Did We Miss the On-ramp to the Future?

Just as one of my recent posts demonstrated the impressive prescience of some individuals from the recent past, so have I just come across equally compelling proof of our failure to rise to the challenge and optimism of previous generations. The following is a Disney forecasting from 50 years ago, a long time when you realize all the wondrous things that were accomplished between 1908 and 1958…

This 1958 piece (brilliantly animated) sets a marker that we are still far short of hitting. What have we lost in the past decades that we no longer seem as ambitious and capable as our fathers and mothers? We are capable of developing all sorts of IP that focuses on individual consumption and gimmickry, but have little capacity it seems for social change on the grand sort of scale imagined by these people:

with thanks to B.Daul for the link

Archive Dive #5 – Bear With a Moustache (11/08/2003)

I’ve never been a great Salvador Dali fan, although I do appreciate his value as an artist. However, I saw something very compelling today that – while not altering my impression of his paintings – has changed my mind as to his work. I was privileged to attend a presentation by Roy Disney, introducing a short animated feature film, begun in 1946 as a collaboration between Messrs. Dali and Walt Disney. The collaboration never bore fruit until a few months ago, when the completed piece, 57 years in the making, was presented at select Film Festivals (just recently winning best animated Short at the Melbourne International Film Festival). It was shown tonight to members of the Producers Guild, who had been invited to attend a screening of Disney’s new Feature, Brother Bear (but more on that later).

The Dali/Disney Short was presented twice, with some comments in between by Mr. Disney. I’m glad for the second viewing, as I was able to really explore some of the more obscure “morphing” sections of the piece.

Fragments of the original unfinished film “Destino” along with story boards, sketches and an original score were painstakingly put together by a team assembled by Disney’s nephew Roy Disney after they were discovered in the studio’s vaults. The result was beautiful.

For more info, click on any of the following links:

This one…

…and this one even has video clips!

As to the “Main Event”, namely “Brother Bear”, it was another Disney home run. A beautifully told story, with lovingly textured traditional animation, and content that will be sure to make a parent proud to take their kid to the movies. It’s a story filled with ancient lore, Spirits, Shamans, Totem, animals that talk, and even a healthy tribute to Strange Brew, that cult fave Canadian export. I wonder if all that non-Christian content will get as roundly criticized as the Harry Potter books…

[update 11/26/2009: The final version of Destino can be found on YouTube, by entering the word "Destino" (strangely enough!) in the search box. I cannot embed the video here, however, as I believe it is an unauthorized posting]

 

40 years before his time…

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance…handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities.

science fiction writer James Berry, writing In the November 1968 issue of Mechanix Illustrated

November 1968: will the gap between then and the same time last year (November 2008) seem wider or narrower than the gap between 2010 and 2050 (taking this year of great economic upheaval, crisis, turmoil and restructuring as a “fulcrum point” between the two trajectories)?

More interestingly, perhaps: I wonder who will reveal themselves as the most accurate visionary of our time?

Parental Study Break

For all you Mommies and Daddies that have read the same children’s board book one too many times, may I recommend one further reading…

How Would You Improve The Internet?

In recent news, the country of Sweden crashed: Apparently it is possible to cause every single address in a domain to go down (in this case, .se), by making a simple script error during routine maintenance…whodathunk? I shudder to think what may happen when routine maintenance on the .com domain takes place…

In another bit of “wish I’d never done that” news, Tim Berners-Lee just admitted that the forward slashes in the Web’s URL design protocol were both unnecessary and – in his words – a mistake. With this in mind, I thought it might be fun to wander around the Web, and the Internet as a whole, just to see what we could find, by way of unfortunate stories we may have forgotten, or never even known about…things that “seemed like a good idea at the time”. We’re getting closer to the end of the year, when all those retrospectives come out, and I thought this would be as good a time as any to think back, only not just over the past year, but further. After all, it’s the history we forget that we so often tend to repeat…

Do you remember GeoCities? If you thought they died a long time ago, you might be surprised to hear that Yahoo, who acquired them back when people thought dot-coms would never bomb, recently (as in October 26th, 2009) announced GeoCities was closing its doors. Talk about limping along…

