Our two year-old recently had a meltdown because I took the iPod Touch out of her hands so that she could focus on eating her eggs and toast.

“I want the iPod!  I want the iPod” she said quite forcefully, along with a tear or two.

This incident might also bring a tear (of joy) to Steve Jobs and his usability team, but it sent a chill through my heart.  Our daughter’s greatest influence is…us.  And we have newspapers, smartphones, and sometimes laptops at the dining table.  We seem to be perpetually gorging on media, to the detriment of a balanced approach to real life.

“We have a crisis of attention,” announced a smart person at a digital media conference I attended in New York last week.  I don’t quite remember who said it, because, I along with the others in attendance, were half-listening, half keeping an eye on our various screens.  One another participant suggested we were now in a four screen world (TV, computer, mobile phone, and now iPad/slate), I saw whatever remained of my attention span shrivel up and die.

There’s even a new book on this subject, Hamlet’s Blackberry.  Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Review:

It convincingly argues that we’ve ceded too much of our existence to what he calls Digital Maximalism. Less scold and more philosopher, Mr. Powers certainly bemoans the spread of technology in our lives, but he also offers a compelling discussion of our dependence on contraptions and of the ways in which we might free ourselves from them. I buy it. I need quiet time.

At the same time, near-panic ensues on Facebook and Twitter as people rushed to declare that they were the first to own an iPhone 4, while others declared their despondency at being stuck with “older” technology.  I was compelled to send this cartoon to at least four of my Facebook friends to assuage their feelings of being Left Behind:

I’ve written about this before (see An Ode to Contemplation), but I’ve grown increasingly concerned about digital distraction — especially my own.  In our persistently connected state, are we really better off?  Stress and workload aside, what are we missing when are heads are bowed on deference to one of those four screens?  And why are we so captivated by the Bright Shiny New Thing?

So, my colleague Ron Krabill’s excellent TEDx Seattle talk, Beyond the Bright Shiny New Thing resonates even stronger with me, months later.  He argues that the newest technology isn’t always the best, especially as we seek to engage historically disenfranchised communities (i.e. the poor) with digital media.  It’s one reason why I’m suddenly “geeking out” — slowly turning away from OS X and Windows 7, and messing around with the wonderfully open, cheap (free) and lean Linux-based Ubuntu on a $300 netbook. [more props to the Apple design team, when my daughter saw me working on the smaller netbook, she started jabbing at the screen, hoping it was touch-enabled.]

But beyond simplifying my digital diet, I realize I desperately need to go on a media fast.  Clay Shirky celebrates our ability to collaborate more/produce more thanks to social media in his new book Cognitive Surplus (Yochai Benkler calls it excess capacity, enabling our ability to engage in “social production” — much like my time devoted to creating this post).  I think we sometimes need to take that time we once dedicated, as Shirky argues to living as a TV-fixated couch potato, to just be — and to focus on what matters most.  So to start, I’m pledging to keep my phone, computer and even newspapers far away from places of family communing, so that I can concentrate more…on family.

I love this video (yes, ironically shot with my persistently pocketable smartphone) of my daughter at nineteen months, ogling the “big iPod” in the window of the Apple Store.  Not because of her fascination with technology at such an early age (I joke that she’s beyond a “digital native” and started out as a “digital fetus”), but because ultimately what captivates her most is a yellow balloon.  Out of the mouths of babes…

Originally posted to Storyteller Uprising.

Check out this Forbes interactive map Where Americans Are Moving (built with 2008 IRS data).

Red indicates outgoing migration, black, incoming migration.

Here’s Detroit:

Now here’s Seattle:

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I quickly learned the expression “loaded for bear” as I struggled to master what it would take to become a backpack journalist several years ago.  It’s a wonderful way to say “be ready for anything” — and when you’re out there in the field by yourself armed with a camera, you had better locked and loaded for the shot of a lifetime.  The conundrum?  You have to pack enough to prepare for all eventualities, while at the same time you need to be compact and mobile.

Now, As I prepare for an intense five-day shoot in Detroit, I have to think hard about the ratio of gear:production values.  For sure, YouTube and Flip cameras have sensitized us to shaky video and hollow audio.  But at the same time, as everyone piles into the visual storytelling game, maybe better production quality will help my content stand out.  It’s a lesson I learned after the MCDM hosted TEDx Seattle.  We originally intended to stream the event live through a consumer-grade camera.  Ultimately, we decided to spend some money and go with a high-end setup that would emphasize the “professionalism” that our degree represents, through broadcast quality video and audio.  It was a sound decision: we found out later that we had higher than average viewership for this kind of event, and people remained on our streaming site longer.  Other than the exceptional content, I believe superb audio-visual standards of our live stream compelled our viewers to stick around.

