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METAFORIX MAIL Volume 1, Issue 42 May 29, 2001 Sites and insights for the Information Age Listen to
my conversation with Thomas J. Leonard, coach and entrepreneur extraordinaire,
about your business and the Internet. It's at www.RealInterviews.com.
Thanks for reading! CONTENTS AT A GLANCE: ON
MY MIND: Virtual Woodstock ON MY MIND [From the Editor] A Bouncing New Cyberbaby with 52,600 Parents IBM has 320,000 employees in 165 countries. It also has the technological and human resources to design WorldJam, a spectacular experiment in online collaboration.The project was conceived last year in IBM's corporate communication department. Nine months and millions of dollars later, WorldJam made its highly publicized debut last week. All 320,000 IBM-ers were invited to the party, which took place in the privacy of IBM's intranet. No outsiders were allowed to participate and practically none got to peer through the window and watch. WorldJam was a unique attempt to engage thousands of people in a three-day online brainstorming session. Jonathan Spira, a knowledge management researcher and one of the few outsiders privileged to be an observer, dubbed WorldJam "the business world's Woodstock of online collaboration experiments." Unlike more modest corporate brainstorming efforts, which are limited to small teams with specific goals, WorldJam was enormous in both scale and scope. The 52,600 employees who logged on during the session generated over 6,000 proposals in response to ten broad challenges posed by WorldJam's managers. The challenges included employee retention, work-life balance, and maintaining community in a highly dispersed workforce. Participants were offered a variety of ways to express their views. Moderated chat rooms, electronic bulletin boards, polls, interactive games, instant messaging, and small-group breakout sessions were all available. Many of these communication channels employed software applications created especially for WorldJam. IBM has great expectations for its bouncing new cyberbaby, which will be poked, prodded, and generally studied to death over the next several months. Apart from internal benefits to the company, CEO Louis Gerstner expects "WorldJam to ultimately result in mature products." Outside researchers and product developers are also eager to tap the insights generated by the project. Certainly, IBM will learn a great deal about incentives and barriers to online collaboration within its own corporation and, not incidentally, learn something about how tweaking the incentives and barriers might affect the bottom line. What I find more compelling is that many of the questions raised by WorldJam extend beyond IBM's intranet into the broader world of cyberspace. For example: - Why do some people accept the invitation to participate, while others do not? Putting aside, for the moment, the digital divide, this question is as relevant to the adult population as a whole as to the circumscribed employee population of IBM. - Why do some participants actively contribute to chat rooms and respond to instant messages? Why do others prefer to observe from the sidelines? Are these preferences entirely personal, or are they a function of how this region of cyberspace has been organized and explained? - Would more people participate, or would people make different kinds of contributions, if they enjoyed genuine anonymity? In WorldJam, everyone could be identified by IBM e-mail address -- just as on the Internet, anonymous communication is ultimately a fiction, if someone has an urgent enough reason and deep enough pockets to track another person down. - Do participants, in effect, act as though they have anonymity while they are in WorldJam or a similar environment -- even though they know very well that they can be identified? On the other hand, are participants' contributions informed by an underlying awareness that they are in a public space? Do they use that space as a soapbox, a theater, an arena, a therapy session? - Does a genuine sense of community develop in an organized region of cyberspace such as WorldJam? Do people develop a sense of trust? How close is the cyberversion of community to the face-to-face variety? - Would a space like WorldJam operate differently if it were not an extension of the workplace? Suppose it were an extension of a neighborhood, a university, a charitable organization, a church, or -- as in the case of the Internet -- virtually the entire world? How would people's behavior be affected? - WorldJam, the three-day marathon, is over now. It might be studied as a discrete event or as a process involving planning, implementation, debriefing, and analysis. Will WorldJam yield different insights when viewed from these alternate perspectives? Context, community, anonymity, personality, playfulness, trust, boundaries, time. What do these concepts mean in cyberspace and in real space? WorldJam and its inevitable replications should have much to teach us.
Cordially, Lois C.
Ambash, Editor
MEDIA Colorization Redux? Now that we've begun using our digital video recorder -- aka the new toy from the kids -- I find myself paying more attention to how new technologies are being used to alter old content. As Marshall McLuhan might have asked, How are these new media changing the message?Remember the flap about "colorization" of classic black-and-white movies? We hear less about it these days, but some folks remain appalled at the idea of tampering with original works of art by applying an overlay of color. As DVR and subscription TV services become more pervasive, giving more people the power to rid their screens of traditional commercials, a different kind of alteration will soon be applied to popular TV reruns. And I mean very soon. The New York Times reports that digital product placements can be expected to insinuate themselves into my favorite cop show just as soon as the requisite business agreements have been finalized. Logos, vending machines, and office products that may not even have existed when the episodes were filmed may be allowed, for a fee, to distort Law and Order's chronological verisimilitude. As in the case of colorization, critics decry the ever-blurrier line between editorial and advertising content. Though I admit to an undue fondness for Lennie Briscoe, Jack McCoy, and the other Law and Order regulars, digital product placement doesn't push my buttons in quite the same way as colorization. After all, the original episodes may be replete with product placements. I've never paid any conscious attention -- though I can't vouch for the subliminal. Besidese, those old black-and-white classics are old, which gives them an indefinably sacrosanct aura in my mind. Now that the Times has clued me in, however, I'll keep an eye out for handheld computers, recently introduced soft drinks, and the logos of NBA expansion teams. I'll let you know how much they interfere with the plot.
Access previous issues of Metaforix Mail by date by visiting our archives. Or use the search box on any page of the Metaforix site (www.metaforix.com) to search by keywords.
CYBERSPEAK Reading: It's Incidental An aliterate is a person who is able to read, but chooses not to. According to an article by Linton Weeks of The Washington Post, aliteracy in America is growing by leaps and bounds. Over the past 20 years, the number of Americans who report that they do not read at all has consistently risen.Although the word aliteracy may not technically qualify as cyberspeak, the phenomenon is certainly related to the proliferation of Web sites, computer games, and e-books. Internet developers report that web site visitors prefer to scan, rather than read. Transportation officials substitute logos and symbols for words whenever possible. And in the world of package design, says the editor of BrandPackaging Magazine, the marketing communication "hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons, and, dead last, words." While illiteracy can be identified and addressed, aliteracy is "like an invisible liquid, seeping through our culture." Its symptoms include substituting summaries for whole books and watching the video version instead of doing any reading at all. The writer as cultural hero has been replaced by the rock star, the athlete, the comic, and the movie star. We've arrived at a point where half the American public -- including half of all teachers -- does not appreciate the inherent value of reading. None of this is to deny the importance of learning to "read" non-verbal "texts" in a variety of media. But, as Edmund D. Pellegrino pointed out in a prescient essay published in 1984, "the computer," in particular, "accelerates the atrophy of the intellectual skills acquired for personally reading the books from which the information is extracted." So while you're honing your Internet skills, please don't forget to read, as scholar Kylene Beers suggests, just for "the sheer bliss of it."
Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project Robert
Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 through 2000, believes
that poems were meant to be read or recited aloud. During his tenure as
Poet Laureate, Pinsky undertook to create a video archive of Americans
of all ages, reading their favorite poems. Go
ahead. Listen to John Ulrich, a white 20-year-old from South Boston, read
"We
Real Cool," by the African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Guest Columnists and Interviewees Wanted! Metaforix
Mail seeks your opinions on how information technologies are (or are not)
changing your world of work.
Please note that the links contained in Metaforix Mail are current as of the time of publication. Some of them may no longer be operative at the time you access past issues.
To
Volume 1, Issue 41 May 17, 2001
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