Then there are the ISPs. I was a Mindspringer for the longest time, one of the first evangelists for the brand (until Earthlink purchased them). Along with the likes of Prodigy (still shuffling along, believe it or not, as owner AT&T tries to find someone stupid enough to buy something worth nothing), AOL (reinventing itself every day, yet still deriving the largest measure of its revenue from good old (and I mean old!) dial-up subscriptions), and Netzero (reduced to net zero, as they try to find new ways to also rejigger the fact that they are still a dial-up ISP), Mindspring was a pioneer doomed to be eclipsed by telcos who learned from their mistakes.

When we think back to the search engines, the list is long: Webcrawler, AltaVista (technically still around), Lycos…heck, I’m just scraping the tip of the iceberg, and have already lost interest. Did you know that AltaVista had a chance to buy Google’s search technology way back when, and passed? Whoops. Google, contrary to its current well-deserved reputation, was not innovative at all when it first opened for business. It was efficient and analytical. Its algorithms reinvented web search, based on the ideas of its predecessors, good and bad alike. Some people call that reinventing the wheel, but they at least have not rested on their laurels.

Many websites that burned brightly for only a short while were decried as unsustainable business models (remember Pets.com, Webvan, eToys, Kibu, and Kozmo?), and yet their model has since been adapted and proven successful (Petedge, Upco, Fosters &Smith, Amazon, Barbie.com, Tesco, to name but a few comparable online ventures that seem to have “made it”). Timing is all, it would indeed seem, or at least kinda crucial.

For some, it was all about effective marketing and brand awareness…or the lack thereof: Akimbo.com failed because they could not manage to communicate their value proposition to their target market, among other “challenges”; Hulu succeeded (where Joost, Veoh, Vimeo, and others have not – to varying degrees) because they realized their brand strength was tied to the apron strings of their partners. OK, it certainly didn’t hurt that the networks who own the content it distributes also own Hulu!..

In other cases, interactive success came as a result of reinvention: the transition (or should I say ‘desertion”?) from Microsoft Live Search to today’s “Bing” *might* finally establish MSFT as a competitor to Google, in much the same way as Firefox is to the Redmond giant’s own browser…well, without the Open Source stuff!

Now,who uses RSS? I’m sure it some value, but not yet for me. I subscribe to several feeds, and all I do is trash the avalanche of junk in my inbox each morning. Until people learn to self police their content (be it RSS feeds, Tweets, or Facebook Mafia War activities), the internet is going to continue to burn through ideas like flames across the Verdugo mountains.  There is too much information online, and we want tools that will filter and control the flood of data, not simply fractionalize it. After all, half of infinity is still infinity.

Some companies have good ideas, easily replicable by larger or later-in-the-game interests. Kiko developed a web based calendar, which seems like a great idea, unless you factor that it was not sufficiently proprietary of a business model to prevent Google from developing its own Google Calendar app.; and  HotorNot.com and Friendster were arguably ripped off by what is known today as Facebook (originally Facemash). Several companies are in the process of trying to beat TVguide.com at its own game (something that seems – at first glance – to be a good idea, given that the TVGuide.com site is not so great). However, couchville.com was there first, and since departed. Branding is worth a lot these days, in a very cluttered marketplace and, unless you are a captive subscriber (using ATT/Yahoo TV portal, for instance), or an early adopter (of which there are far fewer than those of us on the East and West Coasts might believe).

Some ideas are not so much failures as temporary successes, taking advantage of loopholes in the law or in best practices. P2P is one prime example, with different offerings coming and going (or continuing to exist despite obviously supporting illegal practices), but there are others, such as Yak4ever, the site that allows you to make free international calls, albeit through a slightly cumbersome process. Google Voice is another offering that seems destined to either succumb to the counterattacks of the powerful telco lobbies, or force a reinvention of telco laws.

