Share This Course!

“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?

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.

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 just a few hours – 6 AM Friday Sydney time, 2 PM Thursday New York time, 11 AM Thursday Los Angeles time – writer and philosopher (and close friend) Erik Davis will be interviewing me on his radio show, Expanding Mind.  The subject?  Why, Share This Book and Share This Course!

Update: You can listen to the recorded interview here, or download the MP3 file here.

The invitation to post came earlier than my readiness but here I am now and what better way to start than to consider sharing as a risk. Here I will attempt to use the focus suggested by Mark, i.e. sharing of culture, knowledge and power…in 300 words or so….

Everyone who has participated in this blog, by reading and/or commenting, has shared individual and collective knowledge.  Shared authoring privileges has further broadened the opportunities for sharing knowledge AND power.

I do not take this authoring power lightly because I believe sharing is a risk. On one hand, a sharer risks ridicule, rejection and being taken advantage of.  On the other hand, a sharer risks affirmation, acceptance and learning.

Now I’ve taken the risk with confidence in the sharing culture of this community.  Although there have been differences in viewpoints, there were no instances of negativity. In fact, there has been much positivity. Sharing has been espoused and promoted within. Hence, we have built collective knowledge even as we used each other as mirrors – or sounding boards – to reflect/echo and advance our own learning and knowledge.

Our culture is grounded in the ethos of sharing for maximum benefit, using accessible language that remains mutually respectful even in times of disparity.  Part of this culture is that every day there are posts and comments such that there’s always a chance to teach and learn.

We feel safe and comfortable with the process of sharing within this community. BUT, are we ready for the product, Share This Book? Open to a wider audience, the risks of ridicule, rejection and judgment are more likely. Will we hide behind pseudonymism or put our personal stamp on the destination of the journey we have enjoyed thus far?

… <300

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.

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?

Birds On Power Lines

Links, which may be of interest for the Share This Course project.  At the very least, it’s a capture of some the information that we have come across and may inspire other ideas, thoughts or discussions.  It’s a list to which we can add, review for relevance and organise as we explore sharing.  It is also a bunch of stuff that may potentially be useful for the creation of a bibliography for the book.

Sharing and online culture

• The Hacker Ethic – Wikipedia Entry
  • “According to Levy’s account, sharing was the norm and expected within the non-corporate hacker culture. The principle of sharing stemmed from the atmosphere and resources at MIT. During the early days of computers and programming, the hackers at MIT would develop a program and share it.”
• File Sharing History – Life before bit torrents…
  • “Contrary to what people may think, there’s a lot to talk about file sharing history, especially since it all started before the P2P technology came crashing in”
• Free Software Foundation – The proper sense of free.
  • “The free software movement is one the most successful social movements to emerge in the past 25 years, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to freedom and sharing.”

The Academic Perspective

• The New Sharing Ethic in Cyberspace – Andrés Guadamuz, Journal of World Intellectual Property, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.129-137, 2002.
  • “The Internet presents us with an impressive tool for distributing intellectual creations to the widest possible audience. In Cyberspace we are starting to witness the diluting of authorship by the practice of legions of writers, musicians, inventors and artists that see the Internet as the best medium in which to present the products of their intellectual labour, even if it means to do it for free.”
• Social Sharing and Risk Reduction – Evolution and Human Behavior
  • “Sharing important resources widely beyond direct kin-group members is one of the core features characterizing human societies. Moreover, generalized exchange involving many community members (e.g., meat-sharing in bands) seems to be a uniquely human practice.”

Talks on sharing

• Radical Abundance – Douglas Rushkoff asks: How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.
  • “…my clearest articulation yet of how we’re using an obsolete operating system for money, optimized for a pre-Internet economy.”

The Book – what is it?

• Copy Fight: Cory Doctorow’s struggle to make books free – Mark Medley, National Post, Monday, November 16, 2009
  • “It’s his commitment and encouragement of sharing that makes Doctorow a thorn in the side of some in the publishing industry (though it should be noted his own publisher, Tor, is part of Macmillan, which in turn is a subsidiary of the massive German conglomerate Holtzbrinck). He wants his books to be read, he wants his books to be passed around and he wants his books to be copied.”
• The Institute for the Future of the Book – A web site for a think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.
  • “Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.
• A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century by Sara Lloyd
  • “We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks.”

