Electron Boy

The staggering scope of the Make-A-Wish Foundation's elaborate delivery of Electron Boy's secret wish is an example of how we should all consider acting every day.

As Electron Boy's motorcade — the DeLorean, the 25 motorcycle officers and a white limo — rolled through downtown Bellevue, pedestrians stopped in their tracks and pulled out their cameras to take pictures. Clearly, somebody famous was in town. But who could it be?

"It's Electron Boy," Erik's older sister, Charlotte Foote, shouted out the window of the limousine.

More than 250 PSE employees gathered outside the company's headquarters and cheered as Electron Boy freed the trapped worker. "It was so loud, people in office buildings were looking out the window," said Make-A-Wish communications director Jeannette Tarcha.

But Dr. Dark and Blackout Boy were still at large. Electron Boy got a tip that the evil duo were at the Space Needle, where they had disabled the elevator and trapped people on the observation deck. Racing back to Seattle, Electron Boy stepped out of the DeLorean to a cheering crowd of dozens of admirers, and confronted his nemesis.

Collaborating in unexpected, magical ways to shower love on one another is a magnificent way to live.

I just called Katherine Long, the reporter, to tell her that it made me cry tears of joy.

US Air Force to Assign Second Life Avatars to New Recruits

National Defense magazine's cover story is about a new effort by the US Air Force to assign Second Life avatars to all new recruits:

“Everyone who comes into the Air Force will be given an avatar, and that avatar travels with them, grows with them, changes appearance with them,” said Larry Clemons, of the Air Education and Training Command. “It will provide them a history of where they’ve been and a notion of where they’re going.”

This is a fascinating development. It demonstrates a fundamental understanding of the shift that is going on in the digital culture. On one level it illustrates that new recruits will already be familiar and expecting to learn from immersive experiences. On the other hand it demonstrates an understanding in the value that people place in digital experiences.

These avatars would follow airmen through their entire careers, earning promotions and educational credits and even moving with them to new offices and bases.

This is also an indicator of a more nuanced point: Digital experiences are real. People invest in avatars and digital experiences as they would physical objects (for more on this, see Rita J. King's essay, "Art, Reality and Cultural Diplomacy"). But they also emulate their avatars experiences. To provide an avatar throughout one's career provides a second track of incentives: Recruits will be motivated to do things to develop both their physical self and their virtual identity. A prescient move on the part of the Air Force.

In DIP's 2009 report, "Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds," (Carnegie Council) we recommended non-military foreign service agencies consider similar in-depth use of virtual worlds.

[Airmen to Live out their Careers in Cyberspace]

Cairo's 1,000-Year-Old Islamic School Embraces Digital Revolution

The La Mezquita Mosque in the community of Al Andalus in Second Life is one of many digital culture Muslim awareness outposts.

The Times Online is reporting that Egypt's oldest Islamic university Al-Azhar, is attempting to combat extremism by introducing English-language teaching and digital education. Al-Azhar is "determined to stop extremists hijacking their religion and exacerbating religious tensions." It's a project in partnership with the British Council.

The British Council has begun a programme to send teachers to Al-Azhar to teach Muslim scholars English and give them vital access to the internet and to the millions of Muslims who speak English. The aim is to help Al-Azhar, which has been training Islamic scholars for more than 1,000 years, to promote an accurate global understanding of Islam.

We chronicled and facilitated the entrance of American University in Cairo, which is not a Muslim university, into the virtual world of Second Life. The Muslim website IslamOnline.net, which was featured in our Digital Diplomacy report is another prominent website that has explored digital outreach as a way of creating dialog around Islam.

[The cradle of Islamic scholarship embraces the digital revolution]

What Twitter and Prison Yard Culture Have in Common

Click here to watch the video.

The recent 140Conf in New York featured the above speech, "What Twitter and the Prison Yard Have in Common" by Andy Dixon, an ex-con who spent 27 years in prison.

Dixon, a third generation convict, spoke movingly about the state and statistics of children of prisoners and the system that expects they will be prisoners or convicts as they become adults. According to Dixon, the system counts the number of children of convicts in order to budget prison beds needed for future adult prisoners. Dixon is now dedicated to stopping "generational incarceration."

Dixon also makes a compelling description comparing the similarity between Twitter culture and prison yard culture. He spoke about the first time a convict enters the prison yard and the politics of that space: "When you get in there, your word better be good. If your word's not good, you can't hang out with the people on the yard."

