Out of Left Field

The dream comes again, but this time

there's a space for me, and the powerman

listens.

I hide my nakedness and offer

the one I fear for

as champion.

I am afraid

I am required.

technorati tags:poem, dream

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Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

If you like

• the bar scene in the original Star Wars,
• the tragic musical monster of Phantom of the Opera,
  
• Jedidiah, the Gyro Captain in Road Warior,
• Johnny Depp channelling Keith Richards,
• Orlando Bloom's cheekbones,
  
• Keira Knightley's feistiness,
• a fantastical plot,
• lots of explosions, and
  
• nasty villians,

and you don't require

• characters with depth, and
  
• a meaningful plot,

then this movie is for you.

technorati tags:Pirates, Dead_Man's_Chest

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The New Social-izing

The online culture is socially-driven, but it's a different kind of socializing. In some ways it's a million Speaker's Corners, where some have megaphones of varying amplifications, and some speak (write, record&play) in a soundless chamber.

The aggregate is beginning to have power, even though many individuals may not. Chris Anderson, in the large megaphone he is editor in chief of, Wired, writes about People Power and says -

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.

Wired 14.07: People Power

Yup. This is how we people amuse ourselves, writing into the void for the pleasure of writing to find out what we think. Is it work? School and business have taught us that writing is work, and there are certainly skills and mind-work required (I believe) but is writing about what we want to write about really work? Or is it the equivalent of the social chatting for pleasure rather than the formalized, constricted, purposeful 'social' interaction of  meetings or political interactions?

Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy.

Wired 14.07: People Power

We like to express ourselves in writing as well as in speaking.

This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.

Wired 14.07: People Power

Yup, even if we don't write/talk strongly enough to be heard individually, we can make enough noise together to talk back to the powers-that-be in a way they can choose to hear. And that's something, I guess.

technorati tags:peer_production, Wired, Chris_Anderson

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