Lonny J Avi-Performing Digital Futures

Transforming courses into games

2011-11-11T23:43:00.001-08:00

I will be transforming my Winter 2012 quarter courses into gaming experiences to immerse students in the media careers they aim to build. Forming new gaming company: Media Futures Interaction, Inc. Encounter your media future and aspiring role today! I teach three courses and each course will have its own gaming kit. The first one I'm building is the Organizational Futures Game Kit under a new subdivision of the company known as iOrganizeFutures, Inc. Each subdivision has the potential to spin off. iAdvertisetheFuture Advertising You-niversity Game Kit or Advertising Media Mogul Game Kit. iSpinCollectiveImaginations, Inc. Public Relations Spinning Social Media Game kit. I want learning and teaching to be as fun and as exciting as a game!

Immediate inspirations: http://2020mediafutures.ca/About

Queering the Future

2010-02-22T00:08:00.000-08:00

I want to recommend Zach Blas and his creative project entitled Queer Technologies. This is one in a series of creative steps in looking at what a Queer perspective would be on ubiquitous computing. Check his work out at: http://www.zachblas.info/

Performing the future as Public Relations

2010-01-02T23:45:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to evaluate and distinguish the difference between critically evaluating future scenarios and what it means to evangelize new social media. Here is Ogilvy's 360 blog
http://blog.ogilvypr.com/ and the Institute For The Future: www.iftf.org

In my forthcoming book, Performing in the Future Tense at The Institute For The Future (IFTF), I have researched the past and future development of social media as part of evangelizing and promoting an augmented and networked mind. I look at the scenarios, games, and theater, that the RAND corporation and its offspring, IFTF have developed over the past 50 years to look at the future of digital media.

Long Now Seminars

2008-02-02T19:35:00.001-08:00

Upcoming Seminars

Find out what's next by viewing or subscribing to our seminar calendar (also available in: XML, iCal format) and mailing list.

* 02008
o Feb. 4 (MONDAY) - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought"
o Feb. 25 (MONDAY) - Craig Venter, "Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention"
o Apr. 25 (Friday) - Niall Ferguson & Peter Schwartz, "Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress"
o May 21 (WEDNESDAY) - Iqbal Quadir, "Technology Empowers the Poorest"
o Jul. 23 (WEDNESDAY) - Edward Burtynsky, "The 10,000-year Gallery"

New Book Reviews from RCCS

2008-02-02T16:40:00.000-08:00

Each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies (RCCS)
publishes a set of book reviews and author responses (
http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp ).

I am happy to say that I have a book review posted for this month!

books of the month for february 2008 include:

Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Publisher: MIT Press, 2006
Review 1: Jentery Sayers
Author Response: Wendy Chun

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth
Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Author: Fred Turner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2006
Review 1: Lonny J Avi Brooks
Review 2: William Bryant
Review 3: Merav Katz-Kimchi
Review 4: Linda Levitt
Review 5: Alan Razee
Author Response: Fred Turner

La Comunicazione del Terzo Settore nel Mezzogiorno
Author: Stefano Martelli
Publisher: Franco Angeli, 2006
Review 1: Gaetano Gucciardo (Italiano)
Review 2: Gaetano Gucciardo (English)

Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions
Author: Ned Rossiter
Publisher: NAi Publishers, 2006
Review 1: Daren C. Brabham
Author Response: Ned Rossiter

Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society
Editors: Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson, Geert Lovink
Publisher: Routledge, 2006
Review 1: Athina Karatzogianni

The Internet Imaginaire
Author: Patrice Flichy
Publisher: MIT Press, 2007
Review 1: M. Beatrice Bittarello
Author Response: Patrice Flichy

The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting
Author: Darren Wershler-Henry
Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2007
Review 1: Adam Tourek
Author Response: Darren Wershler-Henry

The Politics of Cyberconflict
Author: Athina Karatzogianni
Publisher: Routledge, 2006
Review 1: Andrew Robinson
Author Response: Athina Karatzogianni

Uses of Blogs
Editors: Axel Bruns, Joanne Jacobs
Publisher: Peter Lang, 2006
Review 1: Tricia Farwell
Review 2: Tama Leaver
Review 3: Damien Pfister
Review 4: Daniel C. Smith
Author Response: Axel Bruns & Joanne Jacobs

enjoy. there's more where that came from.

