I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

If Ashton Kutcher’s 4.5 million Twitter followers make you feel inadequate, I’ve got good news: scientists investigating social networks have punked the “influentials” theory that drives celebrities to the top of the charts.

Aplusk, who boasts that he’s bigger than CNN, is apparently overrated. A new study finds that the importance of most influential spreaders in a social network does not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people. Which means well connected celebrities and organizations may have less influence over the spread of valuable information than we give them credit.

Exploring the impact of network science on the spread of information as well as the spread of viruses, Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and a cross-disciplinary team of scientists dismiss e-fluentials, viral marketers run amok, and tipping points. Marketers have spent billions promoting these concepts, including Influentials Theory, which spins the notion that influential people matter more than others. It is also the premise behind Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, The Tipping Point.

Compare the illustrations below. We used to think that networks worked like the one on the left. The new research suggests they look more like the one on the right: more random, more distributed.

Duncan Watts, one of the pioneers of network science and now the principal research scientist at Yahoo!’s Human Social Dynamics Group, has long been skeptical of the marketers and the pop sociologists. Watts, the author of Six Degrees: The Science of the Connceted Age, has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people and ignoring influentials altogether.

Less-connected people who are less strategically placed can have a significant effect of the dissemination of information, Kitsak’s research team now finds. They discovered that the location of an individual within at a hub of a network can make them more central to the flow of information. The finding seems to support both the random nature of communications networks as well as the value of geography or local knowledge in disseminating information.

Incumbents with historic ties to geographic communities might see an advantage in this ecosystem. More likely it could further disintermediate the flow of information from traditional hubs. Look at the connections from Luis Perez, who posted his Facebook connections on Flickr. Now consider there are more than 70 million Facebook users like Luis.

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Jonathan Harris is one of few designer/developers exploring new territories for stortytelling in the digital age. In The Whale Hunt, he gave us new ways to experience a story through creative interfaces of perspective, understanding and sensory engagement.

Jonathan is back with a new project, The Sputnik Obervatory, that documents contemporary culture through video interviews with  leading thinkers in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Harris says the premise is “that everything is connected to everything else.”

The project,  the result of a two-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., soars with provocative ideas that  highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas. At its core is a creative navigational system  – a Harris hallmark – where every thought leads to another thought.

The language of the interface can be unfamilar and esoteric — learn how a mobile bacteria called a spirochete can help you think about big things — but the journey through complex ideas is worth the trip. The site weaves Web 2.0 participation and sharing  as it swims the streams of Big Think consciousness, all while managing to maintain the voice, context and perspective of experts who rise above the wisdom of the crowds.

At a time when most web wites are designed for the dumb, Harris and Sputnik send design and storytelling on the Web into a higher orbit.

The stigma attached to the left is that it’s logical, analytical, produces the expected. Boring.
The right, though, is non-linear, holistic, intuitive, produces surprising discoveries. But here’s the good news: they’re not mutually exclusive.

So a debate grew in the Right Brain Rules to Innovate workshop about whether an entrepreneur can discover opportunities by using the right brain, too, or whether an entrepreneur is too set in old ways. Is Bill Gates old school? Does he use more of the left brain, whereas Steve Jobs may use more of the right? Peskin clarified – it’s not that the left-siders can’t think creatively, they just need to let the right side chip in.

In fact, the two sides are connected through the corpus callosum, said Dan Suwyn, a managing partner with Rapid Change Group. In fact, women have an advantage – the corpus callosum is thicker in female brains. (Applause from the females heard.) That puts us up to par with well-rounded giants like Albert Einstein, who had a thick callosum, too.

So is there a debate, or is it now beyond the grey realm – does collaboration and innovation require an evolved right side skill? Peskin said those who use the right side learn and make something better.

No longer do the creative folk work alone, unable to be understood. There’s a notion of collaboration. Creativity is no longer a single gig. CNN used Microsoft’s Photosynth to create its ‘The Moment’ project in which the public submitted photos of the Inaugration of the United States’ 44th president, Mr. Barack Obama.

