Tag: Values
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No News Corp. is good news … or is it?
As regular readers of this blog will know, I believe we are living through a profound cultural crisis as digital culture (OS3) undermines and overthrows literate culture (OS2). My new book, You Are Your Media, tracks this conflict across many different social spheres, from food to architecture to business and beyond. Remarkably, we can see…
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Rethinking 7 Generations
You may have heard of the 7 generations idea or concept or phrase. It is typically understood as being derived from First Nations culture and to mean that when making decisions today we should consider the implications of those decisions on people living 7 generations in the future. As such, it is a useful and…
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To Give or Not to Give – The Pros and Cons of Birthday Gifts
My kids have been invited to a lot of birthday parties over the years. One thing I’ve noticed (or to be more accurate, my wife has noticed…I only noticed her noticing it!) is that more and more kids are having parties where gifts are politely declined. “No gifts” has been scrawled on more than one…
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A Better Way to Occupy
Yesterday I introduced the idea that the greatest transformative potential for any social initiative lies in creating feedback loops between OS1 and OS3. By OS1 I mean oral culture and technologies and by OS3 I mean digital culture and technologies. I also said that in order to effectively implement such strategies, which I refer to…
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Bradley Manning’s Day In Court
Today, after almost 18 months in solitary confinement, having been denied access to lawyers, to family, to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and even having been denied clothes, Bradley Manning will for the first time face a judge. At his pre-trial hearing he will be formally charged with – among other things – “Aiding…
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Improvising Poetry and Our Digital Future
A couple days ago I posted a recording called Where The Bears Go by my duo The John Waynes (so named because it consists of John Sobol (me) and Wayne Kelso). Today I posted a second recording by The John Waynes called The Evil I. For those keeping score, Where The Bears Go is a…
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Jazz: An Unfinished Conversation (Race and Language in the Digital Age)
Jazz was – among other things – a century-long political conversation between Black Americans and White Americans. It was a musical, intellectual and spiritual conversation within a highly politicized social context whose axes were language, race and power. Jazz was also a conversation about technology, and about techno-cultures. To be specific, in jazz the conflict…
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Franky Rousseau Large Band – Terrific Jazz By Any Other Name
Last week a friend sent me a link to this provocative blog post by famed jazz trumpet player, Nicholas Payton, who argues that jazz is dead. To me this isn’t news, since I wrote the same thing in a lengthy piece in Toronto’s eyeweekly back in 1992. And like Payton, who is being berated by…
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Phone Hackers vs Facebook – the Future of Privacy Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about the Future of Privacy in light of the ongoing Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking by journalists in England. But in another courtoom on the other side of the Atlantic yesterday, Facebook was being held accountable for its massive invasions of privacy. Specifically, the American Federal Trade Commission concluded that Facebook deceived…
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Phone Hacking and the Future of Privacy
I have been keeping tabs on the Leveson Inquiry in the UK, which continues to deliver the most astonishing insights into contemporary media culture and its effect on the lives of British citizens. Today’s testimony was perhaps the most remarkable yet, although its hard to measure degrees of amazement when almost every witness offers mind-boggling…
SOBOLTALK 