In LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, Masha Tupitsyn explores the curious intersection of the print tradition of books and the micronarrative model of Twitter. The project is essentially an experiment that appropriates the forms of social media — soundbites, fragmented commentary, quotes, condensed reactions — in a work of film criticism that preserves the cultural purpose of the genre but divorces it from its traditional medium of essayistic narrative. What makes Tupitsyn’s project exceptional, however, is that it reverse-engineers the now-familiar frameworks of Twitter anthologies — unlike Tweets from Tahrir, for instance, which sought to capture of a slice of the social narrative about the Egyptian revolution by culling tweets after the fact, Tupitsyn’s approach put the intention of the book before the composition of each tweet, so that every tweet was deliberately crafted with the larger narrative in mind. Rather than a cohesive analysis of one idea at length, however, that narrative instead connects dots across diverse sources and constructs a mosaic of cultural patterns that explore the relationships between films.

LACONIA is, in essence, an architecture of thinking. It is also a book that shows its skeleton. That tackles the multi-media landscape as a language pattern rather than a material phenomenon.” ~ Masha Tupitsyn

At its heart, the book is as much about film itself as it is about how Tupitsyn thinks about film in the age of infinite connectivity and on a platform that has more in common with poetry than with prose. In Tupitsyn’s own words:

In some ways, I think I was born to write this kind of book because for me writing always starts with: a line, a phrase, a fragment. Modeled on the aphorism, while updating and tailoring it to film and pop culture, the goal in LACONIA was to zoom in rather than to zoom out, to write in close-ups, so that every word, to quote Ezra Pound, could become ‘charged with meaning.’ Like the aphorism, which according to James Geary in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, must be ‘brief, definitive, personal, philosophical, have a twist,’ and reveal some larger truth, each tweet in LACONIA is a miniature exegesis; an appraisal of the world through film and media since our understanding of the world has become increasingly, if not entirely, shaped and mediated by both.”

In a way, LACONIA is akin to John Chris Jones’s classic, The Internet and Everyone, substituting tweets for Jones’s lengthy letters to piece together a dimensional meditation on a medium through thoughtfully engineered fragments.

Spotted via The Millions, who have a wonderful piece on the future of fragmented reading.

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“You are a mashup of what you let into your life,” artist Austin Kleon recently proclaimed. This encapsulates the founding philosophy behind Brain Pickings — a filtration mechanism that lets into your life things that are interesting, meaningful, creatively and intellectually stimulating, memorable. Naturally, I was thrilled for the release of Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption — an intelligent manifesto for optimizing the 11 hours we spend consuming information on any given day (a number that, for some of us, might be frighteningly higher) in a way that serves our intellectual, creative, and psychological well-being.

Johnson — best known for managing Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, then directing Sunlight Labs at government transparency operation Sunlight Foundation — draws a parallel between the industrialization of food, which at once allowed for ever-greater efficiency and reined in an obesity epidemic, and the industrialization of information, arguing that blaming the abundance of information itself is as absurd as blaming the abundance of food for obesity. Instead, he proposes a solution that lies in engineering a healthy relationship with information by adopting smarter habits and becoming as selective about the information we consume as we are about the food we eat. In the process, he covers the history of information, the science of attention, the healthy economics of media, and a wealth in between.

In any democratic nation with the freedom of speech, information can never be as strongly regulated by the public as our food, water, and air. Yet information is just as vital to our survival as the other three things we consume. That’s why personal responsibility in an age of mostly free information is vital to individual and social health. If we want our communities and our democracies to thrive, we need a healthier information diet.”

(For a piece of timely irony, consider the fact that the book came out at a time when the U.S. government is considering a policy that not only attempts to regulate access to information, but does so for the purpose of force-feeding the public Hollywood’s entertainment lard.)

Johnson begins with a familiar quote from Steve Jobs:

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

He builds on the analogy between food and information by arguing that just like we know we’re products of the food we eat, we must understand just how much we’re products of the information we consume — and consume accordingly. Yet the sheer amount of information available to us — 800,000 petabytes (a million gigabytes per petabyte) in the storage universe and 3.6 zettabytes (a million petabytes per zettabyte) consumed by American homes per day, expected to increase 44-fold by 2020 — is mind-boggling.

Using Google’s n-gram viewer, which searches the occurrences of a particular phrase in a corpus of English books from the past 150 years, Johnson points out that the term “information overload” became popular in the 1960s, surging 50% by 1980 and then again by 2000.

But, Johnson is careful to point out, the term itself is semantically broken:

The concept of information overload doesn’t work, however, because as much as we’d like to equate our brains with iPods or hard drives, human beings are biological creatures, not mechanical ones. Our brains are as finite in capacity as our waistlines. While people may eat themselves into a heart attack, they don’t actually die of overconsumption: we don’t see many people taking their last bite at a fried chicken restaurant, overstepping their maximum capacity, and exploding. Nobody has a maximum amount of storage for fat, and it’s unlikely that we have a maximum capacity for knowledge.

Yet we seem to want to solve the problem mechanically. Turn it the other way around and you see how absurd it is. Trying to deal with our relationship with information as though we are somehow digital machines is like trying to upgrade our computers by sitting them in fertilizer. We’re looking at the problem through the wrong lens.”

