Britain from Above: helping describe the value of reach
Last Sunday the BBC began its excellent new series Britain from Above hosted by Andrew Marr. The BBC themselves indicate they regard the programme - combined with extensive online material - as marking “… a stepping stone in how we plan to develop content in future.”
It’s also provided me with a couple of additional ways to try and further illustrate the thinking behind the conversation I had last month in which I discussed what was behind the name ‘St. Paul’s Reach’ (SPR). Bear with me here - I don’t know if I’ll get this right first time.
In the first extract the story of St. Paul’s during the Blitz is retold, including (at 2.12) the iconic photo taken on 29 December 1940 by photographer Herbert Mason from the roof of the nearby Daily Mail building (I used to work just round the corner at Plumtree Court and the sight of St. Paul’s as seen from half-way down Fleet Street looking back up Ludgate Hill is one of London’s truly underrated views).
At that point, St. Paul’s was regarded as the physical embodiment of British national morale and, as such, any meaningful future must see it remain intact, ‘as is’, with maximum effort being put into ensuring its longevity & stability. This idea helps illustrate two of the key themes Stuart Candy refers to in his thoughts about ‘lost futures’. In short, the role & inter-play of both contemporaneity and stability in our own thinking about the future.
It is unlikely that we now - in the same collective way - believe St. Paul’s continues to embody the very same set of cultural & emotional values as it did back in 1940 (though for some that will still endure). As such, we can recognise those values as the “…emblems of the thought-world that produced them.” They were a product of their time, but we both remember them and can ‘recall’ them with some fidelity. The have vestigial resonance.
St. Paul’s is also seen now - according to the programme - as “one of the few constants in an ever-changing cityscape” (interestingly, that could have been as true then as now - though for differing reasons). This leads us into the second extract - London in the Future - which considers the cathedral as the low-rise visual counter-point to the projected new high (and getting higher) rise London: understanding what will come by reference to what survives or has been bought forward from the past. After all, since then the views we take of St. Paul’s from various vantage points across the city have been designated as ‘restricted’; even protected by legislation to ensure they remain a stable feature. This is equally an expression of our more recent ‘thought-world’ and, indeed, has a clear impact on how new building can be approached in the City of London today.
Let’s also consider the importance of significance here. As Candy states: “Each of these also implies a range of potential viewpoints from which “our present”, as well as things that have gone before, take on different significance, because as today recedes into the past, it will be cast in a very different light depending on the kind of future from which it is surveyed.”
So, while there may be some entertaining counterpoints here what is the ‘reach’ I’m trying to describe and which I believe the example of St. Paul’s is a useful analogy for?
If I asked you to consider St. Paul’s we’d all come up with differing constructs drawing on past, present & possible future. Despite that, we can still find some form of ‘thought-world’ in relation to St. Paul’s that allows us to express & share some level of meaning around the notion. As such, it is the idea of St. Paul’s that has reach across all such temporal boundaries - both real and imaginary - even though that idea will not remain the same thing.
Our interest in driving forward meaningful and useful future activity is certainly one based on understanding change and emergence across time, but our ‘reach’ should also be one which - to paraphrase Candy - engages a “…more nuanced understanding of time and possibility.” In the same way there is no single, deterministic, ‘right’ way to conceive of St. Paul’s, we need to add conceptions of contemporaneity, stability, significance, change and outcome to our process of thinking about the future rather than just “…constantly, and for the most part fruitlessly, focusing on correct prediction of content… “.
Candy is unequivocal: “The future” doesn’t exist, but our ideas about it (or lack thereof) have a palpable effect on what we do, or not, in anticipation of times to come.” It’s the ongoing exploration of those multifarious ideas that the ‘reach’ of SPR seeks to engage with.
Share this article from St. Paul's ReachSuperstruct: new forecasting game to launch
The Institute for the Future is planning the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game: Superstruct. Set to start on September 22, 2008, the game will focus on creating the strategies needed to overcome five “superthreats”, ranging from a devastating disruption of the food supply chain, to a pandemic, to “global weirding” weather patterns to create millions of climate refugees.
