da Scriffles

Just because we can, does it mean we should? This was a philosophical question raised at the X/Media/Lab conference last week at the Sydney Opera House.

Just because you can record your sexual prowess on a website – the number of times you get it up, the times of the day or night when you’re at your sexual peak etc – should you?

Writer/journalist Anand Giridharadas tickled everyone's fancy with a little afternoon delight - there's a website called bedposted.com . 

 This became the running joke for every speaker who followed. 

The ABC was there, The Edge from the State Library of Queensland was there, a party from QUT’s Creative Industries was there too.

X/Media/Lab has become a major event for anyone interested in digital media.

The stellar line-up at last week’s event at the Sydney Opera House included Robert Tercek, a renaissance man of the entertainment industry; Ralph Simon, founder of the modern mobile entertainment industry (inventor of the ringtone); Fanshake founder Dana Al Salem, who built the Yahoo! Europe team when she was 18 or so years old; and Amin Zoufonoun, Google’s director of corporate development.

Most of them, like China’s Haidong Pan who built a Chinese Wikipedia, stuck to the theme of how do you build an innovative global Media idea into reality.

Google's Amin Zoufonoun quoted World Bank figures to prove his point that the digital economy should indeed warrant closer inspection by investors and governments: for every 10 percent increase in broadband speed there's a corresponding 1.3 percent economic growth. NOTE: no private investors were present at the conference. Well, there was one angel from New Zealand but he didn't raise his hand.

The overall message delivered by most speakers was that digital is a new ballgame but it’s the same game. Digital businesses need to solve a real-world problem, or tell a compelling story, and do what they do well to be successful.

Ralph Simon, who flew in from South Africa where he worked on the World Cup, identified the key common ingredients of great innovations: originality; a network of believers who spread word by mouth;  adequate seed funding; international connections and a cast-iron belief & persistence. These ingredients apply across the board – not just to digital innovation.

Dana Al Salem identified two tribes. She supported her argument that the more things change the more they really stay the same by comparing today’s GenY and the hippies of 40 years ago.

 Hippies championed free love and so does GenY who are known as the Hook-Up Generation. Hurricane Katrina now//Hurricane Camille then. Glastonbury now // Woodstock then. Virgin Galactic space travel now // Copncorde’s first supersonic flight then. Vietnam War // Iraq War … BP spill // California spill in ‘69. The big difference between the Baby Boomers and GenY?  GenY’s overstimulated so they’re difficult to excite, they love change, they are a tagged species. Hippy freedom didn’t include an acceptance of loss of privacy and a love of exclusivity.

While most speakers talked about how to make money one speaker spoke about the need to create a philosophy to govern digital ethics and life. Anand Giridharadas, the tech columnist for the International Herald Tribune, has been writing a book living in a small, isolated Indian village. And he too came to the realization that the digital era has not really changed the workings of social networking. The technology’s changed, the platform has changed but it’s still a village where everyone can hear everything that goes down through paper (or grass) walls. 

He calls it ambient sociability. He says it’s something old wrapped in something new. Giridharadas says the internet is not a rootless, new phenomenon without precedent, it’s all the bickering, praising, coming and going that makes up life in a traditional village. But he suggests that there are more challenging areas than marketing and economics that the digitally enabled society has to solve. There’s a question of civility, universality and transparency. Issues such as how much anonymity is too much? Should people be held accountable for their online actions with the introduction of a persistent digital identity?

What happens to honesty and personal integrity when people, being conscious of the image they project online, start to edit themselves to make their personal brand more palatable? Does that kind of self marketing turn people into liars?

He ended on this note:

“We need to figure out the shape of the life we wish to lead and ask how all these magnificent, dangerous ones and zeroes can be put to the task.”

 “How do we evolve a digital philosophy? What would it look like?” Just because we can, does it mean we should?

Little Johnny The Movie is a new Australian animated comedy premiering at Melbourne's Comedy Festival on April Fool's Day.

Digital distribution plus clever marketing targeting a niche audience - with a streaming option available in the US by the looks.

Australian content being pumped out over an Australian digital channel - this is the kind of activity that is under threat, if you heard Robert Tercec speak at the XMedia conference in Sydney last week. Tercec, one of the world's most prolific creators of online content, spoke about Comcast's takeover of AOL as the start of the end for an open internet. I'm more concerned about national sovereignty versus multi-national corporations - & whether governments can learn to withstand the mighty dollar.

With the networks building their channels online they will go into business with the Telcos to control not just programming but the quality of delivery - according to your ability to pay.

Little Johnny seems to embody so much possibility of a great future on an open web - where anyone can produce content find an audience.

While many Australian program producers are still looking to the networks and other traditional distribution models, Instinct Entertainment has taken a giant leap into the unknown it seems with this project - though it really is great content so from that perspective it's not a risk. Though it is in the native Aussie twang which is a no-no for international markets.

The cinema page of the website has a demand widget that tallies votes by towns and cities so you can keep track - though I don't know how many votes it will take to get screenings.