Johnson argues that instead of the lens of productivity and efficiency, which have become a false holy grail for our inbox-zero-obsessed culture, we should consider this through the lens with which we assess what we consume biologically: health. Because the problem is now larger than a mere matter of getting things done:

It’s a matter of health and survival. Information and power are inherently related. Our ability to process and communicate information is as much an evolutionary advantage as our opposable thumbs.”

Still, Johnson cautions that we’re wired to love certain kinds of information, most notably affirmation, so we seek out information that confirms, rather than challenges, our existing beliefs. (Cue in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble.)

Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?”

Ultimately, at the heart of The Information Diet lies an urgency to not only recognize, but also act upon, something we all intuit but have a hard time enacting:

Like any good diet, the information diet works best if you think about it not as denying yourself information, but as consuming more of the right stuff and developing healthy habits.“

To aid in that, Johnson has provided a toolkit of helpful (mostly) free software for a healthy information diet on the book’s site, ranging from productivity apps to ad blockers to various setting hacks to make your favorite services and social web platforms more conducive to info-wellness.

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As the editor of what’s essentially a public-service curiosity portal, ad-free and supported through reader contributions much in the way public radio and libraries are, I’m the first to cry “Wolf!” at any oversimplified insinuation that putting content behind paywalls is the way to make journalism and entertainment sustainable endeavors. I am a firm believer in content meritocracy and the pay-what-you-will model as the future of publishing, but I am also profoundly saddened by the way editorial and curatorial merit are being hijacked, regurgitated, and spat out as sellable commodities not benefiting the original creator or curator in any way.

(In fact, just this week, the Huffington Post took my recent piece on this Victorian map of woman’s heart and did with it what’s referred to as over-aggregation — reposting a reworded article with no substantive additional reporting and no prominent via-link for proper source attribution.)

So when I came across Robert Levine’s Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, I was ambivalently intrigued. One one hand, it opens with such binary war cries as:

By making it essentially optional to pay for content, piracy has set the price of digital goods at zero. The result is a race to the bottom, and the inevitable response of media companies has been cuts — first in staff, then in ambition, and finally in quality.”

Implicit to this argument is the assumption that if we did indeed make it optional for people to pay, most wouldn’t. This needn’t be the case — the disconnect between price and value is as much about price as it is about value. Most people won’t pay for mediocrity but, at least in my experience, will gladly pay if they see value.

But Levine then takes a deeper look at the complexity of the issue, starting by correcting the popular misquotation of Stewart Brand’s infamous argument that “information wants to be free.” (That’s the same Stewart Brand, by the way, who in the 1960s campaigned to get NASA to release the then-rumored satellite image of Earth — something hard to imagine was a point of contention in the age of breathtaking satellite timelapses available to the layman online.) As Levine points out, the full Brand quotation is much more nuanced:

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Levine goes on to argue that the real conflict of the web is between the media companies slaving away at the true value-creating work of journalism and entertainment, and the tech companies racing to distribute their content, be it legally or not. But the idea that information will inevitably be free is based on the theory that the price of any good would fall to its marginal cost, and the marginal cost of digital distribution is exponentially approaching zero, bringing down the marginal cost of media along. Levine pokes two main holes in this argument: it’s not only a theory, but also one economists developed for commodity goods, and implicit to it is the admission that if the price of culture fell to zero, content creators like movie studios and investigative journalists would have no way of covering their production expenses. At the root of this paradox is a dangerous conflation:

Much of the enthusiasm for free media comes from mistaking the packaging for the product. If you believe people once paid $15 for silver plastic discs, it’s only natural to think online distribution will revolutionize the recording business. But if you realize people were paying for the music on those discs, it’s obvious that someone still has to make it — and that someone probably wants to get paid.”

On the other hand, Levine points out the uncomfortable reality of the tools for extracting value — tools not of device drivers but of human drives:

Reporters can access online databases and interview sources by Skype, but they still have to read the documents and ask the right questions. In cases like this, ‘information wants to be expensive.’”

In criticizing the questionable and often outright illegal practices of aggregator sites, Levine scathes:

In Silicon Valley, the information that wants to be free is almost always the information that belongs to someone else.”

He wryly observes the predatory paradox of the early ecosystem that laid the foundations for today’s information value systems, including the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998:

For media companies, getting advice from technology pundits was like letting the fox lead a strategic management retreat in the henhouse.”

For my part, I started Brain Pickings more than six years ago as what’s commonly referred to as a “passion project” (though I don’t like the fleeting noncommittal relationship this phrasing suggests) and didn’t have a business model — but I did have a crystal-clear editorial model, which remains the same today: get people interested in meaningful cross-disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were interested in, and in the process empower their networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity; break out of the filter bubble, if you will, though conceived long before we had the very vocabulary to articulate it. So when an aggregator like the Huffington Post, a business-model wolf wearing an editorial-authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-free) content and regurgitates it on its (ad-plastered) site, it lives up to the term “parasite” at the heart of Levine’s argument, derived from the Greek parasitos and used to describe “someone who ate at someone else’s table without providing anything in return.”

While Levine rightly recognizes the remarkable creative empowerment that affordable technology has effected, he also observes the flipside:

This explosion of creativity has enriched our culture immensely. But many bloggers face some of the same problems as newspapers: it’s hard to make money if half the people who read your stories do so on another site.”

