My fellow people, I apologize for such a long absence. My days have been long, and my nights hardly exist, but I will be back in full action soon giving my $2 on social innovation, media strategy, and marketing. Right now I am in an even stronger place to speak on these subjects after my Hunger and Homelessness Week at LC. At first I thought that my marketing and communication efforts were okay, but then after the week had ended, and the events laid to rest, I thought of alternative marketing and communication strategy. We tend to separate marketing from our communication strategies very often. In reality, we must realize that our strategic plans for communication ultimately provide us the marketing that we seek and need. Every organization needs a team. A team of typographers, graphic designers, copywriters, and communication strategists to wrap all of the artistic and visual elements into something that will catch the eye, the mind, and ultimately the body. We need INTELLICOM!
Incoming:
emotive thoughts
that swirl through blood as thick as sand
dribbling through the lips
of incoming demise
A siren whistles in the backdrop of a
quaint scene painted in the aura of dadaist
distaste
Output:
a sad childlike man
whose time has passed
whom fears the worst
whose life he does not know
whom has fallen
drifting ever so lightly
out of sight
There’s a stream of light that we wish to ignore. A brilliance that attempts to blind us, but never finishes the job—even though we wish deeply that the light would. Each and everyday I carry myself around desiring something that I can never quite place a finger on to touch—I desire to be carried outside of myself to view the world from the perch of a cloud, as well as from the depths of one’s soul. Yes, I understand that the concept of the soul can be trivial to some, and even to me, a person that gobbles logic up, but does not act in a purely logical manner enjoys the thought of a soul—fore if the soul exists then somehow I know that I too exist. In my mind, we humans walk in bodies that never reveal their true selves. Our bodies contain nothing but images which should be shed away at once. What is our true essence? Our true visual representation? Well it is light. A deep, bright light floating around seamlessly, and wandering the Earth attempting to bring itself out of all shadows. If we understood that we are nothing but light, if we discarded the dirty skins that we have placed upon us, then we will begin to realize that each and every one of us connects. That every light is entangles with one another. We can feel each others emotions, the pain, the happiness, and the void that never departs.
I recently came across a short article about artist Tim Devin who does live polling in Boston by placing infographics on street signs, telephone poles etc asking questions regarding whether one feels a sense of community in their area. At the bottom of the infographic will be yes or no and a passer-by simply tears off a piece of paper to answer the pole. This simply action, on a larger scale, could start the marathon of creating social changes within communities on the local scale. Think about it? We could take this idea further and create webs of graphic responses to these poles to show city council members and state representatives the truth about communities we live in .
See, the simplest ideas can be some of the most innovative. Why pay a company to create a poll when we can do it ourselves, and tally the results on our own. Our streets are landmines when it comes to understanding the social climate in that each step of the way could be the grand explosion needed to explore new ideas. I am going to replicate this project by Tim Devin in the area of Lynchburg, VA + because I am curious as to how the results will turn out.
Here’s a link to the article; maybe YOU can replicate this in your ‘hood. http://bit.ly/zTgiG2
**If you do this in your area post some pictures to show the world.
Realization hypOthesis: Creatively disrupt your community to find the secrets hidden within the streets, the pavement, the steps, the doors, and the footsteps.
thenewinquiry:
Notes from the 2011 Singularity Summit
by Mike Thomsen
The idea that we can run out of time is peculiar. It’s a product of how we organize our memories.
Human consciousness is a kind of romance with the idea that time is finite and consumable. This assumption of finitude means that time can also become digested and metabolized urge, energizing the desire to imagine what is coming next. Being able to organize the past into a semicoherent system, we extrapolate forward and read ourselves into a specific future. We make predictions: Moore’s Law tells us the size and cost of microprocessors diminish every 18 months. Polling reminds us the United States prefer to re-elect their presidents during wartime. The Super Bowl favorite wins three out of four times. It has been written, and so it shall come to pass.
In the opening keynote of the Singularity Summit, Ray Kurzweil, inventor, writer, and immortalist, spoke about the looming end of prognostication. By his best estimate, the Singularity — the moment when our predictive mechanisms are overwhelmed by superintelligent computers that surpass the understanding of any one person — will happen in 2029. This will wipe clean all the fantasies and modeled futures we made for ourselves. Our ability to predict our personal destiny will vanish; in its place we will have the strange sensation of falling through the floor of our own life.
The Singularity tells us that the future is not a truth we can discover, but merely a theater for our private melodramas. Mom and dad are going to die. I’m never going to be an astronaut. Oh my god.
Read More
(Source: bit.ly, via thenewinquiry)
Where do we go from here? How can we unleash our creative technological capabilities in a society so disturbed by uninhibited technological growth and societal change? As the years move forward society seems to be afraid, and yet in the corner there are a few of us—the true future. We do not believe in prohibiting technological advances, religion plays no role in shaping the future, and we advocate a global consciousness unforseen in the past. The question is how do we move forward?
Personally, we must raise consciousness in the area of technocracy. You may say we have a technocratic government, but we need a way to increase the power of professional researchers, engineers, and innovators. We have the potential and the technology already in place to mass-market, and make affordable, advances in human capacity, cognitive promise, and sustainable growth. Rather, our attention is placed on scum politicians, corporations, and populism. Yes, this is more of a rant, a discourse on the need for a true change especially in the United States. Our current system of ideas are archaic at best relying on a constitution that should not be the cornerstone of our political organization because the United States does not exist in a temporally static state.
Secondly, we must begin to meaningfully innovate and create new technologies. For the past few years we have focused our attention on marketing short-term innovations without the prospects of long-term development. We need to gather more research teams on stem-cell research to create a non-linear pattern of development so that we may use and review stem-cell research in a multitude of disciplines. Furthermore, the investment in nanotechnologies, gigabit(and beyond) networks, infrastructure research and design etc. We have the ability to advance beyond our imagination, but funds are dwindling—primarily put into federal systems that do not need further funding just new leadership and different models. In the victorian age technological revolution and innovation was sought after by all—what happened to that drive for innovation, that passion for technological advancement. A movement towards victorian age innovation, ideas, and technical prowress will bring society to a point of uninhibited technological power.
Tonight as I was pounding drinks with an ole friend of mine from Elementary school we discussed the need for innovation in social work and community development practices.From our experience with getting to know children and young adults from varying backgrounds we have noticed that one of the primary problems that are faced is that social workers and community workers attempt to make a macro-scale change instead of attacking small populations at a time; failing to realize that what works for one group will not work for another group. There is this idea in the United States that things must work at a fast pace; consequentially, this type of thinking creates a dynamic in which we are lumped together without any acknowledgement of our individual selves.
The same mindset persists in urban planning and sustainable design in the United States. Our planning and development units lack a desire to research and implement global practices. I really want to bridge this gap between the global and the local, and bring practices from around the global both developed, developing, and non-developed nations to the United States. It’s time that we become transparent and start sharing ideas and research.