Where such ongoing “could go either way” projects as MySpace.com,  Friendster (it’s still trying to make a go of it, my friends, and doing quite well in the Asia Pacific regions!), Kiva (currently under attack by folks who’d like to see it go the way of govWorks.com. Did you read the recent NYT article?), Project Natal, and James Cameron’s “Avatar” (had to throw that one in there!) end up is anybody’s guess. That’s where you come in: What failures and unforeseen successes do you recall? What is coming down the pike that you feel may completely reinvent interactive content production, storage, distribution, and/or consumption? Are you working on something that will make the Internet an even more robust tool and platform for communications, community and content? What does the Internet mean to you, beyond the conventional Web and email? What internet ventures do you feel will still be with us by the end of 2010?

History shows that much of what we praise today will be gone tomorrow.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley (1818)

Do you know John Hanson?

History has a strange way of reinventing itself, sometimes because a gap needed filling, and sometimes even when no gap existed.

Take, for example, the case of one John Hanson. I recently received an email from an uncle of mine, suggesting that George Washington was not actually the first president of the USA. In my uncle’s words, “…not many peeps realize the pre-Washington history of the presidency”. His statement was founded upon the claims made here.

I found the claim intriguing, and decided to do some research in to the matter. What I learned was that this claim was essentially untrue, but I also learned a little more about US history and – more specifically – why the US came to be.

The “Hanson as original President” argument is based upon his appointment as President of the Confederation Congress in 1781. However, if one follows this argument further, even HE was not the first “President”, but rather the first ELECTED President, as  Samuel Huntington and Thomas McKean had served before him in that office, after the ratification of the Articles of Confederation.

However, I think one has to clarify the difference between the President of the Confederation Congress (which was the title these three men, and their annual successors, held), and the “President of the United States”: the former served when the US had no Executive Branch, and served largely in a ceremonial capacity only. Actually, to be specific, the United States did not even exist yet, so how could he be “the first President of the USA”?

Here an excerpt from Snopes:

“It is important to note that although both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation used the phrase “united states of America”, neither of those documents was intended to create a single, unified country out of the thirteen former British colonies. Colonial leaders feared the creation of a too-powerful national government dominated by factions and so specifically refused to create a unified nation or to transfer sovereignty to a central government, Instead, they in effect created a national Congress to whom they could subcontract administrative tasks performed on behalf of all thirteen states: conduct foreign affairs, make war and peace, deal with Native Americans living outside the states, coin and borrow money, supervise the post office, and negotiate boundary disputes. Congress could NOT, however, raise money to carry out these tasks by levying taxes on the states, nor could it raise troops in order to defend the country or wage war, or even compel the states to comply with the laws it passed. In short, the Articles of Confederation created a Congress extremely limited in authority, with insufficient power to carry out the duties assigned to it”.

The Confederation Congress failed eventually, transferring responsibility for the national debt to the states in 1787.

The key to all this being that the Articles of Confederation did not create “The United States of America”, but an alliance of thirteen INDEPENDENT and SOVEREIGN states. The failure of this partnership led to calls for establishment of a centralized federal government, and thus was drafted the Constitution. From the perspective of understanding why and how the Constitution and US came to be, it is certainly very interesting and important to know about John Hanson and the Confederation Congress. It’s going a little far, it seems to me, to suggest he was the “First President of the United States of America”, though!

So the United States did not come to be as a result of the Revolutionary War, but rather because the Confederation of Sovereign States failed to operate under their intended principles of autonomous partnership.  The failure forced the drafting of the famed Constitution, centralizing authority and power, and establishing the US of A.

I love it when I learn something new!

Archive-Dive #4 – The Veterans (03/18/2003)

Veteran’s Day seems the perfect day to repost this entry from over six and a half years ago, with perhaps an addendum at the end:

It seems that the hype over this Middle East sortie is taking longer to warm up than the last one (1991, or somewhere around there – for those who feel compelled to refer to their archived TV Guides. It was under “Desert Storm”, usually after “Friends” or “Just Shoot Me”, depending on what channel you were watching…).