Or, to put it more crudely:

How can any company compete with a rival that offers its products but bears none o the expenses? The free ride has become a road to riches.”

And while I have the luxury of not caring about the “traffic” such parasites are stealing — because I’ve made the choice not to measure the quality of merit of content and the quality of audience, you, in pageviews and ad revenue, the basic currency of the Internet and arguably the reason for the brokenness of it all — there’s still something to be said for the theft of creative and intellectual labor here.

In reassessing the vision for art and commerce thriving together, a vision purveyed at the dawn of the digital revolution, Levine laments that it’s time to acknowledge this isn’t happening and won’t “until we turn the online free-for-all into a free market.” (Cue in my faith in a pay-what-you-will meritocracy.) Levine drives the disconnect home:

Traditional media companies aren’t in trouble because they’re not giving consumers what they want; they’re in trouble because they can’t collect money for it. It’s the natural outcome of an online economy that transfers wealth from ‘each according to his ability’ to ‘each according to what he can get away with.’”

And parasites certainly try to get away with a lot. With their masterful search engine optimization — which produces what I call the HuffPostification of headlines, titles that sound like a fifth-grader or a caveman (or, in the most successful of cases, a fifth-grader caveman) composed them and frequently feature the word “awesome” — they have perfected the craft of giving machines what algorithms think people want, then collecting money for it. Never mind the cultural footprint.

Having just returned from the annual Futures of Entertainment summit for my MIT fellowship, where Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain brought back the now-infamous web-age adage, “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product,” I was particularly taken with Levine’s thoughtful argument that this entire imperfect information economy, with its parasites and its promises, was “a choice of design, not a requirement of technology.” As editors, curators, and publishers, we choose how to measure our merit, collect our money if we so choose, and, most importantly, serve our audience. As Levine puts it,

Like TV, the Internet is only as good as what’s on it.”

Levine goes on to examine the many facets of information value and intellectual property, from the devastation of the music business to Google’s war on copyright to how Europe is handling censorship, and in the end reminds us the tough calls that shape the future of the Internet will not be made with technology R&D breakthroughs but with ethical decisions on how to use that technology and what to value. He offers a poetic reminder by citing the first French copyright law, circa 1791:

The most sacred, the most unassailable, and the most personal of all properties is the composition, the fruit of the writer’s thought.”

Ultimately, I completely agree with Tyler Cowen when he says, “Everyone who follows cultural economics should read this book.”

I, by the way, was happy to pay $13.99 for a Kindle copy of Levine’s book — and would’ve happily paid much more had he offered a pay-what-you-will option.

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It must be the season for posthumous anthologies of treats by beloved children’s authors. After Shel Silverstein’s Every Thing Thing On It comes The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories — a fantastic new collection of seven rarely seen stories written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss, published in magazines between 1948 and 1959. But what’s even more remarkable than the book itself is the story of how it came to be.

In 2001, “dentist by profession and Seussologist by obsession” Charles Cohen, discovered the first of these lost stories in vintage magazines on eBay and set out to find the rest, eventually acquiring multiple copies of some. He then started listing these extra copies on eBay, noting the lost Seuss stories they contained. The listings caught the eye of Random House art director Cathy Goldsmith, who had worked on books with Seuss himself. The rest was history.

In the 50s, and in the 40s before that, this was the place where Fitzgerald and Hemingway tried out stuff in short stories in magazines. And Ted was among them. This is the point at which Dr. Seuss is becoming Dr. Seuss.”

More than just a literary gem, which it certainly is, The Bippolo Seed is also a wonderful embodiment of two of today’s most beautiful phenomena: the notion that anyone with a passion and an vision can leave an imprint on culture, as Cohen did in discovering these buried treasures, and the power of a great, curious curator in bringing that vision to the forefront of culture, as Goldsmith did in discovering Cohen.

Images courtesy of Random House

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We’ve previously made the case that everything builds on what came before, yet our human tendency is to inflate and overestimate the novelty of our ideas. Today, we turn to five concepts from the centuries of yore remarkably similar to the central premises of five of today’s social web darlings, in the hope of illustrating that, indeed, creativity is combinatorial and innovation incremental.

TWITTER

In November of 1906, artist, anarchist and literary entrepreneur Félix Fénéon wrote 1,220 succinct three-line reports in the Paris newspaper Le Matin, serving to inform of everything from notable deaths to petty theft to naval expedition disasters. He became the one-man Twitter of early-twentieth-century Paris. In Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, artist Joanna Neborsky captures the best of these enigmatic vignettes in stunning illustrations and collages. Sometimes profound, often perplexing, and always prepossessing, these visual snapshots of historical micro-narratives offer a bizarre and beautiful glimpse of a long-gone French era and a man of rare creative genius.

Catch our full review, with many more illustrated “tweets,” here.

FACEBOOK

Long before there was Facebook, there was the Republic of Letters — a vast and intricate network of intellectuals, linking the finest “philosophes” of the Enlightenment across national borders and language barriers. This self-defined community of writers, scholars, philosophers and other thinkers included greats like Voltaire, Leibniz, Rousseau, Linnaeus, Franklin, Newton, Diderot and many others we’ve come to see as linchpins of cultural history. Mapping the Republic of Letters is a fascinating project by a team of students and professors at Stanford, visualizing the famous intellectual correspondence of the Enlightenment, how they traveled, and how the network evolved over time.

