Oliver Gassner: Hi Bruno!
Bruno Giussani: Hi Oliver
Oliver Gassner: Would you please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us what you do for a living including telling us what you did before?
Bruno Giussani: I observe the evolution of technology and try to understand its impacts on individuals, organization and society. And then use this over many platforms: I write articles and books and blogs, speak at conferences (and organize some), work with companies, etc. I do it internationally, based in Switzerland (which is a good base for these things).
Oliver Gassner: Why is that so? (not the observing, Switzerland ;) )
Bruno Giussani: The obvious part is: It's central, well-functioning, and has a good infrastructure. The less-obvious is: both the Zurich area and the Lake Geneva area (Geneva-Lausanne) are really interesting places in terms of the people that live there and that go through, bringing fresh air, ideas, techs, investments, etc. And the hiking and skiing is just minutes away...
Oliver Gassner: In 2002 you said in an interview that in 2017 German would be an irrelevant language in Switzerland and that English will be the new dominating language. How is the project going? ;)
Bruno Giussani: I wouldn't call that a "project". And the story is slightly different. But my intuition was right I believe. Switzerland has four national languages (German, French, Italian and Rumantsch). German is supposed to be the "mother tongue" of the majority of the Swiss (about 5.5 million out of 7). But that hides a cultural misunderstanding, because in reality German is their first foreign language: their mother tongue is Schwitzerdütsch, the local dialect(s). Which is a spoken-only language. People are very attached to Schwitzerdütsch. At the same time, English is becoming so pervasive not only in the daily surroundings (brands, music, advertising slogans, Internet) but also in professional life, particularly in places like Zurich, where a high percentage of people use English as their job languages (in banks, insurances, think-tanks, university, etc). So my thesis, to make it simple, was that in 15 years there would be a sort of linguistic duopoly, with Schwitzerdütsch as the "daily life" language and English the "professional language" and German being squeezed between the two. Of course it was not an absolute, I'm not expecting German to disappear nor schools to stop teaching it: but if you spend a couple of days in Zurich you will see that that's exactly the trend.
Oliver Gassner: I often play a short association game in the Netzstimmen-Interviews. I'll give you keywords and you answer as quickly and as short as possible. Ready?
Bruno Giussani: Sure. As long as I understand the words.
Oliver Gassner: ZX81 or Apple ][, C64 or ATARI?
Bruno Giussani: Well, for me that would be none of the above. I didn't play with the Sinclair nor the Commodore nor the Atari nor the Apple II, there were no computers in my family when I grew up and when I started out in journalism the newspaper was still produced with linotypes. So it took a moment. But then computers made into the newsroom and it was an aha! moment.
Oliver Gassner: Mailboxes (those on 300 baud)
Bruno Giussani: First e-mail sent was a test, first e-mail received was a big emotion.
Oliver Gassner: Usenet or Compuserve?
Bruno Giussani: Usenet
Oliver Gassner: TCP/IP
Bruno Giussani: Setting up the first connection was a real, real pain. Meeting Vint Cerf who co-developed TCP/IP was quite something.
Oliver Gassner: hypertext transfer protocol
Bruno Giussani: makes life easier
Oliver Gassner: Ted Nelson
Bruno Giussani: hypertext
Oliver Gassner: William Gibson
Bruno Giussani: "Cyberspace", obviously, but can I say that I loved the main character in "Pattern Recognition"? She had the coolest job ever.
Oliver Gassner: newspapers
Bruno Giussani: So many people seem convinced that they're gonna die and they're all wrong. They're gonna change. Dramatically. But death is a very distant notion.
Oliver Gassner: weblogs
Bruno Giussani: The beginning of something that we don't yet really understand. Community, conversation, participation, co-creation: all these words describe part of it. But blogs are also most of the time just tools for easy publishing.
Oliver Gassner: wikis
Bruno Giussani: Part of the same phenomenon. We are facing the evolution of a communication ecosystem here, which includes blogs, wikis, cell phones, social software of any kind, search, and much more - including the "old media" - and we ought to look at it as a system, not as separate technologies or platforms or phenomena.
Oliver Gassner: digg or slashdot?
Bruno Giussani: Both. For the same reason. Digg has an automatic core, Slashdot an editorial core, but again, both are symptoms of a similar evolution and provide different kind of informational and social value.
Oliver Gassner: copyright
Bruno Giussani: If you think in social and cultural terms, "Some rights reserved" is so much better that "All rights reserved". Larry Lessig and his posse are crucial characters in all this evolution.
Oliver Gassner: crowdsourcing
Bruno Giussani: Can you remain good when you grow big?
