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.

For the past year or two I’ve been an active member of a terrific listserv moderated by Trebor Scholz of the iDC (the Institute for Distributed Creativity). The list features wide-ranging discussion of a very high calibre, as many of the world’s best-known digital artists, activists, curators, scholars and critics are subscribers and occasional contributors (Bruce Stirling, Lev Manovich, DJ Spooky, etc.). Anyway, there is currently a thread on iDC that explores the idea of Continuous Partial Attention (CPA). That’s one name given to the way people manage multiple datastreams as they work, and by and large people on the list have described this condition in very negative terms. Some posts have suggested, for example, that people go ‘blank’ when they try to manage too many incoming data streams. Here’s my post to the iDC listserv from last night, responding to this thread…feel free to add your comments after reading it…js
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I’ve been giving continuous partial attention to this thread for the past few days. It has casually nagged at me as it nattered discontinuously along (listservs are 90% CPA) until just now, when, as I lay restlessly in bed giving continuous partial attention to all sorts of dreamy thoughts, I found myself focusing productively on the notion of CPA for the first time. Which, in a way, is my point. That most of the time most of us are giving attention to many different things, and managing that aggregate feed quite comfortably, and choosing to focus on one stream or another only as needed.

In fact, I’d propose that the P in CPA might more accurately be changed to Peripheral, as in Continuous Peripheral Attention. That seems to me how we live most of the time, even when we’re unplugged. (All at once sensing faces, air currents, light sources, soundscapes, memories, hopes, destinations, calculations, companions, desires, aches and pains, etc.) And I don’t see that our wide-spectrum awareness need necessarily interfere with our narrowband focus either. As an improvising musician I’m always trying to balance my focused and diffused awarenesses when I play within an ensemble. It’s a technique. A sophisticated dialogical skill. Maybe such a skill has to be mastered to maximize the soulful usefulness of connected culture, like the competing Yin and Yang energies in Tai Chi, or the Jungian anima and animus energies.

Maybe our (I say our because I believe this holds true for the vast majority of the readership of this list) resistance to CPA stems from our collective allegiance to literacy, a profound attention-focusing technology that unlike aural/oral or digital networked communication requires that peripheral attention streams be extinguished to be effective. When there’s lots of noise we find it hard to read or write meaningful texts, and that makes us nervous. We ‘blank’. (Supposedly, tho I don’t really believe in techno-blanking, at least not as something significantly different from all the other forms of ’spacing out’ we know and love/hate)

But our conflicted experiences as literate emigrants to the datasphere don’t really matter here anyway. What matters is that there is a generation of kids out there for whom reading long texts is weird, for whom writing long texts is weird, for whom literate-style one-way communication that eliminates peripheral streams is downright freaky. That’s why I’d like to think that continuous peripheral attention is a more accurate description than continuous partial attention, because the former allows for the possibility of a focused stream within that peripheral awareness, of a constructive managing of flow that transcends superficiality and/or chaos. And thus it suggests to me – in my more optimistic moments anyway – that the kids having sixteen conversations at once might be leading somewhere I’d be like to go.

Why did I call my new blog The Talking Shop? Lots of reasons.

1) It’s a place to ‘talk shop’. In my case that means it’s a place to engage in enlightening conversations about the past, present and future of interactive networked media.

2) It’s also a place to celebrate and critique businesses that engage in online conversations, i.e. talking shops. This is important to me because I’m a big advocate of integrating blogging and other social media into business as part of what I call the ‘conversation economy’. I think shops should talk.

3) I’m a communications consultant and this is my shop. I’m selling talk - mine and yours and theirs. This blog is the storefront where I display my wares.

I hope you like it here in my new shop. Though I’ve really just opened. This is the quiet time when the shop owner turns on the lights and opens the blinds, before the hustle and bustle of the business day begins. But I have a hunch this place will soon be busy, bubbling with babble. So stick around and share your thoughts. Talk some shop. Shop some talk at The Talking Shop.