Category: Four pillars

If there was a kernel for this post, it was probably Sig at Thingamy writing “Forthcoming: documents, schmocuments and Pluto“. At least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway, here’s the list. All beginning with S. Just for the heck of it.
Stalinists: Even though there is some doubt as to whether he actually ever said it, Stalin is often credited with saying that as long as people know there is an election, it’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes. A variation of this tends to operate in enterprises, where “power” is vested in the presentation-makers and minute-takers. What social software does is threaten this power.

Sadists: Learning to do things in an enterprise can be painful. Learning to do hard things can be very painful. I have worked in a company where, in order to save on stationery costs, they instituted a process whereby the “stationery cupboard” was only open on Tuesdays between 2pm and 4pm; if that wasn’t enough, no stationery could be ordered unless a form was filled in; and forms were only made available on Tuesday mornings between 10am and 10.30am. Learning how an organisation works is often like growing ear hair. There are no short cuts, it just takes a long time. And causes much suffering. What social software does is threaten to take away this familiar pain, leaving phantom limb sensations.

Stockholmers: Similar to hostages forming an attachment to their captor (despite the invidiousness of their position) there is an enterprise tendency to form deep-rooted and long-lasting relationships with lock-in vendors. This syndrome comes in two flavours: Temporary and Permanent. The Temporary one is less intense, fading when there is a change of management on the enterprise side. The Permanent version is a real feat of engineering, able to withstand multiple changes of management. Nobody gets fired for buying locks. What social software does is threaten to release the hostages from their secure jails.

Second-guessers: Any swarming or emergence effect needs to have a swarm in the first place. One place. With the plethora of options available in Web Too Many Oh, this creates a paradox of choice. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to choose. Second-guessers can stultify attempts to derive value from social software, by fragmenting the enterprise base in time and space. Space because they ensure multiple options are taken up simultaneously guaranteeing there is no critical mass, no liquidity. Time because they engineer an enterprise change-of-horse-in-midstream, never actually allowing the liquidity to be acquired. What social software does is threaten to take away the freedom of the second-guessers.

Sewer-dwellers: The ploy here is to define the battleground for social software as infrastructure, as plumbing. Even though it shouldn’t be the case, most enterprise buyers treat infrastructure as overpriced, oversold and over. As soon as the argument shifts to sewerage, the enterprise immune system has no problem repelling all boarders. This is despite the fact that social software has minimal infrastructure costs. Why do sewer-dwellers do this? Because it’s their home. What social software does is threaten to take away where they live.

Silobites: These are people who live in silos. Their jobs are to ensure that as much stuff as possible is stored in the silo, the bigger the silo the better they feel. They are defined by the walls. What social software does is threaten to take down these walls, building small connectors between silos.

Look at the things threatened. Power. Familiarity. Security. Housing. Freedom. Enough said.

Now there’s an ironic title. Shades of Charlie Chaplin for sure run throughout this post, so much so I have no problem declaring Fair Use for displaying this still, which I downloaded from Wikipedia to emphasise this story. All rights remain reserved with whoever owns those rights, despite the still being 70 years old….

There I was, relaxing after lunch, sun shining, birds chirping, Jeeves-and-Wooster time. I’d bought the latest Bob Dylan album, Modern Times, admittedly in the dinosaur way (hard physical CD from bricks-and-mortar HMV high street store), and I thought I would import it into my iTunes while listening to it. After all, it was Sunday afternoon.

Fat chance.

It took a long time, much longer than usual, for the iTunes/GraceNotes CDDB stuff to happen, some strange noises but finally it did. Then I started the importing. First track went fine. Then everything died on me. Not a kernel panic, but Not Responding and Spinning Disc and requiring quite some effort before I could Force Quit iTunes in order to eject the CD. And even then I couldn’t eject the CD at first. But finally I succeeded.

I tried again. But no luck, the Mac refused to recognise the CD any more. Kept ejecting it.

So I thought “CD problem”. Went and tried playing it on my Bose. 10 tracks recognised, all playable. Tried playing it on my Sony Vaio, 10 tracks recognised, all playable on Windows Media Player. Tried ripping the tracks using Media Player, also all fine.

So the problem was not with the CD but with something in the DRM space between the CD and iTunes. Specifically between the CD and iTunes. [Please bear in mind that even my worst enemies wouldn’t accuse me of being pro-Microsoft anti-Apple. I like iTunes, I like Apple, I like the Mac, I like the iPod, even if I am frustrated by the DRM. I live with it in the hope that the DRM will disappear, in the belief that the DRM exists because of the music industry and not Apple per se, and that the problem cannot continue for more than a couple of years].

Anyway, I was getting ever so slightly irked by all this.

So I checked if Boing Boing had anything on it, Cory and gang are usually pretty sharp when it comes to DRM idiocies. And sure enough I found this story: Bob Dylan and iTunes sell un-rippable music; update: Cory has placed an amended story now, which you can see here.
I read it, and moved from there to Kim Cameron’s Identity Blog. And, even though I go there often for research on Identity, for once I was motivated to comment.

For which I needed a login. Which I didn’t have, so I sought to get one. Nowhere to get one, or at least nowhere I could see without installing missing plug-ins I wasn’t allowed to install. Smelt like the Microsoft-v-Apple nonsense. I use Firefox on an Intel MacBook running OSX.

