stargeek
Pecking at ETech?Pecking at ETech?Pecking at ETech? 02/11/2004 04:17 PM Russell says:That's odd. I haven't noticed pecking or being pecked. Pompous? Nothing more or less than I would expect. I wonder if I'm missing something? I'm generally fairly sensitive about this sort of stuff. Anyone here at ETech have any specific examples?Interesting conference - too bad I wasn't there to get a longer impression, but boy it seemed like there were some serious pecking orders there.And someone else I know there said this via IM last night:You are missing some good conferences this week here, although I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the bloggers are pretty pompous.I'm not sure what to make of that. Pecking orders? Pompous? It bothers me, I guess. I DO think we're talking about blogging too much, but pecking? Via Yusuf This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Pecking at ETech?Grok Headline matches for Pecking at ETech?Investors as Pecking PigeonsInvestors as Pecking Pigeons 06/18/2004 09:55 AM Dutch pigeon shot for pecking art
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 A few months ago I wrote about Edward Hall's book The Hidden Dimension, on the science of proxemics -- the study of 'social distance', how we relate physically and psychologically to space and to overcrowding. A month earlier I wrote a fanciful piece about how people choose where to sit at a boardroom table and what that says about them. Now I'm reading Impro, by British playwright Keith Johnstone, which is ostensibly about the art of improvisational acting, but which has a great deal to say about other subjects, including proxemics. Here's a passage on Status and Space that especially caught my attention: Imagine that two stangers are
approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds
of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at
an
even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in
order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more
before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs
of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're
equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one
isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and
muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or
half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think
the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember
doing
it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and
gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to
cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not
notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of
the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously
exchanging
status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person
stepping
aside.
Johnstone is interested on how this subliminal body language and
status-checking can be exploited, to both powerful and comedic effect,
on the stage. I'm more interested in its implications for human
behaviour in a crowded world. I didn't believe the above passage was
true until
I started observing people (and myself) moving in crowds. You can
easily pick out who
sees him/herself as dominant, and who's going to move aside, a mile away by their demeanor and
body language. It's hilarious to watch. Older people almost always
expect, and subtly signal to younger people to move aside, even young
people in gangs with attitude. And they do move aside, belying their whole
superficial demeanor. Women tend to defer to men of the same age, but
old, frail and pregnant women somehow trump everyone else -- everyone
moves aside for them. I watched adults puff themselves up and brace
for
collision with children (especially those of cultures that let their
kids learn these status rules slowly) rather than simply
get out of their way. In one case I watched a very respectable,
well-dressed middle-aged man actually deliberately kick a child out of the way, and
then apologize to the mother (not the child) that he (the man) 'wasn't
paying
attention'. I never realized how arrogant I must appear in crowds. I tend to dislike them, 'pretend not to see' people in them (much to the dismay of people who later tell me I 'rudely' ignored their smile or nod or wave of recognition), and take on a hurried, distracted, disinterested, hostile and elbows-raised demeanor. It works very well, except with some children, and except when I have to pass people from behind. Imagine how this plays out in protest demonstrations! And in lineups, especially where first-come first-served is hard to observe because there are no clear lines, or where some lines move much faster than others. So here you are a dominant person, forced to wait passively behind a long, crowded line of 'people of lower status', while other people of low status move ahead faster or even cut into line. Foaming at the mouth time! Ever noticed that the people angriest in lineups are middle-aged businessmen? Maybe I'm finally starting to understand pecking orders: Why they're important in nature, as a simple and automatic mechanism for social organization and balance. And how, in man, in our horrifically overcrowded civilization culture, they get inflated and perverted into political hierarchies and produce megalomaniacs and nuclear pissing contests. What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures -- communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is -- a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding -- and what it isn't -- a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?  Impro has some other
wonderful insightful observations on several topics. Here are my
