Dave Pollard: Music, Film, Literature, Television and the Arts

CCK08: Connectivism and the Challenge of Making Connections in Vast and Complex Networks

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:05:38 GMT

We're now 2/3 the way through the 12-week MOOC (online course) on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. Next week we get into the role of the teacher and the future of education in an online, connected world, and I'll have a lot to say about that. But while there has been some discussion about complexity in this course, we have made little progress in dealing with the ultimate question that I think this course raises:

In a world with a billion people online, connected in multiple and unfathomably complex ways, how do you find, and then connect, with just the right people to do what you need to do?

Here's a summary of some of the ideas I've written about on this blog about how to do this:

Know yourself well, so you really know what you're looking for in a partner (in enterprise, in community, or whatever). You can't find the right people until you know what you're looking for.
Get attention by saying or doing something important or interesting. Articulate an unrecognized need or a creative idea or a provocative possibility or an intriguing offer. Do something bold and imaginative. Make something truly novel that the world needs (a prototype will do). This is not easy, but if you can get people's attention, you are more likely to have the people you need to find, seek you out and connect with you.
Craft an invitation. Write up something compelling and send it out to as many people as possible, asking them to forward it to others. The people who accept your invitation will be the right people.
Get out there and have a lot of conversations and collaborations. Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. So join groups that will expose you to people with common interests, and converse and work with their members. The more people you talk with, seriously, about things that matter to you, the more people you are likely to find who share your passions and your purpose -- the people you are meant to make a life or a living with, or just work together with on an important project.
Be loving and generous. Great collaborations and partnerships have great chemistry. Open yourself up to that chemistry, and let others know you are open to it.
Be attentive. The people who can make a difference in your life, on your project, and in the world are often not the people you would expect. Listen, watch, feel what's being felt but not said, draw people out.
Seek diversity. The wisdom of crowds demands diverse perspectives, ideas, ways of thinking. Echo chambers are terrible places to generate new ideas and ways of thinking.
Draw on the strength of weak links. The people you seek may well be two or three degrees of separation from the people in your immediate networks. Ask the people you know who they know that fit what you're looking for.

This is a big list, but it's an unsatisfying one. A lot of people are doing these things, yet finding people this way still seems very much a hit-and-miss proposition.

What else do you know that works? How do you find the right people? Where do you look?

Category: Communication

Links of the Week - Saturday/Sunday October 25-26, 2008: The Sacred Places Edition

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:28:41 GMT

Cartoonist Tom Toles shows us this year's scariest Hallowe'en costume. Thanks to my daughter Tiffany for the link.

The Power of Place: My friend Amy Lenzo is working on a four-woman project called The Power of Place with the Collective Wisdom Initiative to discover 'transformational' meeting places, where collaborative work just works better. Bowen Island, which is the first such place that comes to mind for me, is already on their map. Their plan is to identify the principles and practices that make such space work (a kind of pattern language exercise) and then see if they can be extended to create such places virtually. Brilliant project! If you have thoughts on this, post your comments to CWI. Specifically they want to know:

Where are these meeting places that have demonstrated their transformational influence?
What are the characteristics and qualities they demonstrate?
How do they contribute to experiences of transformation and generativity?
What is the potential of transformational meeting places— if made visible worldwide — collectively committed to service in the world?

Being Poor: Three years ago John Scalzi wrote an extraordinary (and suddenly timely) article about the agony of poverty, and what it means, every day, to your sense of hope and self-esteem. Thanks to my Alaskan friend Chris Lott for the link.

The Most Radical Thing You Can Do: The most radical thing you can do, says Rebecca Solnit in Orion, quoting Gary Snyder, is stay home. Live there, create work there, connect there, build new bottom-up authentic community there. Stop driving and flying and running away and make things work right where you are. It's your right, and your responsibility.

Silence Like Scouring Sand: Also from Orion, Kathleen Dean Moore writes a lovely article on the attempt to make some places free from all human noise. Just listen:

How shall I describe the beauty of this place? It’s an open glade, like the nave of a cathedral, carpeted in deep green moss and deer ferns. There are huckleberry bushes, their bare green branches standing in the rosy litter of their own fallen leaves. The bunchberry leaves have turned red, but the wood sorrel is intensely green. From the forest floor, the columns of the trees rise impossibly high, closing at last in a vaulted green ceiling. Everything glitters with scattering rain. Even the air twinkles, as if it were champagne.

And what do I hear? A tiny lisp—a bushtit maybe. Tick, tap, pock of waterdrops, different sounds for every surface they strike. I hear a drop of water pop when it hits a maple leaf forty feet way. There is the faraway rustle of the river. Time passes, unmeasured. Then the quiet is filled with the clatter of a bald eagle, a sound like stones shaken in a tin pot. Sitting on his heels in the damp moss, Gordon grins, but doesn’t speak.