More on the project in our original piece about it here. See also Dena Goodman’s excellent and somewhat controversial The Republic of Letters : A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment.

QUORA

Published in London between 1690 and 1697, The Athenian Mercury supplied answers to readers’ questions on love, literature, science, religion and a variety of utilitarian concerns and personal matters. The answers came from The Athenian Society, consisting of publisher John Dunton and three of his close friends.

The Athenian Oracle: Being an Entire Collection of All the Valuable Questions and Answers in the Old Athenian Mercuries is an exact reproduction of a book published in the early 1920s, culling the most fascinating and curious questions and answers from the gazette’s archive. You can also sample some of them on the Athenian Mercury Project online.

HT MetaFilter

YOUTUBE

If you thought drawing large audiences around silly cat videos is a phenomenon of the YouTube era, you’d be wrong. The man to whom we largely owe the very existence of YouTube — Thomas Edison, who invented the first motion picture camera and made film both a mass communication medium and a creative craft — also invented the cats-engaging-in-silly-acts viral meme…in 1894:

Edison was also no stranger to the selling power of some girl-on-girl action, as evidenced by this antique viral of boxing women:

These gems, along with others, were originally featured in our piece on Thomas Edison and the invention of movies.

TUMBLR

Thomas of Ireland authored the most famous florilegium of all time. Florilegia were compilations of excerpts from other writings, mashing up selected passages and connecting dots from existing texts to better illustrate a specific topic, doctrine or idea. The word comes from the Latin for “flower” and “gather.” The florilegium is one of the earliest recorded examples of remix culture — a Medieval textual Tumblr.

I spoke about the florligeium as a metaphor for networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity in my recent Creative Mornings talk on the subject.

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Much has been said about how the Internet is changing our brains and what this new culture of learning means for the future of education. While much of the dialogue has been doused in techno-dystopian alarmism, from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, narrated by Orson Welles in the 1970s, to Nicholas Carr’s reductionist claims about attention in today’ digital age. But the truth about attention, as it relates to the intersection of technology and education, seems to be a lot more layered and complex — and, if Cathy Davidson, founder of Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, is right, a lot less worrisome. That’s precisely what Davidson illustrates in her new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn — a fascinating meditation on how “attention blindness,” the peculiar phenomenon illustrated by Harvard’s famous invisible gorilla experiment, has produced one of our culture’s greatest disconnects, the inability to reconcile the remarkable changes induced by the digital age with the conventions of yesteryear’s schools and workplaces.

As long as we focus on the object we know, we will miss the new one we need to see. The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of knowledge not as thing but as a process, not as a noun but as a verb.” ~ Cathy Davidson

In another famous experiment, Davidson, then provost at Duke, gave the entire 2003 freshman class iPods as part of their academic curriculum. Though the pilot project was at first widely derided, it quickly silenced the critics as students found intelligent and innovative ways to employ their iPods in the classroom and the lab in everything from collaborating on group project to podcasting a conference on Shakespeare around the world.

Davidson uses the insights from these experiments as a lens through which to examine the nature and evolution of attention, noting that the educational system is driven by very rigid expectations of what “attention” is and how it reflects “intelligence,” a system in which students who fail to meet these expectations and pay attention differently are pigeonholed somehow deficient of aberrant, square pegs in round holes. Yet neuroscience is increasingly indicating that our minds pay attention in a myriad different ways, often non-linear and simultaneous, which means that the academy and the workplace will have to evolve in parallel and transcend the 20th-century linear assembly-line model for eduction and work. (The assembly and the factory are in fact a familiar metaphor from Sir Ken Robinson’s insightful thoughts on changing educational paradigms.)

Refreshingly constructive and glimmering with much-needed optimism about the future of education in the digital age, Now You See It makes a fine new addition to these 7 essential books on education and offers a well-argued antidote to the media’s incessant clamor about the deadly erosion of our attention.

Thanks, Jake

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In May, I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful Creative Mornings free lecture series masterminded by my studiomate Tina of Swiss Miss fame. I spoke about Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity, something at the heart of Brain Pickings and of increasing importance as we face our present information reality. The talk is now available online — full (approximate) transcript below, enhanced with images and links to all materials referenced in the talk.

TRANSCRIPT

These are pages from the most famous florilegium, completed by Thomas of Ireland in the 14th century. Florilegia were compilations of excerpts from other writings, essentially mashing up selected passages and connecting dots from existing texts to illuminate a specific topic or doctrine or idea. The word comes from the Latin for “flower” and “gather.” The florilegium is commonly considered one of the earliest recorded examples of remix culture.

In talking about these medieval manuscripts, Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker:

Our minds were altered less by books than by index slips.”

Which is interesting, recognizing not only the absolute vale of content but also its relational value, the value not just of information itself but also of information architecture, not just of content but also of content curation.