Oliver Gassner: Edelman/Walmart
Bruno Giussani: Did I say above that we "don't really understand" yet what's really happening. Flogs are a symptom of that. I understand that Richard Edelman has apologized and acknowledged that it was a wrong move. I just searched for a quote from him that I put on my blog in May: "We have to be about truth, listening, learning" (http://giussani.typepad.com/loip/2006/05/the_deconstruct.html) They thought they had learned enough, apparently...
Oliver Gassner: Second Life
Bruno Giussani: Real life is being increasingly shadowed by synthetic/virtual life. Not only in Second Life of WoW or so: think for a moment of all the personas you have in cyberspace, from the Google results when you search your name to your openBC profile etc. We will all live with multiple, partial personas. Our SL avatar will be one of them.
Oliver Gassner: It is hardly imaginable that creating fake entries in a blog without mentioning the authors and that they are paid was "truthful" from Edelman. How could they do a blog project and not involve Rubel?
Bruno Giussani: I just checked Steve's blog, and apart from 6 lines on Monday he has not commented on it, which to me is evidence that he's immensely pissed about this Wal-Mart mess. But, again (I'm repeating myself), the "blogosphere" and the whole ecosystem are still growing by trial and error.
Oliver Gassner: I am not sure Walmart pays Edelman for trial and error ;)
Oliver Gassner: You are both a journalist and an entrepreneur. Isn't that mutually exclusive?
Bruno Giussani: I've just had different careers at different points in time. Kind of a revolving door situation.
Oliver Gassner: But now you are an entrepreneur? No longer a journalist? Or the other way round?
Bruno Giussani: I'm a writer contributing mostly commentary and analysis (columns) to newspapers and magazines and websites and blogs and speaking at conferences. I'm also organizing a couple of conferences (which, to me, is an editorial job, like putting together a magazine: you pick themes, topics, and who gets to write the stories) and consulting with a publisher on developing a new magazine. And I sit on the boards of two Internet companies.
Bruno Giussani: Two small Internet companies.
Oliver Gassner: And there is no interference between these activities?
Bruno Giussani: Where do you see them?
Oliver Gassner: Not sure, for example when you need examples in an article. You either mention the company you work with or you intentionally avoid mentioning it. Both is an interference.
Bruno Giussani: Well, that would apply only to the two companies of which I'm a member of the board. If I happen to mention them in an article - and it's very, very rare - I am pretty transparent about that, saying it explicitly. And if you go on my blog http://LunchOverIP.com and click on "biography" you can see it there, too.
Oliver Gassner: You also mention your affiliation in print articles? (It's easier with blog articles.)
Bruno Giussani: There is no need to mention it if the article has nothing to do with these companies. When it does, I mention it (but I don't remember any article I've written in the last two years that mentioned these two companies). And there is almost always a link back to my web page at the bottom of my columns (except when the newspaper has "a policy against personal URLs", don't get me started on this).
Oliver Gassner: We touched some current online developments in the association game. Is Web 2.0 really a good name for what is happening in the online world at the moment?
Bruno Giussani: It is a practical label but it has been stretched in every direction and it has no real meaning anymore. Is it about technology? About behaviour? About features? About business models? About? What's really happening online, the turn we've taken, is that
1) we are leveraging the full potential of the Web by building coherent ensembles - a page, a data set, a feature, a service, a news story - starting from disparate elements and
2) we now can involve the broadest possible number of people in meaningful, value-creating social, economic and cultural activities. What's the correct label for that?
Oliver Gassner: I usually say that 'Web 2.0' means: "The Net (!) works the way it is supposed to."
Bruno Giussani: Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his book that the original vision for the Web was: "anything being potentially connected to anything". That's also a way of saying it.
Oliver Gassner: You said newspapers were gonna change dramatically. How?
Bruno Giussani: They will change in many ways. Nobody really knows how this emerging immediate, un-mediated world will develop, but clearly newspapers (and the "old media" in general: broadcast TV and radio included) have lost their position as observers and lecturers, and now they have to engage. To engage with their readers, and find ways to work with them in making sense of reality. Those who believe that newspapers are dead don't know history and can't see that media exist only because they have a social function, and newspapers will continue to have a social function for a long time. One thing that strikes me for example is that in new-media-saturated countries like Japan and S-Korea, the number of magazines is actually going up rather than down and print is flourishing.
Oliver Gassner: I hear that Myspace wants to produce a print magazine. That would be an example. And why won't they die? Won't at some time the print editions reach a circulation that is too expensive to produce?