He then applied this logic to Twitter: "People that are real negative ... you don't see 'em long. But the people putting out the positive note ... people follow the heck out of them."

"Keep your word. Be about your word."

(Via Tish Shute who has a great post about the Augmented Twitter panel she was on, which we missed.)

Second Life Economy Breaks New Record

Against the backdrop of Greece declaring bankruptcy and Portugal on the brink of collapse, the virtual world of Second Life just came out with some intriguing numbers about their in-world economy: This past quarter, Q1, their economy hit an all time high. Key points include:

• User-to-User Transactions totaled US$160 million, a 30% increase year-to-year and an all-time high
  
• Total Sales on Xstreet reached US$2.3 million, an 82% increase year-to-year and a 24% increase over the previous quarter
  
• Total L$ exchanged on the LindeX totaled US$31 million, a 9% increase year-to-year
  Residents active in the Economy reached 517,349 in March, a 2010 high
  
• Monthly Unique Users with Repeat Logins peaked in March at 826,214, a 13% increase year-to-year and an all-time high

They attribute a number of factors to the increase, including the movie Avatar, which they call the "James Cameron Effect" and Linden Lab's increased investment in Second Life's infrastructure to improve user experience.

Maintaining a Stable Economy

This latest report also includes a "spotlight" on how stable the Second Life economy and currency is. This comes with charts showing savings of Second Life users and a discussion of how they maintain a stable currency with necessary inflow and outflow of money.

Like most currencies, the exchange rate for the Linden dollar "floats" on the LindeX: it moves as the supply and demand for Linden dollars moves. However, a stable exchange rate is critical to a stable economy; inflation and deflation, left unchecked, could wreak havoc on the pricing of virtual items and the purchasing power of a Resident's Linden dollar balance. For the casual Resident, who may have only a few hundred Linden dollars in his/her Second Life account, most moves in the exchange rate are inconsequential. But for business owners in Second Life, who may have Linden dollar balances worth hundreds or thousands of US dollars, even a small change could be a cause for concern.

Image Source: Linden Lab.

Second Life users presently hold as savings inside Second Life around 7 billion Linden Dollars (L$), which is approximately US$26 million. It is unclear how many users this amount is divided by. It could be spread thinly and horizontally across 16 million accounts or, more likely, vertically and narrowly through a few hundred thousand accounts.

In an era in which we distinguish between "virtual currency" (currency exchanged in games and virtual worlds) versus "real currency" (currency associated with countries such as the Dollar and the Pound Sterling),iIt's a fascinating study in how economies function and it has possible global implications. After all, how virtual is currency if you can use real currency to spend it on things that give you satisfaction? What difference is there?

How Big Is It?

The digital landmass also continues to grow. The total landmass if translated into the physical world is around 2,073 square kilometers, which is just a bit smaller than Luxembourg and close to the size of Mauritius.

It's a commendable, lengthy and informative read.

[Second Life Economy Hits New All-Time High in Q1 2010]

What *is* a hoax?

I had no idea when spotting these two people on the street today that their story was already a media sensation. The New York Times published a story about the very public apology, explaining that when Jeff Ragsdale infuriated his girlfriend Megan Brady to the point where she stopped taking his calls for two days, he decided to win her back with a sign.

The article was then picked up by the AP and as more people read it, other groups, among them the Huffington Post and Gawker, took great zeal in pointing out that the duo, both actors and entertainers, had fooled The New York Times, leading the newspaper to add a disclaimer to the piece:

There is considerable evidence that this is a hoax. Jeff Ragsdale has worked as a comedian and actor, and his work sometimes involves blurring lines between reality and performance.

On repeated questioning today, both Mr. Ragsdale and Megan Brady insisted that they are really a couple who really did have a falling out and that nothing depicted in the piece below is fake. A person claiming to be Mr. Ragsdale commented below, insisting on his veracity.

Obviously, we are skeptical at this point. We will dig further. Just as obviously, we wish we had done the digging before we published the post.

A hoax? What is a hoax, after all?

Balloon boy was a hoax, because the parents lied for no reason other than fame and attention while jeopardizing their kid's life and dignity to boot. There's no blurring of the line when a real emergency crew needs to be dispatched to deal with a lie while other people with real emergencies are neglected. That's a hoax.

