But today we’ve seen another fail in the possibility of quality community journalism in BC with the announcement of another shakeout in community papers in BC. Black Press just bought out Glacier Media’s 11 papers and they’ll close the 4 that happen to compete with Black papers in Nelson, PR, 100 Mile and Quesnel.

The performance of its remaining publications should get stronger as the economy improves.

via CBC News – Media – 4 B.C. newspapers shutting down.

I’d venture to say that the performance of Black’s 4 papers that suddenly lose competition will get stronger very soon!

So what’s the prognosis?

Ultimately, what I want is a vibrant free press. A group of media outlets that hold society and its leadership accountable.

Though I haven’t caught up yet to this episode of The Wire, I enjoy that this is flying around Twitter right now: “You know what a healthy newsroom is? It’s a magical place where people argue about everything all the time.”

Where there is a monopoly, like the CanWest stranglehold soon to be weakened in Vancouver, there is less chance of effective journalism. And while competition also leads to bad journalism sometimes as everyone tries to be the first, or nearly the first, to report the death of Gordon Lightfoot while he happened to be getting his teeth cleaned, I’d rather see some healthy competition as the good outweighs the bad, at least in my universe.

But I also read today that The Canadian Press is going to cease to be a non-profit cooperative purveyor of news as 3 media groups are going to now run it as a for-profit business.

And I’m left with some real sadness about the potential for community political dialogue. When community papers now weigh less than the fliers in the middle, it’s time to wonder if quality online outlets can go to press and put a paper in people’s hands. Certainly a place like San Francisco is a geographically tight and politically vibrant enough community for San Francisco Public Press to try creating a hardcopy edition.

In the end, I turn everyone once again to George Monbiot’s advice to aspiring writers: Choose Life! The 6 years of this site certainly wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for this fantastic perspective on writing, politics, integrity and improving society. I only hope we can live up to a solid ideal, an ideal that Monbiot wrote about even before the explosion of blog-platform journalism and editorialism.

Because I know it just got harder today in BC and Canada for all of us to enjoy the ideal of a quality press.

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By the way, while I’m not commenting on this news release, I would like to mention here that the International Committee of the Red Cross has just released a very important statement on ending the closure of Gaza. People will of course support or condemn this ICRC position for good, bad, non-rational or compelling reasons. But I’m not writing about that today.

Committed activists and ideologues on all sides of Israel issues contribute to this intense level of spin expertise. Within the discourse, there are, among other things: facts, disinformation, misinformation, irrational attacks, flagrantly hyperbolic analogies, opinions, rhetoric, invective, anger, racism, Polyannaism, political agendas, global conflict paradigms that in part revolve around middle eastern land, and the governments and lobby groups of dozens of countries. It’s a classic imbroglio flambe.

I will take but one example of a variety of things I have to say about Israel. Let’s start with an analogy, knowing full well that it can be creatively re-interpreted by anyone with an agenda to accuse me of pretty much anything. I can handle that.

[Note: just for fun, let me state clearly that I make no comments in this entire piece about whether "the state of Israel ought to exist or not"...just so that if anyone accuses me of being on either side of it, I'm just not talking about that issue in this piece. Later, though. Oh, and preemptive disclaimers are a feature of a society of discourse living under a chill.]

Here’s my question. Can anyone criticize policy decisions or actions of Israel’s government?

Can Canadians criticize the government of Canada for supporting tar sands development, or even spending tax money on child care subsidies? Typically, yes. And in doing so, few seem to be accused of being racist, anti-Canadian, or harbouring hatred for Canadians.

Can Canadians criticize the US government for its support of a free trade agenda with despotic regimes, or even spending tax money on food stamp programs? Typically, yes. And in doing so, few seem to be accused of being racist, or harbouring hatred for the American people, though to be honest, many are accused of being anti-American for criticizing or supporting something someone else either agrees with or disagrees with. That’s too bad. Chills suck.

If France begins above ground nuclear testing on a “French” island in the Pacific Ocean or embraces a Tobin Tax, do I necessarily hate/love the French people for decisions of the government, regardless of who voted for what and by how much? I wouldn’t think so. I think I’d still appreciate their cinema and fries.

