iPlot

Digital Innovation Workshop for Germany’s Largest Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung

“Journalism is not a profession anymore, it’s an activity,” I heard someone say at a conference in Paris a few weeks ago. Assuming that’s indeed the case – with news breaking on Twitter, commentary provided by popular bloggers, and both distributed via aggregators and social networks – you can imagine newsrooms becoming panic rooms, and the gatekeepers of the public turning into the horsemen of the apocalypse in private.

The profession’s common objection to the burgeoning social web paradigm is “We may all be publishers, but we’re not all editors.” But that claim can be easily countered: Do we still need editors? “If the news is important, it will find you,” asserts Marissa Mayer of Google, and she refers to the emergence of hyper-personalized (maybe also hyper-local) news streams that you can opt into without an intermediary and that come to you via one of the myriad social channels. Just one data point: In January 2010, visitors to nytimes.com spent an average 14 minutes on the site, whereas Facebook users stayed on Facebook.com for an average of seven hours. This begs the question of what’s more important to the newly empowered news consumer: Speed or credibility? Social aggregation or expert curation? Location-based delivery or correspondents on location?

Moreover, content farming (i.e. Demand Media) and other forms of on-demand journalism (i.e. Spot.Us) are fundamentally challenging the agenda-setting oligopoly of traditional media. Then there is the rise of the Mobile Internet: A recent Morgan Stanley report forecasts that it will have outgrown the Fixed Internet by 2015. And of course there is now the iPad and other tablets.

The future of journalism will be social and mobile, whether you like it or not, and it might likely require cross-platform storytelling. Consequently, news organizations are not only rushing to launch tablet versions, they are also shifting their expectations towards reporters: “Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand. If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it.’” Said Peter Horrocks, Director of Global News, BBC.

In light of all these trends, innovation is no longer an extracurricular activity for newspapers; it has become a mandatory task for rescuing the profession of journalism. “Innovate or die” seems to be the only real option. Or, put more mildly: If newspapers don’t just want to age (and ultimately die) with their traditional readership, how do they render themselves relevant for future readers, that is, the generation of digital natives, and their vastly different media consumption habits? (see the random sample of interviews below, polled on the streets of Munich: “How do you receive your news?” – in German).

The good news is that the future of journalism doesn’t have to look all that grim. Every abundance creates scarcity, and for every asset given away for free there are assets for which you can charge. Whether these assets will still be content, well, that’s another question – one of the many questions we asked in an all-day digital innovation strategy workshop that frog held last week at the headquarters of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest newspaper, in Munich. The paper is read throughout Germany by 1.1 million readers daily and boasts a high circulation abroad. Attendees of the workshop included, among others, the paper’s managing directors as well as the managing editors of the print and online newsroom (which are – unlike at many other news outlets – still separated at Sueddeutsche). The discussion was animated, critical of buzzwords and easy solutions, with lots of food for thought for both sides, and ultimately very encouraging.

With its stable circulation and ad revenue, its strong brand, and its immense popularity both among readers and journalists (Germans call it a “Leitmedium” – an agenda-setting publication that in recent surveys was even ranked ahead of the venerable SPIEGEL in terms of “authority”), Sueddeutsche Zeitung is uniquely positioned to view the digitization of content and the transformative principles of the social web less as an existential threat but a historic opportunity to reinvent journalism.

The Twittering’s On The Wall

Upon the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin has launched a remarkable “living” online memorial: the Berlin Twitter Wall.

Using the hashtag #fotw, people can share their thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall and tell the world “which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.” The Web site scrolls messages along a backdrop of the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the wall still standing and painted with murals. By clicking "stop" and "play", older tweets are shown. A click on the cameras up on the wall displays a selection of the domino-artwork that will fall in a symbolic act on November 9th 2009 at the "Fest der Freiheit" (festival of freedom) at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

I love how the Berlin Twitter Wall intersects history and real-time action, memory and instant gratification, gravitas with graffiti, concrete architecture and virtual realm – and make all of that open and social.

Thinking about Germany’s Future

I was in Berlin again last week, at the Federal Chancellery. Earlier this year, I had the honor of participating in a series of expert hearings or what the Germans call "Zukunftswerkstatt" –a think tank hosted by Angela Merkel and dedicated to envisioning and discussing the future of the country (or at least the next two decades). I took part in a session on quality of life and welfare and a few weeks later in a roundtable with the "Bundeskanzleramtsminister" (I love the German language), the Minister of the Chancellery, Thomas de Maiziere (I guess the US equivalent would be Rahm Emanuel). The results of the hearings and workshops are documented in a book titled Deutschland's nächste Jahre - Wohin unsere Reise geht ("Germany's next years – where we're going from here”) that is available now in stores and on Amazon (in German only).