I've been noticing this phenomenon a lot lately, this idea that anything unusual must be a hoax. Take the case of Die Antwoord, a South African rap-rave internet sensation launched to mega-stardom on Boing Boing. Die Antwoord now has a record deal with Interscope. When you get to the bottom of the post linked in the last sentence, look at the comments about how Die Antwoord is a hoax.

Really? Was Ziggy Stardust a hoax?

When I spoke to Jeff and Megan on the street this afternoon, they struck me as real. The fact is, anytime people stand out in the streets with signs, it's a performance of some kind, meant to capture attention. Megan explained that journalists have been hounding her family members and boss, who is a public figure, to determine whether or not Jeff and Megan are really a couple. The Heene family is a "real" family, but that doesn't make their hoax any more or less destructive.

Let's say Megan and Jeff are just two fame-hungry poseurs. Maybe they met on the street last week and decided to cook up a media campaign, whereupon the media promptly fell for it. So what? Read their signs. "I was verbally abusive! I'm sorry, Megan!" If this is public art, it's one of the most thoughtful and meaningful displays I've ever seen. I don't care if these two people are strangers. I don't need to verify that Jeff in fact verbally abused Megan to stop and think about myself and the people in my life. So many of the nasty little comments dished out on a daily basis by friends, family and strangers alike are, in fact, verbal abuse.

"So many people have stopped to tell us that this makes them think," Megan said.

In a way, it reminds me of The Gates in Central Park in 2005. Many people thought the display was a hideous one, completely invasive in a public space. I was on the fence about it until I went to The Gates and as I walked through them along with hundreds of people one crisp afternoon, sun streaming through the saffron curtains, I realized that The Gates,at least to me, was never about the intrinsic aesthetic of the art itself but rather about the consciousness that flows through the space. The same goes for Megan and Jeff.

I'm not saying it's not important for newspapers to make a distinction between real and false. It would have been extremely helpful, and could have possibly diverted a massive international crisis, if Wall Street criminals and their cronies had been investigated before robbing billions, or if the lead-up to the war in Iraq hadn't been reported at face value. But the time to get all taking-ourselves-too-seriously is not over signs that harm no one, and in fact, might improve a lot of lives by simply making people think.

"This is public therapy," Jeff said. "It's expression."

It's public art. As an artist myself who works globally on commissions that rethink public space, I love Megan and Jeff's willingness to stand on a street corner holding these signs, being socially vulnerable, answering questions and being real. If their careers flourish as a result, good for them!

But...has Jeff's gesture resulted in a reconciliation?

"He's on probation," Megan said, "But I'm out here with him."

PS. This endorsement of public art in this instance in no way supports the content of the other work of Megan Brady and Peter Ragsdale.

"More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship"

Image credit: Lilit.

It's not a big trend, but it's a noticeable one. The New York Times reports that there is an uptick in Americans living overseas who have decided to give up their US citizenship.

The Federal Register, the government publication that records such decisions, shows that 502 expatriates gave up their U.S. citizenship or permanent residency status in the last quarter of 2009. That is a tiny portion of the 5.2 million Americans estimated by the State Department to be living abroad.

Still, 502 was the largest quarterly figure in years, more than twice the total for all of 2008, and it looms larger, given how agonizing the decision can be. There were 235 renunciations in 2008 and 743 last year. Waiting periods to meet with consular officers to formalize renunciations have grown.

One of the reasons people in the gave for giving up citizenship was losing their US bank account after over 40 years of using the bank. The reason: Anti-terrorism laws require you to maintain a US address in order to have a US bank account. This also has implications domestically for the homeless. If a person loses their home because of unemployment, they also forfeit the right to have a bank account. A vicious cycle.

While the numbers are not enough to give the US pause, the issues highlights a dissonance between government policies and lifestyle. In an increasingly globalized economy in The Imagination Age, because of the Internet, which enables remote and virtual work, people can increasingly choose where in the world they want to live.

[More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship]

Stanford's new "Liberation Technology" blog

Stanford University's Liberation Technology program has launched a new community blog worth checking out. It's open to the public participation at the moment.

Liberation technology is broadly defined as any technology that can be used to promote democracy, defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, and promote development, among other social goods. Any stories or comments that raise our awareness about these issues are welcome.

Current links contain stories ranging from "How to Vanish into the Dark Web" which refers to a story about the perils of online social activism to "Silicon Valley Man Infamous to Chinese Censors Comes Forward."