So I thought I’d use an InfoCard, the alternative route suggested. How do I get one? I read the blurb. And tried to “click on the movie below to see how Infocards work”. Nothing to click. No movie playing. The Microsoft-v-Apple smell got stronger.

No login. No way to get a login. No ability to comment therefore.

So I gave up and made myself a cup of tea.

And wrote this post.

Modern Times, indeed. People, we’re in for a bellyful of laughs at this rate.

Or a linux-based DRM-free ecosystem for all this.

While the world and her husband argue about what Web 2.0 means, whether they can use the term, what Enterprise 2.0 means, whether they can use the term, and what’s hot and what’s not, and the price of fish, there are some people quietly going about their business using the concepts without worrying about any of this.

Read what Clarence Fisher is up to. See what he is doing in his classroom, as described in this post.

The Personal Learning Network that Clarence speaks of is not just about schools, it has meaning and value in every context where learning is of value. PLNs exist everywhere anyway (except perhaps in real and virtual cemeteries); but the value of having them embedded in social software is something that many haven’t grasped. Which is why, as Clarence points out, there are still drop-out rates for these things.

Clarence is not alone. Take a look at what Kate Simpson and her friends are doing at elgg. Go see what Barbara Ganley is doing. Read everything that Judy Breck writes, either in book form or at Golden Swamp. See what Vicki Davis is up to. Track what Stephen Downes has to say about the subject of learning and social software.

Blogs and wikis aren’t about dollars or rankings or A-lists. They are about people working together on learning and on discovery; about people learning and discovering about working together.

Clarence, or for that matter anyone else I’ve mentioned above, let me know how I can help. I can be contacted at [email protected], I have only today realised that my Contact Me bit went missing after my blog disappeared in May. If anyone out there knows of other sites I should be tracking regularly, I’m all eyes.

While many of us may understand the distinction between Because Of and With companies, there are still many unanswered questions as to the right business models to use for Because Of companies. As with most of opensource (and some will say it should be all of opensource, and I tend to concur), Because Of companies are really about infrastructure and utility.

I have always maintained that With companies undergo a transition to Because Of companies over time, particularly if they are successful to a point of dominance in a given market.

Sean’s post musing on capital structures makes interesting reading in this respect, and raises some critical questions. The particular companies mentioned should only be used as examples to illustrate the point, the issue relates to all Because Of companies.
If you want to understand more about Because Of Rather than With, you may find this post useful.

This is a short post about what could be a big subject. [Do I hear sighs of relief? Enough already! :-) ]

There’s a fascinating article in the latest Scientific American MIND:

Scientific American Mind: The Teen Brain, Hard at Work
Under challenging conditions, adolescents may assess and react less efficiently than adults

The Big Endians argue that there is such a thing as a teen brain, distinct and different from an adult brain, that these differences can be seen by fMRI scans of prefrontal cortex activity, and that endogenous behaviour control begins to win in its battle with exogenous behaviour control as the adolescent grows into a mature adult. That this maturing process involves synaptic pruning and more efficient use of prefrontal cortex resources over time.

The Little Endians argue that this is pure hogwash, that all these differences are culturally and environmentally triggered, that the entire Big Endian argument is a Sell More Psychoactive Drugs campaign.

And somewhere in between they’ve figured out that the brain stays pretty much the same size from the age of six or so.

I am not a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist or a psychologist. Just an interested amateur. But the whole debate intrigues me greatly, since it has significant implications for how we deal with education and how we deal with Generation M.

Of course there are physical and physiological and hormonal changes going on, this is not in doubt. What I am intrigued about is whether there are significant changes in the brain, other than that we would call learning and adaptation.
So I ask myself, “Is it possible that teenage angst is a function of the environment and culture rather than age? That the “teenager” finds himself (or herself) asked to behave “like an adult”, while amongst a heap of adults who patently don’t “behave like adults”. And it is this that causes the angst.”

I ask myself “Is it possible that adults could have the multitasking high-speed responsive cognitive abilities that “teenagers” exhibit, if only they hadn’t had their synaptic pruning and endogenous behaviour control kicking in?”

I ask myself “Have we perpetrated a con on ourselves, force-fitting a unnecessary teenage phase into everyone’s lives by defining such a phase, then describing all the painful consequences of that force-fit as “what teenagers do”?

And finally I ask myself, “Is Generation M different because they were the first Western generation to refuse to accept the con? Did Generation M hold on to the different ways of handling the prefrontal cortex, did they refuse to allow synaptic pruning, did they somehow avoid some of the conditioning and anchoring and framing that previous generations did in the name of Growing Up?”

Update: Let me try and frame all this a little better. Is it possible that children stop asking why because they get told “because I told you so?”, and that some of this shows up as “synaptic pruning” ? Is it possible that everyone has the cognitive and multitasking abilities that Generation M portrays, but that these abilities are “conditioned” out of existence? Is it possible that the videogame and MMOG generations have held on to some abilities that prior generations have lost? Is it possible that something in what we call “maturing”, as endogenous capabilities override exogenous, actually loses some of these innate capabilities?

Hope that helps people understand where I’m coming from. In no way am I challenging the physical growth stages, these are obvious. What I seek to understand are the mental changes from a neurological sense rather than from what we term education.

Just musing. As I try to understand. Comments welcome.