Next to him, almost hidden under the log, is a small metal canister. This is the Jar of Quiet Thoughts. Gordon put it here, an invitation to people who visit One Square Inch to record their responses to the silence. I open the jar and pull out crumpled scraps of paper. Many wrote of love. One couple came here to be married, a person came to pray, another found deep connection here, in the call of a thrush. Others wrote of wonder, to hear the voices of the deep quiet. I realize that One Square Inch has become a sacred place—silence has made it so. Quiet is a kind of reverence.

A small wind shakes a huckleberry bush. A crow calls from the crown of an alder. A hemlock needle falls on my shoulder, and I turn, astonished to have heard it land.

Deeper in Debt: My friend Rob Paterson has posted the scary chart above showing the gap between household financial assets and financial liabilities in the US. That's minus $4 trillion, folks, and this was before the recent housing and stock market collapses.

...But They Still Don't Get It: Bush economist Greg Mankiw admits that the IMF and other deniers of the possibility of another Great Depression on the horizon are oblivious to the 1929 patterns forming, and the lessons of history. I've asserted, for the record, that I think such a depression is still a couple of decades off, though we're going to have some grim times ahead before then. What astounds me are the dreamers who still expect the economy to bottom out, turn around, and resume perpetual growth imminently.

Shrinking Our Way to Survival: New research shows that, to achieve CO2 reductions needed to avert climate catastrophe, we need to shrink the global economy by between 1 and 3 1/2 percent every year through 2050. The recent contraction in affluent nations, if we embraced it instead of panicking over it, could move us along that path, provided (and this is a huge 'provided') the rich and powerful (who received almost all the incremental wealth in the last 40 years), do most of the shrinking over the next 40, and restore some level of equity to our society and economy.

Canada Dumps Toxic Asbestos in Struggling Nations: Canada remains the only affluent nation that still hasn't banned the use and export of asbestos, which has horrific health consequences for both producers and users, and the right-wing Canadian minority government is working hand in glove with the asbestos industry this week to keep it that way. Shameful. Thanks to Graham Clark for the link.

The Law, American Style: So let me get this straight: The "tough on crime" Bush administration supports "three strikes" laws allowing repeat offenders to be imprisoned for life, and supports capital punishment for a host of crimes, but if they, in their absolute discretion, decide that something in the law (like a prohibition on torture or extraordinary rendition) is not to their liking they just need to write a "signing statement" exempting themselves from it. So the President, charged with upholding the law, is above the law, and the constitution doesn't apply to him. "The Bush administration has informed Congress that it is bypassing a law intended to forbid political interference with reports to lawmakers by the Department of Homeland Security." Can someone explain to me why for that reason alone this whole regime is not in jail?

Credit Default Swaps: 55 Trillion Dollar Time Bomb: Even the head of the SEC says the completely unregulated CDS market has played a big role in the collapse of financial markets, and could yet undo the trillion dollar patch we've placed on the wound, unless it's properly regulated, and fast. And even Alan Greenspan is now basically admitting that "self-regulated" markets are unregulated, rogue markets, a colossal failure of policy and political will, and a catastrophic mistake.

Just for Fun: Two wonderful and inspiring and lovingly crafted songs on YouTube. From the UK's Imogen Heap, the wonderful anti-procrastination song Headlock. And (thanks Patti for the link) from Tracy Chapman, the romantic and moving song The Promise.

Thought for the Week: From the writer's preface to the controversial play Doubt by John Patrick Shanley (thanks to Tree for the link):

What is Doubt? Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who's your best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.

This is Who I Am, Now

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 03:10:12 GMT

I confess that my rambling post on Monday was my way of thinking through what I wanted to say in this one. Over the past couple of years, after transforming the way I lived as a result of my serious illness, I have learned an enormous amount about myself, and in the process, about other people, about the way the world really works, and about how we might live and make a living better. As a consequence, this is who I am, now:

I am, as I have become fond of saying, a space through which stuff passes. Like all animals, I am in substance a container, a water-filled bag of self-organizing, self-managing, interdependent creatures that have evolved this container as an effective means for their survival, health, mobility, and comfort. This staggeringly-complex container, including the brain and senses these creatures evolved as their feature-detection system, is wonderful, and it brings them great joy. I am happy for them, and honoured to represent them to the rest of the world. They are very clever, these creatures who constantly tell 'me' what to do. They have a million years of knowledge in their DNA, and they are almost invariably right in the billions of decisions they make for me. This despite the fact that the unnatural world that has evolved in the last few millennia is utterly different from the world their knowledge is adapted to, so they need to be improvisational as well as instinctive. And they are.

What they tell me to do, most of the time, is engage in nine activities that suit their purposes, allow me to coexist with other humans in this terribly overcrowded and overstressed world, and amuse me in the process. I told you they were clever! These nine activities:

playing	learning	loving
conversing	giving (ideas, knowledge, competencies)	self-managing
being present	writing	reflecting

I used to do these and other things with specific goals and intentions in mind, but I've come to realize that I do best when I let go of outcomes and just focus on practicing these nine things, making time and space for them, getting a little better all the time -- and when I do, the right outcomes seem to emerge automatically. So now I spend most of my waking hours practicing these things. This is what I do.

