By supporting this initiative, Kuoni is underlining its long-standing commitment to corporate responsibility. As a tour operator, Kuoni is deeply involved in all aspects of the travel experience, both now and for the future, and makes every effort to maximise the positive effects of the world travel industry and minimise its more negative repercussions. The company has already initiated and successfully implemented over 30 projects all over the globe, with its prime focus on sustainable supply chains, sustainable products, human rights and environmental stewardship. This is the second sustainable tourism film to be supported by Kuoni. The first winning short-film, which focuses on sustainable hotels, will be featured on the contest’s facebook page.

The first winning film and full contest rules are available online starting 1 Feb 2012, 9AM CET at: https://www.facebook.com/KuoniGroup?sk=app_353019991381070

The amazing Palazzo Marino in Milan will October 19th 2011 be the setting for another international Culture|Futures conference, which in Milan is organised by Ragnarock Association in cooperation with the City of Milano and other partners.

The conference will discuss the role that Scandinavian and Italian actors in the creative industry have in reaching an ecological age that is the Culture|Futures vision for 2050.

The conference will also be focusing on the way design, food, fashion and innovation can guide people towards more sustainable standards of living in the next few years.

To speak at the conference, Culture|Futures and Ragnarock have invited several guests from the sector to talk about how they connect creativity and sustainability, the guest-list includes among many others Kigge Hvid (CEO of INDEX), Francesco Paulo Zurlo (Vice director of INDACO) and Guizy Bettoni (Director of CLASS).

For further details on the Culture|Futures Conference in Milan and the full program and guest-list of the day download the Culture Futures programme

For registration  please write conferenza@ragnarock.eu

Please also see, RSVP the Italia Facebook Event page

If any other question, please contact:

Elisabetta Ferrario

e-mail: elisabettaferrario@ragnarock.eu
mobile: (+39) 3473578941.

Culture|Futures is an international collaboration of organizations and individuals who are concerned with shaping and delivering a proactive cultural agenda to support the necessary transition towards an Ecological Age by 2050.

The Cultural sector that we refer to is an interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral, inter-genre collaboration, which encompasses policy-making, intercultural dialogue/cultural relations, creative cities/cultural planning, creative industries and research and development. It is those decision-makers and practitioners who can reach people in a direct way, through diverse messages and mediums.

Affecting the thinking and behaviour of people and communities is about the dissemination of stories which will profoundly impact cultural values, beliefs and thereby actions. The stories can open people’s eyes to a way of thinking that has not been considered before, challenge a preconceived notion of the past, or a vision of the future that had not been envisioned as possible. As a sector which is viewed as imbued with creativity and cultural values, rather than purely financial motivations, the cultural sector’s stories maintain the trust of people and society.
Go toThis post comes to you from Culture|Futures

David Buckland is an artist with an international reputation. In 2000 he created and now directs the Cape Farewell project, which brings artists, scientists and educators together to collectively address and raise awareness about climate change. This highly successful artistic intervention has spurred worldwide activity and underlines the power of artistic engagement to stimulate and vision the necessary cultural shift to build a sustainable and exciting society.

In The Art of Climate Change, David explores what happens when artists collaborate with scientists and educators in response to global warming. Cape Farewells highly successful artistic intervention has spurred worldwide activity and underlines the power of artistic engagement to stimulate and envision the necessary cultural shift to build a sustainable society.

Resources:

Twitter: @capefarewell

Facebook Group: Cape Farewell

Cape Farewell: www.capefarewell.com

David Buckland: www.bucklandart.com/

Background:

In October 2009 delegates from across Canada and beyond joined Artscape in Toronto for our third Creative Places + Spaces: The Collaborative City conference. In a packed two-day program inspirational keynote speakers and ground breaking projects made the case for the power of collaboration to solve complex multi dimensional challenges and to fuel innovation. www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca

Over the next few months “The Campaign of Ideas: Video Knowledge Exchange” series will bring you a regular diet of conference highlights focusing on the major themes of the conference and some of the tools for collaboration that were presented.

Respond to Our Current Poll: Visit the Creative Places + Spaces website at www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca and tell us what you think is the most practical and relevant conference learning on the theme of Collaboration Fuels Innovation. The poll is located on the lower right-hand side of the website.

