As per the description on the TED site:
What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto — a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.
Take it away, Clay:
A fun and informative TED Talk by Joe Sabia, described thusly:
iPad storyteller Joe Sabia introduces us to Lothar Meggendorfer, who created a bold technology for storytelling: the pop-up book. Sabia shows how new technology has always helped us tell our own stories, from the walls of caves to his own onstage iPad.
I’m not working today – I’m sitting in my backyard and enjoying the flowers and the birds and the bugs. You should do something like that too. If you’re not or can’t – watch this – and then go do it anyway.
Cheers.
I miss Ze Frank’s daily web show – it was a continually awesome and inspirational journey shared by so many. Here he gives a recent TED Talk and recounts those key moments that revolved around using the net to share experiences.
Always a joy to revisit all things Ze.
Share this with someone.
Cheers.
I found this over at BoingBoing – It looks like one of those extraordinary RSA Animate works that visually distill a talk and embed it securely into the depths of your brain – but since it’s not on the RSA site proper I suspect it’s actually just a promo for Steven Johnson’s book done in the same style.
Regardless – it’s pretty good and worth 4 minutes of your time just for the nifty drawings:
Or – you can just watch his great TED Talk and get 13 minutes more of Johnson’s good ideas.
Cheers.
The RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has a massive collection of thought provoking talks online, more in-depth stuff than found on TED.
Sometimes these talks are distilled by the folks at CognitiveMedia into abridged animated versions – RSAnimate – that cut to the core of the subject by adding entertaining images and text and ignoring the boring old talking head babbling at the podium from the original discourse. Good stuff. Very good stuff. Case in point: Daniel Pink‘s talk on what it is that drives us to do anything.
Enjoy.
Check out the other talks too – especially the one by Jeremy Rifkin on Empathic Civilization.
Cheers.
Thanks, Fred!
Temple Grandin talks at the recent TED conference about how the world needs all kinds of minds. Fascinating stuff.
We inevitably seek to shape, categorize, reform and alter the way our kids (and ourselves) think, behave and interact with the world. We do this because we want our kids (and ourselves) to be perceived as normal, to fit in, to be a part of the world instead of being apart from it.
I am all too aware of the role bipolar behaviour influences the arts. Autism, in all its many forms, has often been regarded as a strange dysfunction or aberration of the brain instead of as a possible evolutionary step for our species. Doubtless if the grand scientific minds of the 1800′s were to see how most of behave today we’d all be locked up in Bedlam.
While some forms of brain difference are manifestly disabling there are many many traits of the human mind that allow some of us to become an Einstein, Newton, Gould, Rainman, or even Temple Grandin.
I’m no flippin’ expert – I only have my own experience to bring to bear upon this – and I don’t want to go all Jerry Mander and Neil Postman on you but I suspect the rise in autistic symptoms within our younger population may indeed be in response to the overwhelming deluge of unmediated information. Unlike Postman and Mander, I don’t see this as a bad thing – it just is – and, as in times past, the brain will find a way to survive, to protect itself and ultimately thrive.
I don’t know. I just think she gave a really cool talk. Lemme go think about it.
Cheers.
P. S. Although Postman and Mander can come across as intensely pessimistic luddites they do have some good thoughts on the media cesspool we are drowning in. I remember reading Mander’s The Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television when I was working for Henson on Fraggle Rock. During a break in shooting I was half-in / half-out of this round foam blob creature that ate Doozers and poring through the pages when Jim asked me: “What are you reading?”. I gleefully held up the book and he snorted: “That’s a bit inflammatory, don’t you think?” to which I replied: “Not if you keep paying my salary!”
Anyway – there’s a really good piece by Mander that is more recent over at the Lapis Magazine site. It’s called The Homogenization Of Global Consciousness: Media, Telecommunications & Culture. Give it a read and then let me know how easy you sleep at night.
I’d really love to see him and Kevin Kelly go at it.
The title of this post is deceptive because I’m in a rush to get the fuck out of here and I couldn’t think of anything else to call it.
My son is working on a project for school – he has to give a presentation on a country and his assigned country was France. First thing we do is haul out the globe and see where France is in relation to where we are on this ball in space. Start big – work inward toward the details.
Parag Khanna gave a talk at TED about maps and borders and how we should observe the past while planning for the future. He used a favourite quote of mine from Mark Twain:
History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.
Khanna shows how maps are not just a product of where politicians and armies decide to draw lines in the sand. The influences that carved the myriad of coloured patches on our globe – always shifting – can be observed and predicted.
Apropos of nothing to do with this post really, other than the title, is a book by Michael Chabon Maps & Legends. It’s about entertaining storytelling. It is fucking brilliant. Read it.
We tell stories about ourselves all the time. That’s how define who we are. Our maps upon the globe and tucked within the pages of countless dusty and outdated atlases are a vestigial layer of our story. Who we are or were. Where we are or were. How and why is also concealed within those geopolitical quilts – if we know how to look.
The stories we tell to our children and to each other are maps of our journey through life. The borders shift and change. The colours alter their hue or fade with time. Fact or fiction they are all stories, they are all maps and they all change.
The project on France is doing very nicely, thank you. By the time my son makes his presentation in class he will know as much as he can about the history of France, the culture, the language, the food, and the geography of that sectioned off surface chunk of this spinning globe in the black of our solar system. I’m already very proud of him because when we first looked at the globe he said:
The world isn’t really like this – we could draw lines anywhere we want – and you still can’t see them from space. I think we just decide to make them because we want to be different.
Smart kid.
I have no idea where my future map will take me or what the lay of the land may be – but I do know I my borders have been expanded because my story now includes my son and his view of the world.
I’m out of here.
Cheers.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
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