In spending my life doing these things, I have grown astonishingly and almost continuously happy. After fifty years mostly filled with anxiety and depression, I am lighter than air, filled with joy every day. I am becoming, inexorably, what I was always meant to be, and it is a wonderful journey. The grief I feel for Gaia is always with me, a part of me, but now it is my strength, my connection, my understanding, and it no longer saps me. I know I cannot save the world from the dreadful extinction that's begun, yet I know that what I do, now, is making a positive difference, and has made and will make the world a better place. It's all I can do, and I'm proud of it, and of me.

I have developed a consistent approach to doing all of these things, that seems to make me a better practitioner of them:

Sense:	Observe, listen, pay attention, focus, open up your senses, perceive everything that has a bearing on the issue at hand. Connect.
Self-control:	Don't prejudge or jump to conclusions. Don't lose your cool. Focus.
Understand:	Make sure you have the facts and appreciate the context. Things are the way they are for a reason. Know what that reason is. Sympathize.
Question:	Ask, don't tell. Challenge. Think critically.
Imagine:	Picture, hear, feel what could be. Be visionary. Every problem is an opportunity. Anything is possible.
Offer:	Consider. Give something away. Create options, new avenues to explore. Suggest possibilities. Lend a hand. Help.
Collaborate:	Create something together. Solve a problem with a collective answer better than any set of individual answers. Learn to yield, to build on, to bridge, to adapt your thinking.

My "sweet spot", what I do uniquely well and love doing which is of use to others, is to facilitate self-understanding and self-change, in myself and others, by imagining possibilities. Imagining possibilities greatly enriches the quality and pleasure of all nine of the things I do. What is then done with those possibilities is not of great concern to me -- I'm an idealist, not a realist, and I'm not very practical, coordinated or good with details. I'm a dreamer, which can be a problem. I've been known to walk into trees.

I'm also somewhat self-preoccupied. I love to love, and be in love, and give things to people, and play, and converse, and these are very social activities, but I confess they're very selfish. Being loved, being understood, having the things I give to people appreciated, are not really important to me at all. If the people I love and converse with and play with don't get what they want from interaction with me, then that's fine, I will find others to be with, no problem, and I hope they find what they seek from others, too. I'm like a child, impatient, easily distracted. Love (all five types of it) is the addiction the creatures who make up 'me' have chosen to give me -- there is never too much of that exquisite chemical rush of arousal, euphoria, bliss, affection, delight, pleasure and appreciation. Yet strangely, for reasons that I can't fathom, I don't really like people that much -- given a choice, I generally and consistently prefer the company of wilder creatures. The truth is I love the people I imagine those I love to be, not who they really are (if I could ever know who they really are). Yet those I love rarely disappoint me as I learn more about them -- my ability to imagine them as more lovable still is limitless and incorrigible.

I do have a problem with neediness. Although no one believes me when I say it, I don't think I have any (one-on-one social) needs myself. And for whatever reason, I tend to disengage when I am with others who profess or appear to need something from me personally. Call it a fear of intimacy or commitment or responsibility, it is what it is. I don't want to be needed; it makes me feel trapped. I have to be free. Perhaps it's because I'm working hard to become more authentically myself, to be nobody-but-myself, so that when someone needs or expects something from me I fear they'll make me everybody-else in the process of being what they need or expect me to be. I try to warn people about this (I tell them I am polyamorous, and lazy, explain about compersion, and warn them of my selfishness and insensitivity and intolerance of neediness and expectation) but I still end up hurting people, which does make me unhappy. I try to be absolutely honest and yet gentle with others, and I have no tolerance for dishonest or cruel people. Maybe I need to wear a sign.

That's not to say that I don't need other people in order to be healthy and happy and to do many of the nine things I do. I just don't need any specific person to do these things. The more people I love, talk with, and am in community with, the happier and more social I become. I like to spread myself around, probably too thin for others' benefit, but then I already admitted I'm selfish. That doesn't prevent me from being generous, but only if you don't need or expect it of me. Let's play, talk, learn, share, love together, but then let me go and I'll let you go. I'll see you again when our paths next cross, and we can do it all again. And I need time alone, too, to reflect and recharge, and time in nature, away from the cities and suburbs and farms that become each day more alien and atrocious to me.

Last month I wrote:

I am just the space through which stuff passes, a part of the unfathomably complex dance of all-life-on-Earth. A part of that dance, it seems to me, is learning to improvise which of that passing-through stuff to touch, and which to just let go. It's not a choice, so much as a knowing, a collective and connected knowing, an instinctive and sensual knowing. "Ah, I know how I can make this better, or clearer, or more interesting, or more useful, or more innovative, or more fun -- there!" Like the expert who just knows, from practice, where the puck or ball is going to be, I'm learning, perpetually, to be there, to do that stuff I do that helps just a little bit, to know what to do and to have fun doing it.

