Just after the Iran election, Twitter emerged as news.  It seemed not only to be able to share information about what was happening in Iran with folks following events around the world, but Twitter was also encouraging the ability of protesters to congregate spontaneously and keep each other informed of developments in real time.

I work with Left/Progressive organizers across the country, talking with maybe six to ten out-of-state activists each week. In a week I’m in email communication with several dozen. In Illinois, far more.  Over the course of a three-month period, I cycle through communication with almost 600 organizers in 30 states, trying to touch base with each four times a year.  In addition, I consult with In These Times, a revered Left/Progressive print publication.  I mostly work with In These Times as a local expert on the Internet and social media.

So, I have a pretty broad view of ongoing American Left strategies and tactics to accomplish specific goals.  Regarding my area of expertise, the Internet, the independent Progressive movement is at the very beginning of becoming aware of the power of horizontal, online social networks.

Right now, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the others are enhancing communication…

A pattern I’ve noticed among professionals I know is the tendency to share the benefits of one’s expertise by actually imparting knowledge on how to engage in that professional’s profession.  A psychotherapist has at her or his disposal a host of interventions to bridge the client to the client’s desired state.  The intervention often chosen is the one where the client is invited to view and feel about himself or herself in a similar fashion to the way the therapist views and feels about the client.  The client is invited to experience the world psychodynamically.  The practitioner guides the client to share the practitioner’s model as a strategy to achieve the desired change.

I’ve noticed this in several contexts.  Outstanding teachers often are not only communicating information, they are sharing how the information is communicated.  There is sometimes a tendency to teach by making the student a teacher.

Outstanding political organizers are not just engaging in the step-by-step process of achieving goals, they are at the same time training and guiding the activists that they are working with to emulate the organizer’s behavior.

Excellence in communication may not just be about nurturing an environment that supports the exchange of information…

Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been explored in the context of what authors, ideas, and social forces suggested and guided Darwin to come up with the specific principles of his theory.  At the other end of the influence equation, many books have been written focusing on how that theory influenced other writers, contemporary society and the generations that followed.

Darwin’s other two theories have been offered little of this kind of attention.  His theory of sexual selection, having become influential over the last 40 years, has not compelled the kind of cottage industry of influence divination characteristic of Darwin’s first theory.  Perhaps it is because the female plays such an important role.  Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, the theory where he outlines how the effects of the environment may influence evolution in a single generation, has been ignored.

Society and evolutionary theory are evolving.  A new social milieu is emerging.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been examined for how it was influenced and for what it has influenced.  Consider what evolutionary theory may next emerge in this new barrierless, horizontal, transparent and diverse world.

Hierarchy is becoming less effective at controlling resources.  The “might is right” age-old leverage paradigm…

Once a month I attend a group of about 25 social media and web 2.0 aficionados specializing in the use of online tech tools for nonprofits.  At Net Tuesday some are programmers, many are staff members in nonprofit organizations, there is the occasional entrepreneur, a web application company employee and consultants.

I got on Twitter the beginning of this year, largely as a result of how often discussions turned to that application.  I finally started using it this May.

My connection to technology is, I believe, unique.  I am a technophobe by many definitions.  I experience anxiety when having to interpret and use hardware like a cell phone or a recording device, such as a VCR or DVD.  So, I don’t explore.  On my cell phones I’ve never learned to do anything but dial a number.  I don’t know how to text or retrieve a phone number.  Until the last couple years I just left my phone off unless I was making an outgoing call.  I can’t get the VCR working without my wife’s assistance.

Perhaps my greatest technological letdown was buying my first computer, a Mac, around 1992, in no small part to be able to log onto the…

I’ve been reading Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Having read Trippi, Rheingold, Shirky and others, I thought I’d go back to the source of many insights regarding media and social transformation.

McLuhan is a very odd experience. He often writes in an oracular style, allowing the reader several ways to interpret what he says. As a specialist in the process rather than in the content forms of human mass communication, he nonetheless relies upon a deep reservoir of literary references to offer texture to what he writes. The result is truly Delphic. It feels like much that is communicated can be taken in opposite ways. From my perspective, it feels like he misses much by committing so deeply to an ethnocentricity that places the works of modern culture above ancient societies along with a deep reverence for Progress.

He evidences a methodology and spirituality that revere process yet neglects to embrace all process as part of a larger whole. But, then again, maybe not.

McLuhan writes, “If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the…

Mysticism is largely about shifting identity. There are techniques–strategies and tactics–that encourage opportunities to identify at levels alternative to what occurs within one person’s body or one’s imagination. When the opportunities appear, an individual can choose to identify with something different from himself or herself.

