Share This Course!

Surprise = Information & so, Make It New.

What are your thoughts? Observations? Suggestions? Now’s the time, and here’s the place. Thanks! –Mark Pesce

“But a magnificent brut! ‘Caligula’ (Mr Danl Magrath,
bookmaker, wellknown to Eastrailian poorusers of the Sydney
Parade Ballotin) was, as usual, antipodal with his: striving todie,
hopening tomellow, Ware Splash.–James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pg. 60.

Suggestion:
Read Finnegans Wake again. Pick a word. Make that a title and write on from there.

Observation:
More than half of the magic stored within ‘Finnegans Wake’ dwells within the air, literally awaiting a speaker to link the symbol with the sound, and ‘make it whole’, like a neurochemical synaptic lock & key, the symbol and the sound harness the powers of Onomatopoeia, and like with musical notation, the medium changes utterly when processed through a musical instrument as sound waves.

Thought:

I deduce that future books will have a spoken component, and behave like a book of magical spells in the way that when you speak the right words in the right order with the right sense of commitment and intention something will reveal itself to the reader/speaker. Something that not even the author could imagine, something that to us today may just seems weird, like meaningful synchroncity, or the workings of international finance capitalism? This constellation of ‘things’ is best left described as ‘life’ I think, that magical/mystical experience and the goal of great literature and Shamanism. Life seems to make the momentum of linearity, the gives a sense for the arrow of time, life-like literature therefore; may define a good page turner. I believe we are living in a Holographic Multiverse, and I think that Finnegans Wake is a Holographic Multiverse too.

Thought Question:
How can I better serve both the ‘network’ and my own ’seclusive’ writing habits to a balanced satisfactory degree, producing the best work I possibly can but still staying within the wishes and prefered orbits of our network of, co-creators?

Observation:
Leading by example, recording and sharing your works, works.

Thought:
I’ll add that it seems to me that Government generally (U.S, U.K and Australia) clog up and slow down the inevitable coming together of the tribes by shared experience, and the new age of publishing. See The U.K’s Digital Economy Bill, for an example of ‘hyperstupidity’.

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.

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?

Well, quite apart from the fact that almost everyone is fairly much hypnotised by all things networked, the infrastructure of society is now so heavily reliant upon it that there is, frankly, very little room for the modern equivalent of a Luddite.

Do not even attempt to imagine what it takes for you to roll on up to that hole in a wall on a suburban street to extract some readies for the big night out with your mates. Because it will hurt your brain once you realise that you’ve but done a stratospheric fly by over the surface, let alone scratch it. Just kidding. Look up banking networks on the Internet. It’s fascinating.

Anyway.

The thing is that the handloom weavers didn’t just stop existing when the first mechanised loom came onto the scene. There was a transition. But during that transition there was a resistance to change. A change that had well started, a change that was well in play and essentially past the point of holding back. Other factors were involved, to be sure, but for the purposes of my metaphorical swirl to an idea, I reckon you’ll give me a bit of free rein here.

Reading everyone’s input into this project so far confirms to me that Share This Book – whatever it will be – is a thing that embraces change.  A book that identifies the tools and the people – which is which? *smirk* – to ride this wave of change. A book that showcases the realities of hyperintelligence and hyperconnectivity (already in place now for many earthlings), which can be harnessed for no other purpose than to share with even more people the knowledge and the communities that can be tapped into to achieve a shared purpose.

We can’t smash the loom, because we love the loom.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake famously wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”  According to William James, perception is essentially a reducing function, taking the raw and overwhelming reality of the world and filtering it down to a the few objects of consciousness.  Current research in neuroscience seems to support this hypothesis: the world pouring through our senses accounts for many, many megabits of data, while our brains only operate on a few bits per second.  Anything more, and we would find ourselves overwhelmed in mostly meaningless noise.

That pretty much describes the Internet of 2009.  So much comes to us from so many different quarters that most of us simply follow the same links to the same sites, day after day.  Dull, but dependable.  Nothing to overwhelm.  Although we live in an age of media hyperabundance, our overall media diets have not changed significantly.  We still watch a lot of broadcast television, see films in the cinema, listen to radio, and so on.  These are safe, known quantities.

When something new does make its way past our filters, it’s something that’s come in from a friend or other trusted source.  That social bond makes it safe to venture out into the chaos.  That social bond is the new gatekeeper. We rely on our friends than ever before, as tastemakers and cool finders.  Our social networks have become media sharing networks.  These networks are our filters against the chaos of infinity.  Those individuals with the best networks will be able to balance the new and important against the old and comforting in a way that allows them to thrive in a time of rapid change.  More and more, we will be judged by our networks.  Our gatekeepers.

Share This Course has been in existence for rougly two and a half weeks. The community continues to grow. THE FRONT PAGE IS YOURS has unleashed the beast and we are posting tons of info and having great conversations. Connections are being made.

Some questions have come to my mind. As much as i enjoy the very theoretical conversations, i feel i am more focused on the way these things work and trying to help them be efficient.

In an early blog comment, Sylvano mentioned protocols. This topic has not really been explored yet. So in thinking about an idea for the blog, i wondered how exactly i should go about changing this blog in what i thought was a good way.

