This nice video just went up on my Youtube channel: my entire keynote speech (67 minutes) from the Future with High Speed Broadband Conference in Auckland, New Zealand on February 23, 2012. Topics: Transformational Technologies and Creating new demand for ICT services - The Future of Broadband and ICT -, in detail: the coming telemedia convergence, the future of content in a hyper-connected society, social networks are cable TV without the cable, why open standards are crucial, why and how data is the new oil, how Control is being replaced by engagement and involvement, why sustainability becomes even more important, the shift from egosystems versus ecosystems, the new drivers of Innovation. The slides are embedded below, as well.
This Quickfire Storytelling session brings together some of the world's leading futurists (see below) to share bold ideas and conflicting predictions of how the world might look in 10 years' time. This video (which we shot ourselves using a Kodak HDCam and Sony bluetooth mic) shows the first 10 minutes i.e. Gerd's introduction, the 5 minute talk and brief discussion with the other speakers and the audience. Twitter buzz is here
You can download the 10MB PDF of my presentation (unfortunately, the slides are not visible in the video), here.
I am delighted to be involved with PressPausePlay, a movie about digital creativity, funded and promoted by Ericsson, featuring people such as Hank Shocklee, Seth Godin, ZeFrank, Sean Parker, Larry Lessig and Mike Mesnick. And it's finally out and available! Here is what it's all about:
"The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world's most influential creators of the digital era"
From the blog: "we have had so many people ask "Where can we see your film?" and this week we are very happy to say our digital distribution has begun! PressPausePlay is now available online in many countries around the world, with more coming soon. You can now find PressPausePlay on iTunes US, iTunes Canada and iTunes UK. You can also purchase PressPausePlay on Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Vudu.com, CinemaNow.com, Xbox, and Playstation. Or put us on your Netflix cue where we will be coming soon..."
TNN will be bigger than CNN, including video and audio on Twitter, produced by the masses with rich filtering
One of the key differences between TNN and CNN is the filtering – there is none on Twitter whereas CNN has editors and verification.
In the decade of the reputation economy we will have more ways to assess news validity, though we will also need more finely tuned senses on what is or might be correct.
Twitter is an ocean whereas mainstream news is a dripfeed so it is more manageable. It is the role of the ecosystem around Twitter to filter the news firehose. Flipboard, paper.li, Twittertim.es, Geneio and so on are seeking to filter Twitter and social media.
One of Twitter’s revenue models is charging companies significant amounts for access to the full Twitter firehose, but the ‘Spritzer’ feed of 2% of the firehose is available for free.
In a world of information overload, Twitter is one of the most useful information sources if you know how to use it well.
For the most current insights and trends in the living networks, follow @rossdawson and @gleonhard on Twitter!
This video summarizes the key messages of my 2009 book "Friction is fiction" (free PDF). The bottom line is that in a networked and digital society we can no longer merely rely on FRICTION i.e. planned hurdles and carefully placed obstactles to enforce payments or otherwise get paid for something. Most traditional friction points - whether in media / content, communications / marketing or business and commerce - can now be easily bypassed (see free music streaming vs itunes, Youtube / Netflix vs cable-tv, whatsapp vs sms etc), and this trend will only accelerate. IMHO I think it will suit us better to get used to it now, i.e. we may want to lessen our dependence on friction and increase our efforts to monetize based on radical user empowerment. Think Zappos not Barnes & Noble. Be sure to watch this related video recorded at TedXWarwick on the same topic.
Here is another episode from a series of videos I made with my friend and fellow futurist Ross Dawson, in Sydney, last month. Read his entire post here, and check out Ross's video channel here. And be sure to visit GerdTube:)
Via Ross's post: "Here are a few of the points we make in the video: * Many executives want to know whether and why they need to open up their business models and customer interactions * Open systems are faster, more viral, have more innovation, and are more fun to work in * Apple is the only prominent example of a closed system that is working well * There is a long and gradual trend to open systems, but progress is rarely linear and it hasn’t shifted as fast as we may have expected * Platforms and open source have been significant wins for open systems * There is a battle between ecosystems – you want to be open within the space but compete with other ecosystems * Android within the platform is open – arguably too open – yet it competes with other mobile platforms it in fact so has boundaries * Being too open can make things slower to progress, for example with quality assurance issues * The development of a highly interconnected world creates more need for open systems * APIs have provided a huge boost to the Internet economy * Google’s early move to expose APIs to many of its products provided the impetus for this to become standard practice across the net * A key issue is the pace at which commercial organizations should open out their models * Facebook has become more open over time due to customer pressure, however now that Google+ has provided a ready way to export personal profiles that changes the competitive landscape in social networks
Update: my new book "The Future of Content" was just released on the Kindle
I want to start 2011 in a renewed spirit of generosity and sharing, so here are the complete PDFs of my last 3 books, for free; provided under a Creative Commons,non-commercial, share-alike, attribution license (see below). If you still want to buy the dead-tree versions of these books (or donate something for the free PDFs - yes, that's an option, too;), you can visit my Lulu Store, or go to Amazon.com, or check out my 'Paying for Gerd' page. You can also return the favor by blogging or tweeting of Facebook-liking my stuff. Thanks, and enjoy, and have a great 2011.
