Share This Course!

I uploaded Future Present to Scribd. Now I can imbed my book in any website I like. Such as this one!

Future Present

(You may need to have Adobe’s Shockwave player installed to make this work.)

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.

(Although I had thought I would not post during my holidays, indulge me.)

The big movie this Christmas holiday is James Cameron’s SciFi epic Avatar.  In a major feat of creativity, Cameron and crew have imagined a whole world – Pandora, which circles a gas giant in Alpha Centauri’s system – and all of the flora and fauna native to that world.  Of most interest to us, both as filmgoers and as humans, are the Na’vi, the three-meter-tall humanoid natives of Pandora, about whom hangs the plot of Avatar.  The Na’vi speak their own language, referenced in the film as various human characters try to master the tongue, and presented translated in subtitles when the Na’vi speak to one another.

Cameron is known for his eye for detail: the Na’vi language received the same attention as the animals and plants of Pandora.  Working with Paul Frommer, a linguist from USC, Cameron developed a language that was easily pronounceable by the actors while still retaining an alien flavor.  Na’vi is a ‘conlang’, a constructed language, with its own syntax, grammar and vocabulary, standing alongside other constructed languages, such as Esperanto, Tolkien’s Sindarin, and Star Trek’s Klingon.

Frommer was invited to write an article on Na’vi on The Language Log, the premier blog for linguists, and in its comment threads something wonderful happened: people shared their own enthusiasm for Na’vi, and began to work together to create resources which would help them learn and master the language.  Within a few days after the film’s release, a full Wikipedia article documented the language, a website invited visitors to learn the tongue, and a mailing list allowed linguists to explore the topic in detail.  The phenomenon of Na’vi is a perfect example of hyperconnectivity (a blog) leading to hyperintelligence (a community of learners).  It’s happening in real-time.  Go and see.

It’s customary for teachers to leave their students an assignment when leaving the classroom for any significant period of time – work that extends the students’ skills while keeping their intellects honed and ready.  In that spirit, I am requiring that all of the students taking Share This Course! begin a project I’ve named ‘Assignment: Share’.

The goal of ‘Assignment: Share’ is to become more conscious of all the ways we use digital media to share our experiences. We share links, we share documents, we share photos, we share videos, we share music, we share movies, we share just about anything that can be digitized, stuck on a server somewhere, and presented via the Web.  In a very real sense, the Web and digital sharing are identical.  I’d like you to make this explicit in your own practice.

For the next ten days – that is, until Christmas Eve – every one of us (including myself) is required to share at least one bit of digital culture, every single day. This is a holiday time of year, there’s lots of media floating around.  Perhaps there’s that photograph of you sitting on Santa’s lap, or eating the perfect latkes at a Chanukah dinner, or some Christmas lights that look very beautiful/garish/trippy.  Or an article you read that changed your life in some meaningful way.  What ever it is, share it, and tell us briefly why you’re sharing it.  This sharing of culture is the foundation of Share This Book, so we must grasp it ourselves before we can explain it to others.

I will be opening a new thread every day from now until Christmas Eve, for that day’s sharing.  This assignment starts today, right now. Don’t be afraid, don’t be shy.  Everything is interesting.  Everything deserves to be shared.