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speech by Lou
Gerstner, CEO of IBM
OECD Ministerial Conference
Ottawa, Canada, October 8, 1998
The rise of these powerful networks are about many things, but most fundamentally it's about a transfer of control. Control of this medium, which was born in government and academia, has been tacitly transferred into the hands of tens of millions, soon to be hundreds of millions, of users worldwide. And the momentum is irresistible.
Shift
Control: A Message for the Future
by David D. Thornburg
PBS Teacher Source, May 1999
The idea that informational media are under the control of
any particular centralized power is becoming obsolete in the face of the
proliferation of alternative channels of communication opened up by the Web.
Nowhere has this been more decisively demonstrated than in an event that took
place on March 24, 1999. At 2:50 AM, two technical operatives of the Yugoslav
Federal Telecommunications Ministry, backed by about ten policemen, entered the
premises of Radio B92, the main independent radio station for Belgrade, and the
dominant provider of non-government-provided news for the region. The staff of
the station was told to immediately stop all broadcasts, to disconnect their
computers and telephones, and to turn over the transmitting equipment. When the
station's editor-in-chief, Verna Matic, entered the station, he was immediately
arrested and held for eight hours.
In the past, such an act would have caused the silencing of an independent
voice. In this case, control was shifted instead.
Within minutes, Radio B92 was back in operation, using RealAudio to stream live content to the world at
large through Radio B92's Web site. Other radio
stations throughout the world (including BBC) were then able to pick up the
audio feed and re-transmit it from transmitters outside the country. While I'm
sure the local government would have loved to shut down the Web site, Radio
B92's site is hosted by XS4ALL in the
Netherlands, a country in which the Yugoslav police have little clout. As for
the location of the local source in Belgrade, the broadcasts are probably being
made from moveable sites, perhaps from basement studios hidden throughout the
city. Short of closing all telecommunications from Belgrade to the rest of the
world, it is hard to imagine how Radio B92's Web operation could be shut down.
Paulo Freire, using the language of psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, distinguished between two types of personalities: biophilic and necrophilic.
The biophilic personality is a lover of life driven by a pursuit of freedom and a desire to see all people free.
For the biophilic person, justice, equity, and the democratic ideal can only truly exist when freedom reigns as the primary goal of any society or institution. Therefore, success from this perspective is gauged in degrees of freedom: freedom for themselves and their fellow citizens.
The necrophilic personality is driven by the desire to control and be controlled. The necrophilic person is one who "fears freedom" because it undermines control. Freire stated that "Oppression - overwhelming control - is necrophilic; it is nourished by a love of death, not life". Therefore, success from this perspective is gauged in degrees of control: as much control as possible over as many as possible.
Which type are you?
Net
Knowledge: The Coming Revolution in Higher Education
by Martin Irvine
Gnovis, December 2000
The Internet economy usually treats centralized control as damage and routes around it.
Information
Is a Weapon
by Daintry Duffy
Darwin, November 2001
Once soldiers are armed with the power of information, how
will traditional military hierarchies adapt?
Will the brass jealously guard information and the status it provides, or
radically change their training methods to build a different kind of soldier?
What happens when every squad leader in the field has the same information in
front of him that his commander has? Will squad leaders continue to follow
orders without question or will they demand more input in the decision-making
process?
As corporations have discovered, engaging technology to empower employees,
disperse control of information and flatten the hierarchy can often bring
unexpected—sometimes even unwelcome—ripples of change.
Learning the Laws of
Media
by Harold Jarche
Blog, May 12, 2005
Marshall
McLuhan's Laws of Media:
Every new medium ...
1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot)
2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or a form of art
(the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports)
3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile
brings back the shining armour of the chevalier)
4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its
limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams,
that is total paralysis)
The Learning Management System ...
1. extends the instructor's voice beyond the walls of the institution
2. obsolesces the classroom (but small, face-to-face executive classes are on
the rise)
3. the LMS retrieves the correspondence model
4. it has flipped into a costly administrative tool that does not meet the needs
of inter-connected learners using other more effective technologies to
communicate.
Social networking technologies (blogs, wikis,
eportfolios) ...
