You know more than me, we know more than you, and wherever this all going, we're going there together.
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… was spend time being overwhelmed by the brilliance and depth of the animated films, sculptures, etchings and drawings of William Kentridge, a South African animator, set designer, director and political artist.
One of his main recurring figures is Soho Eckstein, here pondering why, what for, or whether he has bus fare or the price of a beer ?
Just thinking out loud, so to type (speak).
After posting the item below I got to thinking … I wonder if there’s more “news” today, as greater populations, more complex social and economic systems and the greater rapidity of flows of information (thanks to the Web) interact ?
And does more “news” mean less critical analysis and establishment of facts, with more opinion … and thus less real “news” ?
I wonder if pre-Web there was more time to dig around and get to the bottom of things, or whether there was just less information-based activity upon which to opine ? And did the “news” media see its role differently, or has it failed to adapt to the new conditions offered by software and the Web, preferring to see them merely as tools with which to make posting of the “news” more efficient ?
Just wondering. If anyone understands and knows, please share.
… it’s become a futile exercise in frustration to watch and try to make sense of how mainstream information (let’s call it “justifications we run past the audiences to see if they’ll believe this one”) creates news and public awareness, which is then used to guide domestic and foreign policy.
Sure, there’s lots of personal opinion and invective and sloppy thinking and writing on blogs (including this one as a good example). There’s also lots of expertise, clear and hard-headed thinking and excellent analysis on blog.
This post by Somerby, found on the Atrios blog, sets out an interesting perspective. It reminds me of status and positional power relationships … much like the mainstream media assuming that because they’re there, they’re entitled to be higher-up on the organizational chart of the news industry.
Have you ever been in a position in an organization where you were smarter and/or more competent than your boss ?
So how about it? Is there something “exceptional about the blogs” when it comes to slander, misstatement and error? Is it true that newspapers “have done the same thing?” As the discussion progressed, Andrew Sullivan seemed to say that blogs do have a special problem in this area; Shafer kept insisting that they didn’t.
But at no point in the eleven-minute discussion did any panelist state the obvious—that we have seen, in our recent history, exceptional waves of group misstatement driven by the mainstream media! In particular, as everyone knows (and knows not to say), Campaign 2000 was a two-year orgy of spin and misstatement about Candidate Gore—a slander campaign that was endlessly driven by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Nothing even remotely like it has ever arisen from the web (Matt Drudge excluded).
But in an eleven-minute attempt to decide if the web has a special problem with slander, none of the panelists—nobody; no one—bothered to state this obvious fact about the coverage of Election 2000, an election which changed our political history.
Go ahead—watch or read this part of the discussion, and marvel at the way our recent history has been disappeared by mainstream and “liberal” pundits. Indeed, how thoroughly have our mainstream pundits managed to bury this part of our past?
… out for a walk this early sprinng afternoon in a bohemin-immigrant-where-artists-live neighbourhood in Montreal, and I noticed the following colourful sign in a slightly down-at-the-heels gallery window:
$top Painting …
Sex, Drugs and Violence are where the money is
… in this very recent interview.
“And what Giuliana Sgrena really stressed with me was that she — the bullet that injured her so badly and that killed Calipari, came from behind, entered the back seat of the car. And the only person who was not severely injured in the car was the driver, and she said that this is because the shots weren’t coming from the front or even from the side. They were coming from behind, i.e. they were driving away.
So, the idea that this was an act of self-defense, I think becomes much more questionable. And that detail may explain why there’s some reticence to give up the vehicle for inspection.
Because if indeed the majority of the gunfire is coming from behind, then clearly, they were firing from — they were firing at a car that was driving away from them.”
… James Miller wonders about this in an article at Tech Central Station titled “The Coming War on Blogs”.
… maybe dangerous to your health, depending upon whether the strip searches include your various cavities.
Who knows what might be lurking inside ? Sad, but true, story.
Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends. Jeremy Wright of Winnipeg was not allowed to cross the Canada/USA border, either because there is no job called “blogger” or because everyone knows you can’t talk to people you’ve never met without using a telephone.
I’m still not 100% sure what happened at Customs at the airport. Really, totally unsure. However at the very least I was denied entry and flagged for followup any other time I try to enter. As far as I can tell, I am not “banned” from entering. I’m not sure why the border guard said I was, threatened to throw me and jail and seize my assets, etc.
I don’t know if any of what I experienced is even allowed by DHS (Department of Homeland Security). And I don’t even hold anything against DHS, Americans, etc. At the end of the day it’s this guy’s job to protect the border from, as he said, “ingrates and other seedy characters”.
