Share This Course!

We are receiving ever more new sensations and our brains are busy processing them into some kind of perception of reality. It’s an inescapable individual endeavour.

But over time, certain individuals begin to realise that it isn’t just their own unique perception of the world. They encounter other people who have also found themselves perceiving in a similar way – taking in the sensations and organising them into a similar, meaningful experience of the world.

At the early stages, all manner of conversations will be going on about what may or may not be happening and where it may or may not be going; confusion reigns and the only thing people seem to agree upon, is the basic fact that there are many new sensations.

Imagine the residents of Pompeii looking up at the mountain, for example.

Now if a conversation starts amongst a few people wondering about the cause of the smoke and the mildly unsettling tremors, it may well occur that as they share their perceptions of reality, they realise a new, shared perception has been developed, bringing even greater meaning to those new sensations. Enough so that it results in a shared action, like, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

As the number of people who begin to perceive the new sensations increases and if the way they perceive those sensations largely overlaps, then a shared understanding has arisen.

But reviewing my pretty diagram, I am now seeing that the linkage between Hyperconnectivity and Shared Understanding needs to be represented in at least two distinct ways: one is the capability of sharing the understanding once it has been identified, which is what I had in mind when I constructed it; the other is the catalytic function that Hyperconnectivity provides for bringing about the initial spark of actually identifying a Shared Understanding between individuals.

A catalyst, just like this blog.

I found this recent article on Jaron Lanier entitled “The Web Gone Sour” rather thought-provoking as well as reiterating some of the themes explored in Share This Course.  Among these are the notions of connectivity, hyperintelligence and the balancing of the individual and the community (drawing parallels here so these weren’t the exact words in the article, ok?)

The article writes,

One of the main targets of Lanier’s critique is the concept of the “wisdom of the crowds” or the “hive mind”. This is the idea beloved of so many social media enthusiasts that the collective wisdom of a large number of people, generally harnessed online, will exceed that of the individual.

I think the internet, as with anything within Information Technology, is a tool – valued for its potential and use. Hence, its value depends on the people who see its potential and use. It’s about the people.  Technology, no matter how advanced or ‘super’, is useless if not used….as I learned years ago, sometimes there is merit in stating the obvious (the purpose of Philosophy as a course of study, I believe).

So what has this got to do with us here?

Well, I think that this really highlights the goal of hyperempowerment because that brings the focus (and value) back on the individual, where it starts. The individual who shares and participates in the sharing culture to build hyperintelligence is thereby empowered as part of the process. It is not about the media that connects us but that which we eventually become for partaking in the process and the product of it.

Of course, this is just my interpretation of it. What do you think?

A break from my pictures.  Instead, I thought I’d share an audio posting.  We haven’t had one yet.

The content of this audio snippet comes from a book, Human Groups, written by W. J. H. Sprott.  He was the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and his bio on the back cover concludes thus:

Though he is a student of group
psychology, Professor Sprott is
nevertheless a confirmed ‘non-
joiner’.

Don’t you love it.

Anyway, before you listen to this excerpt, take a moment to think about the challenge before us here on achieving a shared understanding about this course.  Think of the myriad of technologies, shifts in business and culture that are taking place, and the vista of possibility that lies before us.

As you embrace that scene, invite another to stand along side it.

Consider that Sprott’s book was published in 1958.  Mid twentieth century. It is a study in how people interact in groups, particularly face-to-face. It draws upon the relatively new efforts in social psychology and describes the many difficulties in attempting a conceptual analysis of all the issues and ideas presented in the area of human groups.

Listen to the world being described – not that long ago – and note the very real challenges they faced in a much simpler environment. But also note the very same challenges that still exist today.

AUDIO FILE: Human Groups – Sprott <– Click this link to listen to my 100 seconds of droning.

Can You Dig It? by Pop Will Eat Itself
(embedding, ironically enough, not working for me.)

Recently, my agent told me that my next book would go to a kindle publisher and I have to say I was a little crushed. It was like hearing your movie is going “straight to video” and I felt sad that I wouldn’t have something to store in my basement.

However, my excitement mounted considerably when I began to examine the kindle publishing paradigm.

* “publishing” (per se) costs next to nothing.

* the publisher’s role is to market the book, not print & distribute it.

* the split can be MUCH better – you write, publishers market & the split with some is 50-50, from what I’m hearing.