So a while back I wrote [in a poem] about the difference between a people and a government’s policies [see below]. Are there any differences? What should be the significance of the differences? And if you are interested in testing your attitudes toward this issue, take this test: read this article and see if you can de/re-spin everyone’s perspective. It’s pretty complicated, but a worthwhile exercise. Maybe I’ll get around to doing that in here one day.

via 22 Impolite Questions: a Response to Rhetoric Crimes « Politics, Re-Spun.

are Noam Chomsky and Phyllis Bennis anti-American if they criticize their imperial government?

and what about Israel?

am i anti-Semitic if i disagree with the domestic or foreign policy decisions of the de facto fundamentalist Jewish theocracy in Israel?

do i wish all Jews in the world dead because i don’t agree with any given decision of the Israeli government?

are Noam Chomsky and Phyllis Bennis self-hating Jews if they oppose any given decision or set of decisions of the Israeli government or decisions of the US government that support Israeli policy they disagree with?

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But when we look to Twitter to see patterns of political discourse in Canada, we find politicians are generally behind the curve in using this medium to do anything more than promote the busy-ness of their daily itinerary.

More analysis below these interesting excerpts:

Small had been hoping to learn something about how politicians use Twitter, but to her surprise, she found that it’s the media and political junkies who are taking the greatest advantage of the Twitterverse.

…

The main problem with politicians’ tweets, she says, is that they’re too self-directed—often updates about what the politician is doing or where he or she is travelling or visiting. Rarely do politicians use Twitter for conversations, she found.

…

Media accounted for about 10 per cent of the Twitter conversations with this tag, compared to politicians, who accounted for 1.4 per cent of conversations, Small found. The other big talkers with the #cdnpoli tag included bloggers and individuals, whether just partisans or political junkies.

via Politician ‘tweets’ the least interesting thing about Twitter, study finds – thestar.com.

I can understand that politicians don’t want to discuss political issues with other tweeps. They are rather busy. But they’re also whipped by parties to not go rogue by saying something in Twitter that will cause scandal or otherwise engage the public in political dialogue in a way that the party spin machine can’t run its message control.

That, I think, is why Tamara Small arrived at these conclusions about Twitter use: wonks and media outweigh politicians significantly.

Something, though, that Susan Delacourt doesn’t explore in this piece is how journalists in Twitter may be affected by discussion about news topics to the point that trending topics in Twitter may actually help determine what corporate media and the CBC decide to be newsworthy.

If you have any doubt about that, do some research on how the #BustyHookers hashtag developed a life of its own in a way that likely would have left that phrase only marginally newsworthy.

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So should I be seeing if anyone wants to contribute here beyond me?

The first question is whether it’s worth seeing if anyone has pieces to contribute to this site. It’s not like anyone can’t already set up a blog at WordPress in less than 2 minutes. So people would have to see value in contributing “here”. And there’s nothing to preclude someone from contributing here AND wherever else they live online and off the interwebs.

Then the question is who should be contributing?

6 years ago when I started this site, I asked friends who lived on various spots on the political spectrum to contribute ideas with the idea of creating some comment dialogue among contributors, like a virtual salon. It never took off. Maybe because it was 6 years ago and not now. Or maybe it was because I don’t believe in the effectiveness of a left-right political spectrum and instead prefer a 2D or 3D spectrum like at PoliticalCompass.org so a left-right paradigm may have been doomed to fail.

I don’t have a richly developed sense of what “kind” of people ought to contribute to this site beyond a few things: not crazy people, not racists or bigots, not folks who would get the RCMP visiting me in my home to discuss what contributions I approve. I certainly don’t think that only people I agree with should be contributors. That’s just not worth anyone’s time.

I put it out to the community of you folks.

So if you are inclined to contribute more than just comments to this site, think about it. Toss your ideas into a comment in this post about creating a contributor community here. Send me emails. Tweet me. Figure it out to whatever extent you wish. I don’t have all the answers, or any answers necessarily, though I do have inclinations.

Let’s see what the crucible burns for us!

• June 29, 2010 -- Campaign Stops Corporate Voting in BC Municipalities, Probably (0)
• May 18, 2010 -- Pettiness: the Defining Quality of Politicians? (3)
• June 21, 2009 -- Ignore My Copyrights (0)
• April 27, 2009 -- No More Strategic Voting: Thanks STV! (0)

Jessalynn Keller once interned with that magazine and studies gender, empowerment and inequalities. Read her master’s thesis abstract here and her  commentary on Jaime Keiles’ experiment here. Here’s an excerpt:

She seems to recognize teen magazines as rather complex cultural texts that are certainly problematic, yet worthy of our analysis and recognition as an integral part of American teen culture.

via - BRAZEN BEAUTIES – Living Life… Seventeen Style.

