Question 70 of 365: How far will serious take us?

When I look at what goes viral, what memes consist of, or even what I happen to click on within my twitter stream; there is always an element of humor found within. Not all of them are laugh out loud funny, but in the way that they tickle my brain or make me think differently, they are funny. They are novel and different, incongruent with the rest of my day. That is why I am drawn to them on a regular basis.

That is why OKGO’s new video has seen 7 million views.

It is the reason why the word FAIL has come to prominence.

It is why Four Square is starting to matter for a great number of people.

All of these things have a huge element of play in them, and even though I am not a meme or virality expert, I can still spot something that will “blow up” quite easily (or at least has the capacity to do so). If something is humorous, novel, memorable, and doesn’t require a lot of effort to consume it will have the power to be passed around at length by the horde of folks trolling the internet for such things (which is a great many of us).

The problem I am having is that on the whole, I am a pretty serious person. The work that I do is pretty serious. It may be novel to some, but it certainly follows a tradition and isn’t really breaking with others’ daily existence enough to warrant being “passed on.” While some may remember what I do, if I stopped blogging or working on my own projects, there would be very few who would morn the loss of my voice in the conversation. And, in general, many of the things I do take a good deal of time to understand or grapple with. Not by design, but because I don’t have the time to continue drafting on each idea to make it palatable to everyone.

I have no doubt that these questions will not be the next meme. And yet, I am serious and methodical about how I do them. I think them through and get great joy from the act of asking and answering big questions.

Yet, how far will that take me? How far will these ideas reach if I can’t put them together into a package that allows for 7 million views?

And even more pessimistically, how far will being serious and complex take our values and our ideas about business, about education, and about networks? If we cannot do our work in such a way that garners mass support, how do we hope to get leaders elected or get skeptics to even come into the conversation. I think that it may be time for people who are not as serious, and who can design works of pop art or novel systems that cause people to jump on bandwagons to reengineer the ideas we grapple with on a daily basis.

Where are the education designers (real design, with an eye for virality)?

Where are the agile business practice advocates (ones who can set up mobile systems for engagement that are better than discussion forums)?

Where are those that can break through the filters that everyone has for their everyday life?

And to a certain extent, the answers are that we are them or we must become them. We must at least try to make our ideas work on a larger scale. We must design objects that can be passed around outside of our small communities. We must be humorous and novel in our approach. And if that is too much to ask, a certain cleverness will suffice.

And I do realize that this will take a lot of time and that there is a place for being serious and academic and driven by the community of thinkers rather than an external community. But, if we believe that even one of our ideas is needed to make the world a better place, we owe it to the idea to provide a package that makes sense to everyone else. We owe it to ourselves to not let ego and esoteric discourse get in the way. We owe it to one another to make sure that what goes viral has some of what we are thinking about embedded into it.

At least at this very moment, I think so.

Question 23 of 365: Is asking for permission still important?

Is it still important to ask for permission when people tell you exactly how they want you to use their work?

Is it still important when your identity is entirely public?

Is it still important when your everyday life can just as easily be a topic at the water cooler as major world events?

Is it still important when the sincerest form of flattery is the embed code?

Asking for permission used to be something that was a common occurrence when you wanted to borrow ideas or resources from one another. It used to be standard operating procedure when you wanted to contact someone that you didn’t know; you had to ask someone who had their contact info to be introduced. In another time, stumbling into the limelight wasn’t a possibility for anyone with a video camera. In that sense, you used to have to ask permission of the distribution systems (public access TV, independent films, etc.) to become infamous for your content.

No longer is any of this the case. Asking for permission has gone way out of style. It is more important to disseminate information, remix work, make contact, and market yourself than it is to take the time to ask for permission. Permission itself is an outmoded construct. Permission implies a singular ownership. Permission requires one person to know things that others cannot without it. Permission is hierarchical. It is anti-flat world. It is against the commons. It is a falsehood in a world where you can “follow” anyone or where life streams aren’t questioned as being too invasive.

Or perhaps, it is all just an implied permission. Perhaps we are to the point where we are just giving each other permission for everything, where we find it is easier to share our work than it is to hide it. Perhaps permission has dissolved into the vast ocean of free content that exists. Perhaps the only people who are still fighting for permission are the ones who are trying to hold on to the remnants of intellectual property that have been usurped by other, more open outfits.

On the other hand, I hope I am not making the case for everything to be in the public domain. I am not communistic in my view of our lack of permission asking. Rather, I believe in attribution. I believe in purchase. I believe in obeying the wishes of content creators. But, I also believe that a society that does not ask for permission is one that forges a trust that should be sacrosanct. If we all understand what it means to build something together and to reach for better ways of learning, creating or working then we can collectively pull everyone out of poverty. We can collectively attain transparency. We can work together to be productive, profitable, and passionate.

If we don’t ask for permission, we must act in everyone’s interest.

We must be a plural society if we are to be this connected. I do not believe that this is too idealistic when we are no longer separated by 6 degrees of separation. When we literally can connect with anyone in the planet by 1 degree, everyone is our neighbor. And, most of the time, you don’t even have to ask your neighbors for help when you are in trouble. Help just comes.

Digital Legacy: Lesson Plans

Today I will be working with a group of students at Ute Meadows Elementary on the idea of creating and tending their Digital Legacy (or what some people call their a Digital Footprint or Digital Identity). Here are the lesson plans for just such an event:

1. Write-on:
2. Types of Digital Legacies:

• The Good
• The Bad
• The Ugly
• And more Ugly
• The Most Ugly

1. There is a new type of reputation out there. It lingers and builds long after you you have stopped caring about it. Managing it is hard. Too many elements to focus on, and too little time to maintain them all. So, you do what you can.You look for just the right resources to update at just the right time to get you exposure. You believe that in doing some good, you will get recognized. But this kind of reputation doesn’t work like that. Your expertise can go unrecognized for years. So long as you have a well founded web presence, others will find out just how amazing you are, eventually.

   I often think about this digital trail that I am leaving behind. It is amazing to me to know that many of the ideas I am having right now will affect others years from now. I still receive e-mail about a band web page I put up when I was 16. It is scary how much the Internet
   has a memory. It is cataloging every keystroke I publish. And this is beautiful. The internet knows that my name is associated with my ideas. This makes me truly happy.

2. What do you want Google to say about you?
3. Design your ideal Google search page with the following items:

• 10 different places on the web that you want to (or already do exist)
• A one-two sentence summary for each of those 10 different places
• The total number of links to be found about you.

1. Who will help you create this digital identity/legacy?
2. So, if we are all writing a story together, weaving our Digital Identities together, perhaps we better start actually writing a story together. We may never know quite where it will end up, but you can bet that if you start with something that is good enough, it will always keep on growing.