Share This Course!

This week I’ve been invited to speak on two panels at the Sydney Writers Festival.  These panels concern digital media and the emergence of the electronic book, and I’m on them specifically because I told the organizers I was working on Share This Book.  That hasn’t really gone as planned: there is no finished text, what we have are a lot of ideas and (perhaps) some flagging enthusiasm.

When I go before these audiences this week, what can I tell them we have learned?  I know that I’ve learned a lot about consistency, about contribution, and about what I reckon the future of the book to be – which I’ve been sharing recently, here.  But I also want to bring to them what you’ve learned, because this isn’t about me.  This is about us, and about what we are working to achieve.

Please leave a comment, or start a discussion, and tell us what you’d like to share to other authors who have the same questions we do about where all of this is going.  I’ll do my best to record what I say on these panels, so I can bring that back and share it with you.  We can close that loop and move on into deeper work.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Since this course began, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to think about sharing in ways I never have before. When I first discovered facebook and the status report input, I shared all kinds of stuff that I don’t think now I should’ve shared – this accelerated dramatically when I got facebook on my blackberry and began sharing at all hours of day and night, wherever I was standing at any given time.

I remember one night being at a punk rock show (they still have punk rock in America, yes) on the 4th of July and posting “this bands sucks – a lot” from my BB. Two hours later I was in a local watering hole and at least three people came up to me and said, “I can’t believe you thought that band sucked.” I had actually meant it as a compliment, really – it was sort of an inside joke between me and members of the band, whom I’ve known for years, but I posted it live and lots of other people have smartphones and it appeared to them – instantly.

That was the night I realized the power of the network, but it didn’t end there – I later had a row with friends via facebook status report and that’s when I removed the application. It was too immediate and too bizarre and I had to take myself out of that loop of potentiality completely.

Nowadays, I only “share” on facebook when I am very happy and have relatively little to say – “Had a nice day at the beach,” “Just had a great Thai massage.” I no longer report things that are negative or weird or introspective or strange, because there are just too many people on that network now. Friends, of course, but relatives like aunt and uncles and cousins and others that just “wouldn’t get it.” I still have problems with comments to other posts, ranting occasionally, which often touches of a flood of replies that is fun, but later I think, “Why did I do that?”

Twitter is the same – I have relegated myself to only re-posting news articles I am reading, and my blog, once public, is now under lock and key with passwords given out to three people whom I love and trust completely. I made that move long before this course began, and now that it’s that way, I feel *really free* to “share” whatever, because my sharing is a closed loop. With all due respect to Justin Hall, I don’t think I could share all the deep shit he used to share about his father’s death and everything else in his life with “the network” as a whole anymore, though I used to do that quite a lot without regard to the consequences, back when the web was new.

So how about you – what do you NOT SHARE? And have you found yourself creating safety rules of what you do and don’t say to the network? Because people really *are* listening, oddly enough – something I had to learn the hard way.

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.