How Entrenched is Old Media Thinking? | The Relationship Economy......

"Have They Forgotten Who The Customer Is?

News is a business aimed at serving the market. The market is people. If the people are shifting, and the data speaks loudly that they are, to “social media” vs. “top down media” then maybe the old media outlets should follow the customer rather than expecting the customer to follow them.

Those who have invested heavily in an old system will resist changes brought about from a new system. The more they resist the more they loose for the new system is being built from the very customers the old thought they controlled."

Future Positive : Gift Economy

"The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture by Eric Steven Raymond

To understand the role of reputation in the open-source culture, it is helpful to move from history further into anthropology and economics, and examine the difference between exchange cultures and gift cultures.

Human beings have an innate drive to compete for social status; it's wired in by our evolutionary history. For the 90% of that history that ran before the invention of agriculture, our ancestors lived in small nomadic hunting-gathering bands. High-status individuals (those most effective at informing coalitions and persuading others to cooperate with them) got the healthiest mates and access to the best food. This drive for status expresses itself in different ways, depending largely on the degree of scarcity of survival goods."

Tipping Point

Collaborative Thinking: Analysis of Social Networks: Telling Old Stories In New Ways

"Based on the incredible amount of media coverage, many people might believe that social networks are a recent discovery – a phenomena resulting from consumer participation in web sites such as Myspace, LinkedIn and Facebook. However, research, analysis and theories on the subject began over a century ago. I recently read 'The Development of Social Network Analysis' (Freeman) and thought I would draw attention to several individuals and point out some key impressions. The list below serves only as a brief illustration. There have been dozens of notable contributions from a variety of researchers, academics and practitioners across multiple disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, and mathematics)..."

Social networks and threshold models of collective behavior > Meredith Rolfe University of Chicago

How does social network structure affect the spread of ideas and behaviors? Lenin advocated the use of small revolutionary cells{small groups of activists who cut of outside ties and dedicate themselves to the cause of spreading their ideas. Contemporary marketing firms seek out (Rosen 2000). In both cases, the goal is to spread an innovation through a population, but very different social network structures seem to be required. This paper seeks to resolve this apparent contradiction as follows.

Building on Granovetter's (1978) threshold model, I differentiate between innovations that spread easily and those that are not likely to spread. I then show that the impact of social networks on collective behaviors is conditional on the ease of diffusion. Small networks may incubate nascent innovations which are more difficult or costly. However, if most individuals inhabit small and dense personal networks, behaviors which spread easily will be stifled.

Human Hardware: The Illusion Of Conscious Searching

"You know what you’re doing, right? We are all rational beings. We are all blessed with huge neocortexes and use them on a regular basis. This is especially so when we do something as thoughtful as use a search engine. Our rational loop is kicked into high gear. Right?

Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re not as rational as you think you are. Even the emotionally sparse act of using a search engine is driven largely by subconscious behavior. We are a bundle of pre-written scripts, which play out with little interference from our conscious minds. So, for this entry in the Human Hardware series, I want to spend some time exploring the theory of the illusion of conscious will, to borrow the name of a book by Daniel Wegner, the same person who advanced the theory of transactive memory. Unfortunately for Descartes, it’s not so much a case of “I think, therefore I am” as much as it is “I do, therefore I am.”"

U.S. Schools: Not That Bad | BusinessWeek

"Students have 2 million minutes—the time from the beginning of eighth grade to high school graduation—to build the intellectual foundation they'll need for professional success. That's the premise of a new documentary, Two Million Minutes, that's making waves in education and political circles.

The film tracks six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. The Indian and Chinese students work diligently on math and science, while the American students work hard but appear less focused and leave plenty of time for video games and social lives. The message is that because of our education system, we're getting left behind."

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

"'Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward"

Why Don’t You Say What You Mean? | Deborah Tannen

Directness is not necessarily logical or effective. Indirectness is not necessarily manipulative or insecure.

Kurt Schwitters | Gwendolen Freundel Webster | The Archive

Kurt Schwitters is generally acknowledged as the twentieth century's greatest master of collage. Just as collage is essentially the medium of irony, so Schwitters' life is characterized by paradox and enigma. Born in Hanover, the only child of affluent parents, he was a loner in his youth, plagued by epileptic attacks, introverted and insecure, and as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art he proved as apt as he was unimaginative. Although his contact with Expressionist artists in Hannover in 1916 gave him more confidence to develop his own style, even his most impressive works (such as Mountain Graveyard) were little more than imitations of his contemporaries."

How to Give your Product Away and Still Make it Pay | Geekpreneur

"Back in the good old days, it was enough to produce an idea, stick “.com” after the company name, and wait for venture capitalists to throw suitcases full of money at you.

You didn’t need a revenue model, profit predictions or anything more than a basic business plan. All you had to do was declare that you were going to give away whatever you produced for free while advertisers pick up the bill, and investors would assume that companies would line up to give you their marketing dollars."

Topics in Social Psychology: Persuasion (CROW)

"Resources for the Teaching of Social Psychology is a part of the CROW Project, Course Resources on the Web."