In the new posts flurry of Dec 7 and 8 2009 a post was made into a page and it was weird, but that was fixed quickly enough by just changing the page to a post. But what if a new page is needed? Who decides that? Mark? Definitely. But who else and why?

Searching google for hyperintelligence shows 50k+ results. In my mind number one should be a page here at STC.org. Permalinks are also very important in my opinion, for readers and search engines.

So i thought how to go about doing this? i could just do it and make the page. But i also want to see what others think first. i thought i would like to message Mark and see what he thinks. i could email him or facebook or post on the blog or comment on another post.

That brought to mind the question, Should all communication involving this community be public? Is there a need for private communication? How does this community make decisions about itself? And that led me back to protocols.

This community, my inner anarchist is dying a little, needs some protocols. Nothing law like but whos and whys. Is this project going to be just a free for all? Or will there be some sort of, for lack of a better metaphor, hierarchy? Im down for either or both. But i think these are things that need to be put into words.

How do we as participants in this group interact with each other in both our own and the groups best interest?

Share This Course on Facebook!

After Mark’s challenge this morning, at least morning here in CST, and his helpful push to get a Facebook page made, i accepted the directive and made a Share This Course / Share This Book Facebook page. i did plenty of research on whether to choose a fan page or a group. It seemed to me that a fan page would be the better choice. Groups on Facebook are like an extension of the person that created them, where pages are more autonomous with people that admin and make changes.

Right now the page has a very long unwieldy URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Share-This-Course-Share-This-Book/204601627568
but once we reach 100 fans we can choose a vanity URL, so become a fan.

If anyone has any comments, concerns or ideas i am very open to them. i have already included the STC blog under notes, and some links under info. i will take the responsibility of overlooking the Facebook page and making sure it fits in with the overall Share This Course way.

This is my first front page post, i hope to make many more. And thank you for your support.

Personnel recruiting is an old-fashioned business.  A recruiter flips through their Rolodex, calling clients who might need new employees.  Then, flipping through the Rolodex again, the recruiter contacts individuals who might be good candidates.  The best recruiters are matchmakers, carefully marrying their client’s needs to the candidate’s capabilities.  It’s a rare skill, or at least it used to be.

A few years ago, my friend Konstantin Guericke (who worked on VRML in the early days) helped to start a social networking website known as LinkedIn.  LinkedIn bills itself as the social network for professionals.  Your profile is your resume, and you can link your resume to your previous employers (who are also on LinkedIn), your co-workers (again, also on LinkedIn) and so forth, so that your entire employment history becomes a tapestry of links to individuals and organizations.  LinkedIn makes everything implicit within a resume explicit – something so useful that LinkedIn has now become the de facto standard for business hiring.

The question for the recruiter is simple: what do they provide that LinkedIn doesn’t?  LinkedIn is the Rolodex.  It is the connection to the companies and the candidates.  It is the matchmaker.  Recruiters – who are all using LinkedIn, because their clients use it – are about to be obsolesced by it.  They won’t be alone.

All jobs that depend on a high degree of connectivity are about to be obsolesced as all of the rest of us boot into hyperconnectivity. Individuals who specialized as connectors and translators between various communities or businesses will find themselves swept aside as the tools give every one of us the same advantages.  This is why the newspapers are collapsing as an industry – each of us is as well-connected as any editor.  That wasn’t always true.   It is now, and business must adapt or die.

Google Waves will change our ideas about collaboration, sharing – and authorship.

On Friday I watched the Google Waves demo, and I was stunned by what I saw.  I thought Google Waves was a collaboration tool for creating shared documents.  But Google Waves allows people to “roll their own” social networking communities that will share with each other in hyper-threaded conversations that can be either open to the world or closed to specific invitation.

The lines between “community” and “collaboration” are disappearing.  Who knew they were one and the same?

Google Waves combines email, text messages, mobile phone input, blogs, URLs, picture sharing, and just about every other tool out there for an archived conversation that can be continuously updated by participants.

The difference between Google Wave and Facebook is that you won’t have to use one account to juggle friends, family, business associates and the like. Through the creation of different Waves for all your communities, you’ll be able to carry on conversations that relate specifically to the Wave you’re in at any given time.

In the very near future, “Waves” will dominate our time online.  You’ll have a family wave, a friends wave, and various projects waves, both for work and pleasure.  As I said last week in a flush of hyperbole, “Waves will eat Facebook!”

Through this endless sharing and ability to edit one another’s emails and posts, our notions of the “single author toiling alone” as Pesce wrote earlier, may indeed be dated. We may be pioneers in ShareThisBook, but through Google Waves, content creators (and everyone is one in this model) have endless tools to create either literature – or just lists and chaos.  Either way, sharing and collaboration will be writ large in every online community on earth.

The question on my mind is this: will our use of Google Waves create a “product” – a stand-alone document that has a start and a finish – or will it, like the WELL of yore, create an endless novel with no beginning and no end?  We may find that we like the community and the conversation so much, that it will no longer matter to us.   One thing is certain – the answer will not come to a single mind – but to all of us, together.