favourites:On Creative Blocks: At a time when I seemed to have lost all my artistic talents, I began to explore [dream images] and hold onto and attend to them..Then I progressed to attending to mental images [things I pictured for example while reading]...The effect was so interesting that I persisted...I looked in the window [that I was picturing in my mind] and saw strange rooms in amazing detail...I belatedly thought of attending similarly to the reality around me. The deadness and greyness of my life and imagination were immediately sloughed off...The dullness was not, as I had thought, an inevitable consequence of age, but of education. On Overcrowding: People travel a long way for a 'view'. The essential element of a good view is distance, with nothing human in the immediate foreground. It lets us experience the pleasure of having our space flow out unhindered. Posture improves, breathing improves...These are all probably symptoms of human overcrowding. On Social Distance: When you hand out leaflets on the street, you can't just thrust them into people's hands. You have to establish that you're giving out leaflets, and then present one at exactly the right moment. If you get it wrong, people will either ignore you or be alarmed. [It's a very complex social activity, hard to do well, as any election campaigner will tell you. It's a submissive act, requiring great improvisational skills, and almost impossible for dominant personalities to master.] On Education: Most schools teach children to be unimaginative...Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better teaching if we thought of adults as atrophied children. Many 'well-adjusted' adults are bitter, uncreative, frightened, unimaginative, rather hostile people [anyone you know fit this description?]. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that's what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing. Many teachers express surprise at the switch-off that occurs at puberty, but I don't, because first of all the child has to hide the sexual turmoil he's in, and secondly the grown-ups' attitude to him completely changes. A story written off as childish fantasy in an eight-year-old may be taken, at fourteen, as a sign of mental abnormaility. The adolescent therefore has to learn to 'fake' everything. On Art: We have this idea that art is self-expression, which is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated...Imagining should be as easy as perceiving. [In children, it is.] On Acceptable Behaviour: Sanity is a performance...It's a matter of presenting yourself as safe... When people are perceived as unpredictable, they are socially rejected...And it's no good telling a student he won't be held responsible for the content of his imagination [he will]...so the student must pretend to be dull...People's normal behaviours destroy other people's creative talent. All the social weapons we use against other people we also use, inwardly, against ourselves. On Assuming an Identity: Our faces get fixed with age, but even in young people you can see that a decision has been taken to appear tough, or stupid, or resigned. (Why Stupid? Because then people expect less of you). Sometimes in extreme situations people will break out of their usual expression and you can't even recognize them...Our personality is the Public Relations department for the real mind, which remains unknown. It always seems to function at some level in terms of what other people think. If I am alone and someone knocks on the door I 'come back to myself'. I do this to check that my social image is presentable. Though I may later get 'lost in the conversation' [and get outside my personality]. People isolated for long periods report 'personality disintegration'. [Perhaps this isn't madness -- maybe they become who they really are]. A final caution: Despite its insights, this book is hard work -- it's written for those who know the jargon and rituals of acting, and for the rest of us it's tough slogging. |
Right then. Emerging Tech is over and everyone's heads are full and we've all got a little bit of a hangover from last night celebrations and socialising. I'm now back in Los Angeles, having taken the train up from San Diego with the lovely Phil and Anno. The train journey was filled with little aggravating child noises and I was sitting in the wrong direction so arrive in LA feeling queasy and dizzy. The train goes so close to the Ocean that it's almost impossible not to want to sacrifice all future working ambitions, get out at any convenient station and run giggling into the water with warm sand between your toes. Manfully, I have resisted.
I fly back to the UK on Sunday evening - arriving back sometime around early lunchtime on Monday. I think I'm going to have to make an appeal for a long weekend off work to try and digest everything that's been going on and make sense of it. I think my understanding of the event is even more blurry this year than last. In the meantime posting is likely to be more erratic than usual...
"No one owns who my
friends are". Great FOAF session today. Dan Brickley who created
FOAF, gave a good overview of what it is and how it is used.
I
enjoyed the idea of dating on
phones via bluetooth and FOAF.
This way you can date
somebody who is in the same room, same restaurant, immediately, with
the same interests as you... Great stuff.
Marc and Eric also OF COURSE showed People Aggregator. I really
like the idea of linking the friends I have in Orkut with the friends I have in Linked In, with the
friends I have in ...
I am not sure these networks will agree
to share their databases with you (or anybody else), Marc, but let's
see what happens. I agree on the fact that if we all own our own
identity on a FOAF file, it is better than having to fill-it in in 10
different networks...