Cal State East Bay Communication Students visit The Institute For The Future

2007-11-14T19:05:00.000-08:00

Students from my research methods and organizational communication courses attended a talk at the FutureCommons, a public forum initiated by the Institute For The Future last year that features speakers in industry, academe, and IFTF on forces shaping the future. The turnout by students exceeded my expectations. As my student Jennifer Medina put it; "it's about time for us to see this Institute you speak about in your classes!". For some students, it was the first time they had set foot in Palo Alto; for others, it revealed a new type of workspace for thinking and creativity--a loft like setting with no cubicles and comfortable spaces for collaboration.

It was great to see San Jose State anthropology professor, Jan English-Lueck, who worked with IFTF on a study of the impact of new media on Silicon Valley life.

Andrea Saveri, one of the directors at IFTF and one of its leading anthropologists, welcomed us and had everyone introduce themeslves as we settled in for a fascinating talk by professor Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media in the Institute of Creative Technologies and the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

She spoke on the subject of Transliteracy:
Transliteracy: crossing divides
Transliteracy involves the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks. It is not a new behavior but has only been identified as a working concept since the internet generated new ways of thinking about human communication. To date, the concept has largely been developed by Professor Sue Thomas and her colleagues at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, England, but it is an open source idea ripe for expansion. This talk discusses examples from history, orality, philosophy, literature, and ethnography and asks whether transliteracy could provide a unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century. http://www.transliteracy.com

We even viewed scenes from Singing in the Rain as an example of actors struggling to transition from working in silent films to the talkies, a period of learning new literacies. I can't wait to take more students across the bay to explore IFTF and other sites of interest connected to new media and organizational communication! This energized me!

Disciplined Imagination

2007-03-29T01:47:00.000-07:00

Building another thought stub here; stay tuned!
Disciplined imagination: Building scenarios and building theories

Trip Report on Google March 21 Part Two

2007-03-29T01:28:00.000-07:00

Had to post this fantastic vision of the future of my daughter Amieh and me at our Google Day! I hope she wants to become a software guru!

Trip Report on Google March 21

2007-03-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

Had the good fortune of being invited to lunch at Google by two very special friends, Peter and Cindy. Peter is one of those fascinating people you get a chance to meet and see their meteoric rise and yet retain their gentle soul. I met Peter right before he went to work for Google as we met on the BART. Peter now works in Google Analytics and other projects. Peter just got back from a trip training international teams in Dublin, London, Paris, and sites in India. Cindy is another great friend who worked at Sun Microsystems and is now a usability coordinator at Google. She has offered to give our students a tour of the campus and she is enthusiastic about creating a relationship with our department and recruiting our students to take in part in usability studies at Google. This is a great start to introducing our students to Internet studies and the contrasts between corporate and academic research: how the questions generated align and diverge. And of course the pics!

Here's Peter next to one of the first server racks used by the founders of Google:

Darwin's God or Darwin's Future? How does the digital future relate to evolutionary theory?

2007-03-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

Darwin's God, an article that ran in the New York Times Magazine (March 4), has stimulated me to think about a number of ideas regarding how evolutionary theory relates to thinking about and acting out the future. See my earlier post and thought stub on evolution, God, and ubiquitous computing. I'm posting a longish section here but it's worth it as I've already had some inquiry on whether I've written anything about this theme yet. Thanks to my colleague Grant Kien for that inquiry!

Here's a selection from Darwin's God:

"Some cognitive scientists think of brain functioning in terms of modules, a series of interconnected machines, each one responsible for a particular mental trick. They do not tend to talk about a God module per se; they usually consider belief in God a consequence of other mental modules.

Religion, in this view, is ''a family of cognitive phenomena that involves the extraordinary use of everyday cognitive processes,'' Atran wrote in ''In Gods We Trust.'' ''Religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them.''

At around the time ''In Gods We Trust'' appeared five years ago, a handful of other scientists -- Pascal Boyer, now at Washington University; Justin Barrett, now at Oxford; Paul Bloom at Yale -- were addressing these same questions. In synchrony they were moving toward the byproduct theory.

Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood's being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.

Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed ''spandrel'' to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase's but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

''Natural selection made the human brain big,'' Gould wrote, ''but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels -- that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.''

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent -- which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior -- is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.