“Next Generation Germany” Expert Hearings Hosted by the German Government

Representing my employer, frog design, I was honored to participate in the "Next Generation Germany" initiative. Jointly hosted by four leading German trend research institutes, the Innovation Council of the Endowment Foundation of German Sciences, the Bohnen Kallmorgen & Partners political consultancy, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Next Generation Germany initiative was launched on the occasion of the Federal Republic of Germany's 60th anniversary to enable an interdisciplinary dialogue with civil society and develop a guiding vision for Germany in the year 2030. Key themes and findings of the hearings were presented today at the Future Congress in Berlin. A book documenting the exchange in full detail will be published at the end of June.

The hearings took place between February and April at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin and brought together academics and practitioners from a variety of sectors. Participants represented science, media, NGOs, and corporations, including Allianz Group, Ars Electronica, Bertelsmann Foundation, Brand Eins, Club of Rome, DEKRA, Die Zeit, Free University Berlin, Folkwang Design School, German Center for Social Progress, German-French Center for Social Studies, German Institute for Community Organizing, Trendbuero, and Vodafone Foundation.

The German government is well-advised to embrace open innovation and new digital technologies. Barack Obama's new media-based campaign has fostered the momentum for using the Internet to reach, engage, and mobilize political constituents. Governments worldwide are now exploring the possibilities of social media and mobile communications to enhance their outreach. Citizens, on the other side, expect technology to introduce more transparency to governance and to empower them to actively participate in the agenda-setting and policy-making process.

Self-organization, open- and crowdsourcing, and social networks are enabling new forms of civic collaboration and government-citizen interaction. The innovative use of digital technologies, in particular the mobile and social web, can generate empathy and empower citizens to engage in the political process - both of which are key factors in ensuring leadership, social coherence, and a high quality of life in Germany and around the world.

next09: From Google Economy to Twitter Economy

I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums and one that stands out from the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international participants, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

Jeff Jarvis: "The Great Restructuring"

The first day, the keynote day, was a little disappointing, maybe because expectations were so high. Jeff Jarvis warmed up the crowd with his trademark "What Would Google Do?" Powerpoint deck. While a terrific thinker and speaker, for some reason he and the audience did not really click although he presented a lot of thought-provoking content. The rather stiff response may be attributed to the fact that the attendees were either too familiar with what they heard or felt slightly overwhelmed. Or maybe they were indeed excited - but too German to show it…

Umair Haque, who followed Jarvis, faced an even tougher, albeit partly self-inflicted challenge: explaining the new paradigm of "Constructive Capitalism" in 45 minutes. That's like asking Marx to walk you through his Communist Manifesto in a Twitter chat. It didn't help, certainly, that Haque used the much gushed-about Prezi presentation software; all the zooming in and out was dizzying and, if anything, exposed the lack of stringency in his outline.

Fortunately, Haque had an opportunity to correct this first impression and reiterate some of his thoughts on a panel with Jarvis a day later, which turned out to be a much more suitable format for his ideas on the transformation of capitalism. He also took the occasion to rebut the attacks of Andrew Keen ("The Cult of the Amateur"), who, on the opening day, had chastised Haque (and all the other thinkers he considers to be under the dark influence of Silicon Valley) for propagating rampant free market liberalism and a dangerous new radical individualism in the guise of the social, consumer-empowered share economy that the conference was celebrating. Keen poignantly remarked that Twitter was getting us back into the 18th century: rather than liberating us from institutional hierarchies, it would reinforce an old power structure and an all too human division of roles: between those who follow and those followed.

Andrew Keen: "Digital Vertigo"

Jeff Jarvis & Umair Haque: "When Money Talks"

Keen accused Haque et al of naïveté and insisted that Google and the other web juggernauts were not "leveling the playing field" through link love (by sharing the scarcest resource on the web: attention), as Haque had claimed, but were rather using it to expand their pursuit of world dominance. In Keen's eyes, Google's openness is nothing but a suave mechanism to foment a monopoly in the attention markets. In the same vein, a party pooper in the audience asked Jarvis: "If free sharing is the future of business, why doesn't Google share its page rank algorithm?" Jarvis' response wasn't all too convincing: concerns over malicious abuse of the data. Hmm. So much for radical transparency and trust as overriding principles in the share economy.

