‹ Principle # 6 - Managing in a Wired Workplace •
Euan picked up a sound bite (below) from one of the 10 Principles with which I’m experimenting (as in looking for feedback).
He picked an interesting one. I’d argue that without the genius of the thousands and thousands of people who’ve invented, demonstrated, practiced and promoted blogging, the collective “we” wouldn’t have been able to get into all these conversations about how important conversation and voice are to our ongoing development as societies and as a species.
Euan challenges … now that the conversations are being made visible, and shining throught the structures, well … whatare we gonna do about it and with it ?
I don’t know Latin, so this is likely to be goofy … from homo sapiens to homo interactivus, or homo conversens ?
Human beings have been having conversations since time began. That’s how we’ve figured out all of the things we’ve invented and how we govern ourselves. It’s how we’ve gotten to how we are now.
In the Industrial Age, reporting relationships, and the assumption that the dog on the top of the heap knew more than all the other dogs, were the formalized structure for conversation . It doesn’t work very well this way, anymore.
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January 20, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Anonymous
Jon, Dave Rogers here.
I wrote something a little negative about the topic of conversation, that being, of course, conversation, over at my place. http://homepage.mac.com/dave_rogers/
Having done that, I think I should remark here that what you and Euan and some others are doing, well, most of the weblogs I actually _enjoy_ reading (and that includes Dave Weinberger who I think is a genuinely nice guy and a very imaginative thinker), are, in effect, conversations.
(That was a pretty tortured sentence, what with the comment abuse and all. Don’t you think?)
But I’ll reiterate something that I believe too often gets lost when we focus on all the positive ways this sort of discourse actually resembles a conversation. It’s merely reflection. It has value, and it is worthwhile, but we shouldn’t confuse it with something it is not. I think we need to be cautious, for our own sake and for that of others who are also trying to come to grips with this new medium. I think we run the risk of overselling it, and losing touch with something else that is more valuable in the process. I’m not sure exactly how big a risk it is, and I don’t think it’s confined simply to this new medium. I think we’ve been doing it for quite a while now.
I need to go buy another copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. It’s been a few years since I last read it, and my daughter has the only copy that was sort of in my possession. Have you ever read it? I want to read it again, and if it says what I think I recall it saying, I want to use it as a rejoinder to The Web as World.
Anyway, back to fixing my plane…