Share This Course!

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

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.

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.

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.

We human beings are very good at sharing information.  Much of the tremendous success of our species is due to the fact that we pool our informational resources.  Something learned by any one of us can be known to all of us because we share.

We have lately stumbled upon a new type of sharing, which arises out of our hyperconnectivity.  Connect people together and they begin to share.  Give them a goal – such as say, the creation of a book about sharing – and people can begin to share very specifically.  If enough of these people have expertise in their domain of sharing, the aggregate effect of all this sharing will be to multiply the wealth.  Everyone will benefit from the specific knowledge of every person.  Gaps in one person’s knowledge will be met by strengths in another’s.  When this works well, everyone wises up.

The exact conditions needed to produce this flowering of ‘hyperintelligence’ differ from task to task, and community to community.  Wikipedia stumbled into it, and created a model that can be adapted to different needs.  The most important ingredient is the committed involvement of a group of intelligent and passionate individuals.  Given that, almost anything can happen.

Can we create hyperintelligence here?  Pooling our intelligence and our sharing our knowledge, can we create something greater than the sum of its parts?  That has always been my goal with Share This Course! – a hyperintelligence which will power the creation of Share This Book.  But hyperintelligence takes time to mature.  I set an artificial limit of three weeks for this first stage in our task – impossibly optimistic.  Do we have the patience to wait for our hyperintelligence?  Can we supply the energy and attention it will need to grow into potency?