Bruno Giussani: Who says that it's to expensive to produce? Think of the rise of free newspapers. Almost one third of the circulation of daily newspapers in Europe is currently "free" newspapers ("Metro" etc),

LINK free newspapers HERE: http://giussani.typepad.com/loip/2006/08/newspapers_ther.html

which means that printing is not really the problem. Distribution is, particularly if you want to cover huge non-metropolitan areas, so maybe (maybe) one of the phenomenons we will see is that newspapers will be cheaper in urban centres and more expensive to subscribe if you live far off. I'm just thinking aloud. And if MySpace is thinking about print, is not only because they want to have a nice piece of paper: is because Murdoch knows that there is still a lot of value there.
Oliver Gassner: At reboot 8 you gave a talk about a citizen journalism project that was initiated by a Swiss magazine. Do you think that this is a good model for what we will see in the future?
Bruno Giussani: That was just a localized example, but it is a possible development. The story is simple: in November 2005 riots erupted in the French "banlieues". All media flocked there, stayed three days, and then when things calmed down they packed up and went back home. A Swiss magazine, "L'Hebdo" (disclosure: I write for them from time to time and consult with their publisher) decided to stay, and started sending ALL of its reporters to Bondy, a suburb of Paris, on a weekly rotation. They were staying in a small room they rented from the local soccer club, and every week one would go and the other would come home, and they started telling the stories of Bondy, in the magazine every week, and on the BondyBlog (http://www.bondyblog.fr) several times a day. It wasn't easy, but they got traction, and hundreds of comments, etc. After four months they ran out of reporters, and they had a brilliant idea: they called for volunteers bloggers, and trained a few of them in basic journalism and use of blogging tools, and then passed them the blog. They were (are) students, a teacher, the coach of the soccer team, a couple of unemployed people. They started blogging their own social reality, and basically that gave birth to the first ever information outlet in Bondy, which had never had a local newspaper (and is not really covered by the Paris press). They have done a fabulous job, and now they are at the beginning of a presidential campaign and they will definitely be in a position to make the voice of the "banlieues" heard during that campaign. They even got a few scoops. Now, that's a Swiss magazine creating somehow a "citizen media" in a place that did not have a media. I personally believe that it is one of the most interesting media stories in Europe in the last couple of years.
Oliver Gassner: OK, let's have a look at the future of computing and the net. - Is what we see online exponential innovation or does it only feel like that?
Bruno Giussani: It is. To me sometimes it feels as innovation overload actually. Not because there is too much innovation, but because in the noise it's becoming difficult to see what innovation matters (signals) and what doesn't.
Oliver Gassner: Which futuologist impresses you. What is her or his vision?
Bruno Giussani: Alvin Toffler has always been a master, and Paul Saffo has good methodology (although he hates to be called a "futurologist", he prefers "forecaster"), but in general I try not to be carried away by futurology. There is much to be learned in daily experience, and there is much to be learned in things like novels, for example. "The Traveler", by John Twelwe Hawks, is a good example of a novel that is also, somehow, a study of things to come.
Oliver Gassner: Can you give us a hint where we will travel? (A summary of what the novel sketches?)
Bruno Giussani: We will be travelling across a "Vast Machine". I will give you a link: http://giussani.typepad.com/loip/2006/07/travelling_acro.html BTW: John Twelve Hawks is the pseudonym of a mysterious writer. More in that post.
Oliver Gassner: Everybody calls Second Life 'Metaverse' after 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson. everybody called the WWW 'Cyberspace' after Gibson. I also believe novelists have a thing there. They transform experience into visions.
Bruno Giussani: Indeed. Sometimes, fiction tells reality better than non-fiction. And who better than novelists and poets to find the words to describe new realities? I wouldn't give that task to consultants.
Oliver Gassner: So we need not philosophers to rule the state (or maybe also) but novelists to consult Apple, Microsoft and Murdoch?
Bruno Giussani: I think some of them already do. And by the way, people like Jonathan Ive (the designer of the iPod) are "storytellers" in their own way.
Oliver Gassner: Ray Kurzweil assumes, that Computing Power will succeed human brain power in 1 or 2 decades - Do you believe in AI ?
Bruno Giussani: No I don't. I believe that computing power will keep growing as Ray says, but I also believe that intelligence is a mysterious mix of smart, knowledge, experience, feelings, emotions, symbiosis, empathy, and I don't believe that it can be replicated anytime soon.
Oliver Gassner: My theses is usually: as soon as computers model the brain exactly they will also have the mistakes. And if they don't model it exactly... they won't have the benefits.
Bruno Giussani: Which is a good way of saying it. But my take is: We understand too little about the brain, that it's unlikely that we can model it.
Oliver Gassner: How far do we want to fantasize about the future of the net? 3 years, 5, 15?
Bruno Giussani: Do you remember what the Net was 5 years ago? Think about it. Mid-2001. One year after the stock market downturn. Most of the things that SEEM important today didn't exist, or were not in large use: blogs, wikis, SL and WoW, YouTube and the whole video phenomenon, Skype, MySpace, the billion-dollars Google ads. Do you really feel that you can say with any degree of likelihood what it will be like in 5 years?