Keep Informed About Creative Places + Spaces:

You can follow us on Twitter @CPandS, use #CPandS″ in your tweets and join in the conversation on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. The Creative Places + Spaces website will be updated often, so be sure to check back for updates or subscribe to our RSS Feed or Email Updates. www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca

Creative Places + Spaces was presented by Artscape in collaboration with MaRS Discovery District, Martin Prosperity Institute and the City of Toronto: Economic Development, Culture & Tourism.

www.torontoartscape.on.ca

www.marsdd.com

www.martinprosperity.org/

www.toronto.ca/culture/

Think. Create. Collaborate.

Cultural ecology and sustainable urban environments

Symposium
27-28 July 2010

Sydney Opera House
Utzon Room
http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au

Share this announcement on:  Facebook | Delicious | Digg | Twitter

Symposium 27-28 July 2010, Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House (with drinks and project launch: 27 July, 6pm, Opera House Marquee)

Bookings through Sydney Opera House http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com.

Updates and blogs: http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au. Pre and post HotHouse events can be followed on a dedicated HotHouse website to be launched in July 2010.

HotHouse brings together a diverse group of creative thinkers, each with visionary ideas for transforming urban environments. It seeks to cultivate a new cultural ecology in which the arts play a key role, working with the planners and users of city spaces to address urgent environmental problems.

HotHouse advances the proposal that we no longer curate art but curate space. Taking the city as a venue it replaces the traditional idea of ‘exhibiting’ art with a practical vision of art as a catalyst for social and environmental change.

The guiding principle of HotHouse is that of micro-change and universal, networked participation. Micro-change does not mean small change but networked or interconnected change with vast potential for expansion. The HotHousing process is designed to stimulate new projects, connections and local/transnational community collaboration.

Participants in HotHouse include design thinkers such as Bruce Mau who has spearheaded community-driven projects for large-scale sustainable change in both North and South America, Tony Fry, Director of Team D/E/S and founder of the EcoDesign Foundation, and Adrian Parr (University of Cincinnati); artists/designers Janet Laurence, Dan Hill, Allan Giddy, Mathieu Gallois, David Trubridge, Carbon Arts, Makeshift and Digital Eskimo; new media writers such as Mark Pesce, one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality and co-inventor of VRML; and international curators such as Hou Hanru (San Francisco Art Institute), pioneer of exhibitions that operate in everyday city spaces, and Michaela Crimmin (former director of the UK RSA, Art & Ecology Centre) leading international environmental art curator.

HotHouse is an initiative of the National Institute for Experimental Arts [NIEA] at UNSW (Director, Jill Bennett; Chief Curator, Felicity Fenner) in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney.

” practices… inspired by the precepts of Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” and [which] address environmental problems with creative combinations of conceptual art, process art, connective aesthetics, participatory and socially engaged practices, phenomenological and eco-philosophies, direct democracy processes and other social/aesthetic forms and techniques.

SFEAP seeks nothing less than development of a large contingent of ecoartists committed to staying in South Florida and who are, or wish to become, master cross-disciplinary learners and social system choreographers, skilled at drawing into the collaborative creation of ecoart stakeholders from grass roots community organizations, scientific institutions, public policy agencies and pioneering philanthropic entities. SFEAP will dedicate itself to development and promotion of the best ecoart projects: those that engage and mobilize community while employing, enhancing and melding techniques, knowledge and wisdom from landscape architecture, environmental biology and chemistry, planning and engineering and many other disciplines, and collaborating with their practitioners, while drawing from the deep roots of art history and the broadest lexicon of aesthetic methods.”

While art works that include or are made wholly of recycled materials can be interesting objects and demonstrate how art does not have to be made of new materials, SFEAP, Inc. does not include such work in our definition of EcoArt. We see EcoArt as having an active role in environmental amelioration, and which must include direct community engagement and collaboration with scientists and environmental experts. SFEAP is dedicated to bringing many Florida based artists into EcoArt practice. This is the primary mission of the organization. We currently have our pilot community EcoArt education and artist apprenticeship well underway in Martin County. The apprentice EcoArtists there have just installed their first EcoArt work at the Florida Oceanographic Society. A video about the apprentices and this first project can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6a4VQznh8Ua

Please feel free to cut and paste this definition into an email to anyone in South Florida who is using the term EcoArt in relation to art that uses recycled objects or materials.