But it gets a GREAT DEAL better than that.

Question: What can you do on the web and in a blog that you can’t do in a “book“?

Answer: *EMBED MEDIA* and this is the reality of Kindle that makes Amazon the Gutenberg of our time. (/hyperbole)

Kindle won’t – or soon won’t be – static – particularly those models armed with on-board wi-fi connections, which ups the ante of author “experience control.” Want a reader to “hear” the song your character is listening to? In a static book, you plug in the lyrics and hope for the best. In a Kindle book, you embed the file, or the video if you want them to see it – or just pull it off web on the fly.

We’re already doing this on websites and blogs all the time – it’s automatic to most of us – the difference is that a Kindle “title” will be a hypermedia “authored experience” that will contain text, sound, chats, videos, you name it, to tell its story in a linear *and* non-linear fashion.

The major obstacle to this phenomenon? Copyright & DRM, of course. In the case of music & video, the RIAA needs to step up to the plate and offer a blanket licensing agreement to EMbook publishers and creators – or they can stamp their feet and watch in horror as their media enhances the literature of the 21st century – with or without a license, because the bootleg market will just be completely out of control. (I’m in Asia – you tell me about “copyright control” and I’ll just giggle at you.)

As for me, my only regret now in publishing a Kindle book is that I didn’t write to the medium in the first place. That was then – this is now – the new one will *totally* take advantage of the format.

caveats: 1) because of tl;dr, this is truncated from the original idea, which came to me in tonglen meditation in a rush. 2) these things need a name – there’s a contest. we’ll start with EMbooks (for Embedded Media book.) 3) I use “Kindle” like kleenex – this concept is not device dependent. see #2. 4) this article is rife with error. Have at it.

On the surface, hyperempowerment sounds like an intrisically awesome thing. It’s an ideal for democracy, each individual participating to their true, ever increasing potential. A related concept I have heard is that social networking makes us better people faster. I think that the corrollary of this, that social networking can make us worse people, faster is important for us to address. Hyperintelligences can manifest as Wikipedia, Al Qaeda and everything in between.

With a modernist conception of discrete individuals, the people composing a network dictate its character. A growing body of evidence invalidates this model, revealing a much more complex body of relations at play. The spirits of our networks feed into us at least as much as we contribue back.

Social networks influence our happiness, our weight, our sociability and possibly every aspect of our personalities. The effects happen out-of-awareness and extend beyond the domains of specific communities. As individuals exploring and extending ourselves into these territories, conscious appreciation of these points supports our well-being. By associating with groups that lift us up, we do ourselves and those in our life a service.

Taking it further, can an individual utilize this awareness in the engineering of hyperintelligence? @mpesce consciously guided the beginning of Share This Course to develop socialization and trust amongst us. What strategies and traits might increase health, have a vivogenic impact, not only on the individual participants, but on the ecological system of hyperintelligences?

Further Reading:
Keith Hampton’s research into the impact of social networks on individuals and communities
Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Consider Mom.  In our era of nuclear families, Mom is the center of the family, the axis upon which all else depends.  Mom is the go-to person when problems arise, the remover of obstacles.  Mom makes it all better.  Mom remembers all the soccer games, the birthday presents, the holiday cards, all of the minutiae that make up modern, social family life.  Social is the key word: Mom is the center of the family because she is its most social member.  Mom’s life work, within the family, is the building and maintenance of social relationships.  When that vital link fails – when Mom gets sick, or has to work 12 hours a day just to keep the family fed – the family begins to disintegrate.  Other family members can leap into the ‘Mom gap’ –  something plenty of 21^st century Dads (and Grandmas) find themselves doing, becoming the family’s social caretaker.  Someone must fill that role, or the family will not survive, because the family is that social bond.  The social bond is what makes us uniquely human, and it is also what gives rise to the manifold forms of human groups: nuclear and extended families; tribes and clans; villages and cities; states and nations.  All of them are differing variations on the same theme, a social contract which binds us together.

The social contract within the family is both simple and comprehensive: Mom takes care of the children, sees to their needs, soothes their pains, and prepares them for participation within the world.  Mom does this by engaging with the children and with Dad, becoming the central point, the social nexus of the family.  Everyone connects to Mom, everyone shares themselves with Mom, and Mom turns that connection and that sharing to the greater advantage of everyone in the family.

