Writing in 2006 as the president of a then unnamed NGO and Australia’s “most infamous former hacker,” Julian Assange noted that “foresight requires trustworthy information about the current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw predictive inferences and economic stability to give them a meaningful home… secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight (‘truth and lots of it’).”

He then noted that “foresight can produce outcomes that leave all major interests groups better off. Likewise the lack of it, or doing the dumb thing, can harm almost everyone. Computer scientists have long had a great phrase for the dependency of foresight on trustworthy information; ‘garbage in, garbage out.”

That phrase would recur in Assange’s writings later that year. On December 6^th, he published on his personal website an essay on state conspiracies in which he wrote “Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer’s aphorism is sometimes called ‘the Fox News effect.’”

Wherever on the political spectrum Assange situates his more anarchist tendencies, his reference to Fox News is confusing. On the one hand, he is obviously linking Fox News’ rather tendentious relationship to political reality to pejorative terms like distortion and disinformation.

On the other hand, there must be something about the functional consequences of this practice that appealed to Assange, because he goes on to adopt the same language to describe positively a potential set of responses to state conspiracy:

To deal with powerful conspiratorial actions we must think ahead and attack the process that leads to them since the actions themselves can not be dealt with. We can deceive or blind a conspiracy by distorting or restricting the information available to it. We can reduce total conspiratorial power via unstructured attacks on links or through throttling and separating. A conspiracy sufficiently engaged in this manner is no longer able to comprehend its environment and plan robust action.”

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Our program’s unique focus on storytelling and social media has inspired a lot of interest among companies and non-profits alike.  Over the last few years, we’ve struck partnerships with those organizations, to engage them as “clients” in our various classes and create implementable real-world solutions in collaboration with them.  We call it “community scholarship.”

We just wrapped up an incredible quarter of community scholarship in our required “Strategic Research and Business Practices” course (this class is co-taught by Dr. Malcolm Parks and me).  I’d like to share the multimedia proposals that our student teams created for our clients.  Probably our greatest challenge was doing business with the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Climate Change” program — especially since they’re based in Washington DC.  The embedded video above, as well as the one below, is testimony to the diversity of thought that our professionally-minded students bring to the task-at-hand.  They’re all worth watching, so I’ve also posted the links from our other teams’ client work  (including Birdnote, The New Hive, the Woodland Park Zoo, and the Pacific Science Center).

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The MCDM (with a little help from our friends) is inviting folks to join us this Friday to engage in conversation regarding Wikileaks and its release of documents.

The UW’s Master of Communication of Digital Media (MCDM), in collaboration with the Seattle Public Library and City Club present:

Open Secrets: An Open Conversation about Wikileaks and Information Transparency in America

Seattle Public Library  – Microsoft Auditorium (1000 4th Ave, Seattle, WA)

5:00-7:00 p.m., Friday, December 10, 2010

Admission free, RSVP

Confirmed Subject Matter Experts:

Mike Fancher, Editor at Large of The Seattle Times
Brett Horvath, Director of The Leaders Network
Sarah van Gelder, Editor-in-Chief, Yes! Magazine

Hosted by Hanson Hosein, Director MCDM and Host of Media Space on UWTV
Directed by Scott Macklin, Associate Director MCDM

With the explosion of digital and social media platforms over the past decade, we celebrate the idea of an openness and transparency – especially online.  Is Wikileaks just another platform within this new “open” environment?  Or has the past week’s events provided a harsh lesson in our need to retain control over certain forms of information?  We’ll engage the public in a conversation about the nature of Wikileaks and its impact on our understanding of the Internet.

Streamed live at http://www.livestream.com/mcdm

Department of Communication Chair David Domke recently blogged about 2009 Distinguished Alumnus Peter Clarke, and a particular a piece on health communication research that Clarke co-authored with USC colleague Suzanne Evans in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Their story, “Disseminating Orphan Innovation,” traces the challenges of recreating successful social innovations from one distinct location to another, and how this requires customization, not merely replication.

Clarke and Evans illustrate their case through the project From Wholesaler to the Hungry, an initiative that links established food vendors with institutions who feed and support citizens at the margins of society. At the end of their piece Clarke and Evans offer “Eight Lessons for Customizing Innovations,” and after reading them I was struck by how the conclusions that Clarke and Evans draw mirror the kinds of lessons learned regarding new media adoption in emerging markets: taking time to build relationships of trust, anticipating barriers to adoption, and identifying local champions, to name just three.

As we have discussed in this fall’s MCDM Emerging Markets in Digital Media course, new media innovations in Beijing, Buenos Aires, and Bombay all require unique adaptations given cultural contexts–exactly the customization Clarke and Evans address. Tune in to the MCDM livestream channel on December 4 between 8:45 AM and 3:30 PM PST for student presentations that highlight topics of innovation in emerging markets, or join us in person in CMU 302.

Local veteran sports writers Art Thiel, Steve Rudman and Stanley Holmes launch a new effort today to stave off the ESPNification of local sports journalism with Sportspress Northwest.

They state, “We’re covering Northwest sports with local writers, videographers and photographers who enjoy journalism’s standards, technology’s opportunities and users’ passion. We enjoy good writing and clear thinking. We like to look ahead, and look back, to get a clue about where we are today.”

It will be interesting to track this effort to see if it emerges as a true flip and counter to over franchised sports coverage.