Hello & Goodbye, Mary’s Rock, Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, 2009

This little jaunt won’t be a monster trip, but it will be fun. Catch you on the flip side of the world…

It’s all about the numbers, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2004

On change, systems, influences, uncertainty and defining goals…

• Seth Godin:

  I hope all of you are doing something that makes your grandparents uncomfortable

  (via Jay Parkinson, who is working on something making many grandparents uncomfortable.)

• Zoë Westhof (@zoewesthof), Why I’m Not Realistic:
  

  I choose to embrace change and uncertainty, because I don’t think any of us can rely on certainty anymore. If realistic means sticking to the conventions that are quickly falling into irrelevance, then I choose to be unrealistic.

• How are conventions, systems and institutions adapting to the new reality of constant disruption?

  Perhaps far worse than we thought.

• Continuing on the topic, whenever I read about complex adaptive systems, I keep thinking about the danger of over-optimization and the impossibility of perfection.
• Mike Bonifer (@bonifer), Three Moves (You Can Make Right Now to Change the Game):
  

  There are two issues with focusing exclusively on our goals. The first is that the people with whom we share our scenes usually have different goals from ours. … Focusing only on our desired outcomes can result in a tug-of-war for control of a scene, severely limiting the scene’s progress and potential. Not good.

  The second, and bigger, issue with being exclusively goal-oriented in our scenes, is that we diminish our potential for breakthrough moves. Breakthroughs reveal unexpected avenues for productivity. Breakthroughs can only happen if we are willing to let go of our expectations about what a scene needs to achieve. And what is a goal but an expectation for a scene?

  … When the goal is in our head, it has, in effect, already happened, and what we’re doing in our scenes is trying to re-live history, a very personal and private history that our scene partners likely do not share. When we let a scene define its own goals, we give ourselves and our scene partners the potential to make history together. Creating a shared history is what branding is all about.

• Noah Goldstein, Changing Minds and Changing Towels, via Sean Howard:
  

  We found that by simply changing a few words on the standard sign, guests who learned that the majority of their fellow guests had reused their towels (the social norms appeal) were 26% more likely than those who saw the basic environmental protection message to recycle their towels.

  … So, does this mean that we’re just sheep? Not necessarily. But we’re definitely more likely to follow the herd when we’re uncertain about how to behave. And it turns out that we’re also more likely to follow the herd to the extent that we perceive the herd as sharing our circumstances.

  The takeaway: be very careful how you define your systems, environments and goals; incentives, influences and social proof are very powerful forces. Remember, change or be changed.

Continuing with Umair101…

Video: Sander Duivestein, Penny For Your Thoughts with Umair Haque from the VINT Symposium.

Since I couldn’t find a transcript, I decided to do it myself; click here to view the video (embedding not allowed); or read my transcript below (all errors are mine, not Umair’s…)

Penny For Your Thoughts – Umair Haque from Sander Duivestein on Vimeo.

Umair Haque:

What’s really different about the world today is the fact that we’re much more interconnected. And when we’re more interconnected, we’re more interdependent.

And so the question is, in this radically interdependent world, how do we have to behave to create real value, to create authentic value. Because until we can answer that question, we’re going to see the crisis that we’ve got today, actually intensify. What it really is a kind of a crisis in the way that our organizations behave. So what that means is, we see across industries this pattern of kind of self-defeating, or self-destructive, or value-destructive behaviour, because they don’t know how to do, how to behave any other way.

And we don’t seem to be able to overcome that pattern; and so until we can overcome that pattern, I think that the crisis that we see today, even if we bail ourselves out of it, by bailing out the banks, by bailing out the automakers, the crisis will keep on repeating itself, across industries; it will keep on going on until we answer that problem, of very very self-destructing behavior; and so they’re kind of zombies.

They know that they have to behave differently to create real value, but they don’t know how to do that, because they haven’t been organized and built in a way to do it.

It’s kind of in their very DNA, because the question is not one of strategy, not one of competition but one of institutions. And unless you realize that institutions are what you have to change, you wind up as kind of as a zombie.

Why do we see these patterns of destructive behavior going on? I think the reason is actually very simple: capitalism in the way we built it today kind of undercounts costs and overcounts benefits. Many of the costs that we’re now becoming more and more familiar with – social costs, environmental costs, human costs, the costs of unfairness – and it overcounts benefits, that’s kind of a structural flaw, the heart of the way that we built capitalism itself. And what that translates into is that we see this pattern of behavior of where I strive to make myself better off but I’m indifferent to whether you are better off. And if I can do that, then the result is very, very small amounts of real value that are being created, and today we’re facing that fact.

The way that we should think about it in the 21st century is that we create the world through out action and through our behavior.

So the world is kind of a function of what we do. And when we act in one way, we create one kind of industry, one kind of environment, one kind of world; and when we act in another way, we can create a very different kind of environment, or industry, or world. And so I think the question of “how do we respond to the world”, we have to think about the fact that we are responsible for the actions that we take, because those actions then go on to create the kind of world that then comes back to effect us. And so the challenge in the 21st century is learning to create authentic value, real value.