Oliver Gassner: We can try and if we are right we will both become famous. - Will we soon access data via interfaces like Second Life like we use the WWW now? In 3 years?
Bruno Giussani: I don't see why not. But that won't be exclusive, of course. Many people still access data through paper archives, remember. As I said before, virtual life is increasingly shadowing real life, so soon there will be "virtual" data repositories, "virtual" newspapers, etc. And yes, 3D ways of navigating data and connecting them. That's a given, I guess, although I wouldn't be able to say when that will happen consistently. Maybe 5 years.
Oliver Gassner: You know that you can blog out of SL and make phone calls to the outside phone net? Today? (BTW I am blogging since 2000 and modelled the startpage of a now bankrupt net-security firm after that in 2001 ;) )
Bruno Giussani: That's indeed the direction. I'm quite confident that one of the things we will see developing is more integration of the different communication means - metaverses with blogging with databases with search with VoIP with IM with with with. But that's a generic trend, boosted by more bandwidth and more powerful computers and an all-IP approach.
Oliver Gassner: Will online 'realities' and offline stuff also converge? So that you get a 'mix' of SL and a 'real' shopping mall? In 10 or even 7 years? (Have you read 'Virtual Light' by William Gibson?)
Bruno Giussani: I haven't read "Virtual Light", no. But yes, that was my point above: virtual shadowing really means that the interactions and bridges between the two will keep increasing, pretty much in the way you describe. We actually already live converged lives in that sense, we have for a long time. "Where" are you when you are in a phone call? Are you where you are, or where your correspondent is, or in some other place? And think of the games that bridge online and offline, the area/code stuff. So that movement is already happening.
Oliver Gassner: Will we have implanted net access gear that projects information into our brain in 20 years? Or in 25? 50? Never?
Bruno Giussani: That's really a question I can't answer. We will have functional implants. We already have them. Think Kevin Warwick. Think modern prosthetics. Think brain implants for sensory substitution or other purpose. Think also of how shocking that still is to many people.
Bruno Giussani: A while ago we came up with a friend with a plan to get a fake USB port installed (by a make-up artist) on our forehead and then go to a bar and fake a connection with a laptop and an "uploading" of data into our brain and crazy things would happen on the laptop's screen, just to see people's reaction. We may do it someday.
Oliver Gassner: Be sure to film that ;)
Oliver Gassner: Yep; years ago I read of photovoltaic cells being implanted into the retinas of blind people. I gave that to someone who I had pointed to Cyberpunk. -- OK, your turn ;). What crazy thing is imaginable? (Hey, Jules Verne was shooting people to the moon with cannons...)
Bruno Giussani: I'm not good at "crazy" things. Some newspaper once wrote that I'm a "realistic futurist". But I'm immensely curious of what we will be able do to when connectivity is all around us, like oxygen. At the same time, I'm also very conscious of the fact that connectivity is just a piece of the puzzle: knowledge is another, and social links another, and energy another.
Oliver Gassner: Google is planning to create 1.6 Megawatts with solar power on the roofs of their campus. Maybe they will one day even provide he energy...
Oliver Gassner: Google Power ;)
Bruno Giussani: Yep, the GooglEverything that will run our life.
Oliver Gassner: Tell us about TEDglobal and describe how you are involved.
Bruno Giussani: TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design (http://www.ted.com) and is a conference that brings together every year about 1000 people for four days in Monterey (California) to discuss innovative ideas in these three fields, but also more broadly (medicine, physics, sports, politics, development, environment, energy, education, etc). TED is run as a non-profit, part of a New-York based foundation. TEDGLOBAL is the international TED, and I produced it for the first time last year in Oxford. It will take place again in Africa next year, and my colleague Emeka Okafor is producing it. My involvement with TED is as their European Director. It's too soon to talk about it, but there will be some exciting TED news in Europe in 2007. By the way, if you've never been at TED you may want to check out some of the speeches, which are available in video for free on the TEDtalks channel (http://www.ted.com/tedtalks, but also on iTunes and Google Video).
Oliver Gassner: Are there any other projects of yours that we should have a look at?
Bruno Giussani: Well, I'm a writer so of course most of my thinking ends up in words - in books ("Roam. Making Sense of the Wireless Internet", which was published in 2001 by Random House and has been translated into Chinese - I won't tell you how painful it was to proofread the translation...) and in articles and in small bits and pieces and jots that are not always consequential on my blog (http://LunchOverIP.com) and in speeches I give at conferences.
Oliver Gassner: OK, we'll keep an eye on you. Thanks for the interview.
Bruno Giussani: My pleasure. Enjoy the day.