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The entire editorial is below, but here are ten comments about how deluded the editorial department at the Globe and Mail is.

1. We live in a post-modern world, if not a post-post-modern world. Corporate media is modernist by design; its paradigm is authoritatively objective, one-way, profit-driven, broadcast and top-down. That sounds pretty jaded to me. The Yes Men can only be seen as jaded because they no longer recognize the primacy of modernist corporate media as being much of a useful force in society unless it is subverted and manipulated.
2. Since the medium is the message, increasing proportions of the population are rejecting the message of corporate media’s medium.
3. The Daily Show and Colbert Report are not anomalies today, but they do threaten corporate media’s monopoly over news/truth/opinion. In fact, just today someone’s again writing about how newspapers could even have a future!
4. The Globe and Mail got quite badly punked by the Yes Men in Copenhagen in December, as did all other corporate media. In fact, much corporate media in Canada showed themselves with their pants down when they recently reported the death of Gordon Lightfoot while he listened to it all on the radio while in his dentist’s chair. Fact-check much?
5. Suggesting the Yes Men are the actual threat to the believability of all forms of communication is laughable since corporate mainstream media are constantly guilty of suppressing critically important news while promoting their neoliberal politics and politicians while marketing sensationalism for maximizing their corporate profit.
6. Suggesting that all forms of communication are threatened by the Yes Men is itself sensationalist, reactionary and further proof that the editorial staff doesn’t really get post-modernism in media…but then how could they, they are the established paradigm.
7. The first half of the editorial describes the Yes Men antics, thereby demonstrating the potency of their brand of satire with free publicity.
8. While the Globe editors are correct in describing satire as a “legitimate form of comment,” their demand that there be “sufficient warning for the public” indicates a few things. The Globe editors didn’t get the joke in Copenhagen and feel embarrassed. They think the public is too stupid to get ironic messages. Again, see The Daily Show and Colbert Report. Those in the public who are duped need to learn the lesson that we should question information authorities and verify sources, then compare stated messages with confirmed messages. Then we need to evaluate in our own minds what policies ought to be. This is the point of satire, which the Globe editors are clearly missing.
9. Their example about no one ever showing up for real free concerts in Missoula is a small risk to society as a whole that is being constantly misinformed by corporate media neglecting its investigatory role.
10. I refuse to allow the Globe editorial staff to be the ones to inspire me to ask the question of whether anyone believes a message. Corporate media is so compromised when it comes to truth, they have very little standing to even pose that question. That they end their editorial with it, with presumably a straight face, is laughable.
11. A bonus comment: ultimately, I hope I am being duped by an editorial that is actually ironic in itself. That perhaps the Globe actually welcomes the antics of the Yes Men and their disciples and have written this editorial in an attempt to mock their own paradigm. If so, I will gladly tip my hat to them. But I’m not holding my breath.

Say no to the jaded world view of the Yes Men

Their ilk threatens the believability of all forms of communications.

Gresham’s Law holds that devalued money eventually drives out good money. The more inferior currency floating around, the harder it is for people to believe in the real thing. The same goes for the news.

Last week, a widely circulated news release claimed, “Shell halts Nigerian offshore drilling in visionary new remediation plan.” The document carried a Shell logo at the top and was distributed via a legitimate-looking website. At the bottom was a media-relations contact number (answered by a real person) and all the standard legal boilerplate. The message: After the Gulf of Mexico oil leak, Shell was halting all its drilling operations in the Niger River delta and embarking on an $8-billion environmental rehabilitation program.

It was, of course, entirely bogus.

A group calling itself the Nigerian Justice League later claimed credit for the ruse, saying they drew their inspiration from the Yes Men, a group of anti-corporate pranksters familiar to Canadians. In December, before the Copenhagen climate change summit, the Yes Men produced a realistic-looking press release purportedly from federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice, claiming Canada was adopting strict carbon-emissions targets and donating $13-billion to Africa. It was accompanied by a fake Wall Street Journal article, a fake endorsement from a Ugandan politician and, later, a fake retraction by Mr. Prentice. All this to draw attention to what the Yes Men considered Canada’s lack of commitment on climate change.