So my question would be is how many of your innovations are really not innovations, how many are really unnovations.

So I think the most important question companies can ask themselves today is are we innovating, or are we doing exactly the opposite? Is what we are doing really an improvement?

(Hat tip to Jon Bischke for the pointer to the video.)

—

More Umair101:

• Beyond the massconomy, humanity wins.
• A collection of my favorite posts and insights from Umair using delicious, tagged “umair101″. Tag your own links and insights with “umair101″ to help us get an understanding of which posts and insights were most “mind-blowing” to you.
• And, for a more curated and collaborative look at “Umair 101″ insights, check out the wiki on Core Edges and contribute with the posts and specific insights that were most important for you in understanding Umair Haque.

One way to challenge the definition of photojournalism; not exactly what I had had in mind, but interesting nonetheless.

Horses Think, French Photo Hoax:

Paris-Match awarded their annual Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant this week to two French students who submitted a photographic story that apparently presented images documenting the precarious lives of students today and the things they must do to survive.

When the two winners, Guillaume Chauvin and Remi Hubert, both art students at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs of Strasbourg, stood up at the Sorbonne to claim their trophy and prize money, they announced the true nature of their work. The images were not photojournalism but staged images featuring many of their peers.

See the images for yourself.

Speaking to Le Figaro, Guillaume Chauvin [one of the students] confided that they “wanted to enter the contest in order to show the codes used too often in photojournalism and to prove that something real could be translated into something staged.”

Were any rules broken? According to the British Journal of Photography, no:

However, terms and conditions don’t forbid faked reportages – a situation that is likely to change next year. Already, Paris Match has withdrawn its cash prize, offering it, instead, to the two student’s university of decorative arts in Strasbourg. The weekly magazine, which is now warning readers that the images have been faked, has also announced that next year’s cash prize will be increased to €10,000 as a result of this year’s ‘fraud’.

What to make of the entire affair? I think Chase Jarvis nails it:

I think what they’ve done is not to make brilliant photojournalism, but to make brilliant art. There was certainly a significant price to be paid for that art, or perhaps many prices: the reputation of the award, the reputation of the judges, even their own reputations perhaps–and only time will tell–but they’ve surely made some brilliant statements about the nature of such imagery, called into question the cliched nature of the traditional canons recognizing that work, and made us all pause, even if just for a moment, to consider what photojournalism really is. By blending genres (PJ + perhaps advertising photography?) and creating staged images that were stunning enough to win a Grand Prize (hard work in it’s own right), I’d argue that they’ve achieved their end goal. And they’ve done so in an incredibly creative way. Subversive and meta.

Coverage:

• Horses Think, French Photo Hoax.
• British Journal of Photography, Two students con Paris Match’s photojournalism prize.
• Chase Jarvis, Fake Photojournalism Wins.
• Jörg Colberg in Conscientious, Fake photojournalism wins prize.

Jonathan Jones in The Guardian Art Blog, Art criticism is not a democracy:

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs.

Without introspective thought and relevant context, art that is easy to digest gets promoted and consumed even if it’s not really that filling. Supply meets demand.

But so what?

A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says “this is good, this is bad” without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we’re innately convinced we’re right.

Critics are born, not made. I don’t know why I became convinced that I had more to say about art than other people, and an opinion that mattered more than most. But I did decide that – and persuaded others to listen.

It’s impossible for everyone to be a knowledgeable critic, and I don’t reject the notion that a single, authoritative critic can be a valuable filter; but I believe that it’s impossible for any single critic to be able to render meaningful judgments for the diversity of audiences, tastes, styles and preferences in the world. It’s really not a question of whether the critic or the crowd is a better filter and judge of quality, but in how to leverage the positives and negatives of each method.

In my comment on Do people value great photography?:

Great photography always stands out; it just doesn’t stand out to everyone :)

Quantity [divides quality into segments] more than it dilutes [quality]; it’s unfair to expect everybody to be able to judge greatness. Any widely available cultural activity will always encounter this dynamic: it’s impossible for *most* of the participants to judge greatness; and that’s neither bad nor unexpected.

… The point is that “great” is a matter of personal perspective; the real question for any industry is to identify the preferences and taste within segments of the population and create content that fits the segment.

Art is a democracy, open to any to create and critique, more now than ever. And that’s the beauty. Its asynchronous nature means anyone can create, watch, follow, read, engage, critique; but anyone can turn it off, ignore, dislike, not share. It’s a choice, mirroring the broader world of media and social media. Yes, little of what is created probably passes the “I’d rather be watching Porn” test, but as long as content and creators find an audience, medium, environment and community that supports them, that’s all that matters.

(via Horses Think)

Related:

• Taylor Davidson, Oct 2008, Messages and Messengers, about developing thought and an eye by asking questions rather than making statements.
• Taylor Davidson, May 2009, Expanding on the role of middlemen in stock photography, about editing, filtering and searching through the vast depths of stock photography.