) and the soccer mom, the Black teen in the hood and the new immigrant and the Ivy Leaguer and the minor official, to sympathize and dream with each, and in so doing to demonstrate the shared experiences and needs that connect those of us who would otherwise feel divided, in so doing to replace enmity with compassion.

This we know. And those of us whose hearts are not too hardened by rejection, or corroded by media-fuelled cynicism, or poisoned by bigotry, welcome his willingness to dream, and to lead.

There are those who claim that he does not lead, that his words are empty rhetoric. Yet his words are truly the essence of his capacity to lead. His ability to speak truth to power, to listen to a multitude of voices and to distill their sighs and cries into his own, is the most powerful form of leadership that can be. Speaking as Obama does is leading by example.

In their collective blindness mainstream media suppose that leadership consists of something other than speaking and listening effectively and decisively. That it consists of something other than taking public responsibility for oneself and for others. That it consists of everything except this. But they are wrong. Everything follows from the stories we tell ourselves. Everything follows communication.

It was the power of communication (in this case the widely promoted lies about weapons of mass destruction) that got us into the the war in Iraq in the first place. Bush’s power was not divorced from the dishonesty that ruled in the mainstream media during the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. His actual power was his ability to create that climate of dishonest communication. Just as it was the power to influence communications in America that resulted in the popular support for the pre-war policy of depriving Iraq of medicine, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

This is why Obama’s willingness to return the power of public speech to the citizens of America and the citizens of the world is so important, so transformative, and so powerful. “But,” some will say, “he is the one doing the talking, he is not returning anything to anybody. It is all about him.”

But here too they would be wrong. When, in his acceptance speech in Denver, Obama said: “What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It is about you” he was not just spouting a clever turn-of-phrase. He was using some of that African knowledge that has shaped him. And what is the essence of that African knowledge? It is the knowledge that the individual who gets on stage to speak, to preach, to blow, is not there to speak to people but to be spoken through. That contrary to popular belief, call-and-response is not about the preacher calling and the congregation responding. It is about the congregation calling and the preacher responding. And what the community is calling for is healing. The true leader has an ego strong enough to carry and transmute that burden of need into a song of purpose and possibility, but humble enough to be responsive to the merest suggestion of need, and thus to be directed by the needs of the community that has called him/her into being. That is the power of the bluesman, of the jazz artist, and even some rappers, though sadly few MCs have the humility to heed the call.

So Barack Obama’s words are not ‘just words’. They are leadership incarnate. It is his ability to unite people through his words that will bring him to power. And it is that same ability that will yield tangible results once he is elected. Will they be the results he has promised? Perhaps not. He is admittedly setting the bar extremely high. And yet George Bush has set the bar so very low that we have nowhere to go but up.

Barack Obama is aiming for the stars because America desperately needs him to.

The Skinny: Stephen Harper’s Conservative Government has axed the following programs over the course of the past two weeks:

• PromArt, a grant program supporting foreign travel for artists ($4.7 million)
• Canadian Memory Fund, which gives federal agencies money to digitize collections and mount them online ($11.7 million)
• Culture.ca Web portal ($3.8 million)
• Canadian Cultural Observatory ($560,000)
• Research and Development component of Canadian Culture Online ($5.64-million)
• Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund ($1.5 million)
• Audio Visual Trust ($300,000)
• National Training Program for the Film and Video Sector ($2.5 million)
• Trade Routes, supporting international tours by Canadian performers ($7.8 million)
• Northern Distribution Program, which distributes the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network signal to 96 Northern communities. ($2.1 million)

There are many reasons that these cuts are wrong.

They are economically wrong because investing in Canadian cultural infrastructure through programs such as those that have been chopped has proven to be a VERY successful means of creating a nationally and internationally acclaimed cultural industry sector that continues to be a growth area creating jobs, skills and brand recognition for Canada around the world. Those who mistakenly characterize such programs as ‘charity’ for ‘navel-gazing lefty artists’ have no understanding whatsover of the enormous role that Canada’s cultural sector plays in our economy, nor of the fact that the majority of these funds typically support the most mainstream of arts groups.