The wild creatures whose world I increasingly share understand this well, and it will take a lifetime of practice to become half as wise as they are in the arts of living, and making a living, and being of use, and being happy, without even trying. Just being the space, and touching the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through.

This is who I am, now.

Category: Human Nature

Postscript: Where I'll Be This Weekend Oct 24-26: Bioneers By the Bay Sustainable Enterprise Conference in New Bedford MA. If you're going to be there let me know!

What Makes Us "Us"

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:58:59 GMT

Last year I wrote a 2-part article on The Chemistry of Love. It describes (a) the four self-reinforcing chemicals that make us "fall in love" emotionally (phenylethylamine, dopamine, norepinephrine* and oxytocin), (b) the chemicals that produce erotic feelings (testosterone and estrogens), and (c) the "attachment" chemicals that keep us attracted to love partners after the "falling in love" chemicals wear off (endorphins).

For most creatures, including humans, nature cycles us through these chemicals to encourage us to procreate regularly, responsibly, and (to encourage diversity of the gene pool) polyamorously. The cycle lasts approximately four years:

the "falling in love" hormones are secreted at the start of this cycle, and they endure only long enough to maximize the probability of procreation (any longer than that and they would detract from our paying attention to the needs of the community)
the erotic hormones are synchronized to the reproductive cycle of the lovers, to maximize the probability of conception
as the effect of the "falling in love" hormones naturally wears off, endorphins (opiates) are produced to replace them, as the ecstasy of early love is replaced by the attachment drug, to encourage temporary pair-bonding for the benefit of the young offspring
for the normal four-year breast-feeding cycle of the young, the mother produces hormones that prevent pregnancy and increase attachment to the child
at the end of the four-year cycle, as the young are weaned and able to walk on their own, the endorphins wear off, and the cycle begins again, with attraction to new and different lovers (this is probably why four years after marriage is when divorce peaks)

In other words, we are "programmed" by our bodies to fall hopelessly in love approximately every four years, with multiple and diverse partners, and, if that falling in love produces offspring, to hone in on a partner-bond (not necessarily between the parents of the child, which indigenous humans would not be able to identify in any case) until the end of that four-year cycle, and then to break that partner-bond and start over again with a new round of falling in love.

Our bodies do this "programming" to us because this is the most successful formula for creating healthy and enduring communities, in balance with all-life-on-Earth. It has taken them a long time to evolve this formula. Living organisms, humans included (as Stewart & Cohen have explained), are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit. And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise these creatures' actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.

Our bodies self-manage (or, if you prefer, control 'us') through two complex networks: nervous (electromagnetic) and endocrine (hormonal). The two networks have co-evolved to deal with different challenges and needs. Both networks are excellent learners. Throughout the body, especially in the brain and digestive system, the two have learned to work together very effectively. As a consequence of mutually-beneficial communication and collaboration, most species have developed cultures -- sets of agreed-upon shared beliefs and behaviours.

If you think erotic love is all about sex, you're mistaken. The term is taken from the god Eros, and he wasn't (originally) the god of sensual love. He was the god of playful love. This past weekend, as I went for a long walk in the woods in the autumn sunshine, the love I felt for Gaia was pure eroticism. Watching the wild birds soar, feeling the bark of the trees and the wind, running through the leaves and into a strand of forest so thick that no sun reached its floor. I've had the same feeling flirting, or playing outside in the rain, or in clever, playful banter with dear friends of both genders. No question in my mind that the rush of testosterone imbues each of these arousing experiences with love and delight. And the best sex (whether with or without a partner) is likewise, I think, joyful, light, unhurried and playful. So much of the sex that is depicted in stories and films strikes me by contrast as desperate, cathartic, escapist, even violent. Not playful, or erotic, at all. Like the difference between a sip of a fine wine and the addict's quivering injection of enough narcotic to stem the pain and anxiety of withdrawal.

As I teased out the subtlety of erotic love, and realized it was more (and more complex) than I had thought, I began to think about whether intellectual, sensual and aesthetic love might, similarly, be more complex. Can they be teased apart from the emotional love that the potent chemical cocktail I described earlier provokes?

To take an example from public consciousness, I will confess to a certain infatuation with the artistry of both Sarah Polley and Johnny Depp. I find both actors beautiful. I am irresistibly drawn to people who are very intelligent (without being arrogant about it), people who are very talented, and people who are very passionate (in an un-needy, independent way). Both actors strike me as having these qualities, and both have a huge fan base who would probably say they 'love' them.

What is the chemistry here? I think the aesthetic love, the love of beauty, is the same, and probably stems from the same chemical stirrings, as the love one feels for one's favourite music, poetry or other works of art. Being emotionally "in love" certainly intensifies aesthetic appreciation (when it doesn't completely distract from it), but I believe they are two different types of love with different chemical catalysts.

