Finally Getting into Video

November 2, 2009 – 1:17 am

I bought a video camera off of a guy whom I met via criagslist.org last year with intent to start sharing my adventures with a larger audience. I hope to utilize the user-generated, on-demand video services available to add energy to realizing a just and regenerative civilization. No minor undertaking! Like most of my new ambitions, there has been a lag time of about a year between the original idea and when I actually got down to it. This particular endeavor got a boost from my Using the Social Web for Social Change class at BGI. To get our feet wet, we each had to produce a short video introducing ourselves and blog to the world. Here is take 1 and rolling…

iMovie made it waaaay simple to actually pull this off. It was about a 5-hour endeavor with quite a bit of fumbling and trial and error to get the timing of the clips, transitions and text to flow well. iMovie’s feature set is a bit limited but this also makes it pretty painless to jump into. It integrates with iPhoto and iTunes so it is really easy to pull in media from those channels. Fortunately, I had shot some video this past summer so I had something to work with. Most of my finished product is actually not video because I didn’t have that much usable footage. This forced me to figure out how to use stills, transitions, text overlays and background audio – pretty much all the features iMovie had to offer. I pinched the audio clip from a live Ravi Shankar recording that I love. It’s copy written material but I think the way I have used it counts for “Fair Use“. This means I will probably not run into problems with YouTube and their Terms of Use police. The specific legal jargon relevant in this scenario is that my work could be considered: transformative. The relevant part being:

Repurposing a work to aid identification of the base work is also generally transformative.

I gave credit to Ravi Shankar at the end so I think I am essentially aiding the identification of his base work with the use of his audio. Hopefully YouTube is cool with this. We’ll see.

Feedback and comments are welcome!

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Inspiration Board

October 30, 2009 – 10:15 pm

Daniel Pink's: A Whole New MindI’m reading Daniel Pink’s: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future for my Creativity and Right Livelihood class this semester. This week we had to read Chapter 6 – Symphony and do one of the exercises from the end of the chapter. Daniel defines symphony as:

the ability to put together the pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair. – pg 130

I think symphony is something I do reasonably well but there is always room for improvement! I chose the inspiration board exercise (pg 154). I chose it because I wanted to do something artsy but within my reach and produce something that would inspire me and hopefully others too. Given the rudimentary nature of my artistic abilities (I can use scissors), I went and scrounged a pile of magazines from upstairs and began to flip though them looking for inspiring imagery. I wasn’t that successful in finding much in the way of images but I did find a few – enough to get started. The magazines I found were text-heavy so this is what emerged:

Justin's Inspiration Board

It turned out to be a text and visual synopsis of the world I feel called to create. I hope you find a little inspiration in what emerged.

love
Justin

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Canadians: Let’s Adopt a 100 Litre Challenge

October 28, 2009 – 10:49 am

I awoke this morning with the idea of a 100 Litre Challenge. It looks like the memes driving me successfully mutated :) (see my last post). James and Alisa added to the popularization of local food with their 100 Mile Diet a couple years ago. They spent a full year eating only food that was sourced within 100 miles of their home in Vancouver. Their committed actions had a significant influence on the many benefits of local eating.

I think its time for Canadians to step up to a similar challenge with fossil-fuel usage. Our politicians have proven they are simply puppets for industry and can not be trusted to enact the visionary policies required to bring Canada’s anthropogenic global warming emissions down. This is not a surprise.

So I think it is time to commit to the 100 Litre challenge. It could work like this:

  • 100 litres max for the 1st month
  • 100 litres max for the next 2 months
  • 100 litres max for the next 3 months
  • 100 litres max for the next 6 months

The transition gives people time to ease in before making the big commitment at month 6. This may not be an entirely feasible for rural dwellers but for the majority of urban dwellers it is not an unreasonable consideration. Thoughts?

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Who is Driving, Humans or Memes?

October 28, 2009 – 12:01 am

I had to watch Susan Blackmore’s TED talk on Memetics today for my social web class. Prior to the class I didn’t even know what memetics was. Susan defines them as: “that which is imitated or information that is copied“. Ok, I can buy that concept but where I start to struggle with her ideas and language is when she is trying to assert that memes are in control: The memes are trying to get copied, they are using you and me as their propagating, copying machinery and we are the meme machines. See goes on further to define the idea of memetic drive – as “memes evolve, as they inevitably must, they drive a bigger brain that is better at copying the memes that are doing the driving”.