Both pranks got enough press coverage to be considered successes by the perpetrators. With the Yes Men now drawing eager imitators, we’ll likely be seeing much more of this sort of thing. And that’s bad news for everyone.

Satire is a legitimate form of comment. But it requires a deft hand; and sufficient warning for the public to get the joke. A recent prank in Missoula, Montana, falsely promoted a free thank-you concert being staged by Smurfit-Stone, a container company, and Macy’s department store, two firms that recently shut operations in the city. But to what greater purpose? It had no discernible impact on the corporations in question. And if Missoula ever hosts a free concert in the future, no one will show up.

The jaded world view of the Yes Men and copycat pranksters threatens the believability of all forms of communications. It could eventually undermine the very kinds of positive achievements the activists claim to demand.

Consider the historic truce last week between environmental groups and the Canadian forestry industry on logging practices. It seems such a surprising and radical departure from both sides’ normal behaviour, after years of animosity, that it might easily be considered a prank. In fact it is very good news. But will anyone believe it?

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via xkcd: Infrastructures.

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This blog is a fine companion to the official Diaspora development team blog. There are grounds to be optimistic about an alternative to the Facebook privacy ghouls.

Below is just a first point of principles of Diaspora. They get better as you read on!

Don’t just destroy your Facebook account… get rid of Flickr and Yahoo, too! Nobody needs someone else to “own” their data. Your information should stay yours, and if you can get your friends to agree to switch to an open network like Diaspora, you won’t need to use those services for anything.

via Avery’s Diaspora News » The latest updates about the emerging Facebook alternative.

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Jaded, by the way, is right up there as one of the perfect rock songs along with Born to Run, Blinded by the Light, Year of the Knife and about 4 songs from The Wall. A nice bonus.

View and enjoy and if you need to download my lesson plan for how I used to teach these videos, just let me know. :)

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Now give them money to fund their junk food summer. It’ll be the best investment you’ll ever make in a liberating social media interweb.

Thanks, Matt, for the evangelism!

What is the project about?

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub.

via Decentralize the web with Diaspora — Kickstarter.

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Let’s start by talking about BuddyPress. It started as a WordPress plugin designed to add social media elements [like Facebook features and Twitter] to people’s WordPress sites. Then BuddyPress grew into its own WordPress paradigm.

If I were Nokia or Boston University running a WordPress platform, I could install BuddyPress to manage social media elements for my thousands of “members” just like Facebook.

When I knew almost nothing about BuddyPress, I had high hopes for what it could be. But now that I get it more [assuming I actually do], BuddyPress seems to still be a ghettoized environment. I could create a social media installation on my site, but people would have to login and use it just like Facebook. That means way too many logins for people on too many different sites.

UnionBook is a great social media website for trade unionists, but with less than 4,000 users right now, it’s hasn’t hit its hundredth monkey yet.

So here’s what I wished BuddyPress were…and it [or something similar] still can be that.

1. It should have all the social media elements it currently has plus the new cool ones when they are invented.
2. It should be open source.
3. It should be non-proprietary, just like the culture of the internet in the early days, or even the 1980s, despite DARPA’s involvement, which was hands-off by then anyway.
4. It should be non-profit [notice 2, 3, and 4 in here are already the opposite of Facebook].
5. It should be non-corporate.
6. It should be decentralized, like the paradigm of the internet itself, so it can promote democracy, transparency and commitment.
7. Most importantly, it should be distributed. This means, for me right now anyway, that if BuddyPress were what I think of now as a solid alternative to the corporate Facebook, every site on the net running either the BuddyPress suite of WordPress plugins or the BuddyPress paradigm would be integrated, interactive and networked…like a web. People could flit among them almost as if Facebook were a jigsaw puzzle or an iceflow that is broken up and we just float around on pieces carrying our social media with us. Sickeningly, that’s what Facebook is doing now. We just take our Facebook with us around the web and share things with others through Facebook, thereby spreading the Facebook corporate cancer to everything we touch.

OpenID is a model I had in mind. I like that I could login to various sites with an ID that travels with me, not like logging into Facebook and doing my community there, in its corporate ghetto/prison. But now that I see who is part of the OpenID foundation, I don’t want to have anything to do with that. But the model is still good.