Intellectual love, likewise, I think, is something apart from these other loves. The spark of imagining, creating, appreciating an idea or argument or learning or having an aha! realization creates a delight that is quite different from that of falling in love or appreciating beauty. It is, I think, a form of pattern creation or pattern recognition that fires the synapses of the brain, and hence might be more a chemistry of the nervous system than the endocrine. Learning brings joy and a chemical reward for the same reason we feel elation when we fall in love or recognize beauty -- because our bodies want to reinforce that behaviour for Darwinian, survival advantage. We love learning and ideas because they are good for us.

And finally, I suspect that sensual love, teased apart from the aesthetic, emotional, intellectual and erotic, is also chemically induced and a reward for behaviour our bodies want to reinforce. Pleasant tastes and smells, especially, tickle our 'taste buds' but I am sure also provoke a neural message that says "yes, please, more of this".

No question that, in this chemical soup, the different forms of love are conflated, merge into one in our romantic consciousness, and reinforce each other. But they are, nevertheless, the result of different chemical reactions and can exist in isolation.

The reason for our catastrophic population explosion is simply that (1) we acquired technology that allowed us to keep babies alive without mother's milk (and hence accelerate the renewed fertility of mothers after childbirth), and (2) we acquired technology that allowed us to kill off our natural predators and diseases, which would in a healthy system kill off enough of us, mostly painlessly, to keep our numbers in balance and cull out the weak. In so doing, we screwed up a million years of effective evolutionary development in a mere thirty thousand years, and as a consequence have precipitated the sixth great extinction event in our planet's known history, including our own extinction. Oops.

Unfortunately, as our species began to overpopulate and desolate the Earth, we had to evolve a new culture, the stress-responsive, hierarchical, constraining, passive-consumer culture we call 'civilization'. Without these cultural constraints -- this obedience to hierarchy, this managed scarcity, and this becoming-everybody-else conformity -- we could not live together under such horrifically crowded, constantly struggling, unhappy circumstances. There is now a war of wills going on inside us -- between the will of our body, to do what it has been programmed to do over a million years of constant learning, and the will of our culture, to do what we must do just to survive in our terrible modern and unsustainable world. There is no reconciling the two, which is why we are so ill with the symptoms of this war -- chronic diseases caused by chronic modern stress our body is not equipped to cope with, and the mental illness that plagues every creature denied the freedom to be nobody-but-herself.

This is who we are -- a joyous complicity of the creatures in our bodies, now wracked with the stress of having to be everybody-else, of having forgotten who we are and where we belong and how we are a part of all-life-on-Earth, connected.

And still we are driven by the beat of that ancient drum to fall in love, anew, every four years a new beginning, a new ecstasy, that bliss, that desire, that spasm of pure joy that eclipses so briefly all the grief and loss and sorrow and anger and shame we feel.

It is all we can do.

* incorrectly spelled as neopinephrine in the earlier articles

Category: Human Nature

Saturday Links for the Week: October 18, 2008

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:52:10 GMT

Photo: Colleen's dog, just because just looking at him makes me smile.

What Moves the Artist: Most of my circles, and my readers, are artists in one way or another, so I was intrigued by Malcolm Gladwell's portrait of two forms of artistic genius -- the conceptual prodigy (e.g. Picasso), who peaks early, and cares about outcome, versus the experimenting slogger (e.g. Cézanne), who peaks late, and is preoccupied by learning and process. TS Eliot, my favourite poet, made the transition, and though Prufrock (written at age 23) is his most loved work, the Four Quartets (written a quarter century later) is, in my opinion, far more accomplished. In a piece a couple of weeks ago PS Pirro wrote "I visualize the end product, but not the daily process. That's my error. Because one page at a time, one sentence at a time, it's the doing that matters. What's done is just... done." I am like her -- I have tried to make the transition from the flashes of brilliance in my young writing (with much inactivity and some ghastly and embarrassing stuff in between) to the more careful, studied work I do today. My great learning from Bowen Island was: There is only the practice. The genius of the prodigy is electric, inspiring, lyrical, transformative, but the genius of the patient and present practitioner is ultimately more connective, recognizable, and even (I suppose I should say this with an apologetic shrug) -- useful.

The Real Battle for American Hearts and Minds: The anonymous political pundit who guest-posts on Joe Bageant's blog has another brilliant analysis of what's happening in the 'heartland'. Excerpts:

The primary motivating factor in the development of the religious right is a defensive response to the challenges posed by the power of popular consumer and entertainment culture and not a backlash against progressive or liberal ideas and social movements...

When it comes to predicting the outcome of this struggle, there should be no doubt which side will ultimately prevail in this fight. Religious fundamentalism here and abroad is no match for the powers of popular, consumer and entertainment culture. The reason for that is very simple: popular consumer culture is the most powerful and attractive ideology in human history.[Unlike all other religions and ideologies] it demands no sacrifice from its faithful. It demands only that you purchase and consume and that you become passively entertained...

If progressives are serious about winning victories that can realign our politics, they must find a way to marry the legitimate criticism of the decadence of popular culture with criticism of the decadence of an economic system that creates the savage inequalities we see in America today. Once that is done, the entire project of the right collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Writing in Circles: Pohangina Pete writes poetically about how complexity touches us.