I can’t reconcile the position she has taken. It just doesn’t sit well with me. She leaves me somewhat baffled as she is also big on researching human consciousness, even writing a text book on the subject. She obviously believes in consciousness as she says here while also believing that the memes are driving. How can an idea that gets copied do the driving? Isn’t that like saying that a car that gets driven is doing the driving? I don’t buy it. I think consciousness (human or otherwise) is the driver, period. Memes being non-conscious can not drive any more than genes can drive evolution. They can influence possibilities and range of outcomes but they are not driving. What are you thoughts? Have I misinterpreted her or not understood clearly?

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Regenerative Community Development

October 19, 2009 – 10:44 pm

My terminology on the subject of community development has evolved a little since my first post on the topic. Since beginning at BGI and increasingly so, I’ve had the sense that “sustainable” is not a high enough ambition for our individual and collective pursuits. For example, in the relationship or marital realm, do you feel inspired to aim for “sustainable”. I don’t.

So what lies beyond sustainable? If sustainable is doing things in a way that will allow you to carry on doing what you are doing into the indefinite future; then what lies beyond that is the ability to experience and create more than you currently do. Considering the enormous environmental and social deficit human civilization has dug itself into, we better start designing systems that do just that, improve our collective social and natural capital, while producing whatever goods or services humanity needs.

Read More »

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Social Web: To Twitter or Not

October 12, 2009 – 1:15 pm

Twitter LogoMy social web class is holding my feet to the technological fire. Part of this week’s discussion is about Twitter. I signed up months ago but have so far continued to lurk, having not uttered a single tweet (see sidebar on right). Perhaps my followers (49 of them!) enjoy the silence created by reluctance to tweet. My inner luddite is perplexed by the idea of intentionally bringing even more electronic noise into my life to consume ever more of my attention. So my questions are: can this platform be used in service to the growth of our consciousness? If so, how do you think? How are you using Twitter? How has it benefited and hindered your life?

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The Social Web and the Importance of Weak Ties

October 12, 2009 – 12:46 pm

In social web class this week I learned about the distinction of strong and weak ties. Strong ties are those in our inner circle of friends and family who we have established, trusting relationships with. Weak ties are connections to others we know or know of via friends, conferences, social networking sites, etc. Weak ties turn out to be a strong asset and the social web is making it much easier to expand and take full advantage of this network. A 2008 New York Times article had this to say:

This rapid growth of weak ties can be a very good thing. Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out. Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question.

Read More »

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Reflections on Intensive I: The Social Web and Privacy

October 10, 2009 – 11:45 pm

Privacy Humour: Video RentingLast weekend was my first intensive of the year at BGI. I decided to join the Social Web for Social Change class with the intent to become more skillful at using the web to influence people to toward consciously living in harmony with others and the planet.

A considerable portion of our class discussion was dedicated to online privacy and the implications of sharing ourselves via social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It became evident that we have yet to see the implications on careers and life paths with so many peoples’ lives publicly recorded for all to see. With the majority of social networking sites’ default behaviour set to show most of your information unless you intentionally disable or limit access, your life and connections are available to anyone with a web browser. Is this a good thing? Read More »

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Community Resilience

October 10, 2009 – 10:32 pm

As part of my social web for social change class at BGI I get to choose a topic and research it during the semester using the tools we are learning about in class. Since my team marketing plan this term is looking at becoming a developer of resilient, sustainable, living communities I want to use this opportunity to “feed two birds with one seed” thereby enriching the plan and meeting the requirements for this course. I’m going to start down the path of defining resilience in the context of community development as well as look for strategies to increase community resilience.

I’m particularly interested in how changing patterns of community and evolving our construction techniques can create true resilience through:

  • increasing community-scale self-reliance for food and energy
  • uncoupling from the fossil-fuel economy
  • downplaying the importance of money in peoples’ lives

My hunch is that such an arrangement will also provide regular opportunities for growth, self-actualization and connectedness with others and nature.

It’s going to be a rich semester!

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