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.

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.

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.

I thought I’d share another picture with you to prompt some discussion.

What you see below is what I have conceptualised after having reread a few of Mark’s articles on changing culture and the various ‘hyper’ terms that we have been studying over the last few weeks.

This was a slightly more difficult exercise than my attempts of the first schematic I shared with you and I am not quite as confident on it’s capture of the various notions.  But I figure, why worry about not getting it exactly right when I have a group of people who will examine it and provide useful feedback on how it may be improved, not least for the fact that amongst you is the author of the articles I read to construct the picture.

In contrast to my (consciously provocative) depiction of the features of our current culture, I have given an interpretation of the features of the new culture emerging.  Note that we are only looking at a limited set of features and the picture is not really capable of describing either the current or the emerging culture as a whole.

The culture is changing

Three weeks have passed,  The holidays have come and gone, leaving nothing but a vaguely bloated sense of self in their wake.  And the visitors have been sent home.  The question on all our minds: what’s next?

As originally envisioned, the actual process of writing Share This Book starts from today.  I am going to be drafting the introductory chapter to the work over this week – while also getting caught up on a number of other tasks.  Chapters will not appear daily; most likely they’ll appear weekly, or perhaps twice a week.  Writing is an intense business, and can’t be hurried.

The interesting work beings after these chapters get posted.  That’s when we can all set to work on them.  Do they make sense?  Do they prove the points their trying to make?  Do they flow?  What else can we add – from a wealth of possible examples, stories and anecdotes – to improve the arguments?  And what has been mistakenly left out?  The raw chapters are a starting point, a framework for discussion.  They give us something we can collaboratively build upon.

The basic argument of Share This Book is very simple: hyperconnectivity leads to hyperintelligence leads to hyperempowerment.  But saying it in a way that anyone can understand it – and believe it – will take a few hundred pages.

Sharing underlies everything.  Sharing is the engine which drives all of this forward, both as the theme of the book, and in the creation of the book.  Sharing the work, sharing the creativity, sharing the trials and triumphs, that’s what we’re in for now.  That’s what Share This Course! has always been aiming toward.  We know each other, we trust each other, we have a place to meet, and many tools to work with.  Now we begin.

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.

Three weeks ago I launched Share This Course!, with some idea of where to go and how to get there.  By this point in time we were to have sorted out the big questions: what is a book, what is an author, what is publishing?  Of course, these questions can never be answered definitively – but a provisional answer would allow us to move forward into the next phase, the actual writing of the text of Share This Book.

It’s unclear whether we’re any closer to this goal than when we started, at least in an explicit sense.  There’s no sense that anything has been resolved.  Instead, our world has perceptibly broadened.  New questions arise, leading to still more questions, and so on.  Light is streaming in, a good thing, but, equally, blinding us in our journey toward our goal.  What is to be done?

On the other hand, Share This Course! is ‘dogfooding’, i.e. putting its methodology into practice.  The necessary first step, the establishment of hyperconnectivity between like-minded individuals, has been a complete success.  There are not many of us deeply involved – perhaps fifteen out of the over sixty signed up to this blog – but that is more than enough.  This hyperconnectivity has overflowed into throughout the blog and over into a wiki and Google Wave.  That’s a sign of vitality.

We need not worry about taming this intensity and curiosity, but we must give it direction.  We are exploring sharing in all its aspects at present.  That will eventually roll back into a focus on the sharing of culture, knowledge and power, the subject of Share This Book.  Take a moment and look at how far we’ve come. We are here, together.  Together we are creating something wonderful.  Thank you.

Hyperintelligence doesn’t happen by itself.  It requires a sufficient level of hyperconnection among a community of individuals, the proper set of tools to support their knowledge sharing, and a goal.  Only when all three of these elements cohere – something that doesn’t always happen – can a hyperintelligence arise.

Hyperintelligence used to be very rare, restricted to closely-bound communities of peers – monks in a monastery, or researchers in a laboratory.  It’s broken its shackles of place and space; we’re connected digitally, globally, simultaneously, so communities can form across countries and continents.  The goal of that knowledge sharing can range from Star Wars to Creationism.  But the tool we use for this knowledge sharing is almost invariably a wiki.

Wikis are not complicated; the technology for a web page which can be edited in-place has been around since 1995.  Yet it took us several years to work out that editing is the principle function in knowledge creation.  Group editing is the principle function in hyperintelligence: when we can add to and prune our knowledge, a process supported by the connectivity among us, we can all become smarter.

A few days ago, @Sylvano created a wiki for all of us to use, an example of sharing and initiative which Share This Course! needs to reach its goals.  We need a place to store our knowledge. A blog is perfect for establishing connections and capturing conversations, but knowledge requires something different, something more permanent.  For this reason, the address wiki.sharethiscourse.org now points directly to that wiki: it’s now officially a part of Share This Course!

Now we have to have a good think about what knowledge we want to capture.  All of it, from the inane to the sublime, should go into the wiki.  To make us smarter.

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.

Communication channels have multiplied almost obsessively. Only yesterday I was told about a community within Facebook, FarmVille, where people gather to fertilize each other’s plots. A huge amount of conversation takes place within FarmVille; conversation that doesn’t pass through Facebook, but rather, through a partner. Where Facebook once represented a single channel for communication, it now opens the door to tens or even hundreds of distinct conversations.

This multiplication will begin to afflict all of our lines of communication: what was once one or two became ten and looks set on becoming a hundred or a thousand, or more. This presents opportunities to connect, but it equally places us under a burden to keep ourselves up-to-date on each of our open channels. This manifests itself in all sorts of ways: most blogs lie abandoned; perhaps two-thirds of all Twitter users send less than one tweet a month; we feel the pressure of an overloaded email inbox.

Hyperconnectivity has a cost. It binds the world ever-more-closely together, but it demands precious resources of time and attention. Sometimes the virtual loses out to the real, and sometimes the real loses to the virtual. It’s a balance we never even knew we needed until just a few years ago.

This is more than theoretical. As I find myself drawn into this blog, into the conversations we’re all having, I also need to juggle my work responsibilities, my personal life, everything else. This blog is taking off – and that presents its own set of problems. Like everyone else, I have to manage my work/life issues. Yet, like all of you, I want to share the best parts of me. Is there any real solution? I knew this might happen, and I am prepared to pay the price. But how do we manage successfully connecting?