1. extend the learner's voice
2. obsolesce the course as the unit of education
3. retrieve the Oxford-Cambridge collegial education model
4. could reverse into a meaningless "echo-chamber" (Wikepedia definition of
"echo chamber: Metaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation
in which information or ideas are amplified by transmission inside an enclosed
space.)
Commons-based peer production
* Extends each individual's reach worldwide
* Obsolesces the middle men (accountants, lawyers, traders, brokers)
* Retrieves the barter system or the bazaar - (I can set my own rules for buying
& selling)
* and Flips, when extended to its limits, the Commons into a whuffie economy
Horizontal
Classrooms
by Will Richardson
weblogg-ed, August 11, 2005
Like him or not, I have to say that I've been getting a bit
of an education from Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, and I'm finding more
and more connections between the global leveling he describes and the classroom.
At one point he writes about how in this new world, it's not just the little guy
(i.e. bloggers) who can suddenly start to act big, it's also the big guys who
can start to act small in the sense that they "are enabled to do many more
things on their own." He gives the example of Colin Powell who no longer needs
surrogates to do his research for him; he just uses Google. And then Friedman
writes this:
"This is what happens when you move from a vertical (command and control) world
to a much more horizontal (connect and collaborate) flat world. Your boss can do
his job and your job."
Now that's a great description of these changes in and of itself, but think of
that in an education sense. Read it like this:
"This is what happens when you move from a vertical (command and control)
classroom to a much more horizontal (connect and collaborate) flat classroom.
Your student can do his job and your job."
We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the
Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the
classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment
moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long
lasting contribution of ideas instead of short-lived answers to narrow
questions, it requires us to rethink our roles as teachers and to redefine our
curricula. Remember, we don't own the content any longer. Our students teach us
the tools. They are already connecting and collaborating. To hold on to the
vertical classroom is to risk irrelevance ... soon.
This is what Barbara writes so eloquently about, the struggle to redefine what
it is we're doing here, of letting go of the traditional notions of teaching and
learning. And it's what Terry refers to in his incredibly incisive comment here
a couple of days ago:
"'Classroom' implies an enclosure, a bottle of sorts, a boundary that encloses.
What happens when technology breaks the bottle? You have a
blogwikiflickrfurlicious open space full of connections. Edblogging 3.0 is the
birth of new metaphors for new experience. I oversimplify, but I think we
edbloggers hold both metaphors (classroom and connected-open space) in our
hearts simultaneously. We live in both worlds, yet we know one of them is a dead
man walking."
Command and control is "dead man walking." It will not survive in a world that
is no longer built on command and control relationships. And our students will
not be prepared for their futures if we continue to hold on to it.
CTC Keynote:
Thomas Malone
by Ross Mayfield
Weblog, June 20, 2005
What does this mean for your management style? From "command
and control" to "coordinate and cultivate."
Paradox of standards: sometimes rigid standards in one part of the
organization can enable much more flexibility and decentralization in other
parts of the system. For example, the internet and IP protocol. In a
business, if you can figure out the right area to apply standards (quality,
financial controls, etc.) and give people lots more freedom in other areas, you
can be more confident about the effects.
Paradox of power: the best way to gain power is to give it away.
Linus' empowerment of the Linux community. AES and it's employees. Pierre
Omidyar and eBay.
The
Economic and Social Foundations of Collaborative Innovation
by Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Vice President, Technical Strategy and Innovation, IBM Corporation
blog, August 2005
Clearly, despite having built a highly successful,
profitable business on a proprietary model, IBM takes the open source movement
in its many manifestations very seriously. Working in an open community is for
us a no-nonsense business decision, made only after considerable analysis of the
technology and market trends, and due diligence on the community, its licensing
and governance, and the quality of its offerings.
The firm is no longer the only -- or, in some circumstances, the optimal --
institution for organizing productive, value-creating work. And that promises a
much more diverse and exciting -- and very innovative -- kind of marketplace.
