Human Microphones thwart heavy-handed bans

November 6, 2011January 26, 2012 / Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

I’ve always been tempted to play with IABC‘s tagline, “Be Heard.” Do we business communicators really want to be the noise makers and talking heads? Or do we rather want to be the ‘inside voice’ of business strategy?

That’s why when I first began paying attention to the ‘Occupy” movement (OWS and its franchises Occupy Oakland, Occupy Denver, Occupy Phoenix etc) I argued that we shouldn’t be too hasty to think of them as a fringe movement craving just to be heard. Hard to pigeon hole, it was too easy to dismiss them because they didn’t fit the model of activist movements. I was reminded of something innovators have reminded us from time to time. Disruptive ideas do not stem from existing templates. Marshall McLuhan put it well when he observed “I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish.”

Watching OWS evolve, it is interesting to see how they are inventing a new template for being heard. Make that being taken seriously. They may be leaderless, but have found ways to have their own media team, financial system, and trademark bids. And I don’t mean media in the way we tend to think of it -the kind that come with a lens, a ‘like’ button, or segmented followers.

Much of the media we see being used in these movements are crude hand written signs.

When OWS group figured out that since electronic speakers and microphones are banned in public places (or require special permits) they created what’s known as the ‘Human Microphone’ –basically humans, en mass, repeating something a speaker says so that the sentences get carried across vast spaces of crowds. It sounds like a messy echo, but it is richer than the echo-chamber.

They have also begun another remarkable project in amplification: they are printing their own newspaper. Ok, that’s not new media. But it’s old media in a brand new way. (The fact that it is called, provocatively, the ‘Occupy Wall Street Journal’ may be a brilliant stroke of creativity.) But what really interests me is how they could do it with no real editorial hub, no newsroom, heck, no editor! (CORRECTION: See comment from Jen Sacks, below.)

There’s a livestream, of course, and someone who amounts to a news anchor.

How will this change media? Even if you’re not directly working in the media how this movement works with the groundswell will become one of the most lasting tutorials for anyone wanting to be heard.

When Robotics is more science than fiction

October 29, 2011October 29, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

A few weeks back I took my Robotics team to see one of the coolest robots. It has ‘eyes’ and a brain, and it knows enough to get itself out of trouble, even when its handlers are not in the next room —let’s say 34 million miles away! This was the Mars Rover, at the Mars Space Facility at Arizona State University.

The purpose of the visit was to get students to start thinking of technology as something much bigger than the gadgets they tend to get exposed to. To many 4th and 5th graders a computer is a box with a screen. A remote control is a piece of plastic with buttons. And a robot tends to be thought of as an anthropomorphic device that takes orders.

Is our education system to blame?

Perhaps our society has to face up to the bigger challenges facing young people today. Challenges that may not be solved just because these kids become savvy using an iPhone app. Or being able to define the Pythogorean theorem.

Apart form a tour of the Rover, the students got to meet the NASA robotics team who demonstrated the simple-looking but complicated bots they are working on, using PVC pipes, , scrap metal, Styrofoam, and wire. Twenty years from now one of these could be making the big step to solve unsolvable water, energy or safety issues back here on earth. I think my students walked away from there realizing that robotics is more science than science fiction.

They took notes! They asked a lot of questions!

One of them, a budding designer, is making very complex sketches of his ideal robot. Someday all children will…

I will leave that sentence unfinished –for now.

But as adults, there’s work to be done. Recently President Obama addressed students at the Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center. He was imploring students to think like the future inventors and entrepreneurs. This country is sorely lacking them.

“Now, imagine if America was first to develop and mass-produce a new treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched …or flexible display soldiers …or a car that drives itself. Imagine how many workers and businesses and consumers would prosper from those breakthroughs.”

Those things aren’t science fiction, he noted. It is the “kind of adventurous, pioneering spirit that we need right now.”

My class of 14 students is relatively small. We do not have the funds of a Carnegie Mellon. But we have big ideas. Wide-open eyes. Some of them are already programming the Lego NXT brick to perform some neat manoeuvres.