Thanks @edwebb!

[Liberation Technology blog (beta)]

"I am a Muslim and I am a fan of South Park."

BoingBoing interview with Southpark creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

CHUP! – Changing Up Pakistan blog, has an informative first-person post by Pakistani writer, Kalsoom, offering his take on Comedy Central's 200th episode of "South Park", which includes an image of the Prophet Mohammad.

I am a Muslim and I am a fan of South Park. To make those terms mutually exclusive is polarizing and frankly, unproductive. Aasif Mandvi over at the Daily Show summarized my sentiment exactly when he said last night, “Yes, it [the depiction] would make me uncomfortable and I can understand people being upset about it…but here’s whats more upsetting. Someone, in the name of a faith that I believe in, threatening another person for doing it.”

Kalsoom notes that despite the controversy, the Prophet Muhammad had already appeared in a South Park episode that pre-dated the Danish Cartoon scandal.

Interestingly, this is not the first time South Park has depicted the Prophet Muhammad. In 2001, the show featured several religious figures and Prophets, including Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and Prophet Muhammad, in an episode entitled, “Super Best Friends.” In the segment, Prophet Muhammad is a super hero with “the powers of flame,” who, when a character says, “Even though people fight and argue over different religions, you guys are actually friends,” he answers, “More than friends, we are super best friends with the desire to fight for justice.”

[The South Park Controversy]

Global Collaborative Storytelling Game

I shot this video during a work session in Second Life this morning with Joshua Fouts and Ian Hughes. Embedded media has completely changed the way we work in Second Life.

Dancing Ink Productions is collaborating with the British Council on a global storytelling game. We had a wildly explosive meeting in London last week and now we're continuing the collaboration virtually, via a mix of Google docs, Skype, Second Life and Twitter.

It isn't just that you can show media by embedding it in a prim (which is the basic building block of construction in Second Life). It's that you can actually collaborate on the media right there in real time.

This is a groundbreaking development in Second Life, and yet another reason why the platform is fantastic for entrepreneurs working with globally dispersed teams.

Mister Cat: Seducing Passersby

One of my favorite things in the world is to photograph urban art and graffiti. This yellow cat shows up all over Lisbon. Its creator, Thoma Vuille, has a very interesting story, it turns out.

The 30 year old former fine art student runs art workshops for disadvantaged children. He cites various influences, from post-graffiti and pop art. At night he dons a mask and climbs, spray-can in hand, to balance precariously on chimneys and drainpipes.

The artist is rather eccentric, perhaps a little ‘autistic’. He has lived for the past decade on his jobseekers’ allowance. Out of tune with others, Mister Cat is perhaps Thoma’s way of communicating, or even of existing. ‘It is his social incarnation,’ says Gilles Flouret of Collectif Chat, a French organisation launched two years ago to support the project and the artist. ‘Thoma wants to be seen and recognised, but in a passive way.’

Here's a video with a collection of graffiti art on Lisbon trains.

TEDxVolcano

I had no idea when I bought this notebook that it would end up being the first in a series that have been filling up since getting stranded in London by volcanic ash, or that it would be the basis for a presentation at TEDxVolcano!

Most of the speakers had been attendees of the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. We're in town working with the British Council on a global collaborative storytelling project.

The notebooks will also be instrumental in a report on virtual work that I'm writing for Manpower Inc. (we've been collaborating on virtual work for a couple of years). Aside from the gracious hosting offered by the British Council, virtual work has been the most stabilizing aspect of this situation.

In the meantime, I hope the #140conf that we're missing in New York is wonderful!

Notes from a Volcano Refugee in London

My notebook is already half full and I went back to Magma (no pun intended) to buy out their stock because there's no telling how long this will go on.

For the first couple of days, being a volcano refugee wasn't so bad. It's London in the spring, after all. Bright tulips and patches of sunshine-colored daffodils are up all over Hyde Park. We're here working with the British Council on a global cultural dialogue project and an extra weekend meant more time to bond with colleagues.

On the surface, life in London looks like this:

At the most delicious bakery in the world, Maison Bertaux, this afternoon, people were laughing and stirring cappuccino on blue and white checkered tablecloths decorated with yellow roses. From the ground, the plume is invisible. If you have nowhere to go, the chaotic flight disruptions aren't a big deal.