The aim: survival.
They’ve offered a brief to respond to:
“It’s the summer of 2019. You are yourself, but 10 years in the future. Describe where you are having for dinner, what you’re eating, and what you’re thinking or talking about. How did you wind up there, compared to where you had dinner most often in the summer of 2008?”
I’ve put together a short narrative scenario below.
Update: Alternatively, keep up-to-date with the latest trends & issues behind the scenario via the ‘Future of the Blue Frontier‘ website.
———————–
The end of the blue frontier
I was only half-listening when I heard the phrase. Then the streaming news station had all of my attention. I looked down at my plate and stopped. I felt guilty. I knew what would come. I felt time shortening.
Three words. The Tonle Sap.
It hadn’t flowed backwards up the Mekong. It hadn’t created the nursery lakes, hadn’t the volume to form the largest body of fresh water in South-East Asia; a temporary event it normally repeats every year. The monsoon had failed and as a result Cambodia faced the danger of progressively worsening hunger. The trey riel wouldn’t be providing ‘meat and milk’ this year to the four-fifths of the population that relied on the ‘wild’ fish protein gathered from the river.
It had been predicted each time the monsoon stuttered but now the whole social & economic structure of assemblage or ecosystem fishing on the river faced catastrophe. Each year the Mekong flooded backwards up the Tonle Sap creating an amount of water large enough to raise it from the 14th river in the world by volume to the 3rd : bested only by the Amazon and the Brahmaputra. It created a vast lake in which up to a thousand species matured until being washed back down into the Mekong and the waiting nets. It was a timeless cycle of food production, perhaps the largest river fishery in the world, but now the mainstay had failed. (1)
Share this article from St. Paul's ReachAside: musings on an energy future
Over the weekend I was catching-up with a couple of the excellent seminars produced by the Long Now Foundation, in particular the talk given by Gwyneth Cravens & Rip Anderson on the “Power to save the world”. This broadly set-out the case for substantive adoption of nuclear power as the only viable way we can secure the capacity of ‘baseload’ energy needed to meet predicted future worldwide demand.
A series of comments struck me. Given the far higher energy-output of uranium (say, against other resources such as coal) the difference in the level of secondary extractive / production waste that could be attributed to your usage leads Cravens to assert:
… if you got all of your electricty for your entire life (from uranium) - about 77 years is the average life span in America - then your share of the waste would fit in one coke can. If you got all of your electricity just from coal… over your life you would be responsible for 68 tons of solid waste and 77 tons of CO2 …
Now - leaving aside the technical, political, energy-economics & wealth distribution issues (I know, a large carpet’s needed to sweep under here) - I just idly wondered what would happen if there was a way for your entire future energy consumption to be consolidated and ‘gifted’ to you; real energy futures and what a market for 22nd century christening presents or new baby gifts!
Share this article from St. Paul's ReachWhat’s in a name: change & an imagined place to bathe
I met with James King & Scott Hartop last night to discuss some futures themes over a beer and at one point James asked what the origination of St. Paul’s Reach was as a company name.
I explained that I’d worked at various locations around St. Pauls for a number of years and - inspite of the near constant redevelopment of the area - some view was always present. However, that view wasn’t static as either old buildings were demolished or new buildings emerged. So, although the ‘idea’ of St. Paul’s was always there, each perspective differed and was potentially subject to ongoing change over time.
In effect, SPR as a name sought to reflect that idea of change; recognising that while it can be fast-paced and appear constant we must remember it’s not a universal rate of movement. Further, that such change is likely to have multiple, plausible interpretations and be ‘layered’ around slower changing structures, institutions or ideas. We’re all living through that dynamic, indeed, a view extended and eloquently expressed by Jamais Cascio in his ‘Fifteen minutes into the Future” blogpost.