Thanks. MJ Aagerstoun

Facebook | Mary Jo Aagerstoun: Art from recycled objects and materials is not EcoArt.

We are accepting proposals for three sections of the 3rd BBIEAF 2010 to be held in Daet, Camarines Norte, Philippines from May 30 till June 6, 2010. On its third iteration, the BBIEAF is still a community-based art festival that links up Art, Environment and Sustainability. The three main divisions are Installation Art, Video Art and Public Furniture. Artists are immersed in their respective adoptive communities, and together with the members of those communities, construct large-scale bamboo installations on the beach. Video artists will have their works shown in and around the town of Daet.

Interested artists can send a sketch of their installation proposal as well as their CV, or in the case of video art, a clip of their videos and a CV, and in case of the public furniture, a sketch  and a CV.

Please email all submissions to bbieaf@yahoo.com. Follow us @bbieaf at Twitter and bbieaf camnorte on Facebook.

WOOLOO.ORG – 3RD BAGASBAS BEACH INTERNATIONAL ECO-ARTS FESTIVAL 2010.

Where are you? In the present? In the future? See my lament for clues:

Things only happen here to make what happens next.

Is LinkedIn a viable artistic community in your opinion? How would you improve it?

I don’t think so, and I don’t think i wish it to be. I don’t know if LinkedIn represents a community really as much as an infrastructure. I think it exists separate from something like Facebook without competition because one is about social networks and one is about businesses networks. I also don’t see how it accommodates the needs of an artistic community.

I don’t think there is a social network that does effectively represent an artistic community out there. How specific do you allow it to sort itself? the arts are too expansive with too many points of access to be represented effectively through a network with a defined set of sortable criteria. For self-sorting facebook is more effective because it is focused on individuals not labels. For curated sorting a wiki is better since everything is of equal weight.

That’s the issue with getting past post-modernism isn’t it? Modernism was about the universal, post-modernism was about the categorized, and post-post-modernism is about the unique.

What is at the intersection of mythology, innovation and sustainability?

From now on.

What new symbols, songs, secrets, myths are you driving in the green movement?

I can tell you that I’m trying to drive it away from the color green and images of leaves. The image that bugs me the most is actually grass, since in most places it’s impractical and wasteful regardless of it’s green-ness. I think an era’s aesthetics speak to values and I think we’re pushing the value of the first nature and something more raw, less processed. It’s happening in design, supply chains and our food. I’m also trying to break the myth of technological solutions.

I’m irked by the layering of systems over existing systems to solve problems with the existing system. I’d rather break it down to it’s elemental parts. I’m a big promoter of archaic technology, like using steamed banana leaves or not vitrified drink ware in Indian. Things that were discarded as incorrect in a modern manufactured world that persists into the contemporary era.

Are you an alchemist?

No, there is plenty of magic in real science.

Tell us about your favorite modern painter and how you feel when you gaze at the work.

Are we saying modern or contemporary. I’m a traditionalist when I define the Modern era as something that happened in the beginning of the 20th century out of industrialization. If we’re talking painters though I can name a few. Magritte for being clever and questioning the mudane, Haring for balancing accessibility, message, and challenging art world constructs. I do however find myself most drawing to the infrastructural and phenomenological though and insofar as that is concerned am more trilled by visual are that engages those parts of my brain. That’s not always present in painting, so I have to mention Olafur Eliasson, who fascinates me.

How do you manage the bureaucracy that you’ve created at The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts? How do you personally support your members?

There isn’t much Bureaucracy. We’re extremely small and nimble. We’re the least incorporated we can be and have foregone 501c3 status to stay lean. I suppose we deal with the bureaucracy of partnership with more cumbersome organizations and then it’s oftentimes working within their structure.

We can make our decisions and change methodology rapidly to best accommodate our members and partners since all of the power rests between two equal executives. We’ve yet to expand our power-sharing, outside of partnerships, and those are all project based. It’s not the most profitable, but it’s in line with our core mission, which is really about information and infrastructure. We’re like the opposite of the CIA, we don’t see value in protecting our information, and support ourselves through others valuing sharing information as a desired act.