You may have heard this anecdote. Picasso is sitting in the park, sketching. A woman walks by, recognizes him, runs up to him and pleads with him to draw her portrait. He’s in a good mood, so he agrees and starts sketching. A few minutes later, he hands her the portrait. The lady is ecstatic, she gushes about how wonderfully it captures the very essence of her character, what beautiful, beautiful work it is, and asks how much she owes him. “$5,000, madam,” says Picasso. The lady is taken aback, outraged, and asks how that’s even possible given it only took him 5 minutes. Picasso looks up and, without missing a beat, says: “No, madam, it took me my whole life.”

Here’s the same sentiment from iconic designer Paula Scher on the creation of the famous Citi logo:

(You’ll see, by the way, a number of QR codes – these link to the content being mentioned, so you can read the full article or watch the full interview later.)

Both of these stories captures something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.

This is what I want to talk about today, networked knowledge, like dot-connecting of the florilegium, and combinatorial creativity, which is the essence of what Picasso and Paula Scher describe. The idea that in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.

Kind of LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our castles will become. Because if we only have one color and one shape, it greatly limits how much we can create, even within our one area of expertise.

Einstein famously attributed some of his greatest physics breakthroughs to his violin breaks, which he believed connected different parts of his brain in new ways.

And iconic novelist Vladimir Nabokov was a secret lepidopterist — he collected and studied butterflies religiously. And he believed this scholarly obsession is what helped him develop his deep passion for detail and precision, which is what made his writing so crisp and vidid.

This concept of combinatorial creativity and the cross-pollination of disciplines, of course, isn’t new. In the past century alone, it’s been iterated and reiterated, over and over and over again, in just about every cultural discipline.

In 1952, iconic designer Alvin Lustig wrote in an essay:

I have found that all positions men take in their beliefs are profoundly influenced by thousands of small, often imperceptible experiences that slowly accumulate to form a sum total of choices and decisions.”

In 1964, neuropsychologist Roger Sperry drew an analogy between neurons and ideas:

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains.”

In 1970, French molecular biologist Jacques Monod proposed what he called the “abstract kingdom” — a conceptual place analogous to the biosphere, populated by ideas that propagate much like organisms do in the natural world.

Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content.” ~ Jacques Monod

Monod said ideas have “spreading power” and propagate “infectivity” — we see this today with the language of “viral” ideas.

In 1976, Richard Dawkins, in his iconic book The Selfish Gene, which by the way I highly recommend, coined the word “meme” for a similar concept:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

And I like this last part. Because it makes me think about the cliche we’ve all heard a million times, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But in the context of this domino effect of ideas, it seems imitation might well be the sincerest form of ideation.

In 2010 Steven Johnson writes in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From:

The great driver of scientific and technological innovation [in the last 600 years has been] the increase in our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches and turn them into something new.”

I like to think of it this way: We take information, from it synthesize insight, which in turn germinates ideas.

And then we take these ideas, ours and those of others, we toss them into our mental reservoir…

…where they sit and sort of just float around until one day they float into just the right alignment to click into a new idea.

Now, implicit to this idea of combinatorial creativity is the admission is that nothing is truly original, at least not in the sense of being built from scratch, and that can be hard. There’s a lot of resistance in the creative ego to that idea. But there is plenty of evidence for this ecosystem of influences and inspirations.

In art, Nina Paley photographed archaeological artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and animated them to illustrate her point: All creativity builds upon something that existed before and every work of art is essentially a derivative work.

In animation — in his visual essay entitled Versions, Oliver Laric explores the reappropriation of images by looking at how Disney recycles animation.

In design — there’s a Flickr set called Similarities that exposes examples of graphic design that borrows heavily from older work.

Just recently, this brilliant Joy of Cycling poster for the Transport of London made the rounds. It’s based, of course, on illustrations from Alex Comfort’s iconic 1972 manual, The Joy of Sex.

And of course, the mother of all remix culture studies, Kirby Ferguson’s excellent 4 part series, Everything Is A Remix, in which he explores influences across just about every genre and art medium. Here’s a short excerpt from Part 2, that drives the point home with one of the world’s most celebrated examples of creativity in entertainment.

There’s so much buzz and excitement about the open-source movement today, and many of these principles are hailed as revolutionary, as a sign of the times. But at their core lies something ancient. I believe creativity itself is the original open-source code.

So what enables this derivative creativity and cross-pollination of ideas is a rich pool of mental resources to derive from. And I believe the two main mechanisms of how we fill that pool are curiosity…and choice. Curiosity is one of the most fundamental human drivers. Just look at little kids – this hunger to know the world is deep in our species’ DNA.

Jim Coudal, one of my big creative and curatorial heroes, once said:

Our number one value isn’t in any of the skills we have. It’s that we’re essentially curious.”

But curiosity without direction can be a taxing and ultimately unproductive endeavor. Choice is how we tame and channel and direct our curiosity, where we choose to allocate our time and energy, and ultimately, what we choose to pay attention to.

Harvard’s Clay Christensen writes:

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.”

Here’s Susan Sontag, one of my absolute favorite authors and minds:

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

Much of Buddhist philosophy centers around this same idea, this balance between what’s being phrased as “intention” and “attention” – our intentional curiosity about knowledge and growth, and our choice of where to focus our awareness, what to pay attention to.

