Michael Edson - Speed (Smithsonian) 4/4
Channel: Rui Guerra
Date: 2013-11-16

Michael Edson 4 - Speed

I've been doing a lot of reading about how humans perceive time, perceive speed, perceive velocity, and it's been observed the humans have no neurological organ, framework, that's dedicated to time and speed. It's a very awkward concept and I think about... there's been some research that indicates that the Neolithic cave paintings in Europe were created during a time of artistic and cultural continuity that lasted twenty-five thousand years. 25,000, and we were talking about this at the dish conference in in Rotterdam a few years ago... twenty-five thousand years of continuous human continuity and culture, that's so different than what's happening now, today. So this idea speeders is hard, and gets metaphysical very quickly.
 
That being said, people who develop websites, who think on the web and work on the web, work with technology, have observed from practical terms, practical tools - - pen, pencil - - that it's so much easier to get things done now than it was a few years ago. Back in the 90's when I was doing web stuff at the Asian art museums, we had an exhibition where we wanted visitors to share their tourist photographs of India, online. This is back when AOL, American Online, was big, people had dialup modems, not a lot of people had digital cameras. I learned and wrote in Pearl, basically, Flickr, our own version of Flickr, a photo sharing website, because there really wasn't a Flickr, so we wrote it.
 
Fast-forward 10 years, fifteen years, and the tools we have available to us, solid, for free, powerful, the user interfaces have gotten good, they're available in beautiful simple interfaces on our mobile devices - - that's real. Kevin Rose the founder of Digg, has said: 3 or 4 years ago, 5 years ago, if you had an idea, it was hard, it was expensive, you probably needed investors, needed to rack servers, you needed to buy infrastructure, you needed programmers. Now you have an idea - - for a couple thousand dollars you can see if it works, you can test it with real audiences. And the learning about it can accelerate, can take off immediately. And that's the... I think being able to do things quickly is like compound interest. There's the apocryphal story that Albert Einstein was asked what the greatest invention of humankind was, and he said compound interest... That story isn't real, but it demonstrates a true point - - thinking about that... the team we were talking about earlier that works in secret for two years: sure great things can happen that way, but if they very early on produce a website, put their ideas on a wiki, build a community - - in days, not months or years, they can really begin learning and refining quickly. That's the pattern I think, that will lead to better, more impactful work in museums. Not exclusively, but there's a lot of open territory to explore there, and we're not even talking yet about the real time web, about social media, real time social media's impact on society, on reporting, on people's expectations about how news is made and consumed and shared... There's a lot of thinking that we need to do about how new ideas about speed, at global scale impact knowledge creation, society, etcetera, etcetera.
 
Peter Schwartz from Global Business Networks, which is a consultancy in nonprofit strategy, came to work with the Smithsonian in 2008 or so, and he observed that museums, like universities, were built on the model of enduring wisdom: you don't need to work fast, you don't need to change, you don't need to listen very carefully to the outside world, on a daily basis, a weekly/monthly basis, because you're creating wisdom, knowledge, and knowledge endures. I thought that was a very powerful observation.  And of course there's an element to that that will always be true: we will always need the scholar who goes up onto the mountaintop and thinks difficult thoughts for 10 years without interruption and comes back down with a new idea, a new concept, a breakthrough - - there will always be a need in society for that kind of mind, and that kind of innovation, but there's also so much value to be had in building a network of people with shared interest.