For the second part of the question though, it’s hard to say. I mean, we don’t have funds to directly support their activities. But, we try and talk directly to all of them. They have our address, phone numbers, email addresses, and ultimately all of our lines of communication like our website, social networks, twitter and so on is all us personally. If you get in touch with the CSPA, you’re getting in touch with us directly. We don’t filter that, and don’t understand ecologically mind organizations that put up blocks, since we gain absolutely zero (aside from profit I guess) from not talking and being transparent if we plan to not destroy the planet and the billions of lives that will impact.

And, ultimately, it helps that I’m the web guy too. It’s part of what I do, so there is nothing standing in the way of our web presence, we do.

What were the 3 – 5 best innovations from last year’s CSPA Convergence?

Well we did this in partnership with the University of Oregon’s School of Theater, so mind you a couple of these might be theater centric.

• The Convergence itself. I go to a lot of conferences and I deal with but don’t like the hierarchy and artifice that often surrounds them. I prefer the camp model which, like wikis, aims to gather people around a topic and allow all of them to offer something. So I think it’s in expanding the convergence model to get between these models of conference and camp and add on more doing, not just talking.
• Marbles in a Jar – This is Avery simple re-use model we’ve been working on. It looks at volume of material used as a marble in a jar. You fill the jar until you’re done and then add a second jar for the next and so on to next iterations. For each unit of reused material you move a marble from the first jar to the one for the current project, if you use new material you add new marbles. It doesn’t have to be marbles and jars, but it’s a very simple way to engage your use of raw material
• Energy Budgets – We’re trying to get theaters to incorporate the expenditures of energy into budgets for making. It incentivizes energy innovation by the user. If no one uses energy efficient devices, it doesn’t matter.
• Eliminating recycling programs – this idea started at this convergence in response to the 6 receptacles the University of Oregon had for waste. It’s too much. The idea waste receptacle is only one for compost-ables. It’s not entirely feasible though. When speaking at APAP last month I brought this into a more realist goal. Not recycling because you don’t have anything to recycle. At the CSPA we print proofs of the Quarterly for editing that we share and otherwise we don’t generate material waste by our business. That sort of blows people’s minds.

I think Jack Capitalism and Eli Sustainability are headed for a blow-out, down and dirty fist fight in the months ahead? Ready?

I’m ready, but I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be particularly violent. I think that the necessity of sustainability will be the biggest check on a capitalist future. I think about the labor movements of the post-industrial world and the evolution of that “conflict”. I also think about the 4 roles in the actor-centric model of political change and the political pendulum. Sustainability is different still, it’s an opportunity if we want it to be, but as with all of these models of shift, the future is hybrid, not contrary.

* * * * * * *

Ian Garrett Bio -

Executive Director of The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA), a non-non-profit arts infrastructure organization where he collaborates with others like the LA Stage Alliance, University of Oregon, York University, The Arcola Theater, EcoArtSpace, the Royal Society of the Arts, Diverseworks ArtSpace and others to work towards sustainability in the arts, ecological and otherwise.

Programs at the CSPA include a rich online resource guide, curricular development, a quarterly journal, annual convergence, and the development of collaborative local materials re-use programs and a certification program for arts making being initiated through an international partnership between US, Canadian and British producers. The center was founded by funds received through the 2007 Richard E. Sherwood award for emerging theater artists from the Center Theater Group (CTG) awarded to be used forming a working relationship consulting with CTG on the integration of ecologically sustainable practice into their production.

Ian teaches Sustainable Theater and Management Technology courses at the California Institute of the Arts and has been featured in American Theater, DramaBiz, and The Design Magazine and has spoken at The Central School for Speech and Drama, St. Louis University, and the Indy Convergence along with most arts conferences in the United States.

He originally studied architecture and art history at Rice University in Houston, Texas, but has since come to build an awarding winning practice in live performance and installation art, having also attended California Institute of the Arts to complete MFAs in Lighting Design and Producing.

