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.

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.

leonard mendelsohn
taught children’s literature and studied stories
was a popular teacher, a small jewish Montrealer
who loved telling and tales

when i took his undergrad class at concordia u in 1983
he told us
on our first day
that half our grade would be based on our final exam
which we were required not to take
but to write
to create quality multiple choice questions and essay questions
and we could hand our exam in to him as many times as we wanted over the semester
and each time he would critique and mark it
and hand it back to us
and we could keep the highest mark we got

wonderful
fabulous pedagogy

he taught me and my classmates another great lesson one day in class
when he was telling a ghost story
from his own life
having lived for years in Maine with the last remaining elderly Shaker virgins
and studied their strong spiritualist lore
and there with Sister Delia or some other mistress of jesus
had encountered an embodied mystery
possibly a ghost
and he was telling us about it
in this funny but serious and intense way
until as we listened
enthrallled
he suddenly stopped in mid-sentence
and said pointedly “I want each of you to very slowly turn and look around at each other”
and we did
and we saw a roomful of bodies perched urgently forward
each of us on the asslip our seat
eyes wide
hair up on every neck
and we each realized that we had all been lost in his words
and he asked us:
“Why?
“What is going on here?”
“Look at you, consumed in my tale. How? What is happening to you?”
And that’s a question that has nourished me for twenty years now.
“What is it that happens when a story is told?”
“What kind of magic is that?”

So thanks Leonard
you were a fine teacher
and, i hope, still are

Last week I saw a play called The Four Horsemen Project at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. Created by Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, the play has received rave reviews both here in Ottawa and during its recent run at Factory Theatre in Toronto. I’d like to comment a bit on the play, and also point out how it connects - somewhat tangentially, but significantly - to social media.

The play is a fun, energetic and hyper-kinetic tribute to the legendary Canadian performance poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen. This was a group of 4 poets (bpnichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera) who studiously and ecstatically explored the limits of human vocal communication in a poetic context throughout the 70s and early 80s.

As someone who has also spent many years exploring the same fertile terrain as a poetic performer, the Four Horsemen were always an inspiration to me. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to perform and record with the amazing soundsinger Paul Dutton on several occasions, and count him as a fine friend. (Hi Paul!) For what it’s worth, I also once won a poetry battle with bpnichol, but that’s a story nobody knows and I won’t recount here. Regardless, the point is that these guys were true poets - vocal angels and vocal demons, seekers, soothsayers and shit-disturbers - and as a result, despite a sudden and belated interest in their work due to this new play, they were by and large avoided and ignored, like all real poets, in their day. Basically, they scared the shit out of most people, even tho they inspired, enthralled and enraptured many others. That’s inevitably how it is with poets, the real ones anyway, til they are dead (R.I.P. bp) or disbanded.

As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog, I believe that oral communication technologies are extremely relevant to our understanding of digital communication technologies. In other words if social media is all about ‘conversations’, then it makes sense to seek to understand the familiar dynamics of oral conversations as a means of gaining insight into new digital conversational models. More than this, I feel that the two technologies share fundamental commonalities that distinguish them from literate communication technologies, and that as a result oralists and digitalists need each other. They actively need to be allies if either hopes to fend off the predatory tactics of literate capitalists seeking to enslave the digital realm (via WIPO and copyright, via Geolocking content, via DRM, via penalties for sharing, etc.) as they have colonized oral cultures (a quick review of the legal clampdown on sampling in HipHop would be very relevant here, as would an examination of the negligible legal value of hearsay - i.e. hear-say as trumped by texts, writs, deeds, contracts, etc.).
All of this is to say that those people who push the limits of oral communication are important, they are juggernauts exploding hegemonic literate norms and positing radically new models of engagement, expression and communion. The Four Horsemen were ahead of their time, as were peers like John Giorno (another brilliant poet-friend and a wise and beautiful man) and his lower-east side poet’s posse, which included the likes of Patti Smith, David Johansen, Jayne Cortez, and his roommate, William S. Burroughs.
But it may be that their day has come, that a playful polyvocal poetics of improvisation, of dynamic digital engagement vs. static mechanical textuality, is on the horizon. It may be that the blogosphere, chat, messenger and the rest do not represent a pathologically pointless logorrhea, as some fear, but rather a liberatory linguistic lasciviousness, a collective rush to babble, to squawk, to sing - together. No longer fearing The Four Horsemen in their bardic beards, but becoming ourselves The 4 billion babblers of the networked talkalypse, making meaning, making media, making money.