Supporters of these cuts certainly have no grasp of the significance of Richard Florida’s work on the Cultural Class, in which it is clearly and comprehensively demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between the number of creative professionals in a given city (of which artists are a prominent group, along with tech workers, educators, marketing folks and others) and the overall level of prosperity within that city. In other words, with his detailed statistical study of 30 North American urban economies, Florida proved that contrary to conservative economic dogma (such as that which motivates Harper) the best way to help everybody prosper in the age of networked knowledge is to invest in cultural infrastructure. And this is what is happening in Boston, in Chicago, in Pittsburgh, in Seattle, and all over the UK, where massive investment in urban cultural redevelopment in previously decimated northern industrial towns has yielded an extraordinary cultural and economic renaissance in places like Newcastle and Birmingham. But here in Canada? Here we chop training for the film and television industry, we chop funding for research and development online, we chop our online web portal, we chop the Canadian Memory Fund, and more.

In Canada we chop $2.1 million dollars that paid for the Aboriginal Television Network to broadcast to 96 northern communities. Was this an economic decision? Very difficult to see how it could be. No more than it was an economic decision when Brian Mulroney’s government chopped the entire annual budget for the Native Friendship Centres Radio Network back in the 1980s. How much did we save back then in exchange for eliminating what was a truly cherished institution? A measly $500,000. And today, for our $2.1 million, a drop in the annual surplus budget, we get to chop an essential cultural lifeline and unifying educational tool for native people across Canada. It’s foolish and it’s destructive. And It’s wrong.

A while back I joined the Canadian Music Creator’s Coalition, an organization of musicians and composers supporting copyright reform from an artist-centric and fan-centric perspective. Led by some famous Canadian musicians, it arose to counter the lobbying efforts of the CRIA (the Canadian Recording Industry Association), which is dominated by corporate interests that parrot the predatory and exploitative verbiage of its mothership, the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America), such as supporting the suing of kids who share mp3s.

More recently, I left the CMCC as a protest against that organization’s baffling endorsement of a terrible copyright reform plan put forward by the Songwriter’s Association of Canada. There are a lot of problems with the Songwriter’s plan, chief among them:

1. According to the proposal “Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices would be tracked. ” The privacy issues here are obvious and profoundly concerning. Is there anybody that wants every file they share to be tracked by law? What kinds of slippery slope does this place us on? Strike # 1.

2. The plan proposes the imposition of a $5 universal user fee to be added to every Internet user’s account that would then be divvied up by ‘the music industry’ based on whose files were shared most often. This would be an administrative, technical and public relations nightmare. It is so backwards-looking that it amazes me that anyone would take it seriously. Strike #2.

3. Clause 8 of the proposal says: “the amount of income generated annually could adequately compensate the industry for years of declining sales and lost revenues”. But is this for artists or for the majors? Moreover the plan never mentions how or on what basis the cash that would be generated would be divvied up. Who gets what share? ‘The ‘devil is in the details’, as every one who has ever negotiated a deal knows, which makes it all the more surprising that the CMCC supported this plan. Strike #3 and this proposal is out.

I made my feelings known to the CMCC but they stuck to their guns, so I left. And while it’s no great loss to the CMCC, I admit, I do want to let people know that despite their positive intentions, this organization is heading in a dangerous and largely unhelpful direction.

I mention this because I just joined another copyright reform group, one founded on Facebook by Michael Geist. The group is dedicated to defeating the apalling and alarming copyright legislation that the Conservative government of Canada is about to introduce. I am all for defeating this bill, which is based (remarkably, after all that we have learned since it was passed) on the USA’s disastrous Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.

But while I know what the group is against, given my recent experience with the CMCC, I can’t help wondering what we are all for.

One thing at a time I guess. Our immediate need is to stop this legislation in its tracks. But if we succeed, it will be interesting to see whether the same sort of common ground can be found in favour of truly progressive copyright reform.

oh man

things are getting very, very interesting
out there and in here alike

in here 76design is preparing a massive music biz strike
but more of that in a moment…

meanwhile, out there…

• out there we have the RIAA finally winning its first lawsuit against a music fan - a single mom who may now be fined over $200k for having a small collection of downloaded mp3s on her computer!
• out there we have Prince giving away millions (yes millions!) of free copies of his latest CD as newspaper inserts
• out there we now have Radiohead pushing the envelope by treating its new recordings as shareware, allowing users to download mp3s at will and to pay as much as they choose for them, from zilch to whatever
• and out there we have this awesome blog post by Bob Lefsetz, music industry veteran and renowned music biz analyst, in which Bob calls it like it is, pointing to the desperate need for a new business model in the music industry, and ripping the pathetic failure of the mainstream music biz to develop one.