Connections -

Ian Garrett
Executive Director
Ian at sustainablepractice dot org
The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts
c/o LA Stage Alliance
644 S. Figueroa St.
Los Angeles, CA 90017

Profile Summary: William “Willi” George Paul Green Business Certified Sustainability Consultant and strategic vision planner, writer and program designer for environmental planning, civil engineering and non-profits for over 15 years. Executive producer at PlanetShifter.com generating 125+ thought leader interviews and 1200 posts to-date since EarthDay ’09. Produced two innovative online community building projects as a PhD Student in Environmental Planning and Design at Virginia Tech. Designed the electronic charrette while earning MA in Urban Planning. Developed marketing and online community building strategies for over thirty Internet start-ups.

Willi Paul, Art and Sustainability Consultant
415-407-4688 | willipaul1 at gmail dot com
Current Portfolio | Linkedin Profile | Digital Archive

Selected Work Product by Willi Paul:

• “The PlanetShifter.com Survival Guide to 2010: Curriculum Plans, Thought Leader Interviews and Big Green Ideas,” based on the Event Circle Interviews.
• The EnergyWire Building and Community Transfer Station: Defining Zero Waste in the Green Building Age, version 1.0.
• Book Review: “Hoop House Dance,” Smart by Nature – Schooling for Sustainability.
• Is LinkedIn.com the Wal-Mart of the online business communities?
• Getting Into Oakland’s Skin: Building the East Bay Green Economy, (A Chamber Report 2009).
• Explore Star Dust: Our Event Circle 49 with Steve Kilbey, painter, father and song leader of The Church.
• “Willi’s Green Box:” New green stories and myth generator.
• Two Poems: rattle snakes in oakland | I am a time bomb

Gadget or device art is a great tool for ecovisualization. This is an interesting symposium happening Feb. 18 & 19th at UC Los Angeles. Gadget OK! (also an exhibition) will explore new ways of bridging art, design, technology, science and entertainment using both latest innovations and everyday technology.

RSVP via Facebook HERE

Or, for more information go HERE

Go to EcoLOGIC LA

We’ll have readings, sloth bear t-shirt drawings and other activities from 11 am til about 1 or 2 pm.We’ll be at the picnic tables in front of the Page Museum at 5801 Wilshire Blvd, 90036.

MAMMUT #3 is about megafauna—a term that loosely applies to large mammals including the namesake of the magazine, the extinct American mastodon. We asked contributors to offer a personal perspective on megafauna and how they are represented, used as symbols, or offer a way to understand our own lives.

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY:

Otis Bardwell, Kelley Brooks, Deena Capparelli, Colleen Corcoran,
Akina Cox, Christopher Smith, Nic Hess, Teira Johnson, Christine S.
Lee, Erica Love, Matthias Merkel Hess, Gerard Olson, David Prince,
Gundula Prinz, Jacob Tillman, Mathew Timmons, Alejandro Turell, Erica
Tyron and Claude Willey.

Cover Design by Andrew Zaozirny.

Mammut is edited by Matthias Merkel Hess and Roman Jaster.

RSVP to Release Event on Facebook.

Download the magazine PDF or order a printed copy at mammutmagazine.org

Go to Eco Art Blog

Members:61

Earth Artists is an interdisciplinary network of artists, focused on ecology. The coordinators of the group are based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. “Earth Artists,” as defined by the Ning,  “are dedicated to advocacy for art, sustainable culture, and ecology.” Lots of folks posting photos and info about their eco-artwork.

The Art of Engagement

Members: 476

Also a network of eco-artists, this one with a curated online artist-in-residence. This Ning asks: What role can art play in transforming the current cascade of social and environmental crises? Can we develop a way to create culture, to research, learn and teach with/in ecological systems? Lively discussions and reviews in the forums.

CSPA Connect

Members: 126

The social network of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. Created to give CSPA affiliates a place to exchange ideas. Interesting forum discussions, plenty of events postings, also reports from conferences and of course, members posting photos of their artwork.

Art + Environment

Members: 200

Created by the Nevada Museum of Art. Many discussions and postings related to that museums’  LAND/ART symposium. Some cross-postings from the excellent Smudge Studio blog.

SEEDS

Members: 89

A conglomeration of folks interested in Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance and Science, an interdisciplinary summer arts festival. Most recent posts include news of SEEDS t-shirts and footage of performances from the festival.

Go to the Green Museum

Social networks and blogs are the fastest growing online activities, according to a report published in March by research firm Nielsen Online. Almost 10% of all time spent on the internet is spent on these types of sites, which Nielsen describes as “member communities”, and they are visited by more than two-thirds of the world’s online users.