Stick them in front of the TV –if you hate them

October 25, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Whenever I bring up this topic it turns unpopular, for obvious reasons.

It is unpopular to say this, not just as a communicator, but as a parent. Adults have gotten so used to using television as a baby sitter –and as a back seat pacifier in the SUV — that it offends them to hear the contra view. So here are two recent reports that makes you realize that there are better ways to engage our kids.

Television and problem-solving skills. This was a report in the Journal of American Academy of Pediatrics on the effects on fast-paced cartoons on memory and .
There is also a Kaiser Family report on Generation M2 – Media in the lives of 8 to 18 year olds.

I had brought this topic up (“TV plus children equals brain damage“) in 2005 on this blog, and it still gets a lot of hits. Now I know why. It’s an evergreen topic, simply because there will always be dissenters who think a screen could do no harm.

There has to be a downside of where we are headed. Think about this one fact: The Kaiser Family report found that young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by one hour and 17 minutes daily –up from 6:21 to 7:38. That is almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day! TIME magazine did a cover story on this in 2006. A lot has changed since then, obviously.

If you are too busy multitasking to read the report, here’s the podcast!

What does Big Brother looks like in a post-Jobs world?

October 10, 2011October 10, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Those in marketing have this quaint memory of Apple and its overthrow of those who enforce “information purification directives” in a stifling “garden of pure ideology” (the words spoken by the image of Big Brother on a giant screen).

If it was revolution, it was the triumph of the little guy over big intimidating folks such as IBM, not government.

But what does Big Brother look like today? What would George Orwell have railed about if he wrote about it now?

Few have heard about a program dubbed Einstein –essentially a government surveillance program. Details are understandably sketchy. It was set up for network security of government properties, but aslso to conduct surveillance, to look for the bad guys. Einstein came to be in 2009 as an early warning system, and was described this way:

Developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Einstein software provides real-time monitoring and analysis of Internet traffic flowing in and out of federal agency networks.

There is more here, and here. You would expect governments to get with the program and be vigilant on who’s accessing an intending to compromise their networks. I would be upset if they aren’t.

But then, with the ability to monitor social networking, it gets more complicated. It is one close hop from monitoring who’s clicking on links and from where they are arriving on, say a Federal web site, to doing real-time surveillance of those people via their social networks. It’s also so easy to do. Easy to eavesdrop on a Skype call, or drop in on a Facebook user and check on the frequency of exchanges with a particular person, and do some data-mining based on that user’s friends, photos, interests…

Sounds like the cloak and dagger stuff in the movies? Think again. Two years ago, the Boston Globe reported on social media savvy undercover cops, and in another case, AT&T was sued for helping the government intercept phone calls. Today Facebook is being drawn into this debate about how much we should share, and what it “knows” about us, with one researcher alleging that it could track you even if you have logged out of Facebook.

Somehow I am not shocked, or worried about this. That’s the Faustian bargain we make when we use these services, many of which come at no cost to us. I’ve made the case before that the disease of over-sharing, and our need to communicate with our friends-of-friends-of-friends every moment and minutae of our lives invites this.

We could of course turn these off, or do something else: provide information that would confuse the heck out of anyone watching over our keystrokes. There’s a line in the 1984 commercial that shows us how, and how we could talk them “bury them with their own confusion.”

Go ahead, poke Big Brother in his eye!

“The world has lost an amazing human being.”

October 5, 2011October 11, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Hard to forget, the first PC I ever owned was the Apple Color Classic*.

But apart from giving many of us in advertising and marketing a simple (as in non-geeky) on-ramp to computing, we remember him for his vision, and his humanity.

I found this statement from him, made in 2005.

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share…

…Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.”

*I have not used a Mac for the past 15 years.

iPad or eReader? If you had to pick one, which would it be?

October 4, 2011October 25, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I am getting perilously close to getting a tablet, but having held out for long enough, the choice just got easier.

I was never convinced about the early tablets for the simple reason that they just did not handle enough on the production side of things I would want one to do. I have talked to many about the fact that these were initially conceived as ‘consumption devices’ and every person I spoke to would add the “yes but…” factor. Meaning they put up with what an iPad lacked and found comfort in what it enabled.