So maybe some day BuddyPress will evolve into the kind of distributed structure I’m looking for. Maybe it won’t and something else will. Or maybe nothing will, but I doubt that. It’s too good an idea not to happen, and not because I thought of it, but because the internet was built on that model and it works well. It worked really well until the corporations took over. But we can get that sense of distributed community back.

Open source, distributed social media can be a catalyst for that. And if you doubt that, check out Firefox’s market share. :)

OK, now onto removing my self from Facebook!

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So I’ll be extracting myself from Facebook over the next few days. Community and social media are supposed to contribute to humanity with new means of connecting, but when the price of that contact is sacrificing my privacy and autonomy as a citizen, we get a paradox.

Facebook has us hooked like the crack dealer who gets new clients by giving away product to create an addiction. 400 million have now become dependent to various degrees on Facebook as a core means of social communication. Getting off the drug is hard. Our community interactions are now being held hostage. We must pay with compromises to our privacy.

The increasing restrictions on my ability to determine what I share with others, combined with expanding defaults of openness that subject the millions of Facebook users to abuse. Certainly the majority of users, I believe, are not being as vigilant as they should be at protecting their identities from unobserved, and not so secret data mining.

Try this game.

Click on one of your Facebook friends. Then click on one of their friends who you don’t know. Click on their profile picture. Does it open into their whole folder of profile pictures? If so, they probably haven’t navigated the ever changing maze of Facebook privacy settings, or they don’t care who sees what, which is their prerogative. Then repeat this game 10 times going from profile to profile, seeing how many people likely neglect vigilance.

What are the threats? Two high profile ones are the Facebook data mining corporation itself and the app designers who get monstrously wide access to your identity data and activities in social media.

Years ago, people flocked out of AOL onto the internet in part because they didn’t want one corporation being aware of all their online activities.

It’s like Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that it is not Orwell’s 1984 that we should fear but Huxley’s Brave New World because its model is totalitarianism by friendly hugs and not Orwellian jackboots.

Facebook is a system of subservience that we actually embrace. It has time-wasting games, ways of keeping up with friends’ Friday nights out, but within the context of disturbing increasingly anti-autonomy privacy policies. Explore these critiques of the latest imposition of Facebook into my autonomy, like this one. And despite some wonky logic in parts of this one, there are many thoughtful ideas that challenge the Kool-Aid we’ve been drinking.

At least in Twitter what we say we say, what we don’t say we don’t say. That’s it. Spammers are entering, but the anarchic community blocks them out quickly.

That’s also why the prominence of open source communication models like WordPress is growing because we don’t want “The Man” to be tracking our data/identity/existence.

So what am I going to do?

I’m going to stop compromising my autonomy and privacy for the sake of a communication/community platform.

There are new open source social media sites going live sporadically. We should be exploring these, supporting them and promoting them. In time we can get an open source, anarchic social media platform that functions better than the buggy Facebook and doesn’t compromise our freedom as a rule, something of that the freedom/anarchy of the original internet culture.

In the end, I just can’t handle the paradox that in order to partake of the access to connections in Facebook we have to give up core values of community: independence, equality, citizenship, interdependent responsibility. Developing community in the Facebook model is more than slightly like The Truman Show, where there is no benign master providing us the platform.

So my plan is to eradicate my personal profile from Facebook over the next few days. Politics, Re-Spun will still have a presence on Facebook, but primarily to drive human interaction to my website where what I post is not entirely owned by Facebook by virtue of it merely being there.

In the end, there is no real community in Facebook if the price of admission is accepting their claim of ownership over all community activities and where they set the rules for how we interact.

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While I’m no staunch defender of the arrogance and politically idiotic behaviour of a former junior federal cabinet minister, calling her a dog is just sexist and despicable, especially for an actual newspaper, and I use that term lightly.

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1.20.01, eight months before 9/11 helped destroy rational linearity in politics.

Java will save us. Not the bean, not [much] the computer thing, nor the shark, chicken or Russian cigarette, but the awesome instrumental song that appears on Hugo Winterhalter‘s The Best of ’64 lounge album, though it wasn’t a “lounge” album then.

In a fit of political cynicism, I hooked up my record player and went immediately to find my Winterhalter collection to accompany the neighbourhood’s invasion of cherry and apple blossoms driving an early spring.