This has not gone unnoticed by museums and galleries, with many creating some kind of presence on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. But because this has primarily been done as a marketing tool, institutions are missing a far greater opportunity. By treading gently into the second generation of web development and design, known as Web 2.0, museums risk achieving little, and are effectively paying mere lip service to online social engagement. If they were to make a proper commitment to the enterprise, they could transform their relationship with audiences, change people’s perceptions of them and vastly expand the reach of their collections.

The Nielsen research shows that a major factor in the success of social networks is that they allow people to select and share content.

How will what Clay Shirkey called “mass amateurization” penetrate the art world? Lawrence Lessig writes of the change from a Read Only culture to a Read/Write culture. Now, with intitiatives like Creative Spaces, amateurs are not Read Only any more. They can curate too. How are art institutions going to handle the idea that their authority is no longer a given?

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Wanted to submit a quick post to let our blog followers know that we have updated our projects page on the ecoartspace website! We realize that the more active we are with the blog, that our website becomes less relevant. So, it is now up to speed. This is an ongoing issue and why we really enjoyed having the blog (as we rely on someone else to update the website).

O’yes NEWSFLASH: our ecoartspace Facebook group reached 1,000 today!!! And, we have added a fan page as well and are posting links daily, like a Twitter feed. Plus, we are also on Twitter. So, if you want quick byte size morsels of information/links, sign up to follow ecoartspace through our fan page on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

Amy will be posting soon on a recent panel she participated on in upstate New York with Jason Middlebrook and I plan to write up a summary of the Rising Tides conference I attend last week here in the Bay Area next.

See our new projects page on the ecoartspace website at http://www.ecoartspace.org/projectsinline.html

There really is an overwhelming amount of activity right now in the world of art and ecology. It has been an exciting Earth Day week.

Go to EcoArtSpace

Recently

For all those who missed it (that includes me as I was on holiday beyond the reach of the internet that weekend)  it started when author and publisher Mark Probst noticed that his book The Filly, had lost its sales data on amazon.com, and because of that was no longer appearing in book searches. The book contains homosexual characters. A quick check of other gay-themed literature showed that this had happened across the board.

The brilliant – and scary – thing about Twitter is how fast outrage can spread on it. Within hours the net was alive accusing Amazon of purging gay and adult literature. A massive army of digital warriors gathered to defend the cause.

This is how the BBC’s Bill Thompson reported amazonfail:

It emerged that thousands of other books had been similarly delisted, including such radical texts as The Well of Loneliness and John Barrowman’s autobiography, while a little research by interested bloggers found Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds, the Parent’s Guide to Homosexuality and Hitler’s Mein Kampf were all still searchable and proudly displayed.

Two years ago this would have resulted in a collection of angry, interlinked blog postings. A year ago there would have been a Facebook group to join. But this time it was the Twitter microblogging service that led the way, with thousands of tweets linked by the tag ‘amazonfail’.

The timing was perfect. It was a slow news weekend on what is an extended holiday in many parts of the world. Amazon’s ability to respond quickly was limited, while the echo chamber of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook meant that the noise of outrage quickly reached a crescendo.

Within a couple of days, an apparently more complex narrative emerged. Clay Shirky takes up the story:

After an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes lost their Amazon sales rank, and therefore their visibility in certain Amazon list and search functions, we participated in a public campaign, largely coordinated via the Twitter keyword #amazonfail (a form of labeling called a hashtag) because of a perceived injustice at the hands of that company, an injustice that didn’t actually occur.

This was cock-up, not conspiracy. Apparently. Amazon had been facing complaints because books with adult material turn up in searches for children’s books. By attempting to filter the results, they effectively made anything with a content that’s deemed adult invisible. And that included lots of gay and lesbian books – even classics like The Well of Loneliness.

Shirky’s post is a cautionary, self-flagellating mea culpa. He was one of the outraged. This, he says now, wasn’t homophobia it was stupidity. Stupidity on Amazon’s part for creating an algorithm that would wipe out gay and lesbian literature so thoughtlessly; stupidity on his part as an experienced technology writer, to join hounds chasing Amazon, he confesses.