Winged Pilgrimage: Cassandra writes rhapsodically about the annual migration of the snow geese and asks whether our pilgrimages might have been inspired by our observation of birds, the dinosaurs' flying descendants. I think it is entirely possible. Having made two pilgrimages this year, on the heels of saying I would trade places with a chickadee in a heartbeat, I think what we must realize is that for most birds migration is not an automatic instinct, it is a choice, a decision that flight to another climate is worth the many dangers that flight brings with it. Migration is a conscious movement, one dictated by necessity and the drive to survive. Our own pilgrimages are no less so. Excerpt:

My own inarticulateness, in the face of the emotions the geese arouse in me, tells me I'm in the place that contains fire and the great waterfalls; the sound of the hermit thrush and the flash of a school of bright minnows; a silent shaft of sun on moss in a dark woodland. The snow geese fly in that space of porosity between myself and the rest of nature, following a map imprinted in my own marrow, a route stretching forward beyond language, and back to a time before tongues.

And Wheeled Pilgrimage: Cheryl is chronicling her amazing pilgrimage around the perimeter of Australia with pictures and stories of the people she's meeting and the astonishingly beautiful places she's discovering. If you've never been to Australia, reading this blog will give you a flavour for life "down under".

Stories of Transformation: Jen points us to a remarkable TED talk about Stories of Transformation, by Chris Abani, that shows us why stories are so powerful and illuminating. In one story he explains how his mother broke down when a Portuguese woman at an airport where Chris' family was fleeing the horrors and atrocities of the Biafran war, emptied her suitcase to give her and her family everything she had packed, to help them begin to rebuild their lives. Her explanation for this breakdown after stoically coping with all the outrages and terrors of war:

You can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror, but a simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you.

Just for Fun: Taller Than Trees, a delightful stop motion animation short by Joseph Mann. Thanks to Our Descent for the link. And in a sillier vein, Beth Patterson points us to Palin as President (click on the items in the oval office and make sure you have sound on).

Thought for the Week: Forget What "Is" (and What Is Wrong) Now and What/Who Caused It, and Just Start Over: From Jack Martin Leith, commenting to Geoff Brown and expanding upon Peter Block's argument that we need to stop looking at things as problems to be 'fixed' (and people as their 'cause') and start over with a fresh sheet of paper looking at what we want to create now (not solutions, not future state, not incremental approaches):

Solutions imply problems, in the way that yes implies no and day implies night. It’s not a shift from problems to solutions we need, but from problem solving to creating what we want - and making what we want not our desired future, but our desired present.

Saturday Links for the Week -- October 11, 2008

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:37:33 GMT

photo by Maren Yumi

Mindful Wandering: The coined term (by Barbara Ganley) is "slow blogging", but I much prefer the term my friend Chris Lott uses: "mindful wandering". The idea is to see blogging, which is really just a new way of recording your thoughts in a diary, as a meditative practice, taking the time to ponder the meaning of what you're reading, thinking and writing, letting your mind meander in thoughtful and creative ways to "make sense" of it. I find that some of my best blog posts are those I've stopped and restarted several times, allowing time for thoughts to percolate and new ideas to emerge. Letting your readers follow your thought process, putting yourself in context, can greatly enrich the value of what you write, at least for those readers with the patience to allow themselves to be immersed in "where you are" as you are writing, to enter, as much as is possible in a diary, into intimate, tacit conversation with you. Some of the bloggers in my gravitational community (listed at right) are very proficient at diarizing their mindful wandering: Colleen has been doing this delightfully, day by day, chronicling her month-long retreat in Seattle. Beth's blog is another great example.

An Audience Without A Reason to Care Is Just a Bunch of People That You Have to Clean Up After: Justin Kownacki explains the need to engage your audience with something more than spectacle if you hope to build a relationship that endures, and goes on to tell you how to do it. If you haven't been watching his hilarious online series Something to Be Desired, check it out.

The Effort is Worth It: Justin also directs us to Seth's blog post on our growing propensity (in light of the billions made and lost by lazy, greedy, incompetent financial brokers) to believe luck has more to do with what comes of our life than effort. Seth prescribes a diet of less mindless activity, more effort on important things, more exercise, more volunteerism, more time meaningfully spent with those you love, and more financial frugality. I'm there.

Community Effort That Pays Off: Tree pointed me to this amazing list of initiatives and proposals by the work groups of the Corvallis (Oregon) Sustainability Coalition. It's an ambitious and inspiring list in 12 sectors of public life: community inclusion, economic vitality, education, energy, food, health, housing, land use, natural areas, transport, waste reduction, and water use -- let's hope the town council will listen and implement them. If you have (or should have) a program like this in your community, this would be a great list to get you started. Geoff Brown came up with a similar list for St Kilda Australia, as part of the Sustainable Living At Home community activism project.