Also saw a demo of NewsMonster, it is an RSS
reader that supports FOAF. Nice work, John. "There is too many social
networks. You do not own my data, I do. "
John is also working
on "Exportster", which is a plugin that should be ready within a
month. Its goal is to be able to export the data from the different
networks and sync them.
"We export the data from social
networks and sync them all, so that there is one macro level FOAF
file, in order to have a unified data model."
Tribe also
announced that they support FOAF.
Greg Elin showed fotonotes.net that is
coordinating a semantic photo project which is exploring the issues
combining FOAF and RDF for photos, impressive.
Marc Powell
talked briefly about
Indyvoter.org, "injecting the virus of political dialogue into
online social networks", also supporting FOAF. [Loïc Le Meur's WebLog]
BTW What my hands are trying to convey are the two dots over Loïc's letter i. :-)
Ev gave an amazing demo of Odeo. That thing is going to be as big (or bigger) than Flickr, I'm sure of it.
Here's the whole talk as a ogg file (my mp3 export in audacity refuses to work) and some photos of the screens on my feed (lots more I'll upload later).
Danny and Merlin's lifehacks talk was good too, here's the whole thing as an ogg file as well.
Creative Commons will be an exhi bitor at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego next week.
Etech is regarded by many as the best tech conference of the year, always in step with the latest creations and aspirations of the alpha geeks, having evolved from the Peer-to-Peer Conference in early 2001 and P2P & Web Services in late 2001 to the current multi-tracked annual conference starting two years ago. (Incidentally, the Creative Commons concept was in troduced at ETCon 2002. How time flies.)
Matt Haughey and Mike Linksvayer will be attending. Stop by the Creative Commons booth, or better yet our parti cipant session (time and location yet to be announced). We'll be introducing a new CC metadata-enhanced application. Hint: it's described in one of our tech challenges, heretofore unmet.
If you're in the area but not an attendee, you can still reg ister for a free exhibits pass, or an exhibits plus keynotes and birds-of-a-feather (participant sessions) pass for only $50. Hope to see you there!
O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology
Conference — taking place at the Westin Horton Plaza,
San Diego, CA, Feb. 9-12, 2004 — will have a
This is the key event of the year. We're gonna party like is USED to be 1999.
I'll be there - sponsored by Laszlo Systems and I'll be giving a :05 minute talk on FOAF and the PeopleAggregator.
But clearly the most exciting event will be the field trip to TJ and the House of Mole. Something not to be missed.
Will participate at
E-Tech in San Diego Feb 9 to 12, let's meet there.. Just signed up
to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology
Conference in San Diego, Feb 9-12.
I know many of you will
be there, let me know if you have some time so that we can meet during
the conference.
Hope to see many #Joiito participants at
Jeannie and Jibot. [Loïc
Le Meur's WebLog]
Hey - at least ONE person will be paying full fair to Etech.
Well maybe not, I'm sure Loïc will get some sort of VIP treatment and comped. Afterall - he IS a famous French entreprenuer - right?
The O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference
has TrackBacks (and their associated auto-discovery RDF) baked into
every single
keynot
e,
tutor
ial,
se
ssion, and
BoF
page.
This means you can target your bloggings of the event, providing both
us, the organizers, and your peers with live feedback on the goings
on.
<good on you, terrie!>
Adriaan and Boris are coming!
Emerging
Technology. 
I will be at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in
San Diego from February 9th to 12th.
Rob Kaye is promoting bluetooth this year...
My ETech 2004 photo album (feel free to use any of the photos)
I'll be uploading through the day.
Arrived at ETech. Lots of people and not enough time to blog. The Internet in my room isn't working, but hopefully, they'll fix it today. Today is the Digital Democracy Teach-In. Should be fun. I'll try to post notes.
A few one liners I scribbled in my notebook:
"I wanted to be a revolutionary, but all I got was this stupid blog."
"I'm not an academic, but I play one on my blog."
UPDATE:
from gapingvoid
Lessig Keynote and afterwards discussion and questions, recorded on my iTrip and very lofi (9Mb and 12Mb, respectively). I'm sure high quality versions will be online in the next few weeks, but for now there's this.
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