Appropriately, today I came across some work done by London film and media studio Squint/Opera who’ve created a number of visual scenarios for a project titled “Flooded London: 2090” as part of the current London Architecture Festival. One, imagines St. Paul’s as an effective recreational swimming pool for surviving EC1 residents, its previous, primary role as place of religious worship consumed by a risen sea-level.
Of course, this offers a nice ‘thematic’ link to the forthcoming Global Catastrophic Risks conference (Oxford, UK between the 17-20th July) hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute.
Share this article from St. Paul's ReachFace-to-Face: Thinking Digital
Been busy with some business development projects recently so not had a lot of time to post, but wanted to let you know that I’ll be attending next week’s Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead, England (which runs between 21st-23rd May).
I’ll be there for all three days and - if you’re going - would welcome an opportunity to get together.
Share this article from St. Paul's ReachThe value of online community: to create user benefit, extend brand equity or secure transactional data?
If I offered you a chance to join a community with the following stated aims, would you?
“… a growing but personalized online community consisting of vibrant individuals interested in sharing their opinions about shopping” with the brand in question indicating that it “relies upon its membership to gain valuable insights into the browsing and buying behaviors, as well as the offers and experiences that are most important to you”.
So, you feel OK about that?
What would you say if I asked you to agree to provide the following information in order to join:
- a copy of all Internet traffic going from and coming to your computer
- information on your secure sessions (websites beginning with ‘https’), which may include shopping or banking sites.
- a record of “the pace and style with which you enter information online…”
- information in the header section of your personal emails.
Still OK? Feeling any different about the opportunity?
Now, let’s assume you join the community and - without being explicitly warned of the data capture indicated above - ’spyware’ able to run undetected on your system and capable of recording, monitoring and transferring the above usage information was actually installed. How would you feel?
Still want to join?
This is the issue at the heart of a recent disagreement between the Computer Associates (CA) Security Advisor Research group and Sears about the retailers use of personal data tracking, the permissions given and its new online community initiative: My SH Community. I’d encourage you to read the full exchange from the first blog post, through a response from Sears, to CA’s second response to details of a proposed class action lawsuit.
In short, CA believes Sears is not being clear, transparent or explicit in communicating to potential users that a) software will be downloaded and installed b) that it will automatically monitor and track their internet usage and that c) the information will be passed to a third party. Sears disagrees.
Now, the issue of explicit permission underpins this whole dialogue but there’s also an implicit difference in the perceived value of the community: CA (on behalf of the user) sees the aim of securing transactional data as diminishing its value and compromising the users online integrity while, Sears, seems to believe it’s offering a reasonable trade-off (even if its actions could be viewed as not making the conditions explicit), that is, the users data for exclusivity; special content and advance offers.
So, what is the value of online community: to create user benefit, extend brand equity or secure transactional data? A combination? Something different? Can a valid answer be established without the actual input and position of the community members themselves? How do you accommodate or support ongoing variance and change in a community’s perception of its value? And - just as important - are you being explicit in the ’social media bargain’ you’re seeking to strike with your audience / customers / potential advocates?
Finally, I don’t see much understanding from the brand here as to how its actions could be more widely perceived and interpreted, indeed, Mr Rob Harles VP SCH Community (let’s repeat that, VP of community) was quoted as saying “I don’t usually respond to blogs …”. Er?
So, this leaves me with a key point of confusion. In talking about community and the “vibrant individuals” who support your brand, why wouldn’t you want to go out of your way to communicate the openness and integrity of your actions? After all, as Ian McKee has so eloquently put it “If what you do causes your customers to get a law passed to stop you – HOW CAN IT BE THE RIGHT THING FOR YOUR BRAND?”
Share this article from St. Paul's ReachSocial networks - a global perspective
This map of global social network use has been around for a couple of weeks, but a useful reminder that social media is about more than just a numbers game between Face-Space.
Share this article from St. Paul's Reach