So that, I think, is the role of information curators: They are our curiosity sherpas, who lead us to things we didn’t know we were interested in until we, well, until we are. Until we pay attention to them — because someone whose taste and opinion we trust points us to them, and we integrate them with our existing pool of resources, and they become a part of our networked knowledge and another LEGO piece in our combinatorial creativity.

So if information discovery plays such a central role in how we fuel our creativity and thus in our creative output, then information discovery is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current code of ethics for respecting and crediting this kind of labor is completely inadequate. We have clearly defined systems for what’s right or wrong in terms of crediting creative products across text, image, video, and different media, from image rights to literary citations. But we don’t have the same ethical principles for sources of discovery. And yet, in a culture of exponentially increasing overload, it’s through these nodes in the information ecosystem, these human sensemakers, human synapses if you will, that this very text or image or video finds its way into our mental pool of resources.

So when we choose to take that recognition away, to not acknowledge content curation or information discovery or whatever we call this, we’re essentially robbing someone of their creative labor, and perpetrating another form of piracy. Whether we call it link love or the via crediting, giving credit online is incredibly simple, it’s much easier than doing a proper literary citation or clearing image rights, and yet there’s precious little of it online. And for publishers and curators, it’s not about “getting traffic” or “monetization” or any of those dreadful SEO terms. It’s about something much more deeply human, the same thing that I believe underpins every human aspiration and action, and it’s as true of suicide bombers as it is of the greatest artists and poets: And that is the desire to matter in the world, to be seen, to know that our existence makes a difference, that our creative and intellectual labor is of value to the world.

It’s quite telling, I think, that the amount of work that went into florilegia in the Middle Ages made them the most lavish and expensive books to produce at the time. And I have to wonder, when did we lose this sort of creative meritocracy in how we treat dot-connecting content curation and today’s culture? When did we stop valuing the enormous amount of effort and time and thought that goes into culling and connecting ideas that shape humanity’s creative and intellectual direction?

Here’s Kevin Kelly, futurist and Wired founder and brilliant, brilliant man, pondering the future of the book:

Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works.”

So it’s my hope that we’ll find a way to respect these human synapses of networked knowledge and enablers of combinatorial creativity, and to codify that respect, and indoctrinate it and integrate it with our cultural framework, with how we think about creativity and intellectual property and human labor.

We live at a time when we have a rare opportunity to make up the rules, because they haven’t been invented yet. To set the standards and the norms and the honorable way of doing things. And this, I believe, is our responsibility as publishers and curators and consumers of information. Again, it comes down to choice: The normative models we choose today will shape how much our culture will value this form of creative labor tomorrow.

I love these words from Gandhi:

Our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our character, our character becomes our destiny.”

How we choose to pay attention, and relate to information and each other shapes who we become, shapes our creative destiny and, in turn, shapes our experience of the world. And, in my mind, there’s nothing more important than that.

Q&A

Tools I can’t live without:

• Evernote
• Google Reader
• Instapaper

NPR essay: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything

This month’s Creative Mornings, on August 19, will feature Kirby Ferguson of the wonderful Everything is a Remix project I spoke about, so be sure to grab a ticket when they become available.

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As a hopeless language lover with a soft spot for words, I was thrilled by this week’s release of a new book by lexicographer Erin McKean of Wordnik fame. Aftercrimes, Geoslavery, and Thermogeddon: Thought-Provoking Words from a Lexicographer’s Notebook comes from TEDBooks, the ambitious low-cost imprint we featured as one of 7 platforms changing the future of publishing, and, for just $2.99, offers a wonderfully fascinating look at a slew of a new words and phrases across science, politics, technology, social life and other facets of our ever-changing cultural landscape.

And, in the year when neo-words like “lifehack” and “unfollow” were officially inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s safe to say the techno-tangle of formal language is so pervasive it might necessitate professional untangling. McKean does this with equal parts wit and rigor, making the understanding of emergent language as exciting as it is necessary.

Why these words? I haven’t picked the newest words (or the older), the funniest words, or the most scientifically advanced words. Instead, these are all words that have struck me with their ‘wordishness’ — that quality a word or phrase has of packing up an idea into a handy carrying case, making it portable, accessible, and (most important) transmissible — among speakers of English. Wordishness doesn’t imply elegance, grace or even clarity, but we know it when we see it.” Erin McKean

Sample McKean’s linguistic genius and charisma with her excellent 2007 TED talk, in which she redefined the dictionary:

Online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability. And when you improve searchability, you actually take away the one advantage of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.” ~ Erin McKean

Aftercrimes, Geoslavery, and Thermogeddon is an absolute treat of insight at the intersection of linguistic timeliness and timelessness, served with the kind of passion that makes TED TED.

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Creative visionary, political activist and post-modern Renaissance man Ai Weiwei is China’s most widely known and politically vocal contemporary artist. His now-legendary Sunflower Seeds installation for the Tate Modern in October 2010, which took 2.5 years and 1,600 Chinese artisans to produce 100 million hand-crafted sunflower seeds from the finest Chinese porcelain, offered powerful commentary on consumerism, Chinese industry, human rights and collective labor. In February 2011, a 220-pound pile of the seeds sold for $559,394 at Sotheby’s in London. On 3 April, 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained under harsh conditions for over two months without any official charges being filed, on allegations of “economic crimes.”

