The Obvious?

Wish I were there ....

... but going to be in Vegas instead.

Different rhythms

Stow Boyd has an interesting post today about the movement from blogs towards more "flow" tools like Twitter and how blogging tools, as currently conceived, don't make this transition easy. I agree with everything Stowe says but would also suggest that there are different rhythms to the different tools and that blogging will continue to have an important place. A place to stop and ponder in the midst of the flurry of flow.

Says it all really ....

Via wikinomics

Post filtered friendship

In the old days our ability to make friends was pre-filtered - you only met so many people. Nowadays it is post-filtered. You can meet hundreds online then filter down after the fact.

Pervasive Penguins

Walking to school with my daughter this morning I found myself whistling one of the great tunes from Club Penguin. I then envisaged a Life Of Brian moment when all the other parents in the playground might join in on the chorus.

Maybe one day.

Constance Evans

Since we moved into our house sixteen years ago we have enjoyed the company of the wonderful old lady, Connie, who lived next door. She was a happy, optimistic, cheerful widow who had lived in her house since the 1940's.

Despite failing health over recent years Connie remained a model of how to maintain a cheerful disposition and proved daily that happiness is something you do rather than something you get. Many's the time we have found ourselves complaining about something or other and been pulled up short when we thought of how little Connie had in comparison and yet how rarely, if ever, she felt sorry for herself.

Sadly Connie passed away in hospital this morning. For such a small and understated person she will leave a remarkably large hole in our lives.

Come the revolution

I had a bit of a ding dong with Conrad Bird, Deputy Director, Government Communication, during a panel at The British Library recently over my use of the title "The Quiet Revolution" for my workshops. Conrad took exception to the word revolution and preferred the use of the more moderate word evolution. The reason I preface the word revolution with "quiet" is that while this thing we are at the start will be revolutionary in terms of how we see ourselves and the world around us I would agree that images of the storming of the Bastille are not really appropriate!

However .....

While this is not a revolution in the sense of being bottom up - those in the middle and the top are in some ways as constrained by the system as those at the bottom - and it is also not revolutionary in the sense of a concerted activities driven by one small group with a particular ideology. It is a gradual, revoltuionary sophistication of how we see ourselves, each other and the world we create.

Reading the section in Here Comes Everybody about the power of self organisation in political contexts, along with watching this video about monetary reform, combined with my previous post on the dangers of right answers all lead me to believe, yet again, that while there may be flaws in the wisdom of the crowds the madness, and misdeeds, of the few are currently a far bigger problem. For every perceived risk of anarchy or chaos I see a benefit in dispersal of the power to misuse or abuse.

Diffuse means collective. We need to see things as shared responsibility and take that responsibility. I am convinced that we will re-invent politics, and hopefully even religion, in ways that enable us to take account of our new found ways of understanding our world and working together to improve it. Capitalism, socialism and the belief in a patriarchal deity all feel like incredibly tired ways of making sense of things. Surely we can do better ....?

Fame and the danger of "right" answers

Reading the section on fame in Here Comes Everybody made me uneasy. Clay talks of the inevitability of fame being one way. Once someone becomes famous even social tools can't get away from the fact that one person, whether a pop star or famous blogger, can't relate to the number of people who want to relate to them.

It nagged me that something felt wrong with this until it dawned on me that it is the fame that is wrong rather than the ability to deal with it.

I get nervous when people are given or assume the status of being more right than others, which is partly what is behind fame. People tend to become famous for being thought to be better, or more right, at something; living their lives, making money, singing pop songs, being a politician. Even notoriety is in a way being seen as being better at being bad than others!

Whether it is individuals or groups, religions or utopian totalitarian regimes, thinking that you have the right answer, and are more right than everyone else, causes all sorts of problems.

Yet people want right answers. We are taught to expect there to be a right answer and that we will be all right if we just make enough effort to find it. Business assumes this and that if you just pay enough consultants and do enough spreadsheets you will get to the right answer and be OK.

But I believe the web is teaching us another way.

In our forums at the BBC people used to ask how they could search to see if the right answer to a question had been offered previously. Eventually we learned that it was more productive to ask the question again as someone else might answer of the perceived right answer may have changed over time due to differing circumstances.

Surely even science is just a current working hypothesis that changes sometimes fundamentally when someone like Einstein comes along with enough insight to shift the paradigm. We need to make decisions because we need to do things and we need to do so on the best information available to us at the time we need to make those decisions. However getting wedded to those answers or becoming famous for having come up with them is a slippery slope.

For me a moving scrum of people thinking about, debating and building on, recursive "right answers" feels like the best way to deal with the complexity of modern life.

Maybe these conversations don't work with someone famous but then maybe fame is an outmoded idea? If the ability to be more right than anyone else and more famous for having done so gets fragmented by a more distributed series of conversations is that such a bad thing?

The cost of managing

Spookily as I read the section in Here Comes Everybody about how the cost of running organisations increases rapidly with their size to the point where running the organisation is its own biggest cost I have encountered yet again the inability of accounts departments in large organisations to actually pay people!

Hurrah!