People are engaging in such opportunities across society. Mysticism could not be further from their minds.

There was a time in our species’ past, perhaps not so very long ago, maybe as few as 3,000 generations ago, when our experience was not characterized by individuality. One of the several profound differences between then and now was that then we had a far less concise idea of the passing of time. This was true socially and biologically. Socially things just did not change much. There were no fads or fashions. Progress as a concept is barely 250 years old, let alone tens of thousands.

Biologically our brains were not sorting in a narrative, sequential path. When narrative reality emerged and spoken language acquired the ability to parse out past from present and present from future, we acquired individuality at the same evolutionary moment. With our ability to disassociate in time we were also able to imagine…

Maybe fifteen years ago, Natalie Cole recorded a vocal track on top of one of her father’s productions, resulting in a duet between a dead Nat King Cole and his daughter.  Drew Friedman, the cartoonist, inked a panel with a skeleton performing with Natalie, suggesting an incongruence in the production.  For some, the duet felt contrived.

A unique video emerged on the web several months ago.  In the video, street musicians from cities across Europe, Africa, South America and the U.S. perform where they live, in the street, with headphones on.  They contribute both to the tracks of the performance and to the video that was recording the series of integrated performances.  The song is Stand By Me.

As in the Susan Boyle video, several story lines come together to create a powerful presentation.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, there was a TV show called Tales of the Texas Rangers.  What I loved was the beginning.  A single lawman is walking down the street.  Over the course of the growing intro music, he is joined and followed by others until by the end there are maybe 30 earnest lawmen walking in a triangle…

Just finished a quick read, A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright.  At first, I found the work annoying.  An approximately 70-page overview of human history discussed none of the competing paradigms but stuck with the conventional default view of history.  An overview observing competing theories would be interesting, but that was not Wright’s goal.  After the ~70-page set-up, he started talking about environmental destruction.

What Wright did is set up a playing field to discuss various ways we may choose to destroy ourselves.  It is a sort of CliffsNotes version of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel plus Collapse without the erudition, insight or sense of doom.

One of the more interesting parts of the book is Wright’s comparison of Sumer and the Easter Islands with the ancient Greeks and Romans.  In Sumer and the Easter Islands, they destroyed themselves, possibly without the knowledge of how they were doing so or without a civic structure to stop the process, but the ancient Greeks and Romans observed how specifically they were agriculturally compromising their future.  The Greeks and Romans did not act to stop the self destruction.

The drama that we, more than six billion people, are in the…

For several months now, the Republicans have been seeking to find a way to demonize the Obama Administration, experimenting with the words “socialist” and “fascist” to see which word seems more powerful at evoking fear.

“Fascist” suggests a one-party government controlled by a small elite, often with close ties to specific corporations.  Fascism is often characterized by an atmosphere composed of fear and reprisal.

“Socialist” seems to imply a government focused on the group instead of the individual, denying individuals their desire to do as they please while seeking ways to make the less economically advantaged individuals within the group more secure.  Implied is the denigration of individual rights.

In both cases, there is the implied “in” group and “out” group.  Republicans are seeking ways to have people who identify with being the out group identify with Republicans, who identify themselves as the out group.  Regarding fascism, Republicans work the meme that Democrats are in total control.  Declaring socialism, they imply that the individual has lost all ability to achieve success.

Republicans and Democrats are mirror images of each other in many ways, particularly as regards the military, military contracts, lobbying-based government, foreign relations and both parties agreeing on how…

More and more work is emerging that is noting the influence of the Internet on society as regards the web as a communications media informing how we view the world.

This is a process rather than language version of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis that the structure of the process through which information is disseminated deeply influences the content that is shared.

Marshall McLuhan understood and communicated that different media suggested different solutions to the problems that society wrestles with.  One-to-many media in a hierarchical society limit an ability to consider horizontal, many-to-many solutions.  There are specific problems created by allegiance to specific media, problems particularly difficult to deconstruct in an environment committed to those specific media.

One-to-many media encourage apathy and a belief that we as individuals can only have a limited effect.  This helplessness keeps hierarchical societies stratified.

The Internet encourages an experience of personal empowerment by offering individuals an ability to achieve goals and communicate in fashions that result in change.  There is a not so subtle realignment of orientation to identifying with a group as a means to specific ends.  On the web, becoming a member of a group is quick and seamless.  Achieving ends becomes quick and…

At a gathering of a group of seven friends in April, folks in their 40s to 60s, someone mentioned the Susan Boyle video.  Everyone had seen it after being directed to it by other friends.  On that particular day, over 35 million people had viewed the most popular version of the video.

