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My friend, Stilgherrian, has posted a scathing analysis of the final report of the 2020 Summit. He’s particularly disappointed with the Summit’s failure to address and take advantage of the power of the Internet to build connections between disparate communities and between the government and its constituency.

I couldn’t agree more.

My views on the ongoing failure of government at all levels in Australia to really engage online are public and published here. That said, the 2020 Summit was a real opportunity for the Rudd government to take positive steps in the way it connects people with service providers, policy-linked activity and each other. But, yet again, it looks like failure on a grand and blinkered scale.

I am deeply disappointed, but really not at all surprised. Once again the no idea, safe option has been taken without a gutsy leap forward.

Australian politicians and policy-makers really have no idea about how to use the Internet. Largely, they are stuck in 1995 and interested only in broadcast messages and policy brochureware.

They are certainly nowhere near what the Kiwis and Brits (amongst a lot of other online constituent-linked activity, No 10 has a Twitter account and uses it to talk with people!) are doing and light years from where someone like Texas Republican Representative, John Culberson is, using Twitter, podcasting, blogging and more to, as he says, put “We the People in every room in Washington”.

That’s not to say that things couldn’t be different here. They could. I personally know a significant number of smart people, working on the ground in Federal Government departments who get the power of the Internet and could facilitate powerful communication and connection efforts between their organisations and their constituencies if only they were allowed to…

My slides and transcript for my introductory talk at the final National Museum of Australia Talkback Classroom on 25 June 2008. The theme of the event was Youth and the Media.

I sat on a panel with Walkley Award winning journalist and presenter, Steve Cannane from the ABC and Jenny Buckland, CEO of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation as we were questioned by a very smart bunch of university and senior high school students on our knowledge and opinion of their engagement with various forms of media.

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Just a couple of months ago, NYU professor, Clay Shirky made what I think is a very incisive observation.

He said that this… without this… is broken. He’s right. Humans are less emotionally invested in an experience without the ability to interact with it. And even more importantly, cognitively much less engaged.

His statement was made in the context of the perception of kids and their engagement with media. Of course, it’s not just kids that think like this. I proudly count myself amongst those who think this way.

But what Clay was really talking about is the dramatic change in the way that media consumption today is shifting. In fact, consumption is no longer an adequate term for describing the way we, and especially our youth - those under 30 for want of a better marker - are interacting with media.

I’m not a fan of the term “youth”. I think it’s remarkably condescending and implicitly infers that the group tarred with it, youth, are somehow lesser members of society. Which is rubbish. I count among my friends, real friends, people aged from 19 all the way to their late 60s. By no means is any of them less than another. They are all fascinating, compelling people.

Unlike the latter half of the 20th Century, where it was expected that we would passively sit, slouched on our couches watching Gilligan’s Island, Baywatch, or more recently, Desperate Housewives, readily taking in the processed cheese of mass-market television and ready to receive the messages of advertisers beamed directly to our cerebral cortexes, there is now a quantum change taking place.

For my colleagues on the panel, Steve and Jenny, and their industries - radio and TV - this means a huge shift in the way that their media is produced, packaged and marketed.

In our always-on, engaged world, we all have the ability to be an empowered audience of one - seeking out and using media as and when we see fit. Sometimes we’ll just watch. At other times, we’ll want to be the creator and broadcaster or we might want to time shift or remix into something new and creative of our own.

There’s good data to show that we’ve disengaged from passive consumption. Our weekly hours of TV watching, of radio listening and of reading long-form material have shrunk dramatically in recent years. Instead, we’re actively participating in things that interest us and with people, real people, that share those interests. And largely, we’re doing it online. Or at the very least, expecting online to be a component of the experience so that we can actively engage.

Now, that broad-brush “online” doesn’t just mean sitting in front of the computer. We’re using many channels and many devices in our quest for engagement and desire for, as sociologist Ray Oldenburg puts it, a Third Place - somewhere not home and not work, but somewhere we feel anchored to and can participate in “community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction”.[1]

That device can be, and often is, the computer in the family room. But equally often, the device is a mobile phone. The common thread though, is the glue holding these interactions together. That glue is the Internet.

Contrary to the assertions of some that would argue that the Internet is bringing us undone, I would argue the diametric opposite. The Internet, far from bringing us down, provides us with a tool, perhaps more powerful than ever before to find a Third Place in a more socially disconnected world. We have the ability today to engage more often, with more people in a more real way.

We have the ability to be a hyperconnected creator, muse, consumer, audience and critic. And so we should.

My message to today’s youth, from my 10 year old daughter to the Gen Yers now a rich part of the business world is “Go forth and engage with media everywhere. Wake them up to your world. Refuse passive consumption. Make an amazing difference.”

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Place

EDIT: Of course, with the AFR’s evil paywall, you can’t read the article online. Lucky they flow it through to MIS Australia.

I’m quoted pretty extensively in a major article in the Information section of today’s Australian Financial Review, the leading Australian newspaper focussed on business. In the article, Social networking comes of age, sort of, journalist Renai LeMay discusses the paper I delivered at itechne’s recent PubCamp events in Melbourne and Sydney. You can see the original slides and notes here.

It’s exciting to be quoted in a journal as important as the AFR. It kind of makes me feel that the message I’m trying to get organisations to understand - that social networking and social media aren’t disruptive to their businesses, rather that they need to become a core part of them - is beginning to get through.

Like a lot of people I know, I’m usually buried under an avalanche of work, stuff I want to read and absorb and incoming messages that fight for my continuous partial attention. My pal, Stowe Boyd, and I have both recently become aware of Feedly, a new Firefox extension that radically messes with Google Reader (which for me usually has hundreds, if not thousands of unread items in it).

Through some magical juice, Feedly grabs the stuff in your subscriptions, as well as a bunch of other attention stream data, and re-presents it in a much more interesting and consumable way.

Feedly offers a number of views into your attention stream data; What’s New presents what it says, The Wall is almost like FriendFeed and at the item level view (although all the features need to be at every level) are a bunch of cool features including the ability to bookmark/recommend an item, to email it, save it for later reading and send it to Twitter. That’s powerful stuff!

It’s making a vast difference to my ability to consume this stuff, and has replaced everything else as my default home page. I don’t quite think I’ve fully wrapped my mind around Feedly yet, but I am enjoying using it much more than flicking between Google Personalised Home Page and an overcrowded Google Reader.

Those of us that dig tagging and words should get a kick out of Wordle. It’s a funky Java tool to build cool-looking clouds from blocks of text.

Here’s a Wordle for my recent PubCamp talk, Slouching Towards Intertwingularity:

And another for my Age of Conversation manifesto:

Too awesome!

Thanks to my pal, Jaz, for the link!