At one point Bob rants:

“The public is no longer unsophisticated. One reason fans are paying Radiohead is because the money is going directly to the band. If they buy the major label product, they believe the money goes to the man, who is SUING THEM!

The fan has no interest in the label’s business model. The fan is just that, SOMEONE DEDICATED TO A BAND’S MUSIC!

How do you get someone dedicated?”

And this - dear readers - is where the rubber hits the road. Very soon now, by the end of this year at the very latest, 76design will unveil a revolutionary music industry platform that specifically addresses these fundamental questions and issues. Bob Lefsetz gets it. He understands exactly where we’re at and why. Bob is asking the right questions at the right time. We at 76design are about to answer them.

Sounds like a lot of hype, right? Well it’s not. Our platform offers fans and bands a simple, efficient and revolutionary new way to manage a mutually satisfying musical economy. It’s so simple and obvious that when we launch people will be kicking themselves and asking why nobody else did this before. Because it is a win-win situation for everyone. Everyone except the labels.

Our secret project is in full production but it is still under wraps. I can’t wait til we get to show you what we’re cooking up. It’s really going to shake things up. In a couple months Bob Lefsetz will have something very new and very exciting to write about.
js

I’ve been part of a terrific listserv for a couple years now. For those of you too young to remember listservs, they are an old-fashioned email-based form of community forum, many of which still thrive in the e-hinterlands, including the this one, run by the Institute for Distributed Creativity. And it rocks.

A lot of very very smart people contribute to it and the conversations tend to very sophisticated, very informed and often very provocative. Ok, I will admit that I do my part to make sure the provocation quotient remains comfortably in the red.
Which brings us to a most excellent thread that has been running on the list for the past couple of weeks. It’s titled “Immaterial Labor and Life Beyond Utility” and I’ve contributed several posts to the thread. We’re hashing out some fascinating ideas relating to the character of the socially networked ‘experience economy’, its relationship to wealth and to the environment, to Marxism, to “sovereign media’, the Italian mercato, the French philosopher George Bataille, the mechanics of YouTube and beyond. Very interesting stuff. For me it has been an excellent forum to articulate some of the theoretical issues underlying our new secret project, which is definitely plugged into the ‘experience economy’.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of proud of some of my posts, but rather than simply pasting them in here, where they would be out of context, here’s a link to the iDC thread archive, where you can find the entire discussion. If you’re interested in the topics mentioned above, check it out here.

I was sent an email recently that was written by Mark Surman, Director of Telecentre.org, with the subject heading: Get involved: Help create new Community Media Foundation from CTV / CHUM merger. The gist of the email was an appeal to Canadian new media activists to lobby the feds to promote the idea that the merger of two of Canada’s largest online and broadcast content players should only be approved if accompanied by a commitment to invest substantially in community media in Canada. This is a great idea and should be supported. The email includes a form letter that you can personalize and instructions about how to send it to the CRTC. Hit me back and I’ll forward it to you if you are interested in learning more.

I think community media is in dire straits in Canada at present and that the CRTC has a responsibility to be proactive in addressing the profound lack of leadership in this area, particularly with regard to online content. One of the great incongruities of online macro-economics is the disincentive Canadian access players (i.e. cablecos and telcos who own Canada’s broadband infrastructure) have in investing in Canadian content. See, in radio and TV, there is a symbiotic relationship between content producers and content distributors. Without the artists and labels, radio cannot survive. And similarly, without TV producers, broadcasters can’t operate. But this basic interdependence breaks down in the online sphere, where the broadband ISPs can sell access to the entire www without feeling any impulse to invest in the creation of content. And by and large, they don’t. When it comes to creating Canadian content champions online, as we have done in music and TV and film, Rogers’ track record, dating back to the days of Wave, @Home and Excite all the way up to the present, is pitiful, dwarfed only by Bell’s brainless lethargy for pure backwardness and stultifying disinterest in Canadian content, community-driven media and p2p creativity.