Or the storytelling project of Jonathan Harris, The Whale Hunt, which places an emphasis on the photographs to tell the story. Akin to the concept of Brian Storm’s MediaStorm.

Other workshop participants are also merging technology and innovation.

Flyp, for example, is a bi-weekly digital magazine, produced by a Mexican company that runs a weekly mag. Have you ever been frustrated when a site pulls you away from the main story when you click on the video or another interactive element? Flyp integrates the text, video and interactive elements all within the story, so you don’t get moved onto something else. Eduardo Danilo, one of its creators, stood up to show how all the elements are fused together. This may add to the size – digitally, any given issue can have 40 to 60 pages. Flyp is now working with ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom of investigative journalism.

One exercise done during the workshop was led by Katherine von Jan of KVJ Company and involved context and thinking about how customers use your innovation. What are the metrics for success? What is the value of what you’re working on? Making health care company globally competitive. A debate grew about the pros and cons. You can get care at 3 a.m. (pro), but how does your doctor in India treat you if you’re in Miami (con)? Is this worthwhile when getting to India is not so complicated and expensive as it once was?

Many called out the dissonance between traditional healthcare and a global approach, moving it from isolated to connected, from Western to integrative.

So everyone got into groups and came up with an original idea. It seemed like the right-side of the brain was blowing steam.

And, yet, it’s a time of incredible creative foment, when tools of creation, distribution and connection — and the ability to make money from it all — have been given to more of us than ever. When multi-billion-dollar companies can be created in a few years on the back of a search algorithm or by using the Web’s distributive power to sell books and the Kindle electronic book reader. When solo bloggers can make fine livings with nothing more than a laptop, energy and a few writing and coding skills. And connections  the technology gives us all the ability to make. (Witness Ushahidi’s ability to save lives using open-source tools avaialble to all)

Last night at the We Media conference opening reception, I asked keynoter John Zogby, the noted pollster (who was flogging his new book , “The Way We’ll Be”), about this dissonance, about what he finds in his survey of America, this odd mix of hype and near-hysteria about the economic downturn against the more than half-full part of the glass I also see.

He, like many , cited Schumpeter’s creative destruction. And he said that while the American people get it (they have adjusted to lower pay and expectations, and realize what’s happening, and have been realizing it lo these past 15 years), it seems our institutions haven’t, that they don’t realize what’s happening to them. (That in a way is a quick definition of Schumpeter’s thesis: that the big don’t get it and fall as the upstarts come in to disrupt them.) He also framed much of his remarks  in terms of his findings that apparently form the foundation of his book: 18-29 year-olds are part of a new, international world citizenry, more interested in making friends and connection via interest than geography, able to travel widely and easily, expecting to have 10 or more places of employment in their lives, expecting to feel personally empowerd.

It is odd, though, that the institutions are ultimately a combine of the people who presumably “get” what Zogby says they do. Zogby and We conducted a poll that supports the assertion of distrust in institutions: “Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the leadership currently provided by large companies, government and traditional media – and they are not confident the leadership from these groups will improve in the future.”  The poll found much more confidence in small business, entrepreneurship and science. In the words of We Media co-founder Andrew Nachison, it’s “a historic, global shift in human behavior and organization. A new era.”

(An aside: I remember the feeling of disorientation I felt in 1997 in Hong Kong, having gone there for Handover of the territory back to China from Britain. It was early days of the Web. I was the founding international producer of ABCNEWS.com, and was there on my first international assignment for the site. It was me, my camera, and a reporter’s notebook, shooting video of artists, dissidents, shoppers, businesspeople, politicians, and putting it up for all to see, combined with a bunch of writing and still photos. Total cost: airfare, hotel room, and some telecommunications and videotape. In the hotel, the news anchors like Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel had taken over a floor, running thick cable, established large editing suites and lit studios, spending, I would guess, hundreds of thousands of dollars to put together their broadcasts. Of course, the order of magnitude was incomparable, as was the quality. But I felt, then, the beginnings of a gulf between the solo and institutional practitioner — even though I was part of the institution — that is now coming home to roost more strongly.)