On June 22 2011, following a large and sustained outcry by international human rights organizations and prolific Western media coverage, the Chinese government released Ai Weiwei on bail, under a number of conditions. But the controversy surrounding his work and the provocative political questions raised by his arrest remain an important part of the global dialogue on art, activism and freedom of speech.

He uses the publicity he gets in a very knowing way, and he uses exhibitions and projects, like the Bird’s Nest stadium, as a platform to be visible and to be able to turn them against themselves. And that’s extremely interesting, and a very sophisticated way of being an artist.”

This fascinating hour-long documentary titled Ai Weiwei: Without Fear or Favour, released by BBC One’s Imagine program earlier this year and recorded shortly prior to Ai Weiwei’s arrest, helps contextualize his work, its cultural significance and its implicit political tensions. Ironically, the film — which deals with issues of openness, censorship and accessibility — is not viewable outside the U.K. thanks to BBC’s restrictive digital media policies, but it’s available on YouTube in its entirety, at least for the time being, thanks to what seems to be Ai Weiwei’s own Chinese YouTube account. Enjoy.

Ai Weiwei is, to my mind, the most significant Chinese artist we are aware of in the West. He’s articulate, he’s passionate, he goes to the edge, he’s unafraid of criticizing the politics and the situation in his own country, nor indeed is he afraid of criticizing Western capitalism.”

For more on Ai Weiwei, his work and convictions, look no further than the excellent Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, culled from the salvaged archive of the artist’s blog, which was taken down by the Chinese authorities in 2009. Courageous, honest and effusively eloquent, Ai Weiwei’s writing offers a rare lens on the mental and physical state of present-day China, the role of contemporary art in politics, and the role of the artist as an agent of change.

via +Mel Exon

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It is Day Two in our ongoing coverage of TED Global 2011, titled The Stuff of Life. (Previously: highlights from Day One; two sets of must-read books by this year’s speakers; remarkable work TED Fellow Nathalie Miebach.) Gathered here are the most noteworthy highlights of Day Two, in photos and soundbites.

SESSION 4: FUTURE BILLIONS

Historian Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and presenter of the excellent six-part BBC series of the same name, which is now available online in its entirety, opened with some striking insights on wealth and the global economy. Most of the world’s wealth was made after the year 1800 and is currently owned by people we might call “Westerners” — economic historians call this The Great Divergence, and it reached its zenith in the 1970s. But, Ferguson argued, it’s not geography or national character: it’s ideas and institutions.

There are six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest: competition, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society, and work ethic. These killer apps can be ‘downloaded” — they’re open-source. Any society can adopt these institutions.” ~ Niall Ferguson

Historian Niall Ferguson

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

The biggest story of our lifetime is the end of Western predominance.” ~ Niall Ferguson

Political economist Yasheng Huang

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Political economist Yasheng Huang explored the parallel economic growth of China and India, examining why China has grown twice as fast as India in the past 30 years. He pointed out the difference between the statics of a political system and the dynamics of a political system — statically, China is strictly authoritarian, but dynamically, it has shifted from more authoritarian to more democratic. Women, Huang argued, play a significant role in strong societies, with 60-80% of China’s workforce being female.

In a surprise visit, economist Tim Harford — whom everyone should follow on Twitter and who authored the excellent new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure — delivered one of the most striking and captivating talks of the day. (Bonus points for calling Hans Rosling “the Mick Jagger of TED,” which couldn’t be more accurate.)

Undercover economist Tim Harford

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Harford explored the mind-boggling scale of consumer choices we face daily and juxtaposed it with the conditions under which our brains evolved.

If you wanted to count every product and service available in New York, all 10 billion of them, it would take you 317 years. The society in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services.” ~ Tim Harford

Perhaps most importantly and urgently, Harford argued for repeated trial-and-error as the only way to eradicate our culture’s God complex, insisting — much like Isaac Asimov did some three decades ago — that schools need to start teaching children that there are some problems with no correct answer, encouraging trial-and-error as the vehicle of learning.

Comedian Robin Ince

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

The universe is pointless. Brilliant, that means you can come up with your own purpose!” ~ Robin Ince

Street artist JR stopped by for a quick update on his wonderful Inside Out Project, the product of the $100,000 TEDPrize he won last fall.

Street artist JR

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Anti-hunger activist and UN World Food Programme director Josette Sheeran opened with a striking statistic: This morning, 1 out of 7 people on earth didn’t know how to find breakfast. Most of us, she pointed out, don’t have to go too far back in our own lineage to find an experience of hunger, usually a mere two or three generations away.

Anti-hunger leader Josette Sheeran

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger.” ~ Josette Sheeran

Sheeran focused on the central disconnect of these devastating statistics: We know how to fix this. A child can be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first 6 months of life. In countries where girls don’t go to schools and meals are offered in schools, there’s a 50/50 enrollment rate for girls and boys, a transformation in attendance that shows food not only helps keep a girl in school, but also enables her to eventually give birth to a healthier child because malnutrition is set generation to generation.

We shouldn’t look at the hungry as victims, but as the solution — as the value chain to fight hunger.” ~ Josette Sheeran

SESSION 5: EMERGING ORDER

Session 5, Emerging Order, was curated by The Rational Optimist author Matt Ridley and opened with geneticist Svante Pääbo, who explored our ancestral origins.