Authorship

• Shared Authorship: Dispersal of the Artist in Electronic Fields – Raivo Kelomees, Studies on Art and Architecture (Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi), issue: 3 / 2007, pages: 82­84
  • “The revolt against authorship, originality, everything made with the author’s own hands, is one of the features of 20th century art, perfectly realised in today’s environment of the Internet and interactive art.”
• In defence of the Author – Justin Keverne, Groping the Elephant – Pragmatic fumbles in the darkness by a Games Industry outsider.
  • “Games need authors. The only thing left to discuss is how visible those authors should be and that’s a topic that will keep us going for the next few years at least.”

Sharing – implementations online

• Global Ideas Bank – A web site that is about sharing ideas.
  • “The Global Ideas Bank aims to promote and disseminate good creative ideas to improve society. It further aims to encourage the public to generate these ideas, to participate in the problem-solving process.”
• Kelvin Grove Urban Village – A web site for a Master Planned Community in Brisbane, which is a partnership between the Queensland Government and the Queensland University of Technology.
  • “The Kelvin Grove Urban Village site has a rich and varied history, including its Indigenous, military, educational, residential and natural history. The Sharing Stories project has been developed to inform the community on the Village’s history.”
• Pool – A web site for creative collaboration
  • “ABC is building an online ‘town square’ for all Australians. Pool is a collaborative space where audiences become ‘co-creators’.  It’s a place to share and talk about creative work – music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more.”
• a.aaaarg.org – access texts and discuss them.
  • “AAAARG is a conversation platform – at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal.  AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.”

Giving – when organisations share

• MIT opencourseware – Access university material free.
  • “MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.”
• TED – high quality videos for the mind.
  • “On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free.”

Because I like  it

• Short History of Sharing – A cartoon.
  • On lessons from when we were young.

Everyone involved in bringing Share This Book to life has some responsibilities.

I promise that I will be attentive – every single day.  (Excepting my Christmas holidays, which run 14 December 2009 to 3 January 2010.  That’s time off for all of us.)  I will be checking in, monitoring the progress of the discussions on the blog, adding new pieces – like this – every single day.  A blog is a hungry beast, and a lively discussion is even more hungry – it must be fed constantly.  I promise that you’ll be getting two hours of my dedicated time every single day (spread throughout the day), so that I can stay on top of what’s happening here.

You must make a commitment to remain engaged and involved.  We will kick things off with a lot of fanfare tomorrow, with plenty of individuals who have signed up to take part, but I am concerned that, as time goes on, as the holiday season heats up (which is also the summer vacation season in Australia, where I write from), people will drift away, back to the rest of their lives.  If too many people drift away, this effort could fail. Jimmy Wales says that he knows an individual variant of Wikipedia will succeed when there are five individuals dedicated to its success.  That’s a bare minimum – unless there are four others of you out there, pulling alongside me, Share This Book will fail in its main objective – to become the product of sharing, not just a book about sharing.

This project is all about shared responsibilities; in fact, we’ll be spending the first three weeks investigating just what those responsibilities are.  After that, I believe something amazing will happen – we will transform ourselves into a potent creative community.  It’s all up to us.

The institutions which provided the steady and monotonous diet of media throughout the 20^th century are collapsing, undone by a sudden, unexpected and comprehensive competition from the public they aim to serve.  We have become our own publishers, broadcasters, and creators.

We find ourselves turning to new systems of production which allow for ever-larger and ever-more-potent groups of individuals to come together in common cause around a project of shared, creative production.  Wikipedia is one such example of a successful project, but it is far from the only one.  I propose to launch another such project, Share This Book.

Share This Book must be an example of the type of culture it attempts to articulate.  I intend to open up the creative process, to make sharing not just the core idea of the book, but the way the book comes into being.  Although I come to this project with an idea, the realization of this idea must be driven by a community willing to share resources, intelligence, and capabilities.

In this new world, the role of the author is redefined; not just a contributor, editor, or cheerleader, yet something of all three.   I will be a peer among equals, sharing my vision in order to bring it to life.  I hope others will come forward and share their own vision, enthusiasm and creativity, working with me to carry the project through to a successful conclusion.

The days of the singular author, toiling in seclusion are being supplanted by an energized community, working toward a common goal.  This is the shared landscape where we will be creating for the rest of our lives.  This is all new, but it is all possible.  With your help.