Howard Rheingold at TED
Howard Rheingold’s 2005 talk at TED (an event which I’m a massive fan of) has just been posted over at www.ted.com
In it, he talks about collaboration, game theory, where current society has got it wrong and where it’s headed, arguing that more symbiotic, collaborative, (bottom up?) organisations and forms of commerce and living are the way forward, are actually quite natural (despite what a superficial look at human behaviour in game theory experiments like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Open source, Benkler’s theory of nonmarket production, peer to peer, crowd-sourcing, are all concepts that feature heavily in the 20min talk. A must-watch. Well done HR for doing the talk with humour and passion in just 20 minutes despite how large and deep a topic this is. Talking about where society’s heading - not easy to put into a nutshell if you want to really do it justice!
Related:
- Context is king
- In the 'Tuymans Experiment', Luc Tuymans (widely hailed as one of the most important artists in the world - e.g. the Tate Modern's description here, and the curators describing him in the first minute of the video above) decided to radically shift the context of his art. He reproduced one of his most famous paintings on a wall in Antwerp, to see how people responded to it. Curators predicted 90% of passerbys would stop and contemplate. In fact, just 4% stopped. A painting that in a gallery makes close to 100% of people stop and think for a few minutes, and appreciate the art for the thoughts it made them explore and the new ways of seeing something that it gives them, was remarkably valueless when transposed from the art gallery walls to a street wall. Context turned a 'million dollar' picture with the power to influence people and the way they think, into a vulgar paint daub on an alleyway wall ignored by 96% of people passing by. There are vast ramifications to this point; I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments below. When I watched this video this morning, here are some other stories...
- Oxford Geek Nights 5
- Should have practiced my talk! Then maybe I would have realised it wasn't even close to being under 5 minutes. Video and slides on the OGN page. Despite the talk being a disaster, it was, from an objective standpoint, successful: I'm getting somewhere with my public speaking jitters, and lots of people came up later to talk about it. I met some really interesting people and heard some great talks. Conversations of note: Stelios Koundoros, founder at Optimor Systems, trying to bring rationality to consumerism with a recommendation system with some interesting maths under the hood. Some interesting standpoints, some refreshingly Internet-sceptic - probably the only ones in the room! Main thrust of his argument was the shallowness and poverty of online interaction versus face to face life. Also disagrees with me about the value of philanthropy where the funder is not also the executor. David Langer, heroic young web entrepreneur fresh out of Oxford, now busy making Groupspaces.com an invaluable social tool for us all! Great tips and stories for someone such as myself looking to follow in his footsteps! Was one apex of a short but interesting triangular debate between he, James Turnbull and yours truly about the...
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