Farming 2.0

Cnn.com posted an interesting item today about the increasing use of twitter and smartphones in farming. Aside from using the phones to monitor weather, pesticide application, soil moisture, etc. (with an increasing number of apps in the works; cool!), what is particularly exciting to me are the implications this has for the local/sustainable food movements: 

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/02/twitter.farmer/index.html

Self-Expression is Over-Rated

Beth Canter, the social media networking consultant, is a blogger who not only writes smart things but has a talent for finding other smart bloggers and reblogging them.  What I love about her work (including the re-work) is that she is a pro.  As in p-r-o.  She has experience and so she doesn't just invent things (i.e. the wheel) and assume that no one else has, no one else knows what it will do, and no one else knows how it works.  No, as with all forms of media, new media also operate by certain kinds of tacit community rules, expectations, and norms.   And people like Beth have huge first-hand experience assessing those needs.  She doesn't just make it up.  This is a breath of fresh air in the world of new media insights, which come fast and furious and often don't hold any water or have any traction or whatever metaphor you want to use:  they just don't do it.

The insight today, in a blog post reblogged by Nina Simon, is that by far and away the most visitors to a website are spectators or, crudely, lurkers.  (Cat in the Stack readers will note that I've written numerous columns on "Lurkers Welcome!" and I know from this blog as well as from my Facebook life that most people watch, they don't actually do.)   The big insight here, though, is that watching isn't about not caring, it is not feeling confident of a point of entry.  This is why the simple "Like" check mark on Facebook gets so many more hits than "Comment."  You can like anything for any reason and it's a low point of entry to click on the "Like" box.   

Simon's advice, analogously, is to CONSTRAIN self-expression.  That seems contradictory to the Everyone Her/His Own Self-Creator rhetoric of Web 2.0, but it makes sense.  As she says, not everyone will paint an image on a mural if given a paint brush.  But give someone premixed paints and ask them to please fill in this one box, and they often cheerfully comply.   

Guess what?  It is the old Biz School truism:  collaboration doesn't just happen!   Collaboration needs planning, even in Web 2.0 world.  Except for cranks who love to zip in, leave a snarky comment, and then zip out, most people, faced with a blank COMMENT box, have no idea what to write and don't like the frightening feeling of leaving a mark that may live on the Internet forever.  Even my 20 year old friend, a Level 80 World of Warcraft computer genius,  expressed nervousness about blogging, putting ideas out there that would live long after he had his first job as an investment banker where snarkiness might not be the preferred mode, at least not in public.   But a simple, anonymous  task that contributes to a greater whole?  That's a different matter.

Anonymous participation, even mental or highly specific, should be part of the repertoire of Web 2.0 participatory choices.  You cannot enforce freedom of choice.   So then, we need an array of kinds of choices if we are really going to make participation participatory.   I like that concept a lot.

Here's the url for this very thoughtprovoking blog, with a shout out of appreciation to both Beth Kanter and Nina Simon:  http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/03/self-expression-is-over-rated-bett....

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And, below, is a truly beautiful YouTube video by Katie Hines, an undergraduate at Kansas State University, who works in the digital media lab with visual anthropologist Mike Wesch who makes some of the most deeply profound, inspiring, and incisive videos about the culture of the Internet, what it means, what it can do, what we want from it.  Katie, in this video, tackles issues of participation, anonymity, and intimacy.

Writing for Free: Anderson, Gladwell, and YOU Have an Opinion Too!

One reason I was abashed when the plagiarism accusations (justified, owned, apologized for, and, I hope, corrected)  came out about Chris Anderson's new book FREE is that I find him terrifically interesting and unusually thoughtful, even if his contribution is chiefly in raising timely questions, not answering them.  Fortunately, his unacknowledged borrowings from Wikipedia have not swamped the fact that we all urgently want a conversation on what is or isn't free and whether being free is or isn't good for us.

Here's the beginning salvo, fired by Malcom Gladwell, another popularizing author whom I admire very much for the way he brings complex questions into a national conversation.   Gladwell in the New Yorker and then Anderson's response in Wired.  

Here's the url for Gladwell's review, "Writing for Free."  You can feel his anxiety (justified, of course) in this writing, as he sees one after another of his fellow journalists left without jobs as this or that newspaper and magazine folds.   But are his conclusions logical, justified, the only way of thinking about the future of journalism (even if print newspapers and magazines are lost):  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090701/0422125421.shtml

Here is the punchline from Gladwell's review of Anderson and it is so true that I urge you to read this exchange and think about it.  I think Gladwell is exactly right in this conclusion:

"And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws."

Read them, and the energetic conversation about what it means for information to be "free" in an era of escalating debt, unemployment, layoffs, bankruptcies, and collapse.  Who pays in the end for what's free?  That is the question.  Attention to next year's HASTAC Scholars:   this will be a great forum topic.  In the meantime, let us know:  What do YOU think?   It won't cost you a cent.   After all, to be a HASTAC member doesn't cost you a thing.  No dues.  Nothing.   After all, HASTAC, like all information, wants to be free.  Right?  

Well, not exactly.  And that's Gladwell's point.  A lot of what seems, on the consumer end, to be free, isn't free at all when you look at the producers.  That is one of the many factors fudged by a glib definition of what a "prosumer" (producers who are also consumers) really is.   Production and consumption come with different outlays, different responsibilities, and, well, different costs.  And understanding the nature of those costs is what every communications media participant is trying to figure out for the digital age.  The real question isn't "is it free?" but "free to whom?"  And, what are the hidden costs of a zero pricetag?  And the hidden benefits of offering a product that costs something--in time if not in money--for "free."

Gladwell notes the perplexing examples of our time, that Apple may well make more from iPod downloads and iPhone aps then from the machinery; that the NY Times is struggling and having a hard time giving selling its products on line but the Wall Street Journal seems to be thriving with its pay-to-read online subscriptions.  Amazon makes more money from its technologies (software and hardware) for online product delivery than from the books it sells.  On and on.

These are complex issues for a fascinating and infinitely complex, transitional time, and give new twists and turns to Stewart Brand's original battle cry that "information wants to be free."