The Greeks say NO

"....NO... means go to hell. It means fry me, cook me on a spit, torture me till your imagination goes dry, but No it is and No it stays." --DKToteras

Last January the Greek people said NO when they took to the streets to protest continuing debt, bigger debt and debt benefitting banks rather than people. The European "troika" negotiating debt terms failed to appreciate that the primary allegiance of the Greek people is not to the Greek government or nation-state but to the Greek family. Greek culture runs in the blood and bones and when threatened it responds with the absolute form of another era.

Mass rallies were organized by labor in 65 towns. Gigantic banners unfurled at base of the Acropolis, the symbolic source of democracy: "The people have the power and never surrender."  An accompanying statement from the powerful Greek communist party declared, "We will strengthen our struggle with people from all over the world against capitalist brutality in order for the brutal measures that bankrupt the people not to be applied."

Greek families have already experienced "a charade of voluntary haircuts." One tragic example is the cuts to the health care system, which was rated by the World Health Organization as one of the best in the world with costs among the lowest of European Union member countries. Following heavy budget cuts last year, there was a 24% rise in demand for hospital services because people can't afford private health care. Additionally there has been a sharp rise in communicable diseases  like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, symptomatic of a health care system near breakdown. This penny-wise pound-foolish approach spells trouble for the region since germs don't recognize lines in the dirt that are national borders. 

The interesting thing about this economic crisis is who decides what and for whom. As of January 2012 when the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund were in negotiations, it was clear  that there was no way the debt amounts could actually be repaid. People like Costas Lapavitsas, writing in a rational manner, called for "default in a sovereign and democratic way by immediately declaring a cessation of payments,"..."with the objective to restart economic growth and avoid disruption of of basic social services."

The Greek government has restructured its debt. Half has been eliminated and funding costs are reduced over the next few years. In these times the Greek people are dependent on government services for health care and retirement funds. However there is little doubt that default terms were achieved because they made their position clear.

Technological Innovation and Creativity

Because of the fragmented nature of the material in the world of digital messages with their meta data, we are in a new phase of technological mash-up. The remix itself is not new, as Kirby Ferguson demonstrates. It has been with us since the dawn of the machine age, and is demonstrated in images with the history of film.

This creativity, as an assemblage or " blage," can create something new, Nigel Scott's true original. A thing is created. 

However, this is not the beginning or end of the thought of creativity:

When one idea begets another, it is difficult to make a product (a technology) because the product is a conclusion. Because if you follow the idea wherever it might lead, you can't stop to conclude it. You continue beyond to the next thought, even though the product doesn't come to fruition. What would be a product morphs. Again.

The question here for the creator of the new thing, the blage, is what happens to questioning, the process, once it has solidified into a product?

This can be seen as two sides of the same coin. What is the strength of one, the creativity that does not conclude, takes things apart. As opposed to the strength of the other, the creativity that is productive.

The viral meme in the cloud

Memes are nothing new. The thought of them was invented in 1976 by the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. To him memes were replicators like nucleic acid, leaping from brain to brain by what he called a process of imitation, and they compete for attention.

When I first heard about memes I thought, oh I know what this is, it's just another word for fad. I became aware of fads as a preteen, observing full skirts and saddle shoes. Oops, I'm dating myself for all to see. Fads have that characteristic. But it also demonstrates a difference from meme. A fad can be about physical objects whereas memes are ideas, like the idea social media, perhaps?

Certainly when memes are creatures of the internet, they are entropic. This means their energy has been spent before they reach you. They share this with "information" in general, as defined by Claude Shannon who devised the formula by which information goes across the wire (or though the ether or whatever channel.) Shannon's information is entropic by definition. So the meme is actually entropic before it goes on the wire, not just afterwards.

When you receive cloud memes or pass them on, if they do contain a new thought, it is limited as part of the shallow, lack-of context that is the abstract machine-driven world. Even if a meme is new, it just becomes another cog in the internet thought-ecosystem because it doesn't contain enough energy to change an agenda.

No wonder memes become viral from the cloud. As information is flying in and out across the networks, button-push by button-push, the meme is sufficiently simple to be instantly grasped before it jumps on like a grasshopper.

Big Questions

Since everyone is taking up big answers, like what happened this last year and what will happen next year, I would like to take up big questions like what is going on in the War of the Titans? and is the Web disintegrating or dying? These questions are too big, however. So for today I am content to wish you a happy Christmas holiday. 

Rarefied Abundance

As I was reading Maria Popova about how accessibility v.s. access to the digital form of information has change our notion of "rare," I began to wonder if this notion might also be applied to other commodities in our changing culture. 

In her article of Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance she delineates two obstacles to discovery. The first is obstacle is lack of awareness that something exists. The second obstacle is a lack of accessibility which means that we may know about it but have no way of finding it.  Digital convergence had solved the lack of accessabililty to a great degree, as things are now at our fingertips in the computer age.

Indeed the amount of things available to us has increased to such a degree that the rare has become abundant and we find ourselves confronted with too much to choice. Consequently Maria has articulated a third obstacle to discovery, lack of motivation. Since we lack the time and place to interact with the subject, be it information or some other commodity, we have difficulty making the choice to actually access it. In other words we lack motivation to go after it.

So when Maria entered the digital library at Flickr Commons to unearth some astounding  photos of  the first Australian expedition to Antarctica from 1911-1914, and she wrote an article placing them into contemporary conversations about everything from photography to climate change, the people motivated to access this content increased from several thousand to 350,000 views within several weeks. 

It strikes me that the online reviews of merchandise at Amazon provide a remarkably similar role for the abundance we find there, as do the rating services like Shopzilla and Pricegrabber. Without some human sorting mechanism shoppers would be left wondering how to make a choice.

Perhaps here lies a concept for the "brick and mortar" shops to work with as well. Ironically, their buyers have performed this same role to some extent historically. As our shopping experience shifts away from them to online, the experience of looking at actual merchandise will be harder to come by, in fact, may be even rarefied. I will have to travel more miles for the experience, and when the providers of the experience develop my trust for their ability to narrow the choice, that helps to motivate me in there.