Java will save us because I have such fond memories as a child of this tune. I don’t recall any of the context other than the fact that I have loved it for decades. The linear rational actor in my mind would be frustrated by not remembering, but the systems theorist in my mind revels in the mere presence of an element of meaning.

It is the collection of small things in life that pull us through doldrums. This week the House of Commons slimly passed a motion further delegitimizing selfish prorogation. Also, there are 3 motions in the Speaker’s office pursuing the government on contempt of parliament for not turning over to parliament documents describing how our government participated in torture in Afghanistan.

This is why I like minority parliaments.

But when I think about the paradigm shift in mindsets that is occurring around us while we’re distracted by the political cynicism, we need to look to Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen Harper [CRUSH] and Canadians Advocating Political Participation [which came from the massively successful anti-prorogation Facebook group].

These two groups are examples of how linear, modernist thinking–particularly in political parties–is so 20th century. The world is evolving quickly. Evolutions in technology and communication like the interwebs are changing how we exist in society and the nature of relationships we exist in.

Political parties are sooooo far behind, they basically just sent some politicians to CAPP rallies on January 23rd to put in face-time, but they are not on the cusp of the organizing wave.

And this brings me back to Java. Listen to the 2:20 of bliss here.

Stop what you’re doing and do a little jig.

Then if you want to know what is killing linearity of thought and politics and social organization, read about systems theory. My friend asked me for a primer on it last night. I referred him to Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics and his Center for Ecoliteracy.

If you dream of social, economic, political or any kind of change, you likely are looking to be a paradigm mechanic: twisting screws, rebuilding the carburetors of our world. You also likely are dabbling in some manifestation of systems theory. If so, read this great review of its paradigm below to see how much you can already check off as your m.o. and then see what other elements of the paradigm can augment your stance today into tomorrow.

Then listen to some more Java, then think about whether the software platform incarnation of Java adds as much to this idea as the mood of the 2:20 in the tune, because it might.

And revel in being a paradigm mechanic, because if not for us, we’re stuck in a 20th century model that seems to long to morph back to the good old days of the 19th century!

From A Systems Perspective | Center for Ecoliteracy.

Systems thinking presents a different lens through which to understand the complexity of the world.

Thinking systemically entails a number of shifts in perception, which lead to different ways to teach, and to different ways to organize institutions and society. These shifts offer opportunities for teachers to present material in more holistic ways, in context rather than as isolated facts, consistent with the way students encounter the natural and social worlds in their own experience.

Systems thinking is one of the consequences of our guiding principle, “Nature Is Our Teacher,” discussed in the Explore section of the website. We note there that a systems approach helps young people understand the complexity of the world around them and encourages them to think in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context. We also highlight the shifts in perception that accompany systems thinking, and discuss their implications for educators.

These shifts are not either/or alternatives, but rather movements along a continuum:

From parts to the whole
With any system, the whole is different from the sum of the individual parts. By shifting focus from the parts to the whole, we can better grasp the connections between the different elements. Instead of asking students to copy pictures of the parts of a honeybee, an art teacher takes her class to the school garden. There they draw bees within the context of their natural setting.

Similarly, the nature and quality of what students learn is strongly affected by the culture of the whole school, not just the individual classroom. This shift can also mean moving from single-subject curricula to integrated curricula.

From objects to relationships
In systems, the relationships between individual parts may be more important than the parts. An ecosystem is not just a collection of species, but includes living things interacting with each other and their nonliving environment.

In the systems view, the “objects” of study are networks of relationships. In the school or classroom, this perspective emphasizes relationship-based processes such as cooperation and consensus.

From objective knowledge to contextual knowledge
Shifting focus from the parts to the whole implies shifting from analytical thinking to contextual thinking. This shift may result in schools focusing on project-based learning instead of prescriptive curricula. It also encourages teachers to be facilitators and fellow learners alongside students, rather than experts dispensing knowledge.

From quantity to quality
Western science has often focused on things that can be measure and quantified. It has sometimes been implied that phenomena that can be measured and quantified are more important—and perhaps even that what cannot be measured and quantified doesn’t exist at all.

Some aspects of systems, however, like the relationships in a food web, cannot be measured. Rather, they must be mapped. In the classroom, this shift can lead to more comprehensive forms of assessment than standardized tests.