Pay with a tweet: Music 2.0
Pay with a tweet: Friction is Fiction
Update: my free videos (50+ keynotes and presentations) are here, the iTunes podcast feed is here (just subscribe to download all videos to your iPod / iPad / iPhone, or computers), and my free slideshows (90+) are here, on Slideshare :)
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about what my position on Wikileaks i.e. Cablegate should be. Some of the best - and also most thought-provoking - insights have come from a recent, hotly contested piece on TheAtlantic.com, written by computer scientist, virtual reality pioneer and musician Jaron Lanier (who I have met once or twice in the past).
I am not sure I agree with everything that Jaron says (in fact, I don't - I hope to publish my own take on these issues soon) but he makes some very valid points about openness and the future of the Internet that I think really merit our consideration and made me think, so I figured I should share them with you (all snippets are quotes from his piece, highlights are mine):
"The Internet can and must be redesigned to reflect a more moderate and realistically human-centered philosophy...openness in itself, as the prime driver of events, doesn't lead to achievement or creativity.
A sufficiently copious flood of data creates an illusion of omniscience, and that illusion can make you stupid. Another way to put this is that a lot of information made available over the internet encourages players to think as if they had a God's eye view, looking down on the whole system.
To me, both right wing extremist leaks and Wikileaks are for the most part resurrections of old-fashioned vigilantism...vigilantism has always eroded trust and civility, but what's new online is the sterile imprimatur of a digital ideology that claims to offer automatic betterment. But if there's one lesson of history, it is that seeking power doesn't change the world. You need to change yourself along with the world. Civil disobedience is a spiritual discipline as much as anything else.
You need to have a private sphere to be a person, or for that matter for anything creative to happen in any domain. This is the principle I described as "encapsulation" in You Are Not a Gadget.
Imagine openness extrapolated to an extreme. What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me.
I used to think that an open world would favor the honest and the true, and disfavor the schemers and the scammers. In moderation this idea has some value, but if privacy were to be vanquished, people would initially become dull, then incompetent, and then cease to exist. Hidden in the idea of radical openness is an allegiance to machines instead of people.
I bring this up to say that asking whether secrets in the abstract are good or bad is ridiculous. A huge flow of data that one doesn't know how to interpret in context is either useless or worse than useless, if you let it impress you too much. A contextualized flow of data that answers a question you know how to ask can be invaluable. If we want to understand all the sides of an argument, we have to do more than copy files.
Random leaking is no substitute for focused digging. The "everything must be free and open" ideal has nearly bankrupted the overseas news bureaus.
Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.
We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.
There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work. The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust.
A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines"
"Lanier thus conflates the right to privacy of persons with the privilege of non-disclosure that states may sometimes exercise. Raising personhood in this context is irrelevant and dangerous.
"I give you private information about corporations for free," SNL's Assange quipped, "And I'm a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's the Man of the Year."
In my talk about Wikileaks at the Personal Democracy Forum recently, I emphasized that we should not see information by itself as a change agent and that a glut of information, especially without context and political leverage, may not result in meaningful change. That, however, is not an argument for less information.
During these past weeks, rather than a nerd takeover, I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech--it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.
The real cause for concern is the emergence of an Internet in which arbitrary Terms-of-Service can be selectively employed by large corporations to boot content they dislike. What is worrisome is an Internet in which it is very easy to marginalize and choke information.
What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet.
I reiterate that one does not need to be a fan of Wikileaks to reject the notion that rather than demand increased transparency and disclosure from institutions with power, we should trust them because trust is a human value. Going back to my starting point, it appears that Lanier is once again conflating human-to-human relations and human-institution relations and suggesting that the same principles should apply to them. A world in which humans don't trust each other is indeed cold and inhumane. A world in which we trust powerful institutions merely on principle is one where we abdicate our responsibilities as citizens and human beings..."
So what do you think? Please comment below.
Update: check out this video: journalist John Pilger in conversation with Julian Assange
It didn't take long for the TedX NewStreet (London) people to put the videos online at the TedX Youtube channel - great! Unfortunately my own talk got started while the wireless microphone was still on 'mute' so for the first minute or so (while I am doing my introduction) the audio recording was quite bad.
Therefore, I edited the video and scrubbed those 60 seconds; the result is below (using my own GerdTube / Blip.TV channel *you can get the iTunes podcast feed here). The original TedX Youtube version is below, as well, as is the slideshow, from my previous post. I think I really touched on some very important issues here, and I would be delighted to hear your thoughts on them. Fire away via Twitter, or Facebook, or comment below. And spread the word. Thanks.
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