But the way life looks on the surface and the way things are in reality are two very different things.

Image copyright Stromboli Online.

Although I keep hearing that flights are canceled "through Sunday" or "at least until Monday" I wonder who really believes that a volcano is on a human timetable, or who might be willing to be in that first batch of flights that go out when the aviation industry and the government decide that it's "safe enough" to try.

Last time Eyjafjallajokull erupted, in 1821, it lasted for almost two years. The volcano doesn't care that we're all waiting to catch flights--there's no end in sight. The slightest bit of volcanic ash is enough to destroy jet engines, even when present in quantities so diluted that the plume can't be detected. And, "whatever is up in the sky must come down," so the World Health Organization is starting to recommend that people consider wearing protective masks in London.

More to come...

The Perfect City

What if you could create the most perfectly functioning, perfectly balanced, optimally populated (which in a functioning economy might mean, in this case, a fully occupied, no vacancies) city? How would you do it? What if you embedded in this perfectly functional city, mystical arcana and had 50,000 years to do it? Could you do it? How well could you do it?

We may never know. But the above video, an articulate, highly detailed (astonishingly geeky) video shows how one person tried to optimize reality using the Sim City game model as a test case. In some ways this is an example of gamer culture posturing (read: I can play better than you can). But, viewed in another light, it's a twist on the human capacity to dig insanely deeply into our imagination using a game as a vehicle to explore and expand reality. Which is the virtual world? Our mind or the game in which we are manifesting our mind?

Who knows, it might even be instructive to some. Maybe even to the makers of Loveland, who are also using an ever-expanding grid, might find this of interest.

I highly recommend a close look at the paper-based mathematical calculations early on in the video. Then go watch the movie Pi.

Murrow Center 3D Newsroom Debuts in Second Life

Congratulations to Larry Pintak for launching the new Washington State University Murrow School 3D Newsroom in the virtual world of Second Life.

DIP was pleased to be part of this journey. We worked with Larry when he directed the Kamal Adham Center at the American University in Cairo. DIP built AUC's Virtual Newsroom, which included a series of major international cross-cultural events, including the first-ever appearance in the virtual world of Second Life of a sitting U.S. Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, James K. Glassman, all of which is documented here.

Moving the Gift in the Imagination Age

“The imagination can only conceive of the world for a moment--a particular time, place and culture--and so must continually revise its conception to align with the changing world. And as these worldviews come and go, each person is pulled in his or her normal life between the influence the world has on imagination and the influence imagination has on the way we view the world.”

--Wallace Stevens



My friend Todd Gailun gave me a copy of Lewis Hyde’s book “The Gift,” which contains a magnificent passage about making the imagination real. The passage (see the video above) summarizes the core philosophy of the Imagination Age, which is that the imagination should lead to the real, and then the line between the two realms dissolves.

The book explains why greed is deadly, in economic terms, and why it strips the magic out of life. Greed, unchecked, can results in mass casualties. This is the case in relation to war, climate change, disaster management and neglecting education and the healthcare system, on a practical level. On a more abstract level, greed results in a withered intellectual and personal life that breeds ignorance, confusion, fear and hate.

On the other hand, giving without cultivating an environment of reciprocity is just as damaging for different reasons, because it can become a bottomless pit of imbalance, laziness, entitlement, disrespect and apathy.

Both conditions run counter to the idea posed by Lewis Hyde, who illuminates the notion that a gift must be kept in motion, either by giving in return or giving a gift of equal value to a third party.

One of his examples is appropriate for Sifnos, an island in the Cyclades in Greece, where I was when the above video was recorded by Andre Blas. If a villager receives two goats, Hyde says, he is not to keep them to breed them or hoard them for himself or his own family, but rather he is to throw a party and feed the village. In turn, the fed villagers are expected to return a gift of equal value to the host, or to a third party. In this way, a gift remains in motion.

Greed never goes unpunished or unnoticed. For example, Sifnos, an island of copper and silver mines, has been occupied since 4,000 BC. During the Bronze Age, this made it a resource for various rulers and factions, and it has been conquered and captured every few hundred years. The Greek historian Pausanias has that the Sifnos gold mines were destroyed in an earthquake in the 6th century BC, caused by Apollo after the islanders, out of greed, sent as a tribute to Delphi a gold golded egg instead of the solid gold one that they had traditionally sent.

I will post more on Sifnos and Greece soon...