People are often boggled when I follow up my research interest in the future of work with the name of my M.S. program: Comparative Media Studies at MIT. While I could go on about how economic security is the cornerstone for meaningful pursuits—including civic participation—here's a direct media tie in. The following is an excerpt from my thesis draft. 

The Fordist framework¹ is fraying quickly. Economic decline, technological displacement and globalization have resulted in a shortage of jobs that will not rebound. A powerful social contract is broken, leading Americans to question if investing in human capital—apprenticeships, internships, education, experience and technical know-how—is a smart use of time and personal resources.

These conditions account only partially for why attention is shifting to other work models. Another powerful influence is former and current media portrayal.

Pay attention to Tom Slee; he's snide, but he's spot-on. In a recent blog post, he neatly sums up how peer economy proponents appear to advocate selectively for its place in the formal economy.

It's not the full interview, but it's a goodly portion of it. Full audio here.

Snowden Vizthink from Willow Bloo on Vimeo.

Recently, a reporter from Marketplace called me for a radio piece. Two Harvard profs just released a study that examined the correlation between pricing and race on Airbnb. Airbnb’s racist! Well that’s not actually how the professors said it, but that’s what many headlines have looked like.

Image by Effie Yang

It was not until I checked my twitter feed that I realised a raging debate on the self imposed media blackout under the hash tag #mediablackoutke. Several local journalists wrote tweets to protest a ruling made in Kenya’s high court on digital migration. The judge had earlier dismissed the petition by the three leading media houses to delay the migration. In his ruling, he says that the deadline date was obtained through consensus since the three players were also part of the process.  Digital migration refers to the movement of broadcast transmission from analogue signals to digital signals. As per the ITU conference different member countries had to set up deadlines by which they would have the switch over.  It is important to note that Kenya became the second country to switch over to digital television broadcasting in the year 2009.  The deadline to completely cut off the analogue signal in Kenya has been a game of chess since. Every other party trying to checkmate each other.

Originally written for and published on 2 Oct. 2013 on Shareable

On Monday I gave a talk to MIT's New Economy Group titled "Crowdfunding, Community Assets and the New Economy". One of the first things I presented, by way of context, was this timeline.

It's not meant to be an exhaustive collection of events, but here are a few things I found most interesting and worthwhile to include.

Donors Choose was arguably the first civic crowdfunding platform, although it has never referred to itself in those terms. It took DC ten years to become entirely self-financing.

More than a billion people a month visit YouTube to watch videos.

Sometimes, those billion people watch the same video. More often, they don't.

YouTube shares information about what videos are popular in different cities and different countries, and for the US, offers a tool to see what videos are popular with different age groups and genders.

I was sad to note today that, with 14 days to go, The New York City Opera has raised less than 10% of the ambitious $1 million target the organization set itself on Kickstarter earlier this month.