8 years ago I created a non-profit called the Community Media Lab that produced a number of online projects with street kids and other young folks. Since then the void in this area has only become more and more obvious, and yet almost nothing is being done to address it. When Alan Rock’ $3.5 billion Telecommunications Highway initiative was disemboweled by Paul Martin we lost a huge opportunity. It wasn’t a good plan, containing a measly $50 million for community media, but it was a start. Today Canada is wasting its global competitive advantage as a multilingual, educated and supremely wired environment because of the failure to invest in those strengths. Community media is one important area in which Canada could easily become a global leader, but our complacency and greed is blinding us to the necessity and the opportunity to look ahead, look around and look within. But there’s still a chance to turn things around. Let’s see if we can’t use our networked power to inspire some movement at the political level.

Finally, it’s back to my blog! The past few months have been brutal as far as workload - which is of course good - but bad news for blogging! I have a slew of topics I’m going to try to get to over the next couple weeks but first off just a quick announcement that I’ll be moderating a panel at ICE 2007 in Toronto on March 21. It’s a discussion with Joseph Pilotta of BIG Research and Bill James of The James Gang Advertising called Tipping, Slipping and Tripping:The Power – and Perils – of Word of Mouth Advertising. Here’s the descriptive blurb in the program:

Viral Marketing and Community Building have long promised to be the new “secret weapon” for online communities. And there have been some outstanding successes. But there have also been some failures that reveal that viral marketing can greatly amplify the power of Negative Word of Mouth. Is Word of Mouth the best thing since the invention of the ice cube tray? Or is it a slippery strategy that can lead to a tipping point – or a tripping point?

Can social media lead to a PR backlash? That’s certainly one of the big fears of clients considering taking the p2p plunge. We’ll hash it out at ICE. Hope to see you there…

This may be the first time anyone has ever tried to link two such disparate practices as jazz and Public Relations, but bear with me a bit and I think you’ll see that the comparison is useful and revealing.

The first principle of jazz is: “mean what you say”. If you cannot commit yourself completely to a musical statement, if you cannot breathe yourself fully into your sound, your solo, your story - then you will fail as a jazz musician. You have to believe in yourself before others can believe in you.

Now this principle runs directly counter to the popular notion of the public relations practitioner as a ’spin doctor’, i.e. as a shill, a sophist whose duplicitousness is a given and whose silvery speech and sly strategies are sold to the highest bidder without ethical consideration.

I’m not going to argue that such spin doctors aren’t real. Obviously they are, and I despise them as much as any citizen should. But I will argue that there is another model, an emerging model, for public relations practice, that is aligned more closely to the core principle of jazz expression: “mean what you say”. I will even go so far as to argue that in the era of instant access to all information, this emerging model should be considered a ‘best practice’ in the PR industry.
The model I’m referring to is one based on the understanding that stories define a business organization. The stories that are told by employees to each other about their company, that are told by customers to each other, told by management to staff, told by marketers to the public, told by executives at conferences, told by the media - a company’s reputation, its business objectives, its brand, its products and services, its recruiting and much much more, are all deeply bound up in this matrix of living stories that are told by and about a company. Someone needs to be thinking about those stories - as coherent meaningful forces and not as shallow fragments to be manipulated - within an organization, or else this vital factor shaping the success or failure of a business burns like a wild fire out of its control.

In other words, every organization needs a Chief Storytelling Officer who considers how stories work their way through an organization’s ecosystem (internal and external, top to bottom) and ensures that their impact is as positive as possible. And in this age of unprecedented transparency and global communication that means ‘not bullshitting’, i.e. not relying on spin, not trying to fool people with phony promises or silly distractions or lame excuses. Because people see through that today. As a professional culture, employees today are too empowered as communicators (with our blogs, emails, TVs, phones, etc.) and too media savvy to be easily taken in by old-style PR. Unless you ‘mean what you say’ your stories will be dismissed as bumpf and your business will suffer on many levels.