To Google's (and Jarvis') defense, one could counter with Haque's sharp line: "When we're all hyper-connected, the cost of evil goes up." True. Moreover, Google does provide real value as it has created a win-win-win business model (advertisers, consumers, Google) that is vastly different from the toxic chunk Haque bemoaned in the non-sustainable and ultimately value-free products that toppled capitalism as we knew it: the Hummer, fast food, derivatives, etc. And yet, if advertising is the admission that you have a mediocre product, and that it is in fact an expression of "failure," as Jarvis put it, then it is hard to reconcile this view with the fact that advertising remains the main revenue stream in the very Google economy from which Jarvis wants us all to learn.

Despite the flaws in Jarvis' and Haque's thinking, however, I am eager to defend them. It's easy to deconstruct constructive visions of the future as ill-informed descriptions of present realities but it is a much bigger task to actually come up with a positive vision. Keen, the rebel with a good cause, does nothing but throwing a bomb, which he readily admits, but he falls short of offering an alternative to the frameworks Jarvis and Haque and others provide in response to the fundamental crisis of capitalism.

Google wouldn't care about any of this intellectual arm-wrestling all that much. It is fully consumed with doing what it does best: firing out beta-products and services, successfully failing by failing rapidly. One mistake that it made, however, may arguably have lasting implications. It didn't buy Twitter. And so the question, it seems, is no longer "What would Google do?" but "What will Twitter do?" Does Twitter mark the beginning of the end of the Google economy?

Jyri Engeström, who sold Twitter-competitor Jaiku to Google and is now a Google employee, might have a clue. On a panel with social media guru Chris Messina he offered some good insights on micro-blogging trends on the web and defended the new Google Profiles ("you have to opt in"). Messina seconded him and brought up another interesting point that established the context for upcoming business models in the Twitter economy: the "glocalization" of Twitter. He described how Twitter is failing to extend the real-time conversation to the whole world, simply because of time zone differences: one part of the world is always sleeping when you're tweeting. The instant social web conversation is therefore asynchronous, after all, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envision services that bridge the time zone gap and deliver tweets when the recipients can actually receive them (keeping them on the top of the feed), almost like an echo across time zones. What if the real value of real-time was the delivery of tweets when it really mattered?

The whole time dimension of Twitter is uncharted but valuable territory, and there are other add-ins, integrators, and localization services that will emerge in this vibrant new ecosystem. The conversation on the social web is as rich as the human communication (if not richer), and it is just beginning to fully emerge.

What everyone agreed on at next09 is that the next big frontier on the web (and in the Twitter economy) is how businesses talk to their customers. We are witnessing an irrevocable convergence of players. Conversational services such as Twitter and Yammer are moving into the social networking space and are acquiring the credentials of social networks and collaboration tools, while traditional social networking sites such as XING, LinkedIn or Facebook are embedding conversational features to catch up with the irresistible pull of real-time communication.

For both groups, and in fact for all other companies, Umair Haque's advice is golden: Take one of the big ideals (democracy, peace, transparency, equality, etc.) and apply it to an ailing industry that is in need of transformation or at least some serious disruption: healthcare, finance, news, energy, government – you name it. Combine that with the principles of the Twitter economy – transparency, instantification, collaboration, and free sharing – and you have a winner.

next09: The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer

(c) next09

I just came back from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums that stands out in the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international attendees, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees comprised of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from leading German companies (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

In talking to many German attendees, my impression was that the German creative community shows no signs of a downturn. The German start-up scene in particular, if that is any indicator, is alive and kicking. There are many new promising web 2.0 firms run by smart entrepreneurs (many of them funded by entrepreneurs who made a fortune during the dot com heyday), and there is a lot of money to go around. Notwithstanding this newly found confidence, however, Germans still look to the US, and in particular to Silicon Valley, for technology trends and innovative business models – this is nothing new but next09 was a stark reminder of how powerful the Valley myth still is. Consequently, there was a large contingent of social media folks from the Bay Area.

I met several great people including Lane Becker, the founder of Adaptive Path and co-founder and president of Get Satisfaction (the "people-powered customer service" that seems to be everybody's darling these days), Natasha Friis Saxberg, the founder of Mentory, a web-based mentoring network, Daniel Reckling from Neckermann.de, Germany's largest online retailer, Stephan Loyen from Simyo (a German discount telco), Darius Miranda from Wells Fargo (which appears to have a pretty sophisticated social media B2B strategy), and many others.

