Transcending Race in Cyberspace – So Much to Do

A colleague of mine forwarded a link to “Transcending "Race" in Cyberspace? Yeah, Right!” which highlighted the extension of racism and stereotyping into Second Life. As Anxious Black Woman comments “if we're going to treat online environments like Second Life as a ‘game,’ I would at least like to envision the space being able to be more progressive and more transcendent of the real-world politics that so many of us deal with.”

My initial reaction was sympathetic but not particularly helpful. “To the extent that virtual worlds allow people to reduce their social constraints,” I commented, “it is inevitable that they are environments of worse social interaction rather than better social interaction.” But is it inevitable? I think the answer is both yes and no.

If we want to create a more transcendent environment, then we need to take a few steps to accomplish this.

• First – reduce the barriers to entry. Many commentators have complained about the lack of non-white and non-sexist avatar templates. Both the corporate organizers of these sites and the programming denizens need to make FREE tools available for a wider array of skin color, body types, clothing, and characteristics.

• Second – encourage greater difference in the avatars we choose for ourselves, our children, our employees, or our students. Those who are fans of Ralph Ellison should recognize the need to walk in other people’s shoes.
  

• Third – we must personally guard against erosion of certain social constraints. Virtual worlds need not be places where crass or cruel behavior has a home. There are real humans acting through their avatars, so we must remember to treat them as people rather than computer generated stock characters.

These three steps will not change the virtual worlds into utopia, but they must surely be a better response than “boys will be boys.” Let’s see what we can do.

Doonsbury Takes on Bottled Water

The December 2, 2007 issue of Doonesbury in the Sunday comics (http://www.doonesbury.com/) included an excellent indictment of the bottled water industry. As “entrepreneur Chad Severnson” explained in the strip, “bottled water is a triumph of perceived need over reason – the greatest marketing coup in history.”

In Own It, I describe the market influence of bottled water:

Public concerns about the quality of tap water (possibly fueled by bottled water advertising and marketing) suggest that fresh water is scarce. As the scarcity increases (at least in consumers’ minds) the bottled water becomes more relevant. Brand names provide an exclusive difference between the competing bottlers, so that the most well respected name in water will become the most successful.

Bottled water serves as a prime example of the interaction between [scarcity and relevance] because water is essentially a commodity throughout the United States, not significantly superior in quality or taste to most of the free tap water available. Nonetheless, the market continues to grow as the public becomes increasingly willing to buy the product.

As bottled water becomes more and more relevant in the minds of the consumers, some retailers have stopped providing free paper cups of water. Bars, movie theaters and concession stands have increasingly stopped providing free water because the public is no longer offended at being forced to purchase something that should be free.

Relevancy can transform market practices and public perception. Just as the producers of bottled water have changed the social relevance of an unnecessary commodity into a prized symbol of status, other commercial vendors, politicians, and community activists seek to shape public norms and create relevance in their message or merchandise.

We regularly play out the bottled water debate in my home because the notion of paying for plain, bottled water offends me. But it does highlight how important it is to develop the perception of relevance for a product or service. While I hate promoting bottled water, anyone who agrees that bottled water is a wasteful practice must also recognize implications of its marketing success.

The Farnsworth Invention - An Ode to Innovatio

Why does a blog on entrepreneurship and innovation focus on a play? Because no play has ever captured the drama of innovation better than The Farnsworth Invention soon to be opening at the Music Box Theatre in New York.

It’s 1929. Two ambitious visionaries race against each other to invent a device called “television.” Separated by two thousand miles, each knows that if he stops working, even for a moment, the other will gain the edge. Who will unlock the key to the greatest innovation of the 20th century: the ruthless media mogul, or the self-taught Idaho farm boy?

The answer comes to compelling life in The Farnsworth Invention, the new play from Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, directed by two-time Tony® Award winner Des McAnuff.

The promotional materials suggest that this is a battle between the last individualistic inventor and the most voracious corporate raider of the early Twentieth Century. That might be true in part, but anyone who has worked to bring new businesses and products to success knows that you need brilliance in both the technology and the marketplace. The tragedy for both these men was that they battled rather than collaborated. Why that was true is one of the subtle messages of the play.

As the promotional material explains:

In 1928, Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrated electronic television from his lab in San Francisco, using a cathode ray tube on the receiver end. On the camera end, he used an “image dissector” to record an image electronically, one tiny portion at a time. The image dissector would later become the cornerstone for further electronic television development. Meanwhile across the country, Vladimir Zworykin was working for RCA to develop his “iconoscope,” a similar model for scanning images electronically.

In contrast, David Sarnoff understood the power of the technology to transform the lives of the audience. The Time 100 has an excellent biography of Sarnoff:

Sarnoff … saw the potential of the iconoscope, a proto-television patented by Vladimir Zworykin in 1923. Within five years Sarnoff had set up a special NBC station called b2xbs to experiment with what came to be known as television. In 1941 NBC started commercial telecasting from station WNBT in New York City, but once again progress was delayed by war. Sarnoff served as communications consultant for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later named him a brigadier general. The title stuck. And in the halls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Sarnoff became known as "the General."

Both Sarnoff and Farnsworth were driven, titanic leaders. Aaron Sorkin’s brilliant script cheats in his narration to make the audience feel better about the predictable outcome from the clash of these cultures. This is a wonderful play, with brilliant dialogue and strong performances. For any entrepreneur who has struggled to be understood by friends and family, the Farnsworth Invention is a must see.

Support literate theatre and the beauty of innovation. See this play.