But Amazon showed off the latest Kindle Fire last week, and it seems as if the debate gets more complicated.

So now, instead of getting a tablet that also behaves like an eReader, I could get an eReader that works like a tablet.

The reviews give me plenty of backup for my bias, especially the fact that you get the Android operating system, and I could potentially get more out of the Amazon eco-system than Apple’s.

The only thing that concerns me is how Jeff Bezos positions the Kindle Fire. “We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet …We think of it as a service.” I can see why he said that, for market share purposes. It is better to create your own category than fight for space in a crowded one. But if it also meant that these devices were mainly on-ramps to the online store, then it makes it nothing more than a shopping cart camouflaged to look like a thin sheet of glass.

I could see where schools could find Kindles more attractive than iPads, if only because they have the promote reading first, after which follows sharing, research, note-taking, and content creation for collaborative purposes.

If you’re an educator, I’d like to find out on which side of the fence you are. Just recently, Teach for America (TFA) members started experimenting with iPads. I recently wrote about it, especially the emergence of an always-on classroom –first in universities, and every now and then, in high schools.

Send me your recommendations, your concerns, and your predictions!

Graphics, info-graphics and flat-out dubious statistics

September 30, 2011September 30, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

I thought I loved info-graphics, until they were run over my marketing people.

Seriously. I used to find the art of info-graphics irresistible long before we they grew like weeds, online. The people who wee good at it were illustrators who worked for newspapers. Some complex heist, or a catastrophic event would be nicely compressed into an info-graphic in a newspaper.

Now there are so many info-graphics, I found this infographc about infographics!

But what exactly is an info-graphic?

It is usually used as a synonym of Data Visualization. But is it? The simple definition of DV is that it tells a story using data points. But it need not be a ‘graphic’ per se. It could be a dynamic time line, such as the Time Line produced by the Guardian, London. They created what seems like a nice graphic of the incidents of rioting in London in August. But it contains a slider that allows the reader to move through the days from 6th August onward, as towns from Tottenham to Ealing to… Liverpool reported incidents.

Here’s what it looks like. Click on image to launch visualization.

Contrast this to an Info-graphic, Big Brothers, about satellites that countries from Mexico to Pakistan to Iran have sent up.

To me the best info-graphic does these five things:

It summarizes a large volume of data in a snapshot.
It tells a story by helping our eye navigate complexity, and move between icons or illustrations that represent events, people, trends, hierarchies.
It is great at providing supplemental information on a page, when the publisher does not want to lose the reader who might turn the page, and jump to something else.
It provides a sense of scale, through visual tweaks, to explain something that might be difficult to comprehend, even with traditional data we cram into presentations (tables, lists, quotes, price points…) The orbiting satellites info-graphic above does a great job of this.
It provides direction, and relationships of where that direction might take you. The simplest info-graphic for me is the compass. I do not need to know the ‘degree’ of the direction, as long as I have the four data points. The best known inf-graphic in this category is the London Underground map.

So what then, is an info-graphic? To Alberto Cairo, an info-graphic specialist, and author of Infographia, who teaches this stuff,

“Infographics are difficult to define precisely because of their multiple and flexible nature….an information graphic is an aid to thinking and understanding.

He goes on to say that an info-graphic makes patterns arise, helps readers stumble upon trends, and it does this in a very small space. Because an info-graphic is so easy grab attention, especially in a world where few people have tolerance for long-form content (such as this post; sorry folks!) an info-graphic can be completely distorted and not get too mush scrutiny.

I am working on an article on just this topic. So if you have some examples -the good, the bad, the completely distorted– please leave a comment here or send me a tweet.

I will leave you with a great resource by Aaron Weyenberg. His post, “How to distort data” looks at the dangers that lie here.

Be warned. This is not a short form content, but it does have some cool graphics!

Hoipolloireport

Angelo Fernando's blog since 2004

Author: Angelo Fernando

Stick them in front of the TV –if you hate them

“The world has lost an amazing human being.”

Graphics, info-graphics and flat-out dubious statistics