In conversations with Jackson Bond and Johannes Haus from Xing, the European equivalent to LinkedIn, it became evident that for social networks and other web players 'conversations' are the next big frontier. The business world is ready to embrace an enterprise Twitter, and many business communities (social networks and intra-company networks alike) are working on proprietary internal micro-blogging services – micro micro-blogging, if you will, that can be better customized and controlled. Yammer for everyone. In one of the main stage sessions at next09, Stowe Boyd ("Unmarketing") presented the Open Enterprise 2009 study, which predicts that in a few years 80% of knowledge-based tasks in corporations will be happening outside of formal organizational boundaries and be open-sourced, crowd-sourced, social, and conversational.

In this vein, I was invited to speak about "The Shrinking Brand – Marketing in a Small World," a talk I had given before at the eMarketing conference in San Francisco. But after listening to Jeff Jarvis' terrific key note on "The Great Restructuring," Umair Haque's pledge for "Constructive Capitalism," and Andrew Keen's passionate rebuttal of both, I felt the need to change the focus of my talk and approach it from a broader view. It was also more fun to present something new. And so I came up with the "Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer" (I know, I know, ten would have been better, but sometimes there are only seven...), based on a concept I've been blogging about over the past few months. This was the first time I ever shared it at a public forum.

My key points, in a nutshell: As brands face an unprecedented level of competition, transparency, and consumer empowerment on the social web, 'meaning' is becoming the new powerful currency that connects brands with their brandholders in the 'share economy.' The new marketing leader, the Chief Meaning Officer, is a strategic activist, social media entrepreneur, constant innovator, and integrator. The Chief Meaning Officer has the potential to transform business through meaningful marketing – marketing that consistently creates added social value, not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and activating the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good – and for profit. Brands that have a reason to exist, an argument to win, will be more appealing than ever.

The Seven Rules:
1. Listen and converse (and converge)
2. Atomize your brand
3. Activate your customers
4. Think and act like a media company
5. Give more than you take
6. Be the change
7. Be yourself

Here are the slides:

Tim Leberecht@NEXT09: The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer

View more presentations from Frog Design.

More about the other next09 talks – and the emerging 'Share Economy' (that you may also call a "Twitter Economy") – in the next couple of days…

Guy Kawasaki Gets the Inside Scoop from Hartmut Esslinger: How Steve Job's Brain Works and the Top 10 Best and Worst Products of All Time

Famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Internet entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki offers a colorful interview with frog design founder and legendary designer Hartmut Esslinger. Hartmut discusses his philosophy on design and his new book A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business, to be published in June by Jossey-Bass. Hartmut talks about how Steve Job’s brain works and why the world’s richest companies continue to put out “crappy” products. Hartmut also reveals his top 10 best and worst products of all time.

Here's the article: The Inside Scoop on Design: Ten Questions with Hartmut Esslinger. 

@SXSW: Branded Conversations / Some Quick Thoughts on the Past, Present, and Future of Twitter

Someone blogged that SXSW Interactive is just like the Internet itself – disjointed, decentralized, scattered, fast, aggressive, random, fragmented, and so on. In fact, the main commonality between the two may be that the number of attributes to describe them is infinite. Like the Internet, the annual tech conference in Austin is an echo chamber of an echo chamber, a place where original thought and commentary get mixed up and mashed up in a highly self-referential meta-conversation.

That was already the case before Twitter entered the scene at SXSW two years ago but the micro-blogging service has certainly amplified the effect. It was both comical and frightening to see the uber-individualistic geeksters at SXSW captivated by the invisible rules of an ostentatious behavioral uniformity: Within one mile of the convention center you could observe the strange ritual of groups of people standing or sitting together, chained to their iPhones, twittering instead of talking: “#SXSW. Twittering about SXSW.” The real conversation was often limited to a quick “What’s your name?” or “Where’s the next party?” just to have some input for the next tweet. It is indeed a Read-Write generation that is coming of age in the wake of an all-dominant present, with no particular loyalty to the past and maybe not even an interest in the future (see Peggy Orenstein’s recent piece on “Growing Up on Facebook” in the NY Times Magazine).