Note: This week we’re holding our fifth annual We Media conference in Miami. Along with our research and other projects at iFOCOS, the We Media conferences, awards and community explore the cultural, political and business implications of a world connected and empowered by digital networks. This new research contributes a small piece to a big story: the beginning of a new era of humanity. You can read more on the big idea here. Thanks for your feedback, input and ideas.

MIAMI – Most Americans are putting their faith in small business owners, entrepreneurs and science and technology leaders to lead the U.S. to a better future – and they are significantly less hopeful the news media, government or large corporations will do the same, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) said small business and entrepreneurs will lead the U.S. to a better future, while 52% said the same of science and technology leaders. Americans are far less optimistic about the leadership of government (31%), large corporations and business leaders (21%), or traditional news media such as newspapers, television, radio, and magazines (13%).

Americans think leadership toward a better future is more likely to come from family and friends (38%), non-profit groups (32%), or even themselves (36%). The Zogby Interactive survey of 2,397 adults nationwide was conducted Feb. 11-13, 2009, and carries a margin of error of +/- 2.0 percentage points. The survey results will be featured at this week’s fifth-annual We Media Conference in Miami (www.wemedia.com), hosted by the University of Miami School of Communication and organized and produced by iFOCOS, a Reston, Va.-based media think tank (www.ifocos.org). This is the third year of the survey.

“Americans are deeply dissatisfied with traditional media’s leadership today – and they also don’t expect much in the future,” said Andrew Nachison, founder of the media think tank iFOCOS, which organizes the We Media conference, awards, community and web site (www.wemedia.com). “I’m not sure what’s worse – the dissatisfaction with the current performance, or the low expectations for the future.”

Dissatisfaction with the news media, corporations, and government runs deep

Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the leadership currently provided by large companies, government and traditional media – and they are not confident the leadership from these groups will improve in the future. The survey shows 71% are “not very” or “not at all” satisfied with the leadership provided by traditional news media. Even greater numbers of Americans are unsatisfied with the leadership of the government (74%) and large corporations and business leaders (81%).

While just one in four (27%) Americans are satisfied with the leadership provided by traditional news media, Internet media – including blogs and social networks – fared far better, with 56% satisfied with online media leadership. Fewer than a third of Americans (32%) believe online media will provide leadership in the future, but they are much more confident in the potential of Internet media to guide the U.S. in a better direction than they are in traditional news media (13%).

“The public’s sense of who will lead in the future is, sad to say, a painful reflection of the place that newspapers and other traditional media hold in American culture. Most Americans don’t think they provide much leadership now, nor will they lead us to a better future. They look to science, technology and entrepreneurs for that leadership,” said Nachison.

“This raises an old question that takes on new meaning as the world’s economy reorganizes around diminished returns: what’s the purpose of a news enterprise? Is it simply to produce, package and distribute data? Or is it more? Is there a purpose to the endeavor?

“We think there is, and we look to publishers and journalists to lead us to a better future. However they are configured, news enterprises must lead. And to lead they must change. That’s a call to action to improve performance and to raise the bar on expectations.”

Americans most likely to look online for breaking and daily news

Nearly half of Americans (46%) said they first turn to Internet news sites for information on breaking news about national and government issues and nearly as many (40%) said online news sites are where they get most of their news and information. These online sites far outpace traditional news sources, such as television (25%), radio (14%), and newspapers (12%), as a source of daily news and information. It comes as no surprise that younger Americans are most likely to favor online news sources, but only those age 65 and older are more likely to turn to television (36%) over the Internet (29%) to get their news.

Methodology: Zogby International was commissioned by iFOCOS to conduct an online survey of 2497 adults. A sampling of Zogby International’s online panel, which is representative of the adult population of the US, was invited to participate. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, gender, education to more accurately reflect the population. The margin of error is +/- 2.0 percentage points. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.