I was deeply moved by the piece as had been the other people in the discussion.  There seemed numerous layers to the production.  We began parsing out some of those layers as have millions since Susan Boyle appeared that night.

There was a lifting of veils on several levels, usually characterized by a reversal of expectations.

Most obviously there was the ugly duckling story.  Expectations were flipped completely as an expectation of the mundane was replaced by an experience of the exceptional.

There was the participation in a sadistic ritual of expecting to observe the destruction of someone’s dear dream to instead becoming aware that we had been participating in a sadistic ritual.  The power of Boyle’s art ripped away the very context that had created the opportunity for her performance to occur.

A deep congruence emerged in her performance that is perhaps so rare as to be…

As a member of the board of directors of the old and respected print publication In These Times (ITT), I have a front row seat observing media and social transformation.  As our society changes, so does its institutions.  In These Times, like many print businesses, is facing change.

Perhaps unique to this situation is that ITT is itself a publication that represents the forces of change, having represented a Left/Progressive perspective for several decades.

In These Times is transitioning to a board-of-editors format from a traditional paid-staff paradigm, forced into this alternative organizational and production structure by an unforgiving economic environment.  There is no irony here.  As a harbinger of change, ITT is changing.

Across the country, there is much talk of the 1930s both because our economy feels informed by what happened last time things were this bad, but also because it was in the 1930s that there was a powerful societal shift from corporate interests to the commons.  In the 1930s, that shift was characterized by hierarchical institutions championing positions that empowered those with almost no ability to help themselves.  The unions exhibited strength and vision.  The Democratic Party sometimes reflected this grass roots, “common man” perspective.

Eighty…

I’ve been a search engine optimization professional since 1999.  I get paid more for this than anything else I specifically know how to do.  It requires no tech savvy (I am technologically impaired) but primarily an awareness of pattern, the implication of those patterns as regards to strategy, and flexibility of behavior.

Muddling through how Google works for a decade, I’ve made discoveries, changed my behavior and watched the results.  Google responds to changes that optimizers make.  Optimizers modify their behaviors.  Over the years what I do to make possible high rankings for my clients, and my own sites, becomes more and more limited to what I believe Google will not penalize in the future.  Often, behavior that Google rewarded at one point in this evolution Google turned around and penalized at a later time.  Though I am very good at what I do, much continues to confuse me.  I have concluded that Google uses random variables in its algorithm to make its behavior less predictable.  That’s what I would do.  I continue to make discoveries regarding what works best, often by accident.  I notice a site doing particularly well, a site subject to some particular linking strategy, traffic pattern,…

For about a year and a half, I’ve been mulling over an idea that involves tracking ideas as they move across the web.  I posted that idea here.  I’ve talked to programmers and various other folks.  Responses have ranged from deep enthusiasm to a shrug.

Basically, a web application with social networking interface would allow anyone to create or pass on a message or document, and one could note participation in a project in a way that the breadth (number of participants), depth (degrees of separation), speed (number of people added in particular time periods) and span (geographic spread) of the idea would be traceable across the web through the display of detailed relationship hierarchy or lineage trees displaying the branching of the idea through the web.  A reports function would allow an ability to run comparisons of ideas across the web.  The structure of idea emergence, distribution and evolution could be examined.

Portions of this programming are up and running (click here) in the PJEP.org website, where online boycotts, petitions, eletters and fundraisers are traced across the various participating users.

It just struck me that this idea might make sense in the…

There is a phenomenon in linguistics where language complexity is directly related to how isolated a particular language is from its neighbors.  A new language is difficult to learn for adults.  When several languages rub up against each other, and adults find themselves speaking curtailed versions of one another’s lingos, languages impacted most by these mash-ups simplify, lose endings, abbreviate and drop challenging sounds.  When adults have to learn a language, the language suffers.

A small, isolated island nation may experience the opposite effect.  When only children are required to learn the language, the language, in both sounds and grammar, tends to proliferate novelties.  Children, without the inhibiting convention of adult habits, get creative.  Those adult conventions that are extremely challenging to outsider adults are things that children learn effortlessly.

The most complex languages in the world tend to be those of isolated aboriginals or a people not impacted by their neighbors for many centuries.  When you leave a language to be learned by only children, there is a multiplication of the unique.

What would it be like if that period of time characterized by the linking of countless associations with specific sounds, and the joyous experience that accompanies the…

I saw this piece appear in March:  Too Much Facebook could cause Autism in Children.  A doctor in the UK suggested that social networking applications were encouraging dissociation, making it more difficult for children to engage in relationship.

