Category: Four pillars

Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be

There’s been a sequence of fascinating comments to my post on Empowering Communities, with Clarence Fisher, Dominic Sayers and Nollind Whachell all chiming in, along with forays into Tribes Learning Communities and Kathy Sierra’s Cognitive Seduction post, coming to a temporary halt at Eve-Online.

A ravelling snowball that I’ve been following with interest, maybe even glee. But.

I think we need to keep in mind the Kurt Vonnegut quote that I used to headline this post.

Children discover things by accident and design and serendipity.

They play role-playing games as if it is second nature.

They congregate into subgroups and reform themselves as if they were born to do that.

Because they were. It is what they were born to do. It is their second nature.

And we have the opportunity to make technology their slaves in this sojourn.

Everything that learners can be provided via technology should be “as well as” rather than “instead of” their real worlds.

They need to have a First Life before they get into Second Life.

[Halley Suitt, thanks for reminding me of that in a post of yours sometime ago]

That is our duty and our joy.

Unauthorised and un-paid-for advertising

I was reading the Guardian this morning and chanced across this article. [How nice it is to be able to reference something in the press without having a zillion passwords and accounts…. thank you, Guardian].

The article refers to tonight’s California bake-off between Esther Dyson of Release 1.0 and PC Forum and Flight School fame,  and Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,  on the question of paid-for mail.

I know and respect Esther; while I don’t know Danny, I have a lot of time for Cory and for the EFF. So I look forward to learning some things I didn’t know tonight, particularly about why paid-for mail could be a good thing, why it could be a bad thing, and why this might create a two-tier internet, which is definitely not a good thing. These are important issues for anyone interested in information.

While on the subject of two-tier internet, you should visit http://pulver.com/savethenet/ when you get the chance. Jeff Pulver has done a brave thing and challenged us all. Take a look and, even better, enter the competition. A truly viral competition.

Which brings me back toThe Esther-Danny bake-off. Reading the article made me think. [Dangerous, I know, but forgive me]. In the same way as I used to consider all viruses to be a special case of software agent, I can’t help thinking of all spam and spim and splog as unauthorised and un-paid-for advertising.

I’m used to the ad-free space of the BBC, as and when I get the time to watch television. Watching ITV or Sky irritates me somewhat as a result, though I still manage to watch The Simpsons every now and then. So when I travel to the US, I can’t abide the television except for news channels. And, to my absolute horror, when I went to India earlier this month, I found that people watched advertising occasionally interspersed with programming.

A tangential aside. Born and raised in Calcutta, I was used to telling people to drive in the potholes and to try and avoid the bits of road that came up every now and then. That’s the way television in India now feels to me.

A tangential tangential aside. Watch this if you’re interested in Indian driving. Incredible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjrEQaG5jPM

I get irritated with DVDs where I have to sit through advertisements before the main feature.

I get irritated with pop-ups.

I like things like TiVo because I can filter out the garbage.

Even if the garbage pays for the programming that gets to me.

I don’t like garbage.

If I start thinking of spam as advertising, and I start concerning myself with all the forms of advertising that I get irritated with, then I’m prepared to pay to prevent receiving it. More later.

You just kinda wasted my precious time: Another reason for blogs and wikis

I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right

from Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right by Bob Dylan

One of my favourite songs, though I must confess I’d gotten quite used to the Peter Paul and Mary version on In the Wind,

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long before I heard Dylan’s original. It may even be possible that In the Wind came out before Dylan recorded the song. It remains to this day one of my all-time favourite albums.

We’ve seen incredible price-performance and network-effect productivity gains in the last forty years; we’ve seen communications and reproduction costs slashed as well, particularly over the last decade or so. But.

But. Human longevity has not shown any such improvement during that period. And everyone understands that simplicity and convenience and usability and screen real estate and time start mattering more and more.

Everyone knows all this. Despite that knowledge, I tend to feel we underestimate one thing about blogs and wikis; the provision of current and valuable context.

Unlike e-mail or voice or instant messaging, there is an incredible ability to sustain context within conversation using blogs. The same is true for wikis, but the conversations are different in tone and structure.

Why is this important? For three reasons:

  • Reduced switching costs in a multitasking world as a result of context provision
  • Reduced risk of misinterpretation as a result of contextual consistency
  • Faster and more accurate responses as a result of the active learning that takes place

Spending time listening to music, reading, even smelling the flowers, is a good thing.

Wasting time trying to re-acquire context and orientation is not a good thing.

More on bloggers and co-creation and content-free living

Doc picked up on something I’d said earlier, and has provided a number of links to the blogger-as-thinker-and-co-creator space. Well worth a read, with some wonderfully tangential moves.

And all this brings me on to something else. Maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe it’s jaded people living jaded lives. But I get the feeling that many people don’t like saying “I agree” or even “I disagree”, much less defending their decision to agree or disagree. This creates a tendency to damn with faint praise, to murmur and snipe rather than to speak out, to take a “the world is my fence and I have every right to sit on it” approach. Wrong, at least in the blogosphere.
Blogs are conversations. Not monologues. It is natural for bloggers to reinforce what is said elsewhere, or to disagree-with-reinforcement, as the ideas develop and enrich and move on. And it is not ego or mutual admiration, but a passion for learning. And improving that learning.

Thinking about blogging: The creative act is not performed by the artist alone

The full quote from Marcel Duchamp is given below:

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

There is something important in what Duchamp said, something I must understand more clearly. He’s an interesting guy, take a look at what the Wikipedia article says about him:

  • While he is most often associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements, his participation in Surrealism was largely behind the scenes, and after being involved in New York Dada, he barely participated in Paris Dada.
  • Thousands of books and articles attempt to interpret Duchamp’s work and philosophy, but in interviews and his writing Duchamp only added to the mystery. The interpretations interested him as creations of their own, and as reflections of the interpreter.
  • A playful man, Duchamp prodded thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much with words, but with actions such as dubbing a urinal art and naming it Fountain, and by “giving up” art to play chess. He produced relatively few artworks, as he quickly moved through the avant-garde rhythms of his time.

If he were alive today he’d probably be called something like RageBoy -)

As far as I can make out, nobody sued Duchamp for doing this to the Mona Lisa:

PicabiaDuchamp-Mona-2.jpg

In keeping with that, I have no hesitation in sharing what RageBoy did to the Scoble/Israel book. Do be careful, people have been known to injure themselves looking at this.

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For those who are interested, it is worth reading Duchamp’s 1957 essay on The Creative Act. Thank you mindwebart3, whoever or whatever you may be, for the link.