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Posted on Wednesday, 30 December, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
I was recently reminded about the Russell Tribunal on Palestine when a friend of mine invited me to join its group on Facebook. I had started a post on it some time ago, one of many along the lines of “look at this, isn’t this neat” type of thing. But the Tribunal, though still new, is kicking into high gear in March of 2010 with a its first session in Barcelona. Before that takes place I decided to look around its already published statements and whose who lists to see if it was something worth following or another in a long series of well-meaning organizations basically telling us all what we really already know without offering a tangible way forward.
The InterWeb loves a list, so that’s how we’ll format this one.
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Posted on Monday, 12 October, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Just a quick one for the “Why we Fail” category today. Medea Benjamin, a co-fonder of Code Pink displays how things go down when you don’t have a clear idea about what you think success is supposed to look like. The often anti-war organization since its guided tour of Kabul has been trying to stitch its previous statements about the U.S. occupation there with what its supporting now, as some sort of hybrid, quasi occupation in which soldiers somehow remain invisible while building up an infrastructure for an entire nation.
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Posted on Wednesday, 16 September, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
This is the Silicon Alley Insider’s Chart Of The Day:
About a quarter of newspapers remain in “the dark ages” according to Silicon Alley Insider (see bottom bar for “none at this time”). But with current layoffs and consolidations being what they are, the question may well be, how much is there to share?
“The American Press Institute asked 2,400 newspaper executives if their papers “provide access to stories or information such as sports scores, headlines, stock quotes, etc.,” via Twitter, Facebook, Email alerts, Mobile/PDA, YouTube, Kindle, Flickr, e-readers, etc., and told them to “check all that apply.”
As the chart below shows, a whopping 24% of all respondents answered “None at this time.” Bizarre.”
Posted on Wednesday, 26 August, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
I love a chart. Today I share with you, dear visitor, the Rogers Adoption and Early Innovation Curve, brought to you by Value Based Management.net. So far so dry, right? Not if you want to actually make your case to the masses.
The curve can explain all sorts of things, such as why so many people in the world continue to use IE6, deny scientific fact (evolution, climate change, causes of heart disease, etc), voted for George Bush (U.S.), don’t trust socialized health care (in the U.S. again, sigh), don’t use Web Standards in their online developments, still don’t get the Israeli annexation of Palestinian land is ethnic cleansing, and on and on. It also shows why so many campaigns struggle: They’re focusing on the late majority and the laggards instead of the innovators and early adopters.
SNIP: “The diffusion of innovations curve (innovation adoption curve) of Rogers is useful to remember that trying to quickly and massively convince the mass of a new controversial idea is useless. It makes more sense in these circumstances to start with convincing innovators and early adopters first. Also the categories and percentages can be used as a first draft to estimate target groups for communication purposes.”
A note to my fellow lefty/progressive campaigner people: Don’t just look at this assomething that is limited to the tech realm. Print it out and keep it next to your dog-eared copy of Don’t Think of an Elephant. Grab the innovators and then go after the early adopters in whatever realm you’re operating.
via Innovation adoption curve of Rogers – Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards – innovations diffusion change model.
Posted on Thursday, 25 June, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
Every now and again it’s a good idea to turn on your own just to see what it’s like on the other side. It helps to have something to actually disagree with them over. This post goes over my recent days spent arguing with the “liberal” commenterati (obsessive commenters on websites. A google search tells me I didn’t coin this word. Damn) about the protests in Iran. It wasn’t a pretty time, but it was an interesting one. If it’s not a tech. or nerd site I tend to avoid these areas anymore.
In this case, it’s regarding the ever changing situation in Iran. The battle ground in question is the comment area at Common Dreams, a usually progressive left news site. It was a wholly satisfying experiment. I learned a lot about a lot about the nature of comment areas, their addicting qualities and how quickly the conversation sort of descends into self-parody. I learned something about myself: According to these people I must work for the Mossad or CIA.
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Posted on Saturday, 11 April, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS: Talk or Share
I generally like Eric Hobsbawn’s “you’re all wrong and here’s why” attitude, often reflected in his writing. On Friday he has written a thought-provoking piece on how both centrally state-planned economies and unrestricted free-market capitalist economies have both run their course and need to be retired before they destroy the planet. And I like his use of the phrase “ideological logos.”
“The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another,” He writes, basically getting to the point I sort of drifted around in this post, but much more succinctly and with less leg work.
The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the “capabilities” of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy – not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.
A shift in tendencies, that sees economic systems as tools of societies, instead of societies as fuel for economies, seems to be the general order here: A decentralized commons-based approach.
via Eric Hobsbawm: Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?
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