Colbert and Jacoby on Truthiness

This just now. Stephen Colbert mentioned his coinage truthiness tonight when talking to his guest, Susan Jacobi, the author of The Age of Unreason. I was told to pay attention, so I did. And this is what I heard.

Susan Jacoby: Truthiness is to truth what military music is to music.
Stephen Cobert: What, you can march to it?
Susan Jacoby: And you don't have to think.

New Fact of the Day

Hat tip to MR for the pointer.
Thing learned just now:

"Immersing the face in water produces a protective action in humans similar to that in dolphins, seals, otters and whales. Called the mammalian diving reflex, it quickly lowers the heart rate and then constricts blood vessels in the limbs so that blood is reserved for the heart and the brain."

Web 2.0 Eyes on San Francisco This Week

I am of the opinion that Web 2.0 is perhaps the greatest thing to come long since WiFi. Collaborating with other like-minded creatives, blogging, setting up communities of creativity et al., is fundamentally what, I think, will shift much of our routine in the very upcoming future.
Actually, many of our respective routines are already morphed by the elusive Web 2.0. And I'm the better for it. I think.
The main reason why I'm a fan of Web 2.0. however, is because it enables much communication between people who are interested in similar things and who freely share similar notions and ideas.
The creative class is faring better as a whole, I think, because of Web 2.0. I bet Richard Florida is happy with this statement!
The big corporations have now caught on. They are seeing the importance of Web 2.0 and they want a piece of that action, naturally.
Just why flock to San Francisco this week and see what Web 2.0 is all about? Well, there where the people are, there will advertising be, ja?
Ja!

The article the BBC News features today says:

'The report found that consumer giants such as General Motors, McDonald's, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance and Wells Fargo Bank will drive much of this growth and have already embraced tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasting and social networking.
Analyst Oliver Young estimates that another 56% of North American and European companies regard Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008.

"If I wanted to be anywhere in the Web 2.0 economy, I'd want to be on the enterprise side," says Mr Young.'

And since I'm anticipating some of the questions to be strictly definition-centered, here's how en.wikipedia defines Web 2.0:
"Web 2.0 is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies."

Eyeball reflecting Facebook logo

The Creative, the Berry, and Productivity

I had a most enjoyable conversation with my friend Polly tonight. Polly is what I would call a highly successful member of the creative class who is both switched on and tuned it.

We were talking about a cornucopia of things, one of them being the importance of context-decoding and connection-making. A successful 21-st century creative is not just one who has acquired much information of a general and esoteric nature but especially one who can make connections, contextualize things fast and effectively, and make the right linguistic choices.

I agree with both cognitively and experientially.

While talking to Polly, I thought of a Richard Florida article on the creative class and the human capital and I thought I’d include a snippet here. In it, Florida and his collaborator Charlotta Mellander, observe:

‘The role of talent and creativity in economic development has been a subject of growing interest to social scientists. Human capital is observed both to be an important contributor to growth and to be unevenly distributed
geographically.

While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic
development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human capital. The conventional measure of human capital is based on educational attainment (share of population with a bachelor’s degree and above). But more recent research suggests that it is more important to measure what people do than what they study, and thus occupationally based measures, associated principally with creative class occupations, have been introduced.’

An interesting study, no doubt. However, it does seem to leave out one important point: the necessity of immediate connection-making as facilitated by technology. A successful creative cannot simply be one who is well-educated, lives in a place where other like-minded creatives live, and has the ability to create in the niche s/he finds her/himself. But as Polly also mentioned, a successful creative is one who can clearly see what the nature of thing is and what connections to make and create accordingly.

Being switched on is a good thing, but being switched on and tuned in is better.
graph per blackberry
text per creative classroom