For content, media inquiries and interviews, contact:
Beth Laing
iFOCOS
404-895-7406
blaing@ifocos.org

For methodology information, contact:
Stephanie DeVries
Zogby International
(315) 624-0200, Ext. 273
steph@zogby.com

Revkin quotes Dr. Boykoff in his post saying: “…it does seem like stagnation or decreasing coverage. I’m curious about links between that and possible interpretations by negotiators of decreased public pressure to put forward a strong agreement leading into Copenhagen.”

I am curious too.

In my experience, broadly successful social movements – and online movements in particular, since in a connected age much of the social/political activity is being centered there -   are few and far between.  They have mostly resulted from a hotly contested U.S. Presidential campaign (or similar foreign election), a catastrophic event (tsunami, terrorist attack, etc) or a massively funded ($100 million + spent, or donated) media campaign.

To be successful, an issue must gain (or reach) massive awareness among a broad and engaged audience in a short period of time; the issue must provoke deeply passionate responses among that audience; and the campaign organization must provide the right set of opportunities for engagement and action that meets the audience’s expectations and sustain that momentum over time.

The fact is, the issue of climate change, while critically important, is extremely complex and currently very far outside the understanding of most average citizens.  Yes, there is high awareness that a problem exists, but what the problem is exactly remains unclear.  Moreover, attempts to galvanize the public’s attention around a realistic solution or mobilize significant change in behavior among citizens has not happened.  It feels like we are not much closer to finding, and achieving, a solution than we have been in the past.

In order for a broad movement to be created, the level of awareness, understanding, and passion for the subject must be raised substantially.  Like it or not, the media plays a big role in that.  But, with the media struggling to compete for attention and the likelihood that climate related news will not generate significant revenue for any media companies, coverage will likely continue to drop.  And as the level of coverage drops, the potential for a major shift in policy or behavior is less likely to happen as well.

In this case, less news is definitely bad news – for the climate movement, and for all of us.

A UCLA study released this week began to answer that question, showing that searching the Internet helps to keep older brains agile. “Our study shows that when your brain is on Google, your neural circuitry changes extensively,” Gary Small, director of UCLA’s Memory & Aging Research Center, told the San Francisco Chronicle this week.

Basically, the study shows that when the brain spends more time on technology-related tasks and less time exposed to other people, it drifts away from fundamental social skills like reading facial expressions during conversation.  Thus, brain circuits involved in face-to-face contact can become weaker, the study suggests, leading to social awkwardness, an inability to interpret nonverbal messages, isolation and less interest in traditional classroom learning.

The study is part of a growing field of research that looks at effects of technology on the brain.  With only a few studies complete, however, there is little consensus as to whether technology has a positive or negative effect on the brain and ultimately what that means to how humans operate.  The reality, of course, is technology has both positive and negative effects – but I am not a scientist so I can’t back that statement up with any data.  What is already clear is that people believe technology can sharpen the functioning of their brain – and they are playing Nintendo’s Brain Age and similar video games to prove it.

There is also a new area of study emerging that focuses on the psychological impacts of technology on our society.  This area of focus, known as Media Psychology, explores how people understand, use, and respond to our increasingly technology-centric and media-rich world.  Researchers argue that by identifying potential benefits and problems that technology and media create in terms of our social interactions and behaviors, we can focus on how to develop media that has impacts behavior in a positive way, such as around literacy.

Why is this important?  Many believe studies like the one conducted by the UCLA researchers will yield more insight into the causes of Alzheimer’s disease and ways to more effectively treat or prevent it for example.  With little understanding or ability to combat the effects of Alzheimer’s, and cases expected to quadruple by 2050, even minimal progress could have a huge impact on people’s lives.  On the Media Psychology side, with technology now playing an increasingly important role in our society, and little evidence that the influence that technology plays will wane any time soon, how we motivate action and impact behavior must be reconsidered.  Everything from how children learn to what is needed to build social movements will have to be approached differently going forward.

No time to waste.