“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment,” said neurologist Susan Greenfield.

Social networking applications do seem to be changing consciousness, and it may be the case that the changes do exhibit some features of early childhood, but I would suggest that living in the moment, a moment characterized by massive amounts of incoming information offered in a fashion that makes integration of that information possible, is a good thing.

There have been other studies that concluded that there are correlations between watching TV and autistic behavior.  That may be the case.  Still, comparing social networking to watching TV is like suggesting a hike through nature collecting butterflies is equivalent to vacuuming the living room for dust mites.  I think professor Greenfield is confusing the two.

Getting up…

My small firm serves mostly the seven communities north of Chicago along Lake Michigan, the North Shore and about 70 Chicago North Side businesses.

I have a smaller territory than most web design, maintenance and marketing services because Lake Michigan creates a wall preventing my prospecting to the east.  This barrier also insulates me from competition to the east.  I can only reasonably cold call businesses 40 minutes away.  If a local business is farther than 40 minutes away, the time it takes to go to the several appointments to complete a site and maintain a client over time becomes prohibitively long.  The same thing works in reverse.  Few design firms from outside this area prospect where I work and live.

So, I have a relatively stable client base.  I serve affluent communities.  My firm places an emphasis on service.  I have a smaller territory but relatively little competition.

When I started this business in 1999, I sprinted for several years, working 70-hour weeks in order to become firmly established while most shops and services still had no sites.  I figured the day would come when every business had a site.  I estimated that it would be easier to build…

In other places on this site, I’ve described my hypotheses that there were specific societal repercussions resulting from the youngest children forming the bulk of immigrating individuals.  The older children tend to stay with or near the family of origin.  This was particularly true up to about five generations ago when inherited land would go to the oldest children and primogeniture laws disinherited younger sons.

I hypothesize that the result was that the United States received immigrants who were both more creative than the status quo and more comfortable within an environment of innovation.  A community’s artists are often made up of the maturational-delayed males (it is my hypothesis that youngest sons are more likely to be maturational delayed), the narcissists and creative types.  Innovators and entrepreneurs often are made up of these risk-takers and societal outsiders.  In other words, the American male classic personality type–creative, selfish, independent and innocent–are features of the maturational-delayed males.  These are the immigrants to America.

This is all conjectural.  Indeed, this site is filled with a vast, interlocking series of conjectures based upon both established studies and unproved hypotheses.  Nevertheless, spying new implications of the foundation thesis and sharing those suggestions is largely what…

My fourth profession was as a sales rep selling mostly greeting cards and gifts to shops and chains in the Chicago area.  I’d tried to make it as a girdle and bra factory executive (family business), free lance illustrator and graphic designer and as a publisher of greeting cards (mostly my own illustrations).  The selling of other people’s greeting cards evolved to become a healthy repping firm with several employees covering over a thousand stores across the state.

My undergraduate degree was mostly devoted to fine arts with an emphasis on psychology.  Most of my rep colleagues were about making money, with one exception.

Leo Burke eventually quit repping to eventually become an academic at Notre Dame specializing in alternative business models after having achieved success at humanizing Motorola as an executive specializing in executive interpersonal relations.  A colleague of Ken Wilber, Leo has used his life to offer integrative business models, influenced by Eastern practices of honor and deep appreciation.  Before all that Leo was a sales rep selling greeting cards.

Back in the 1980s, Leo and I were both running repping firms, often both of us selling mildly competing fine arts, post-hippie, new age or aesthetic-driven product lines. …

The company that would do no evil has little heart.  Google’s attention continues to focus on those larger “brands” or corporations that it sees as peers in a global economic landscape dominated by corporate, controlling interests.  Google encourages the status quo in several ways, using conventions that concentrate wealth with the very few.

Google’s famous algorithm encourages those sites with the most incoming links to rise to the top of rankings.  Google has difficulty judging value outside a context of popularity or the simulated popularity that comes with businesses buying links to their sites to get high rankings.  Google theoretically ranks respect.  What it often only ranks is how much money a business is willing to spend to appear to be getting respect.  Or, it ranks how large a corporation has become, presupposing that respect comes with size.

In the Google universe, each planet or business has size and gravity that can be determined by measuring mass.  Google’s algorithm presupposes that mass, respect as determined by incoming links or established brand, is the only variable that determines gravity.  There is more to respect than popularity or power.  Google has no algorithm for measuring integrity.

Google is losing integrity in the…

I’ve been running a web development firm since January 1999.  Google and my firm were born a few months from each other.  By chance, I began tracking Google’s rise shortly after its appearance, noting the efficacy of its search perimeters along with that of its competition.