Story-Telling Resources: From the same vector as the above links, Barbara provides a veritable host of useful links on storytelling, and CogDog Alan Levine provides (with a caveat on not getting preoccupied with tools), 50+ tools that enable storytelling. Thanks to Tree for the links. BTW, a great everyday site for story-telling guidance and ideas is my friend Shawn Callahan's Anecdote site.

Why We Fall for Greenwashing: Cataclysmia explains the dangerous appeal of corporate greenwashing -- that it reassures us that we don't have to change. It is human nature to be resistant to change, to only change when we must, and we are under siege these days to change in so many ways that when a corporation, cynically, dishonestly, tells us that they're good corporate citizens we are inclined to want to believe it.

Explaining the Financial System Collapse: Six of the best articles on the current mess:

Market Oracle has a smart, easy-to-understand synopsis of the cause for the recent market collapse, including the still-worrisome issue of Credit Default Swaps.
And here (thanks to Michael Serres for the link) is a cartoon version of the same explanation.
When it comes to solutions, I've been arguing for a post-industrial Natural Gift/Generosity Economy for years now, and (thanks to David Parkinson and several others for the link) Charles Eisenstein sums up how our equating money with value led us to this disaster, and why we need a Gift Economy to prevent a recurrence.
Herman Daly explains all the dominoes that had to be lined up (and need to be put back) to allow this folly to continue.
Paul Krugman explains why just buying banks' bad debts is unwise and that a better strategy is to take equity in (i.e. nationalize) the faltering banks as the UK did this weekend.
And this is especially true when some of the bailout beneficiaries just use the proceeds for an extravagant executive party.

The Attempts to Steal the Election Continue: If you can't defeat the opponent by heavily-financed character assassination, outright lies, gerrymandering, or rigging voting machines, well, then, just don't let supporters of your opponents vote. In politics, it seems, the end always justifies the means.

More on Soldiers in the US Streets: Patrick Leahy weighs in on the decision to deploy a US army unit to the 'homeland'. This has stirred up no small hysteria, but I'm still not sure what it really means.

And the Fuse of the Population Bomb Still Burns On: The Bush Administration's anti-family-planning ideology has greatly worsened the lives of as many as a billion women deliberately deprived of inexpensive family planning information and tools.

The Problem with Monogamy: Daisy gets it: "It's absolutely clear that no one is meant to love and be loved by just one person, and that we slowly kill ourselves when try to make this happen. No one can meet all of another person's needs, and there is no reason to expect anyone to do so...The natural outcropping of this, when we do it daily — when we form many diverse loving relationships, as many as will grow, and treat their maintenance as important work — is community." Sigh. Someday, perhaps, the whole world will understand.

Just for Fun: It didn't really happen, but this 'sign feud' between two churches over dogs' souls is delightful nevertheless. Thanks to my new colleague Miranda for the link.

Image: wild horses near Chornobyl

Thought for the Week: Thanks to Sarah Burridge for putting me on to the poetry of Robert Pinsky (by quoting the sixth line of this poem):

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.

And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.

In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

CCK08 Week Five: Groups vs Networks vs Communities

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:13:25 GMT

Week 5 of the Connectivism MOOC is about the distinction between groups and networks. One of the key readings for the week was written by my friend Stephen Downes when he was obviously high on something (possibly New Zealand, which will do that to you).

The point of the lesson is to distinguish groups, which are apparently inherently homogeneous and hierarchical, from networks, which are apparently neither. Members of both are connected to each other. George Siemens asserts that most organized collective activity (like education) fails to recognize the identity of the selves within the collective. Rather than groups vs networks, he distinguishes collectives (in which the self is subsumed) from connectives (in which autonomy of self is retained). "As we integrate our ideas and concepts with others'" he says, "and we extend them into some kind of collective activity, there is an important protection of self in which we retain our identity and our contributions."

I thought this dichotomy rather interesting in the context of the diagram above (which Chris Corrigan and I collectively, or perhaps connectively, created) of the dynamic of decision making which moves from individual engagement and cognition through collective conversation and consensus and thence to individual action, following a Scharmer "U" pattern.

Are we not, I thought, iteratively and simultaneously collective and connective, producing some "work product" that is collective, that of the integrated group, and some that is connective, the individual acceptance of responsibility and resultant actions, whether they be done alone or with others?

George goes on to warn that groups will coerce individuals with deviant ideas to conform to the group norm, with the result that groups stifle innovation. Networks are positioned as the compromise in the continuum from highly diverse independent individuals and conforming, structured groups.

This model doesn't jibe with what I've observed in workplaces throughout my life. Using the terminology of the Wisdom of Crowds, my experience has been that:

"crowds" that are diverse have particular talents (decision-making and prediction among them) that are better than that of either "expert" individuals or non-diverse groups;
innovation works best when there is a balance between creative thinkers and critical thinkers; and
groups and networks that do not share a common understanding of an issue spend most of their time and energy trying to find a common context, and often never get around to applying their abilities to finding solutions to the issue.