“Culture is conversation, and the role of the intermediary is to
shape that conversation and give new meaning to readers’ lives
simply by helping them find the books they need to read.”
- Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books.

So, as the structure of the book began to reveal itself to us, with the first third of it to cover the sharing of culture, I happened to find myself in the local library browsing the shelves and my eyes landed on the spine of a book entitled, ‘So Many Books.’  It is the source of the quotation above as well as the following:

“But culture is a conversation without a centre.”

In considering how we – each one of us – has become expert in the sharing of digital things, what are the conversations that we are aware of being a part? How many are there, what types and how do they intermingle?

When we come to envisage the sharing of the Share This Book book, who do we picture as the people that need to read the book? What are the conversations that we will be having?

Slumming over at Evolver (I kid, it’s a lovely place, highly recommended.)

Anyhow, it’s been slow around here recently so here’s some reading material for y’all (of peripheral relevance here but hopefully interesting nonetheless).

Fear

Fear rules our world. From the level of the individual – motivated to work a job he hates because he fears unemployment, stay with a man she despises because she fears homelessness – to the level of society, where fear of terrorism, disease, or economic instability is used to steer the herd in whatever direction the hungry shepherd and his sheepdogs want, it is fear that forms the underlying basis of almost everything we do (or don’t do), say (or don’t say), and believe (or don’t believe). ….

Hijacking the Network: An Address to Humanity

This is a response to Sleeping Giant’s V for Vendetta and the Art of Brevity, which has fallen off the front page now and so I’m posting it as a new blog:

“My fellow human beings: I come here today not to frighten you, nor to berate you, nor even to try and teach you. It is much worse than that. I am here to free you. ….

By now you’re all likely familiar with the tremendous earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.  The death toll is still unknown; in fact, the infrastructure of Haiti has been so substantially damaged it’s hard to know what is going on there.

This situation is identical to one just under two years ago, when a large earthquake struck the Sichuan region of China.  Buildings and bridges collapsed; for several days no one could get in or out.  An intrepid reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation hiked into Sichuan carrying a satellite videophone and transmitted some of the first images back to the rest of the world.

The communications network has collapsed in Port-au-Prince; mobile phones, though ubiquitous, do not work.  The cell towers have come down, and the wires which bring power to those towers have come down as well.  Amazingly, there is some Internet service; individuals have been using Skype to communicate with the world beyond Haiti’s borders.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world collectively holds its breath and wonders how it can help.  Requests have flown by in the conventional media – broadcast and print – for donations to the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, WorldVision, and so on.   But, as was the case with Sichuan (or lately, any great disaster) the hyper-connections which tie is so closely to one another have become the major channel for information, for news, for sharing the burden of need.  Twitter has more on-the-ground information about Haiti than the New York Times – so the Times creates a Twitter list of individuals in Haiti.  Big media can reinforce and amplify our hyperconnectivity, creating a virtuous cycle which puts all of us into the loop.  We are all witnesses. We can all reach out and help.

Many years ago, when I studied to be a preacher-man, I learned how to write a strong sermon.  The best sermons have three parts: an opening, an exegesis, and a closing.  Put together, these three elements create a dramatic arc which the congregation can latch onto and follow.  Nearly all of my lectures and public talks – as can be seen on my other blog – are presented in three parts.  It seems to work well, whether the subject matter is biblical or technical.  All these years of breaking everything into threes may have affected the way I think.  It’s become difficult for me to think outside of this ‘rule of threes’.

Just as in my earlier book, The Playful World, Share This Book is structurally broken into thirds.  In the first third I want to cover the sharing of culture – that is, all the ways we have become expert in the sharing of various forms of media: songs, videos, links, thoughts, and so on.  This will not be presented as something new, but as the foundation for what follows: the sharing of knowledge.  When the sharing of culture becomes directed and specific to a domain – whether that might be Star Wars or mental health or French cooking – it transcends the contributions of any single individual, and can create a condition of group intelligence, or ‘hyperintelligence’.

Once hyperintelligence emerges, anything is possible.  For example, community of self-professed geeks might take on Scientology (ANONYMOUS).  When applied to the achievement of a goal, hyperintelligence translates into hyperempowerment: individuals punch far above their weight.  That is a new thing, something which destabilizes every institution in the 21^st century.

Three sections: culture, knowledge and power. It’s a sermon, of sorts, designed to illuminate those who hear it.  With your help.