Yet the rise of the social digerati is unstoppable. New data by Nielsen Online shows that social networking sites (which encompass social networks and blogs by Nielsen’s definition) are experiencing growth rates of twice as much as any of the main destination sites (search, portals, PC software sites, and email). The time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth. Furthermore, social networks are gaining traction among new audiences. On Facebook in particular, “the greatest growth... has come from people aged 35-49 years (+24.1 million). Furthermore, Facebook has added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).”

Of all the social networks, Twitter may well be the most pervasive broad- and narrowcasting channel, propelled by an ever-growing base of users. Every day more sophisticated Twitter business models are popping up that move the service closer into the hands of a mainstream audience: charity campaigns such as Twestival and Tweetsgiving (Robert Fabricant pointed out that there is a natural synergy between micro-blogging and micro-donating), as well as San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s efforts to use Twitter as an official channel for city-wide emergency communications are just two of them. And when even Jon Stewart features Twitter and all major publications run how-to guides, this seems to be a clear sign that Twitter is entering the mainstream.

But is it really? First of all, let’s remember that it took the service, despite all the hype, two years to reach today’s level of attention. And the adoption is primarily happening in the US. Even the Internet population of Germany (40 million), the third largest economy in the world, is still lagging: Twitter has only 27,000 registered German users at this point. Let’s also put Twitter usage in context of the overall digital footprint: Twitter has 11 million registered users and attracted seven million unique visitors in February, which represents a stunning 1,382 percent growth since last year. The total Internet user base, however, consists of 1.4 billion users. The most widely used data application on the planet is SMS text messaging: three billion people actively use it. And compared to Facebook’s 175 million users, Twitter’s numbers are miniscule. In other words: The whole world may be talking about Twitter, but the whole world is not yet talking on it. The next few months will tell us if Twitter is over-hyped or if we’re witnessing a revolution – and if so, if the revolution will eat itself.

That’s exactly the concern of Twine founder Nova Spivack who might speak for many other early Twitter adopters when he warns of the implications of Twitter’s massive growth and the increasing amount of uncontrolled abundance. Let alone potential security vulnerabilities, he flags “Mainstream Adoption” (“Tens of millions of new users are going to flood into the service. It is going to fill up with mainstream consumers. Many of them won't have a clue how to use Twitter”) and “Notifications Galore” (“Every service on the Web is going to rush to pump notifications and invites into Twitter”) as the two main threats. In his opinion, “There is soon going to be vastly more content in Twitter, and too much of it will be noise.” This raises an important question: Will Twitter remain an open-ended, self-organized conversation or will we see the emergence of more filters to make sense (and money) of all this chatter? Or, more philosophically put: Can we handle abundance (the entire Twitterverse) without any scarcity (the filter/curator)?

I’d say we need some scarcity, some reduction of choices. Spivack suggests introducing adding meta-data to save Twitter from its very eloquence, and there is definitely demand for organizing the ‘entropic chaos’ that characterizes the never-ending Twitter conversation. This could be an opportunity not only for Twitter itself but also third-party brands acting as curators. So far, almost all Twitter apps either add value on the input side (Twitterphone, Twitterific), visualize the output (see Pepsi Co.'s Zeitgeist app), or combine both (Tweetdeck). But one dimension is underexploited: accessibility.

“Brand curators” – operating along the coordinates of organization (self-organization vs. curation) and timing (real-time vs. past) of Twitter content could offer just that: making Twitter more accessible. For example, they could provide vertical search feeds (in real-time) plus some additional context. Both could be embedded in a visually rich ‘landscape’ view that features ‘favorites’ (domain experts), most popular (re-tweeted) tweets, and “breaking tweets.” In addition, Twitter curators could compile past tweets within certain categories or topic areas, as editorialized search results. Or they could create some ‘artificial scarcity’ and offer programmed Twitter slots, limited in time and audience (Liz Kelly from Brilliant Ink told me recently about a one-hour panel of journalists on Twitter as just one example). The brand would act as a ‘human’ search filter, as a trusted authority that uncovers and organizes relevant tweets. This could be interesting for media companies or brands that are transforming into media companies.

It’s worth pointing out that this scenario is not identical with just a branded linear Twitter feed. What I’m envisioning is a bias to commentary instead of immediacy. Not just a stream of tweets – a handpicked collage of various adjacent Twitter formats (replies, direct messages, re-tweets, searches). Think of it as Tweetdeck for the more passive mainstream user who wants to read tweets rather than write them. First steps into this direction are Breaking Tweets, Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, and especially MyAlltop, the recently launched customizable version of the news rack. Offering celebrity MyAlltop lists, the service provides a blue print for brands: it creates a dashboard that offers curated content, features star Twitterers and their recommendations, and highlights tweets by categories. MyAlltop demonstrates that the verticalization of the Twitterverse is of most value if it goes along with a presentation that is horizontal.