Jimbo's
Problems: A Free Culture Manifesto
by Ross Mayfield
Weblog, August 16, 2005
10 Things that Will be Free
1. Free the Encyclopedia!
2. Free the Dictionary!
3. Free the Curriculum!
4. Free the Music!
5. Free the Art!
6. Free the File Formats!
7. Free the Maps!
8. Free the Product Identifiers!
9. Free the TV Listings!
10. Free the Communities!
Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?
by Kevin Werbach
Managing Technology at Wharton, June 29, 2005
The Internet may be entering a new phase that will
decentralize control inside companies, enable employees to collaborate more
easily, and drive efficiency. But corporations that want to use the web
strategically to build corporate value will not just need to make radical
cultural changes, they may also need to master a new vocabulary with terms such
as Wikis (software that allows anyone to update and edit web pages instantly and
democratically); Weblogs (online journals more commonly known as blogs); and RSS
(really simple syndication) feeds, which distribute content from the Internet.
Arcane as these terms may sound to anyone but the initiated, the technology
behind them is hardly fancy. Wikis, blogs and RSS feeds are relatively simple
tools that will have a huge impact on the way people -- and companies --
communicate and do business. So how is the Internet changing? How can companies
seek to understand the technological effects of these changes? And what cultural
adaptations should companies make to capture value from these new tools?
Philip Evans: One of the simplest arguments I've used to get people out of a
traditional mindset is to point out a statistic -- the cost of transactions in
the U.S. More than 50% of the non-government GDP in the U.S. is based on
transaction costs. Now, what's interesting is that the way most people think
about economics is that execution costs are on the periphery. If you start from
the premise that transaction costs are central to the productivity of any
system, and if you then recognize that most of our time is spent negotiating,
securing, monitoring, making sure people did what we expected them to do,
dealing with the fact that motivations aren't entirely aligned, and so on, you
realize that we have to find a way of working together amid this asymmetry of
information. About half of our time is spent doing those things.
This changes the way you think about productivity in organizations where
innovation, adaptability and dealing with complexity are the key challenges.
Coase's
Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm
by Yochai Benkler
2002
... the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive
collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose
their projects in response to price signals.
In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in
fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest
that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of
production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode
"commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and
contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that
groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following
a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either
market prices or managerial commands.
The paper also explains why this mode has systematic advantages over markets and
managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture,
and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and
communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated. In
particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two
reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to
information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production
has an advantage in what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it
loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than
do either of the other two organizational modes. Second, there are substantial
increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to
interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new
projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the
organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs
involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review
and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which
collaborators. This results in allocation gains, that increase more than
proportionately with the increase in the number of individuals and resources
that are part of the system. The article concludes with an overview of how these
models use a variety of technological and social strategies to overcome the
collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems
by property and contract.
The Control Revolution: How The Internet is Putting Individuals
in Charge and Changing the World We Know
by Andrew L. Shapiro
iorg.com helps organizations manage the change process driven by the distributed power of intranets. Their site features a lot of articles about intranets. Here's the first words you used to see on their home page:
What to do?
You already discovered that an intranet is really about how you make decisions
in an organization and how you view control.
In one of their white papers, The Intranet Paradigm, Steven Telleen writes:
In very general terms, the two views in conflict are the organization as an engineered machine versus the organization as an organic, self-adapting system - the assembly line versus the learning organization.
Under
the Covers Book Reviews
by Mr. Lizard, the Global Village
Grouch
Paying people to produce content that will keep eyeballs glued to a screen while the World Wide Wait downloads perky animated gifs costs money. But toss some PERL scripts in the cgi-bin directory, ask a leading question or two, and watch the virtual fur fly! People will come back ten, twenty, thirty times a day to make sure all the inbred simians who disagree with them are well informed of their stupidity, ignorance, and probable poor hygiene and lack of a sex life. And each time through, another ad clicks by. Far more profitable than just having readers stop by once a day for some boring news articles or the 'Fun Fact Of The Day.'
The Control
Revolution
by Felix Stalder
http://www.future.enterprisecomputing.hp.com/vision/futurist/andrew_shapiro.html
http://www.tao.ca/fire/nettime/0135.html
Understanding technology should be an essential component of
global citizenship.
In a world driven by the flow of information, the interfaces -- and the
underlying code -- that make information visible are becoming enormously
powerful social forces. Understanding their strengths and limitations, and even
participating in the creation of better tools, should be an important part of
being an involved citizen. These tools affect our lives as much as laws do, and
we should subject them to a similar democratic scrutiny.
Code is Law excerpts: Preface | Conclusion
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