As a post-script, the blogger Bookkake doesn’t agree with Shirky, and he’s not the only one:

…the issue at the heart of #amazonfail is not – should not be – whether Amazon’s recategorisation was accidental or not, but how LGBT books came to be classified as not suitable for “family” viewing. How Amazon attempted to place them in the category of things of which we shall not speak.

Which is also 100% true. What Amazon’s algorithm did was effectively exaggerate a societal prejudice.  This wasn’t just a technological failure, it was a cultural failure too. Shirky is letting them off the hook too lightly.

But Bookkake also draws the parallel to  the Dubai Literary festival. Back in February Bookkake and several other bloggers had complained about the Dubai Literary Festival banning Geraldine Bedell’s novel The Gulf  Between Us, which also features a gay relationship.

The outrage surrounding this banning led to Margaret Atwood refusing to attend the festival. Only as Atwood later discovered nothing of the sort had happened. The book was never “banned”. As I wrote in the A&E blog back in February, the book was never invited to the Dubai literary festival at all. The whole “banned” story was seeded by a press officer at Penguin and took off on the internet.

I don’t agree with Bookkake that there is a parallel. Yes, Dubai is an institutionally homophobic culture, and yes, the literary festival still ducked confronting that homophobia, but this was outrage manufactured by Penguin, exploiting another evil, Islamophobia. Bookkake and others who expressed their outrage were being manipulated to sell a minor novel. It was a cynical incitement of the mob.

What both stories show is how fantastically easy it is to manufacture outrage in our instant culture, whether justified or not. That can be good – Amazon are now having to prove they don’t discriminate against LGBT literature.

What frightened Clay Shirky is that he became part of a mob. The sheer speed with which events unfolded overtook his rational side. And what should worry anyone is that the idea that the internet naturally favours a liberal, progressive viewpoint is an absurd one. There has been an assumption, from Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs onwards, that the electronically connected mass is greater and more virtuous than the individual. The classic smart mob case was the toppling of President Estrada of the Philippines in 2001 by protestors who self-organised on using mobile phones.

But here’s another example. Last year  ethnic violence was stoked up in Kenya for deliberately cynical reasons, leaving 1,000 dead and 300,000 more displaced. That too was a smart mob, organised through mobile phones. The mob also destroys.

Image: Hung Drawn & Quartered II (Treeson), 2005, (detail), by Matthew Day Jackson from the Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

This is the reason that many museums and cultural organizations decided they needed websites in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We recognized that people were increasingly turning to the Web as a source of information–for content knowledge but also for trip planning. I believe that the primary reason most museums started their websites is about planning visits. Marketing departments realized that a large percentage of people were using online search engines to find interesting things to do, and they wanted to be there.

Now, things are changing again. Whereas the Web of the 2000s was dominated by search, we are entering a time when more and more people are using social media as their gateway to the Web. Ask a college student what her homepage is, and you are likely to see Facebook, not Google, pop up on her screen. The worldwide market reach of social networks and other “member community sites” (as Nielsen research deems them) is growing rapidly, and it seems likely that Facebook and other social networking sites will continue to attract older, more mainstream audiences.

This means that more and more people are “entering” the Web via social context. Last week, Susie Wilkening wrote a blog post expressing that Facebook has replaced her newspaper as the go-to place for relevant news in her life. It’s not hard to imagine a near future where Facebook (and sites like it) also replace a lot of the ways we use atomized search. This already happens for me with professional research. When I’m looking for a resource on something, my first stop is Twitter, where I can send my research question to my professional network. Then I use Google to track down the references they mention. People often ask me how I find out about interesting projects going on at different museums. I’m not constantly googling “visitor co-created exhibits” and searching blind. I find out about these things in my social networks–via blogs, professional communities, Twitter, and socially-selected content feeds, which contextualize and direct me towards information of interest.

About Nina:

And what about me? I do consulting work and research for a variety of museums (and I’m available!). Previously, I curated The Tech Virtual Test Zone at The Tech Museum, designed virtual experiences with the Electric Sheep Company, and worked as the Experience Development Specialist at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. I live in beautiful Santa Cruz, CA, pursuing museum (and virtual) experience design from the mountains. If you would like to discuss opportunities for collaboration, consulting, or wild projects, contact me.

via Museum 2.0.