The biggest opportunity may be something more fundamental, and it may be one for Twitter itself: a public archive of tweets. Have you ever wondered where the huge volume of Twitter-generated content goes? Who owns all your tweets? Are you giving away your data or sharing it? How can you access it (besides going back chronologically through the search function)? Sure, Twitter keeps tweets and doesn't auto-delete them. You can also set up a LoudTwitter account to generate daily blog posts that contain all your tweets from the past 24 hours. Or you can use Tweetdumpr, which creates a .csv file with your last 250 tweets (it used to be the entire record; the fact that Twitter has limited it lately shows that it may have an interest in monetizing past tweets). But all of these services work only for your own tweets and are rather cumbersome. What I’d like to see is a public Twitter archive. There is value in storing and distributing old conversations, the “now” that’s long gone. Clearly, the totality of tweets represents a massive library of human thought that we need to preserve and make accessible. In the future, wouldn’t it be interesting to go back in time to rediscover the SXSW tweets from 2009? Memory is a vital aspect of all communications, a prerequisite of accountability – yes, one could even consider it a human right. With traditional media eventually locked out of the conversation, we need to maintain the ability to revisit past events (even if they were just communicative) – if not to rectify them so at least to reflect on them.

Or is there no need to remember – and we just go with the feed? Can meaning be self-organized – without scarcity, without historians, without interpreters? And are we producing any meaning at all, or is true what the Boston Globe pointed out: Just as technology is giving us the ability to amplify every word we utter we have nothing really meaningful to say? I guess none of these questions can be answered in 140 characters. Let me know what you think – but take your time.

At the Kanzleramt

I was invited to participate in a half-day expert workshop hosted by the German Federal Chancellery, dedicated to the theme "Next Generation Germany – Welfare and Quality of Living. Possible Trends in the Next Two Decades," on Thursday in Berlin. The workshop was part of a series of expert hearings designed to pursue an interdisciplinary dialogue between different sectors in society.

More soon.

What Do Germans Think of Joe the Plumber?

If Joe Wurzelbacher had already become famous two weeks ago, I’m sure this would have been among the questions I faced when I was recently interviewed by two German-speaking media outlets (the German public radio station WDR and Austria’s daily Der Standard) for their respective stories capturing an ex-pat German’s perspective on the US presidential campaign.

It is widely known that Europeans find US politics half amusing, half alarming. Germans, in particular, not in the least because of their history, mock the need for spectacle and find the “framing” of the political discussion to the expense of a near-total absence of substance rather concerning: how an ordinary plumber from Ohio could receive so much prime airtime and become the last straw in a candidate’s failed campaign, will therefore leave most of them dazzled. Let alone “drill, baby, drill” and Sarah Palin.

At the same, Germans are completely in awe of Obama, and even the notoriously cynical SPIEGEL was inspired to suggest more “excitement in German politics” after the senator’s speech in front of 200,000 Berliners. Germans are also fascinated with grassroots politics and field campaigning to the extent that they are important in the US. No German political party would ever allow more or less unvetted volunteers to make phone calls under their name. There is no “phone banking” in Germany. There is also no real-time focus group barometer during TV debates that spikes when either of the candidates utters the word “tax cut.” And there are no “fact checkers” who check the accuracy of each campaign’s allegations (but remain unchecked themselves, as the Economist pointedly remarks).

While the political culture gap seems to be widening, citizens on both sides of the Atlantic share similar economic woes. The initial Schadenfreude about the implosion of US greed has given way to deep concern about the domestic reverberations of the financial crisis. As Newsweek countered, Germans are sitting in “Glashaeuser” and shouldn’t throw stones. The German government just slashed its growth forecast for 2009 to 0.2 per cent. Klaus, the plumber, might lose his job under these dire circumstances and is probably equally concerned about tax hikes as Joe (although he may have reason to, and Joe, as we know, does not actually under a President Obama). But style and tone are different. If Klaus had said on German TV that he was not willing to apologize anymore for his country and was also in favor of closing all borders, this would have caused a scandal of national proportions. In the US, it was just seen as yet another piece of main street lore, an unexpected narrative of a campaign rich with narratives.