People want to be given the straight goods. And they know when they aren’t. And increasingly, they aren’t taking it any more. They are talking back, through the countless channels available to them. And any business that thinks those conversations don’t matter is just plain dumb. And as more and more young workers who have grown up expressing themselves and sharing information without restrictions enter the workforce, expectations of transparency will only increase.

Because the No Logo folks have it wrong. Kids by and large aren’t against branding, against logos for life. They just want to know that the brand is honest, that it is what it claims to be in its marketing. And they won’t give their allegiance to brands that can’t walk the talk. Nor to employers. “You must mean what you say,” is pretty much their motto. And it’s not a bad one either.
So what I’m suggesting is that the emerging role for public relations is that of an individudal or profession charged with managing the stories that shape an organization, and ensuring that they accurately reflect the life and purpose of the business. Which means that to some extent this person becomes, rather than a dishonest spin doctor, an ethical watchdog (to borrow a phrase from my colleague Stephen Heckbert) who actually works to see that the stories that are peddled (i.e. we are a customer-centric innovative and creative company) are not bogus pap but are actually standards to which an organization can and must aspire. And in so doing he (or, of course she) gives those stories legitimacy, the company ‘means what it says’ and as a result wins on numerous fronts. (Hey, we really are customer-centric and innovative now!).

So once again, jazz comes to the rescue, offering a model for progressive and profitable business practices. Once again, The Talking Shop explains how to make meaning, make media and make money. See ya next time!

I spent much of my life immersed in jazz. Playing it, studying it, living it. Eventually my explorations in jazz led me into deep studies of the nature of communication itself. But my jazz roots still inform everything I do today. In particular, my approach to social media is profoundly influenced by lessons I learned about public communal expression from jazz musicians. A while back I inventoried those lessons and realized just how relevant they were in a business context. So with this post I’m beginning a series of posts called Talking Jazz in order to share some of those lessons.

Luckily, in talking about jazz these days, we have an extraordinary new tool available to us: YouTube. Yes, for jazz lovers YouTube is a godsend. In fact I’ve found jazz videos on YouTube that I couldn’t find in the National Library of Congress in Washington! So as a starting point for talking about jazz and social media I encourage you to check out this extaordinary archival video featuring Billie Holiday alongside many of the greatest legends in jazz.

This video was made in 1957, just a short time before Billie Holiday died of a heroin overdose in a New York hospital while under house arrest. Among the giants performing in it are some of the greatest sax players ever, including Ben Webster (Big Ben, the first sax player to solo) and Billie’s all-time musical soulmate, the exceptionally fine and mellow Lester Young (The Prez, who blows second). Sitting in front of the drummer is a guitarist named Danny Barker, with whom I once had the good fortune to spend an afternoon drinking lemonade at his home in New Orleans. Other players include a very young and skinny Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax, Roy Eldridge (Little Jazz) on trumpet, and Vic Dickenson on trombone.

The point of recommending this video, apart from sharing its beauty, is to encourage viewers to pay close attention to how this group of individuals manages the group conversation that is this song. Unlike written music, this song is completely improvised around a very loose blues structure, and yet without any apparent effort, the players know exactly how and when to make their entirely individualistic musical statements so as to support the coherence of the group. They speak in their own voices, utterly unadulterated, and yet they also mesh seamlessly with each other to form a larger whole of singular power.

What does this have to do with Social Media? Well, imagine if corporate bloggers used the same conversational approach as these musicians. What if they were able to express themselves as individuals but in doing so kept in mind the business objectives of the organization for which they work? What if a community of speakers could manage their interactions this seamlessly and supportively? Exactly!
These jazz musicians know when to support the group by playing and by not playing. When to solo and when to lay out. When to be part of the backup chorus and when to unleash a wild riff that propels the entire group forward. Above all they know how to make room for each other without feeling threatened. They know this because they understand how to converse responsibly. They listen, assess the need for sound, and supply a solution that in turn provides yet another opening, for a conversational response.
In fact, jazz is nothing but an endless series of networked conversations creating ephemeral public communities, (sound familiar?) In future Talking Jazz posts I’ll go into more detail about the structure of those jazz discussions and communities, and how they might be profitably adapted to the networked sphere. But in the meantime, stay cool, cool cat!