Regardless of how our digestion of these next days/weeks/months comes to manifest itself, I’m concerned about one particular issue, among several…:

For those who think “Pro-Choice” means pro-abortion, the following might prove confusing:

I am Anti-War. I think that most of the world is Anti-War. There are few people on our planet who relish the prospect, and welcome the promise, of impending war.

I am NOT however Anti-Servicemen-and-Women.

I’m saddened by the inability of some Europeans to separate US Government policy from US citizens traveling in Europe (see “French spitting on US citizens abroad”, and “Germans cursing at American athletes abroad”). There was a time when Americans at home were unable to separate US Foreign Policy from the individuals sent to enact said policy, regardless of their personal beliefs. The Vietnam War was an era when scarred young veterans returned home to the collective abuse and scorn of their fellow citizens. It was a time when we forgot that our servicemen and women do not have all the liberties that we have. They cannot choose who they want to fight, or when. Their job is to protect our liberties, and they do this by surrendering theirs for the duration of their service…

So, regardless of what happens abroad or- God forbid – here at home, please remember that whatever your views on war may be, the only stand that seems fair and honourable, when it comes to those of our servicemen and women who go forth into battle in the name of our freedoms, is FULL SUPPORT AND RESPECT.

Rail against the right-wing administrative machine that sets draconian policies and makes us ashamed to call ourselves American, but don’t shame our nation further by repeating the mistakes of our past. Welcome our troops home with warmth and love.

I am proud to report that European sentiment toward servicemen and servicewomen has improved considerably. As one British gentleman put it in a piece on today’s NPR, “Don’t get me wrong: Support for troops is undying”.  The gentleman goes on to add, however, “It’s just they shouldn’t be out there because, I think, the whole policy is all wrong. We just shouldn’t be there.”

Young adults today have grown up knowing nothing but conflict with the Middle East. We value the sacrifice made by our young troops, but so many do not see the value in the work they are sent to do. There are no easy solutions, no clear-cut answers, not even a lucid argument that puts our minds at ease. We are once more mired in a conflict that is seen as largely American, when in fact the struggle is global. Our allies “support” us, in some cases only grudgingly. The sacrifices made by their troops are all the more painful to them, as some among them believe they should not be involved.

I wonder if the dying swan of print media, still unmatched when it comes to investigative journalism, is hard at work trying to find answers to the following heavy questions?:

1. Should we really not have gone in to Iraq at all?
2. Should we leave Iraq NOW?
3. What are we doing in Afghanistan, and how long should we stay?
4. What should we be doing with respect to Pakistan?

But above all others, there sits one question:

What are you DOING about it?

Are we, politicians and citizens alike, doing all we can to ensure that we participate in the pursuit of a firm and lasting resolution to the conflict? Are we supporting our troops, not with once-a-year pleasantries, but with ongoing action of our own? If you believe in withdrawal, what are you DOING about it? If you believe in an increase of troops, what are you DOING to support that position?

On Veteran’s Day, I wonder how many of us still think it is enough to simply stand on the side of the road, while the funeral cortege passes by.

News No More

I was recently asked to comment on Arianna Huffington’s latest keynote speech, wherein she called on PR professionals to become more proactive in directing their clients moral actions.

Ms. Huffington makes a worthy call to action, but perhaps to the wrong constituency.

As broadcast news weakens in the face of “social journalism”, I feel strongly that the public has finally and fully adopted a mode of information digestion that no longer relies on “single point of origin” dissemination (TV networks, News portals, etc), but rather on network (as in social media network) aggregation of information, be it newsworthy or not. As individuals develop their sense of social alliance, whether through alumni groups, political affiliation, or other criteria, they will begin to rely on those networks of like-minded people for their information, and thus “News” will no longer be determined by corporate media enterprise, but rather by the true “in the moment” will of the people consuming the information.

In some cases, bloggers will rise to become pundits of worth (and I have no doubt that some will write from the hallowed halls of Huffingtondom!); in other cases, pre-existing news portals will partner with social media platforms to give membership access to news feeds, which will – in –turn – be uplifted and shared, or ignored by the social networks.