From structure to process
Living systems develop and evolve. Understanding these systems requires a shift in focus from structure to processes such as evolution, renewal, and change.

In the classroom, this shift can mean that how students solve a problem is more important than getting the right answer. It may mean that the ways decisions are made is as important as the decisions.

From contents to patterns
Within systems, certain configurations of relationship appear again and again in patterns such as cycles and feedback loops. Understanding how a pattern works in one natural or social system helps us to understand other systems that manifest the same pattern.

For instance, understanding how flows of energy affect a natural ecosystem may illuminate how flows of information affect a social system.

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The audio is weak in places, but the discussion is strong!

The video podcast of the conversation lives at Vista Video.

You can watch it in Miro, the best new open source multimedia viewing software: http://www.miroguide.com/feeds/8832

or…

You can watch it in iTunes: itpc://dgivista.org/pod/Vista_Podcasts.xml

or…

The podcast file is at http://dgivista.org/pod/COOP.Radio.3.1.10.mov

Enjoy!

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VANOC is like the host of a party that you never meet. You have no say in how they plan the party. They answer to no one. They spend all your money, but they won’t tell you how much you have to pay to get out of the party at the end. And once you’re in the party, you have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get into the rooms where “things” take place. Oh, and the party host drives an SUV: the jokes are going viral about how the Anti-Idling-By-Law-Ignoring VANOC SUVs are causing the elevated temperatures in Vancouver [sorry El Nino] that have melted all the snow on Cypress Mountain.

Why does any of this sound appetizing?

VANOC’s sense of what it takes to build a celebratory community culture is simply deranged. And we have only to follow the Olympic spliff torch as the Governator carries it on Friday.

Over a few hours last night I read of yet another American indie media member harassed at the border trying to get into Canada, the second instance in 4 days and only weeks after Amy Goodman was delayed on her way into Canada. Last night I also read and watched how VANOC security personnel tried to convince a reporter that taking pictures outside a nebulous security perimeter is not allowed.

I know I am a free speech zone, but what about the vague area outside venues? And who’s right? Me and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or VANOC, the IOC, an eager VANOC volunteer and a sanctioned or rogue member of VANOC’s 15,000 member security force?

In contrast to the soft fascism of global corporate Olympic “celebrations” for the rich and famous, we have the Decentralized Dance Party. These community enriching, mobile, public dances reflect what a healthy, vibrant social fabric looks like. You can watch some very well edited compilations of their parties here. I particularly enjoyed the Metrotown mall security having a hard time comprehending the dancers who co-opted the private “common” mall space for a public event, before the party drifted onto the Skytrain and Seabus. Information on their next dance this weekend is here.

There will also be a not-so-spontaneous “Dancing in the Streets” flash mob on Saturday to welcome the world. Despite it taking place in the context of the Olympics, it has the potential to actually be merely social and fully apolitical. I wish them well.

A party should not bankrupt, maim, impoverish or denigrate people or values–whether or not they can attend the party functions. Parties that do that are not for the good of society.

When we endure the Olympics and watch the corporate media and political boosterism of the whole show, we must use this core criteria to determine value: do these activities build community or destroy it?

I have my bias, but I’ll be looking for glimpses of anything positive. I can’t say I’m optimistic, though.

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I have only slightly more ability to tolerate the CBC over corporate media when it comes to promoting the Afghan occupation and how amazingly, incredibly awesome the Olympics are.

But yesterday, they ran this story: Protesters target Olympic torch run. It included this weak bit of journalism:

The protesters said Monday their group had been infiltrated by undercover police and said the infiltrators might try to cause trouble so that uniformed police could crack down.

VANOC admitted they had infiltrated a protest group a few months ago. There was no ruse “tried” at Montebello; there was no “alleged” in the agents provocateurs, especially those carrying rocks. Video footage at Montebello captured the “protestors” being confronted by real, peaceful protesters and then “arrested” by the police. After the video went viral on YouTube, the police admitted to planting agents in the crowd.

I hope CBC Olympic boosterism did not directly lead to this story’s watered down facts.

Connected to an easy ride on scandalous police tactics, the CBC missed some flagrant hypocrisy from the IOC.