I’ve been noticing this “bifurcation” for a while.  On one hand, we do want more “authentic” multimedia content, and it’s great to have all of these amateur sources.  On the other, we’ve bought into high-definition TV and 3D Hollywood blockbusters in a big way.  Indeed, The Economist magazine remarked upon this peculiar phenomenon last year: Read more…

Huge congratulations to MCDM student Jon Hickey and his YongoPal team, which won the University of Washington’s Business Plan Competition last night.  Here’s how TechFlash described the win:

Consumer Internet companies haven’t fared too well at the University of Washington Business Plan Competition in recent years, with judges typically leaning toward upstarts with more advanced technologies in the fields of medical devices, electronics or clean tech. But that changed tonight at the 13th annual gala as YongoPal — an online English language education service designed for South Korean students — took home the top prize.     The YongoPal founders — Darien Brown, Daron Hall, Jon Hickey and Kyung Hee Yun — appeared almost shocked as they hoisted the giant $25,000 check at an awards ceremony tonight at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle.

Other than to commend a member of our community, why am I blogging about this?

Well first, Jon partly credits his MCDM education for his success.  He actually worked on his business plan in our newly-formed Business Fundamentals in Digital Communications, taught by adjunct faculty Rick McPherson (who also teaches in the UW’s MBA program).  We made a conscientious decision to bolster our business-related curriculum this year for three reasons:

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As I complete my 3rd year as Director, we enter the 10th year of the program, and we leave our “startup” phase.  As such, we need to provide a support structure as our curriculum matures, focusing primarily on (a) instruction; (b) aligning student interests with what we have to offer.  Here’s the content of an e-mail that I sent to our MCDM community:

(1) A FUNDAMENTAL “WHY” TO THE MCDM [working premise]

(a) We work with a student body of professionals to develop sound strategies on how to communicate with influence and persuasion in this “noisy” digital age. [this is the program in a nutshell]

(b) We help them assess and measure what constitutes a successful communication endeavor [crucial in this new value-conscious age of "Return On Investment"]

(c) We provide the context and analytical skills to grasp the big picture of technology and communication, and provide strategic leadership within an organization based on these key insights [technologies come and go, but critical thinking and conceptual insight endure]

As another frame of reference for further discussion, MCDM student Madeline Moy suggested her own “logline” to me via Twitter:

The MCDM program equips business professionals with digital tools & strategies to effectively connect, persuade and inspire.

I like it, though I’d flip “strategies” and “tools” (we had an engaging conversation about this Sunday as well as I emphasized that the MCDM is primarily about communication strategy, but that we need to deploy appropriate tools to develop that strategy).
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A call today from a local TV talk show producer looking to book me as a tech “expert”, alerted me to YouTube’s 5th birthday today (here’s my segment).  I wish I had known about the video streaming site’s public beta test back in May 2005 — at that same time, I was struggling to compress, upload and share clips from my documentary-in-production, Independent America: The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop using less user-friendly video solutions.  Today, that struggle to produce multimedia and share with the world is over.  And the easier it gets, the more we all have to fight for attention.

Oklahoma sixth-grader Greyson Chance didn’t have to fight too hard.  On April 28th, he uploaded a shaky video of his performance of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” to YouTube (embedded above).  Two weeks later, he has 16 million views and counting, an appearance on the Ellen Show, and a rumored record deal (I’m actually intrigued that his amateur video has so many hits, while his more professional produced performance on Ellen has a few hundred thousand).

Blink and you’ll miss the latest digital media phenomenon story.  Wasn’t it Justin Bieber just a few weeks ago?  Susan Boyle last year?  And yet, there is suspicion about certain timeless forces of promotion and Big Media manipulation even in this Cinderella Story of amateur rags to mainstream riches.

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One of the most memorable moments of the 20th century — Apollo 11′s moon landing in July 1969 — was broadcast live thanks to some pretty spiffy video compression techniques.

We take video compression for granted today; I continue to marvel at how we can transmit live to the world from our smartphones and laptops, largely for free.  Live video streams are now a fundamental component of any communication strategy.

In our digital media masters program, we believe in communicating by sharing our ideas and discoveries through public events.  That’s what our very successful TEDx Seattle at the Pacific Science Center was all about (where as one attendee stated about our transformative “brains on trampolines” event “the space age met the digital age”).

But with all the multimedia communication platforms available to us, we now understand that the event itself is just the first step.  With TEDx we shared our speakers across space and time, by partnering with Livestream to share a live feed with the world, and simultaneously recording it for a YouTube video archive (watch all our TEDx Seattle talks here) — such as Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh’s inspiring presentation about his life’s goals:

Read more…