Geneticist Svante Pääbo

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

From a genomic perspective, we are all African.” ~ Svante Pääbo

As former Brain Pickings contributor Brian W. Jones keenly pointed out, Pääbo echoes this fantastic print by Milton Glaser produced for the SVA and benefitting the One Campaign for improving conditions in Africa and eradicating poverty.

Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel spoke about social learning as a springboard to cumulative cultural evolution, calling it “visual theft” that enables us to learn from the mistakes of others by observing their behavior and stealing their ideas for problem-solving. Language, Pagel argued, evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft as a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation. Since the love of language is a standby here, his point that language is the most potent and valuable trait that ever evolved resonates deeply.

Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Language is the voice of our genes.” ~ Mark Pagel

Sand artist Joe Castillo

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Sand artist Joe Castillo, despite the tragically non-ironic beret, delivered an absolutely mesmerizing live performance of an evolving sand-painted narrative, shape-shifting into faces from different ethnicities and culminating in a global vision for world peace. Here’s some of his prior work, to scratch the itch until his TED talk goes live:

SESSION 6: THE DARK SIDE

Cyberworld investigator Misha Glenny

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

There are two types of companies in the world — those that know they’ve been hacked, and those that don’t.” ~ Misha Glenny

Underworld investigator Misha Glenny delivered a message of urgency: We are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the Internet. He suggested that many hackers either exhibit characteristics consistent with Asperger’s syndrome or developed their hacking skills during their teenage years, before their moral compass had fully developed, but concluded with the slightly ambivalent message — perhaps honed for the highly pro-hacker TED crowd — that we need to embrace hacker culture rather than condemn it.

The Internet embodies a complex dilemma that pits the demands of security with the desire for freedom.” ~ Misha Glenny

Glenny’s forthcoming book, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You, is already on pre-order and a clear must-read addition to these 7 essential books on the future of the Internet.

Cybersecurity expert Mikko Hypponen

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Cybersecurity expert Mikko Hypponen produced a brief history of computer viruses — with many of the early ones bearing a striking visual similarity to some of today’s generative art — and exposed some today’s stealthiest virus techniques, such as “keyloaders” that silently sit on your computer, recording everything you type, including credit card information and personal data.

I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I’m worried that we might not see that because of online crime. I’ve spent my life defending the net and I believe that if we don’t fight online crime, we run the risk of losing it all. We have to do this globally, and we have to do it now.” ~ Mikko Hypponen

In what was part comic relief, part powerful illustration of his central point, Hypponen whipped out an old-timey overhead projector for a part of his presentation, to better illustrate our options for when we do lose the things we take for granted. He concluded by proposing and “Internetpol” — Interpol for the Internet, a bastion of cyber security and investigator of cyber crime.

Lie detector Pamela Meyer

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Lie detector Pamela Meyer shared some insights from her book, Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception, including hands-on tips for telling a fake smile from a real one, the body language of a lie from the body language of truthfulness, and more.

Lying is our attempt to bridge the gap between how we wish we could be and what we’re really like.” ~ Pamela Meyer

SESSION 7: BODIES

Movement expert Daniel Wolpert argued that the only reason we have a brain is to produce adaptable and complex movement, since movement — from the contractions that underpin our speech and facial mimicry to the actions that allow us to exert force — is the only way to affect the world around us.

Movement expert Daniel Wolpert

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of the fascinating The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us, revealed some fascinating theories and statistics behind why and how we kiss. (Did you know, for instance, that two thirds of people tilt their head to the right when they kiss, and it has no correlation with righthandedness?)

Biologist and writer Sheril Kirshenbaum

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

We’re interpreting the world through our mouths more than we realize. Our lips are packed with nerves and signals.” ~ Sheril Kirshenbaum

TED Fellow Jae Rhim Lee delivered what was positively one of the wildest yet most thought-provoking talks to date. With her Infinity Burial Project, she is advocating for a movement she calls “decompiculture” — environmentally friendly, gentle ways of disposing of our dead bodies, an antidote to the chemical-laden, highly toxic burial and cremation processes of how we handle the dead today. Lee is training a unique strain of mushroom to decompose and remediate toxins in human tissue in a process that’s equal parts scientific exploration and philosophical quest to come to terms with her own mortality.

TED Fellow Jae Rhim Lee

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

By trying to preserve our dead bodies, we deny death, poison the living and further damage the environment.” ~ Jae Rhim Lee

Introducing UP from Jawbone

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

The makers of Jawbone revealed an exclusive first look at UP, a jaw-dropping sensor-based wristband that tracks your sleep patterns and eating habits to deliver data that optimizes your everyday life for greater well-being — a promising new personal data tracking tool in the arsenal of the quantified self.

Singer Alice Russell

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Musician extraordinaire Alice Russel closed the evening with her utterly magnificent voice, best described as Adele meets Ella. Her most recent album, Pot of Gold, is an absolute gem.

For highlights from the final two days of TEDGlobal 2011, keep an eye on our friends at the TED Blog, or follow along on Twitter between 8:30AM and 7PM GMT for the live feed.

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Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and keeping it ad-free isn't easy. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.