Distributor Instinct Entertainment has a swag of merchandising online for the Melbourne Comedy Festival Premiere. They are not, it seems, spending money on P&A (Prints & Advertising) to put the film into cinemas without any guarantee of an audience. Perhaps they are as wary of Australian audiences as Australian audiences are as wary of Australian films.

"He's cute as a button and has a mouth like a sewer." 

Not only is there merchandising on sale online but you can stream the whole movie for just $US4.95 - the Aussie dollar is still on par with the USD.

Well, I'm assuming it will go up soon because it's not there at the moment.

If you want to meet the kid from Gallangatta on the big screen in your hometown then you have to raise a posse.

How many centuries did the human race work to fly by flapping before we realised that you don't have to flap to fly?

If you watch a bird fly then you notice that it also glides long distances without flapping.

One day someone asked himself: "Why? How does a bird do this?"

Curiosity led to an explanation and he found out ... we joined the birds and promptly forgot "why".

International educator, Larry Johnson, launched the first Horizon Report on Australian education in Brisbane in May.

He gave a highly entertaining and enlightened talk on what needs to change to integrate the education system into the 21st century. Johnson works with governments and educators all over the world.

His company, the New Media Consortium, is a non-profit group that explores the use of new media and technology.

He has a unique, global perspective and his experience of tech started with building radios with his dad to taking video calls from his two-year-old granddaughter today.

So what does he think effective education is? 

You need to make their jaws drop in awe. Effective education makes kids jaws drop. In India, he knows a teacher who runs a mobile science van. Kids do hands-on activities, such as making a plastic bottle shoot a paperball.

The teacher shows them how "pressure" inside the bottle shoots the ball of paper at them and explains that the same pressure gets planes off the ground. 

Johnson has adopted this teacher's mission to build curiosity in children. To this mission Johnson adds the need to teach mutual respect, and the ability to collaborate. But curiosity is at the top of the list of non-negotiables.

The lesson for people doing the "strategic thinking" to design an effective education system for the 21st Century here is this:

It's not about building a better 20th century, or a better 19th, or 18th - it's about the 21st century.

"What are we focused on?" he asks. "Our strategic thinking is based on a world that no longer exists," he said.

To paraphrase him, "Are we looking to the cold, dark past or into the light of dawn of a new future?"

Sometimes, he said, in order to see the rainbow you just need to change your perspective. Just look out the window, he said.

"The net is like air for children today." His two-year-old grandaughter calls him via video phone and learned her way around an iPad in the twinkle of an eye.

"Facetime Grandpa!"

"We need to build a world as it needs to be for them, that's a very different thing to the world we wish it was for us."

And there's more to this looking at things differently business. What is the network?

Is it the 1.3 billion mobile phones sold every year? Is it the html browsers?

Like do you really think that "The Network" is the National Broadband Network, or the five cables under the oceans that connect Australia to the world? (Singapore has 22 by the way)

"The network is us." He didn't realise this point until his 27-year-old son, who teaches high school in Korea, told him. The network is not cables and computers and phones - it's us, people, we are the network.

There were 6 billion active mobile phones in the world in 2011 - 76 percent have html browser - 96percent have basic browsers - but that's not the network that came into play to make an Arab Spring. The government actually turned that network off in Egypt and the "actual" network kept going - you can't switch it off.

Sometimes you just need to be looking out the window to see the rainbow.

Johnson showed a map of the world taken from space and all the lights show where electricity burns. Then he flashed up the same map showing all the geographical mobile phone connections - guess which one burns brighter?

The reach of the mobile network is BIGGER than the electric grid.

The "network" was radio when he was kid. He made radios with his dad - that was high-tech in the 1950s - FDR fireside chats. His father explained how radio waves bounce around the world so they can listen to the Casius Clay fight in Paris in the wee hours of the morning.

Then television came along. They watched the top-rating show on a Wednesday night The Beverly Hill Billies.

Marshall McLuhan warned - "The network is changing us."

And in 1963, the most trusted man on television, Walter Cronkite, rocked the country with the announcement that the president had been shot in Dallas.

"The entire country stopped for three days in a profound collective mourning," he said.

"We didn't really know what it was that we were experiencing."

So he decided to study computer science to explore the network.

Some practical points that need some thought to factor into "stategic thinking":

• Today people expect to be able to work, learn and socialize where ever-whenever
• Only five cables connect Australia to the rest of the world - Singapore has 22 communication cables 
• the internet is no longer about the Gigabytes anymore it's about mobile
• it's about The Cloud stupid
• openness is the new value - it's not a trend.
• 80 percent of our lives is not spent in school - so how important do you think "informal" education is?

Has your mouth dropped? Because mine did as I listened to the man.

And then he ended it with Benny E King's Stand By Me and he stood silent on stage. He put himself through uni playing jazz and he's a photographer who gets up early to photograph dawn.

Seems to me that he's building a picture of the dawn of the 21st Century here. Will you stand by him?