Brooks Cole's blog

Why All the Media Has it All Wrong about Google's YouTube

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 18:55:10 -0700

YouTube

is just the latest salvo in the case of media eating itself big time. So much more is coming: collaborative editing, dynamic documentary, hyperfilm, panopticon, WikiPedia Media... Imagine what this can mean for Shifting personal, local and global consciousness!

Democratic Transparency in the YouTube Age

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:42:28 -0700

What I love about Web 2.0, the new "social media web" in which everyone can be a card-holding publisher and not a silent spectator, is that there are thousands of simultaneous viewpoints on any event or subject. It is with such holographic triangulation, I hope and pray, that greater truth san be resolved out of the mists of chaos, uncertainty, and unfair and unbalanced reporting.

Republicans Begin to Ask "Is Bush an Idiot?"

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 04:13:19 -0700

I try to make my contributions to Shift in Action non-political. This one is presented more as an exercise in examining the influence of recursive media in our geometrically-growing media culture. By recursive, I mean that media segments are now increasingly featuring other media segments, which are then "YouTubed" and featured on websites, which are then blogged about in a cascade throughout the blogosphere. Now you are reading a blog about all that.

Joe Scarborough, that formerly reliable apologist for the right on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, (former Republican Congressman for Florida) now posits the question Bush himself settled for the rest of us years ago: Is Bush an Idiot?

It is telling in this time of increasing tensions, approaching mid-term elections, rising gas prices and falling poll ratings that Republicans are finally beginning to wonder out loud. Scarborough has a fascinating blog about it on HuffPo yesterday and has assembled a montage of Bush gaffes that would make the Daily Show proud, especially since it includes the Daily Show, (YouTube below):

What is a Mashup?

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 06:30:19 -0700

Mashups

are one of my favorite things - synthetic creativity born from the creativity and generosity of open technologists whose works are available on the web to be cross-pollinated with other technologies or datasources to produce brand-new things. It is an ever-accelerating artform in the World Wide Mesh that promises endless Darwinian generative possibilities.

Looking into Another's Soul by Scanning their Library

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 07:18:17 -0700

Isn't it fun to come to somebody's house and scan their bookshelves or their CD collection to peer into their souls? It's like a holographic UPC code, the soul signature of a person expressed as an array of what interests them and what you share or don't share. If the library belongs to a potential love interest, you might raise your eyebrows at finding How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad: And Other Spells for Love, Wealth, Beauty, and Revenge or The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

For the MySpace generation, it's love me, love my music. What's my music? Just look at my iTunes Library. That's what the social media application MOG does. MOG slurps up your favorites and posts a summary of your collection to connect you with your similarly-minded peeps.

John Lennon: An Original Consciousness Luminary

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:40:56 -0700

Terence McKenna described a fractally eschatonic view of history called the "TimeWave" that posited that history was repeating itself in ever faster cycles, culminating in The Big Event in 2012. That's a separate discussion, but a really cool example is the profound symmetry between the Nixon Right's war on John Lennon and his peace advocacy at the height of the Vietnam War.

HoloMap: The Marriage of Interdependence and Identity

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:06:11 -0700

Identity is a deep subject that keeps theologians and psychologists and philosophers and poets up at night.

Interdependence is a subject that some people want to emphasize and others see as weakness, but for me is just an obvious and indispensable description of everything.

Transforming Philanthropy with a New World Map

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 06:33:54 -0800

Giving Philanthropists the Power to See the World They Want to Create

The Problem: We live in a world which is literally awash in data and information that has swamped our systems of representing and understanding it, precisely at a moment in Human history when we most need to understand this information. The World Wide Web is a vast and remarkable resource, but viewing web pages a page at a time through a web browser fails to satisfy our need to get the “big picture” and takes waaaaaay too long to grok the fullness.