We shall see.

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!

Orality means speech culture, talking culture, the condition of living in an oral culture. You’ll find me referring to orality a lot in this blog because I think that we can learn a great deal about the ‘conversational’ nature of social media and Web 2.0 by studying the conversational dynamics of oral cultures. If we do this we discover important truths about what kinds of conversations work online and why, but more significantly still, we learn about how and why we are beginning to reorganize our world in response to those new and profoundly subversive conversational dynamics.It’s my very definite contention that certain technologies are so potent as organizing tools that we rearrange our societies, our economies, our landscapes - our civilizations - in order to maximize our ability to use these technologies to increase productivity (and ultimately survival) on a personal and collective level. I’m not saying that any one person designs a plan and the rest of society implements it, but rather that we rearrange ourselves the same way ants do if someone knocks over their anthill. It’s in our nature as animals to strive to build bigger, better civilizations, bigger, better anthills. That’s what evolution is all about.

Cars are a perfect example of a technology that when it emerged it was so potent that we reorganized our cities, our economies, our landscapes, our nations, our families, in response to its extraordinary transportational abilities. Of course car pollution may kill us in the end, but that’s a rational perspective that has had a tough time gaining traction in the face of evolutionary imperatives that impel us towards ease and efficiency.

Either way, no technology is as potent as storytelling. It’s how every species survives - by trading information about risk and reward. Storytelling is the killer app of evolution. Without stories, nothing survives. Not bacteria. Not bees. Not us. And as humans our #1 storytelling tool is language.

The thing that we sometimes forget, however, is that human language is not abstract. It can only be manifested as a specific communications technology, such as the human voice. Or in print. Or as hypertext. And my analysis of the structure and purpose of Web 2.0 technologies is based on the principle that each of these three language technologies invites its users to reorganize their worlds differently. The language of the body, the language of the book and the language of binary data are very, very different beasts. In future posts I will go into plenty of detail about how they are different (or in some cases similar) and why it is so urgent for designers, businesspeople, activists and others to grasp their interrelatedness in the 21st century. It’s a long story that I hope will interest you (if it does read further into this blog) but I want to conclude this first post on my this crucial topic by articulating how each of these three communication technologies (oral, literate and digital language) differs with respect to ‘conversations’ at the most fundamental level.

If we understand that speech is not a given but a technology, then it follows that like all technologies it only works under certain conditions. When does human speech work? When more than one person is present in the same place at the same time. If those conditions aren’t met you can’t have a conversation, the technology fails. If I’m sitting on a bench and tell you something, but you aren’t actually there, then you can’t just show up later and expect the technology off speech to work. It won’t. Sound is evanescent, it doesn’t last. What this means is that speech is inherently ‘dialogical’, but its dialogues are bound by time and space.

Writing on the other hand transcends time and space. You can write something and send it across the world by post or in a book. And you can read what people wrote thousands of years ago. That’s a big difference. Writing is waaaaaaay more efficient as a tool for social organization than speech. And that’s why historically, wherever they met, literate cultures massacred and overwhelmed oral cultures (tanks trumped horses, pipelines whipped calabashes, etc.). But unlike orality, literacy is not dialogical. In fact when you are reading or writing you want privacy and isolation above all. So literacy is a monological technology (a series of monologues) that transcends time and space. And as the most literate society in history it should not therefore be surprising that we are also the most individualistic society in history.

Finally, let’s look at why networked digital communication is so threatening to literate society. Like literacy, online language transcends time and space, but like orality it is also dialogical. This makes it vastly more efficient than literacy as an organizing tool, and we are beginning to rearrange our society accordingly.

To sum up then:

orality = dialogues bound by time and space
literacy = monologues that transcend time and space
digital culture = dialogues that transend time and space

This simple equation should also make clear why I think that there is so much to learn about digital conversations from oral conversations - they are both diaological! And therefore the social, economic and community dynamics of each are in many ways proving to be very similar. In future posts I’ll give many, many concrete examples of those similarities and I’ll invite you to seek out and document your own as well. It’s the clearest way to grasp the nature of Web 2.0.

Til next time…