DLTQ.org

Two days ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. Having read his Gulag Archipelago recently, my immediate reaction was sadness for the loss of a champion. A dissident in the Soviet as well as The West, he always strived for a more enlightened debate.

Today, I read an excellent article in OpenDemocracy called Russia: Ideology becomes a mash-up, which covers how the Russian blogosphere reacted to Solzhenitsyn’s death.

I recommend anyone interested in the development of new media to read it. A few quotes:

The internet may have given us the infinite world of hyperlinks but only at the cost of well-documented footnotes, which regularly fall through the infinite cracks of online conversations. Yet history without footnotes is a mere black-and-white parody of itself; it’s a history without subtlety, great for propaganda but useless for serious inquiry.

In the blogosphere, arguments never end, they only acquire new hyperlinks. To win in most battles that take place in the Russian cyberspace, one simply needs to have access to a bottomless reservoir of statistics and a mastery of italicised fonts: how many people really died in Ukraine’s Holodomor, how many wars the US really started, how many Albanians really disappeared in Kosovo, how much money the Yeltsin government really wasted. Maps, budgets, photos, scanned pages of the original manuscripts - it’s all out there at your disposal, to help you cook the greatest historical soup of all times: your customized version of world history, downloadable directly to your shiny iPod.

A great article by Evgeny Morozov which also wrote this good write-up of the Citizen Media Summit in Budapest June 2008

In 2004, Shel Israel wrote:

Conversational Marketing is nothing new. It’s basically the concept that people respond better to lowered voices spoken in credible tones than they do to the aggressive in-your-face marketing speak as is evidences in everything from TV ads to the pap-lingo of so many website. If common sense prevailed, marketers would understand that simply conversing with customers, prospects, partners, investors and employees is more effective. People listen better and longer when you just talk to them and listen back. All too often professional marketers lose their credibility by hyperbole, hubris and amplification. It seems to me self evident that just talking with people is more effective than shouting and repeating yourself as if your audience was comprised of deaf idiots.

Note: my italics | [source] | [via]

With my current work to set up shop with visibility.dk, I am thinking a lot about conversations and how video can be effectively used as conversation-enhancers within organizations as well as conversations with the public, the voters, the customers, the clients.

Conversations are so much more, however, and my hope is that some of the conversations we can have are not only organic (thanks for that phrase, Jeffrey), but also have wider consequences. Can touch people’s thinking, not just their purchase habits.

This week, I am spending some time writing a two-page article about videoblogging for a member’s magazine of my political party. I better get back to that.

Hope you all have a great day!