Though Google was a very powerful tool early in its career, that muscular efficiency has diminished.  That seems due to several factors.

Those folks whose job it is to figure out how Google works to achieve higher rankings often performed their job well, depreciating the searches that Google offered.  Corporations able to pay the most money for professional optimizers tended to get the highest rankings.  Google’s results often showed which firms had the most resources to pay for position.  Google’s algorithms could not distinguish value from money.

Still, if you typed in “Chicago photographer,” you got a list of Chicago photographers on the first page, individuals seeking to sell their services to searchers looking for what photographers had to offer.  That is not the case now.

Google decided to go public in 2004.  On November 15, 2004, they enacted the first of several major algorithm changes, pushing many of the optimized sites from top…

I am a paid professional specializing in search engine optimization.  I happened into this aspect of my profession by mistake.  I decided to prepare seven town directories for the seven communities just north of Chicago that I was targeting.  There were close to 1,800 retail and service outlets in those towns.  In my usual obsessional fashion, I proceeded to photograph the exterior of the almost 1,100 independent businesses and prepare for each a one-page webpage within one of the seven directories.  Four stores objected.  The rest got a web presence at no charge.  For the chains, I just linked to their national sites.  This was in the year 2000.

The idea was to integrate all local commercial activity onto the web.  For the stores and services that contracted with me to build and maintain a multipage site, I was providing a bonus image with a picture in the directories.  I estimated that to keep the clients, I had to bring them traffic.  The directories performed that job, bringing my clients business (at no extra charge), thus helping to make it possible for me to keep my clients long term.

Something very odd was happening while I built out these directories,…

In the previous four pieces, I’ve been exploring the federal government founding, funding and maintaining new job-creation institutions.  The government would reward individuals gathering respect in the form of traffic and time spent on websites serving media, education and art.  The government would not decide who would receive micropayments for each visitor and how long they spent on the site or watching a video.  That would be decided by the traffic numbers.  This is a model that trusts the wisdom of the crowd’s redistributing the crowd’s tax dollars to those whose work the crowd admires.

There would be the generation of high quality news by amateurs and professionals across the planet, high quality educational pieces as determined by the testing scores of viewers and popular art as determined by the number of people lingering over the artists’ work.

Performers might be employed to act out an academic’s lecture scripts.  News might be describing surges in a particular artist’s traffic numbers.  Performers might be reading news.  Art might bleed into academia.  Synergies among the different institutions are inevitable.  Government rewards for traffic and duration will encourage innovation and novelty.

As these new institutions acquire mass, government funding for their providers can…

There is a paradox of government-funded arts in the West.  We in the West don’t believe we should encourage failure.  Too often art reveals where we don’t succeed.  Why would government support those that don’t agree with the ideology of success?

Ostensibly, government supports “free markets,” or the cult of the entrepreneur, by allowing the imaginative cutthroats to cut throats imaginatively, resulting in the financial debacle we observe today.  Americans revere the man that makes money, seeing the vibrant corporation as a symbol of independence, liberty and freedom.

Then there are the artists.  The Western artist also depicts the American obsession with independence, liberty and freedom.  Only the artist through his and her very life and work depicts the repercussion of a desire to integrate the artistic default experience of feeling-part-of-something-larger-than-the-self with the American experience of separation, monetary stratification, independence, liberty and freedom.  The Western artist is presented with a paradox.  How does he or she manifest interconnection, or connection to that which transcends normal experience, in a society that deifies the alone?

Art often calls attention to this paradox, what might be also expressed as a cultural incongruity.  The Left does not see a problem with paying people to…

The administration is not yet thinking in terms of new institutions as it seeks places to invest borrowed dollars.  In the way they are spending some budgeted dollars, they seem to sense that the Internet is integral to future solutions, but the government seems unsure how exactly the Internet can be integral to job creation and a stable, healthy society.  In the previous piece, I show how government-supported Internet news gathering, production and distribution can form the foundation for a vibrant new societal institution.  Consider that government-supported online education can form the foundation for new institutions essential to a healthy, creative, secure, educated society.

A number of studies have come to the conclusion that the strength of a teacher’s talents for performing her or his job has more to do with the quality of a teacher’s education than any other single variable.  Bill Gates, Obama and others have emphasized the importance of training and maintaining excellent educators.  Consider that we open up this process to the web.

I’ve watched several hundred hours of college course lectures by the outstanding lecturers videotaped by The Teaching Company.  I watch and listen to these performers while exercising in the morning.  I’ve listened to…