A classic experiment from the 1940s by the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. For the experiment, subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like ''chase'' and ''capture.'' They did not just see the random movement of shapes on a screen; they saw pursuit, planning, escape.

So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.

What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. ''The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,'' Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, ''Why Would Anyone Believe in God?'' Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, ''people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.''"

Futures of Life @ Cornell University

2007-03-28T20:02:00.000-07:00

I'll be presenting at the Futures of Life Workshop at Cornell University in late April. I'm proud to be at this gathering and inquiry into the future at this level with my esteemed colleagues. I have some preparation to do! Check out the website.

Evolutionary Thinking and Ubiquitous Computing

2007-03-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

This is just a thought stub. I read a great article in the New York Times about the spate of books out recently discussing the evolutionary drive to believe in a God. The idea of being in the open plains as a prehistoric human created the need to develop a sense of forces beyond ourselves. Either you can sense what is dangerous or you're likely to be killed. There's a technical name for this and I'll update this thought stub once I review my notes. My thoughts are (and David Noble is a definite influence here) curious about how ubiquitous computing has this God-like sense about it that's rarely discussed in the ubicomp lit (i mean why would it). But the idea of computerized systems that anticipate your needs is magical, God-like, omnipotent...is this the type of world we're trying to create? A systemic sense of God built into our computerized infrastructures?

Human-Future Interaction

2007-02-17T22:34:00.000-08:00

Jason Tester debuts his manifesto on Human-Future Interaction on IFTF's Future Now Blog!
Very cool Jason! As the future media artifacts designer at IFTF, Jason is the cultural heir to Bel Geddes' New York World's Fair 1939 Futurama exhibits. Here's a link to Jason's vision and his iFuture artifact. His work will figure prominently in my upcoming book on the Institute For the Future called Performing in the Future Tense where I look at how the future is being framed as a performance. I want my ifuture now!

Anthropology of the Contemporary

2007-02-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

Paul Rabinow and company have created a Collaboratory for inquiry into new practices in the human sciences. The emphasis is on bio-power and the ethnographic analysis of biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Their blogs are worth keeping up with:
On the Assembly of Things

Upcoming Conferences

2007-02-10T23:36:00.000-08:00

Upcoming conference at Western States Communication Association (WSCA) next week and I'll be chairing two panels. I'm excited that two of my favorite colleagues, Andy Wood of San Jose State and Jason Tester of the Institute For The Future, will be on the following panel with me:

Envisioning Future Media Spaces and Users: Augmenting Social Freedom or not?

In Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), Lawrence Lessig discusses the increasing legislative umbrella that new technologies of software and hardware now hold over our freedom of action on a daily basis especially in the devices that circulate popular culture from ipods to Google tools. However, this control does not occur through the actions of public legislation; instead, in the name of protecting their intellectual assets, corporations are embedding restrictions into these devices without debate. Actions that were formally legal and free for example, such as copying a video on one's TV, may cost in the future with the advance of digital TV. To what extent will new media restrict our cultural expression or our political freedom? Media spaces (whether analog or digital) are multimedia environments connecting geographically dispersed spaces (Bly, S.A et al, 1993)*. Building from that stance, the panel explores the imagined and real affordances (the allowance or prohibition of daily action) that new media spaces allow, embed, or forbid. How can media spaces or their users augment social freedom in the future? The panel engages this topic with perspectives based on envisioning the future of ubiquitous media and computing in urban spaces, the aural enclaves of the Ipod, and the emergence of Dark Mobs.

A new pic of me-Cheerful yet introspective

2007-02-10T23:12:00.000-08:00

Cool Links

2007-02-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

Networked_Performance
Explores intersection of performance and ubiquitous computing

Paul Dourish
Great researcher of the ubicomp space

A blogging reincarnation

2007-02-10T22:36:00.000-08:00

Well, it's nice to start a new blog to focus on my research interests in forecasting, futures research, ubiquitous computing, internet research and their intersection with performance genres and the stories we imagine, circulate, imitate about the future, the digital future.

Of course, I'll be sharing photos of my family. My little girl Amieh just turned one! And she loves clocks so I'm thinking of getting her a book by Peter Galison on time and the influence of clocks on Einstein. Of course, I probably won't expect her to read it for awhile but I have envisioned her as a brilliant empirical researcher already!

L'hitraot

Lonny J Avi