If you’re looking for a cutesy term, let me suggest “News-On-Demand” as a stop-gap term, but in truth that’s not really it. We will always rely on someone to find the story, but that may no longer be the person who crafts the story, or tells the story, or distributes the story.

PR and communications professionals serve their masters, the client who pays the bills. In this economic climate, few PR firms have the luxury to reeducate their clientele. Instead, I suggest we look not at the horse that pulls the cart to market, but rather at who may now be sitting in the driver’s seat.

I say Huffington Post should find new and compelling ways to organize social networks, so that they have ready and digestible access to information, and are thus empowered to quickly turn it in to “News”.

Perhaps the past year or two were all about FB and MySpace et al growing up. Now they have a chance to determine what they want to be. Some social networks will become small clubs for those who share specialized interests, others will remain platforms for the development of mobile apps (can you say Mafia Wars, iLike, and Farmville?), and still others will see the possibilities inherent in content partnerships, that offer their members value added content – not on a “Push” or “Pull” basis, but rather on a “Float” basis, whereby the information is offered up and lives or dies at the whim of the mob. If it is information of interest to the network, it will find increasing distribution. If not, it will disappear.

My rough 2 cents. My basic tenet is that PR professionals are no longer going to determine what is newsworthy and, to the surprise of still a few, nor are journalists.

London in 1927

(with thanks to H. Black for the link)

2 Steps Forward, 2 Steps Back

Storytelling is at the core of communication, and we get it right when the listener/reader/viewer leaves with more than they came with. In some instances, the story will impart information and enlightenment; in other cases, humor or inspiration.

What is important, always, is to ensure that the platform, channel, or mode of storytelling not become more impactful than the story itself. This was the problem that Technology companies struggled with throughout the latter part of the 20th Century and even up to the present day: Technology is SUPPOSED to be in service to the content or solution offering, but too many companies became enamored with their proprietary or adopted technology of choice, and subsumed the initial value of their offering to the lure of the latest tech wizardry.

As our mobile phones show us, the latest technology will very swiftly become a cumbersome paperweight, to those who insist on being “early adopters”. Companies such as Disney (“Little Einstein” DVDs), Leapfrog (a whole mess of “tools” that now litter playroom floors across the nation), and Fisher-Price have learned the hard way that a technology should only be employed if it truly serves the communicated purpose.  Of course Disney wanted to sell DVDs, but it promoted its ”Little Einstein” series as an intellectual and emotional enrichment program, and it was recently deeply embarrassed by the none-too-surprising revelation that its DVDs held little to zero value, in those particular areas. As a result, it has been forced to offer refunds to all consumers who purchased that series of DVDs. Examples such as this abound, all to say that when we develop a new way to tell stories, we should ponder whether the perceived advantages complement, replace, improve upon, or simply accessorize the core value of the traditional storytelling media: the voice or the written word.

When Guttenberg invented his press, and Christopher Latham Sholes subsequently invented the typewriter, these gentlemen unquestionably advanced the cause of storytelling (especially if you take MY handwriting as a case study in the challenges inherent prior to the printed word!). Edison and others who followed in his wake, brought storytelling to a new level, when they developed the mass appeal of Film, as a medium for enhancing the story.

The book, the radio, the film screen, and – arguably – the TV screen; all have served their purpose in increasing and enhancing the power of the story. They have also been often abused, platforms for the dissemination of content that represented everything from propaganda to junk to violence and more. The desire to sell consumer goods to the widest cross-section of society has led to the imperative to appeal to the lowest common denominator. This “dumbing down” of content has done little to advance the cause of storytelling, and technologies developed recently have sometimes contributed to this decline in intellectual and creative standards.

So, how do we assess the value of emerging channels and platforms that purport to represent the newest standards and advances in storytelling? Will these new tools and gewgaws deliver on their promise, or continue to contribute to the atrophy of our imaginations?

The latest gadget being touted comes from Japan, and is certainly compelling. I wonder, however, if this is a new take on an old system, or truly a new platform and concept in effective storytelling?

What do you think?