When the IOC rejected women’s ski jumping from the Olympics, they violated our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. BC courts, however, rightly recognized they have no jurisdiction over the IOC, which is a wholly unaccountable international organization which answers to no government and will gleefully violate women’s rights in Canada because of whatever policy they hold on which events to include in their games.

Yesterday’s CBC piece, however, neglected to mention that evidence of the IOC’s flagrant disregard for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Instead, they merely wrote this:

“We have to accept protests and there will be some and fine, let’s leave it. We are used to that,” said Gerhard Heiberg, a member of the IOC’s executive board, at a Vancouver news conference Monday.

“For us, it’s not an issue. We accept protest, we accept people protesting,” said IOC president Jacques Rogge.

“This is free, democratic freedom of expression,” Rogge said.

“What we want is no violence and we want the people to respect the laws of the country and then there is no problem.”

It takes a special kind of gold-medal gall for the IOC president to expect protesters to adhere to the laws of the country while his organization itself trampled the very same laws with respect to the female ski jumpers.

I am not surprised by this kind of nonsense from the IOC president, but I have a higher standard for the CBC. We simply cannot let this kind of IOC hypocrisy go unchallenged and we cannot let the CBC play down police use of agents provocateurs.

Our society cannot handle these kind of compromises. The Olympics is bad enough, but we need civil vigilance if we expect to retain the kind of democratic values Jacques Rogge so disingenuously speaks of.

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Time of death: 11:14pm, Saturday, August 15, 2009. And I’m qualified to call it because of how media works today. See below if you don’t get it yet.

This clip above is the most important 4 minutes and 23 seconds of the rest of your 21st century. Watch it.

If you’re like me, much of the data in this piece will be new to you and somewhat astonishing. I had to pause it a few times because I don’t read as fast as young people today, I suppose.

If it’s not all new, it’s because you likely already get how communication will exist for the rest of the 21st century.

Simply: linear consumption of communications, broadcasting, is gone.

We are in a 3D world of ambient information and simultaneity.

Get up to speed or be left in the 20th century.

One-way broadcasting via TV, radio and newspapers to passive recipient consumers is dying fast.

Newspaper circulation is declining rapidly. Soon we’ll see cable TV subscriptions declining fast as information is just everywhere.

I have virtually no need for subscriber TV anymore. The half dozen shows I watch are available for downloading in less than 20 minutes from torrent sites within hours of their broadcast on the east coast. And half the shows aren’t available in Canada without delays of months. I don’t like to wait.

News is online. Hockey? I’m still working on that one. When I figure it out, out goes my cable TV subscription for good.

The internet is a crucible now, it always has been. It is forming new means of communication. Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have survived the burning. New forms will continue to emerge as the new printing presses. When they become ubiquitous, newspapers, TV and radio will finish their tailspin.

I spent many of the last 12 months working up a design to convert some of my editorials into op-eds for community newspapers. I have written recently how community papers are newly critical in sustaining democracy. I still believe this, but I’ve altered my sense of time about this.

Community papers are still generally owned in blocks by media oligarchs. We’re seeing daily newspapers and regional TV stations dying. We’ll see media oligarchs suffer at the core some more.

Community papers won’t have a chance to become critical for democracy until the current ownership mode burns out, leaving new forms of democratic communications to emerge as a phoenix rising out of putrid ashes.

But along side concrete [as opposed to electronic] media in the future, the wired world of ambient media will define a new relationship of information. Community papers of the future will not be so linear and broadcast as they are now. They will be more vibrant and interactive…as much as that can happen through periodical publishing on paper.

So, hold on to your crash bar for the wild ride ahead. And you can join me on the deathwatch of the CanWest media chain as today their stock price is at $0.14. Click on the 5y chart to see how they’ve fallen. All they are is biased, right wing TV, radio and newspapers and some lame web portals, all pretending to be objective because their model is pre-post-modern. They are a dinosaur stumbling over a cliff. I will not miss them and I will toast their demise as I welcomed the departure from this earth of Milton Friedman and Pinochet.

And what I’ve learned tonight is that I can’t convert a media activity in the 3D ambient media world into a 2D linear, broadcast media world by sending my editorials into community papers.

I can’t yet imagine how the future of media will look. I’ve never understood “the medium is the message” as fully as I do now, but I also know that in 5-10 years I’ll understand it far more profoundly as the internet crucible continues burning.

I must go spray some kerosene on the fire now. Join me?

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