Can groups be dangerous? Of course. Groupthink has ruined many once-great companies. Cults are one of the scourges of civilization. Mobs, of organized criminals, religious zealots or drunken college students, can cause havoc and heartache and ruin lives.

But groups of people with a shared purpose and shared set of values and principles have also, as Margaret Mead has said, achieved important changes that would not have been possible any other way. They are what we call communities.

Networks are useful for the reasons explained in Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties". They are 'farm teams' for the communities that you do your most important work with, the 'trade routes' between communities. They are often delightful, stimulating, and helpful when you need something in a hurry. But to me, networks are too loose, too fragmented to be communities or to accomplish any of the important things that communities can do.

Communities are connective and collective and only they can fully enable the powerful activities depicted in the graphic above. As I've said before, love, conversation and community are the essence of what it means to be human, alive, connected, part of all-life-on-Earth.

Play

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:55:19 GMT

Johan Huizinga, who wrote a book on the subject, defined play as follows:

a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly

Other books have urged the incorporation of more play into health and fitness routines, school activities, work activities, and of course social activities. Play is more engaging, easier to persevere with, more relaxing and stimulating and creative. It helps you to think differently.

We use the term to mean many things: hobbies, games, dancing, role-playing, roughhousing and other unstructured physical exercise (alone or socially), story-telling and other imagining and innovating activities, joking, flirting and other empathic activities, using toys, and a variety of sports and recreational activities. We say we 'play' a musical instrument. We contrast it to work, which is 'serious' activity. Yet for many play is fiercely competitive, and for them it is only 'fun' if you win. Is this still play?

A few years ago I wrote about Tom Robbins' concept of 'crazy wisdom':

Robbins describes his personal experiences with near-suicidal depression, and how he was able to pull himself back from the brink of what he calls Weltschmerz (What a wonderful word! -- per dictionary.com it means "Sadness over the evils of the world, especially as an expression of romantic pessimism.") The trick was to rediscover playfulness, or what the Tibetan Buddhists call Crazy Wisdom. Robbins says it is "the wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one's gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything".

Hmmm. For many people I know, what should properly be play (i.e. joyous and fun) is instead essential therapy for coping with their Weltschmerz:

Our commercial entertainments are ultra-violent and escapist (to inure us to the pain of everyday modern living?)
Comedies are cruel put-downs of caricatures, whose sole function seems to be to make those with low self-esteem feel that at least someone is stupider or more ridiculous than they are.
Sports are either so competitive as to provoke fights and tantrums, or so 'extreme' as to provoke near-cardiac arrest. This is supposed to be fun? And what exactly is a 'spectator sport' anyway -- vicarious play?
Video games are addictive, needing no imagination and little real social interaction, and seem to test one's capacity to manage chronic excessive adrenaline flow rather than evoking anything that could be called real pleasure.
In fact, a lot of 'recreational activities' (what exactly is being 'recreated' here?) are addictive -- gambling, drug use, overeating, and shopping probably being the big 4 -- and I don't believe that when you can't stop doing something it's still 'play'.
Sex is portrayed as desperate, cathartic, even painful. Is this a realistic portrayal what happens in most of the world's bedrooms -- a stress-busting, power-displaying, skill-testing, sleep-inducing 'workout', when it should be play, fun, and full of laughter? If so, no wonder it's disappeared from so many relationships, and has driven so many to consume performance-enhancing drugs.
I suspect exactly the same can be said of the dating 'game'.
"Work hard play hard" is presented as the model for leaders. But to me if you work that hard, you're probably not working smart. And isn't gentle play more fun?

In short, I think we've lost the practice, and forgotten the meaning, of play.

While I agree with John Perry Barlow that we should not pursue happiness for its own sake, I do think we should make more time for play.

How might we do this? I think most of us could probably learn from the masters -- young children. Engaging with them, making stuff up with them, or just playing non-competitive games like hide & seek, can re-teach us the value of imagining just for fun. And the key to real play is imagination. And with children of course, the sillier the better.

Practicing a piece of music a thousand times is work, and while it is admirable if it leads to excellence, it is hardly play. Improvising with other musicians, on the other hand, just jamming and making it up as you go along is play -- just look at the faces of those participating and you'll know that immediately.

Companion animals (and even watching wild creatures) can also teach us about play. It's how young creatures learn, effortlessly and safely and joyfully, but even older creatures indulge often in play, especially when they're around the young.

Other improvisational activities -- dancing, flirting, role-playing -- balance imagination (breaking the rules and making stuff up) with the social and physical constraints ('rules') of each activity. The tension between them -- knowing when to do what's expected and when to interject the unexpected -- is what makes them playful. The role-playing I do in the virtual world Second Life is most enjoyable when it's creative, whimsical, clever -- our island is mostly natural but has a kitschy flying submarine. Likewise, carnivals and masquerade parties and murder mystery evenings give you the chance to be someone else -- to get outside yourself and flex your imagination.

What other ideas do you have that could help us all put more play into our lives?

Category: Being Human