There are quotes that stick out in my mind, like the “blogging ain’t a job” qoute that everyone’s bandying about. And there were threats. And there was lots of talk and many humiliating moments. There were also jaw-dropping ones like:
Him: Why would you visit someone in the states you’d never met (I mentioned I was planning to visit several people whilst down there)
Me: Well, I have met most of them, but I’ve talked to them dozens or hundreds of times online.
Him: Do you have any of their phone numbers?
Me: No, but I talk
Him: You can’t talk to someone without a phone number. Stop lying to me.
Me: No, really, I can talk from my computer to theirs
Him: Don’t be a smartass. If you don’t have their phone number, and you’ve never met them, how can you have ever talked to them.
Me: … (at this point I’ve learned that sarcasm doesn’t help, nor does answering questions he doesn’t want to hear the answer to)
Him: So, you’re trying to tell me that you’re going to visit someone who you’ve never met, never talked to and who knows nothing about you? And I’m supposed to believe this?
Me: … (This was two hours in, and minutes before I demanded to be released)
Anyways, I’m not going to New York. The company basically needed someone there this week, and the only way to get a Visa is through a fairly standard 2 week process. Which I understand, and I’m not mad about, it just means I’m not going.
… Welcome to the Internet-based version of MacCarthyism ? More on David Howowitz’s crusade for fairness and diversity, via Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog:
The GoogleSmear as Political Tactic
The Google search has become so popular that prospective couples planning a date will google one another. Mark Levine, a historian at the University of California Irvine, tells the story of how a radio talk show host called him a liar because he referred to an incident that the host could not find on google. That is, if it isn’t in google, it didn’t happen. (Levine was able to retrieve the incident from Lexis Nexis, a restricted database).
It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information.
Recently Steven Plaut, an Israeli defender, at the University of Haifa, of the terrorist groups around the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, was commissioned by Horowitz (and probably others of that circle) to do yet another hatchet job on me, the second in just a few months. I replied to the earlier smear at my blog.
Plaut cited the earlier smears and rightwing bloggers as authorities. (One smear now becomes a “citation” for the next one!)
.. at the Institute for Backup Trauma.
Save Your Job
Save Your Sanity
… and whatever you do, don’t click on The Third Button !
… zipping around on the Web this morning, I took a quick look at CNN.com and saw “that” picture of Terri Schiavo.
I think that one of the great problems of our era is that many many people react at a very emotional and visceral level (which is likely where and how they take decisions) to pictures and images … without accessing and thinking critically about the supporting information underneath those pictures and images.
The television version of CNN is shamelessly showing - over and over again - a highly-edited videotape of Terri Schiavo that may make many people think that the woman is responding in very basic ways to stimuli from parents or her visitors. Unfortunately, this video does not show that up to 90% of her brain is pudding.
… is no doubt progress, GWB would say.
… reviewing an article in the Washington Post titled “Tough Love or Tough Luck ?” that seems to shake its head (so to speak) at John Bolton’s recent nomination as US Ambassador to the United Nations, I came across this:
Finally, Bolton criticized any ” ‘right of humanitarian intervention’ to justify military operations to prevent ethnic cleansing or potential genocide.” One must wonder how forcefully he will work to halt what the administration deems genocide in Darfur.”
Well, one would also wonder …. since there no WMD’s, it seems that George and his buddies decided that the real reason to invade and occupy Iraq was to prevent any additional ethnic cleansing or potential genocide that bad bad Saddam may have had in mind. Oh, wait .. who was it that flattened Fallujah ?
According to the quote above, one would presume that John Bolton would have argued forcefully against the USA using “the right of humanitarian intervention” to set the stage for the march of freedom and democracy that is still at the starting line in Iraq.
Joe Conason in “Head Scratcher?” on Salon.com wonders exactly why Bush puts Wolfowitz (”a decent, compassionate man” - methinks he doth protest too much) onto the world stage in such a prominent and powerful position.
Its got exactly zero to do with how ineffectual he has been … you couldn’t buy worse job performance in his career.
There’s only one reason … with respect to what develops in significant parts of the world due to whatever the World Bank enables or not, its President is not unlike a combination of central banker and Supreme Court judge. The position is both structural and tactical … and has over-powerful reach and impact.
The World Bank is the piggy bank for poor countries’ allowances, and it will be Wolfowitz who doles out the kids’ rewards, according to how he thinks they should behave. In an inteconnected interlinked global economy, with the bureaucratic infrastructures for the distribution of money in countries that are now used to “receiving” aid … Wolfowitz is in the perfect place to to be the 00’s re-interpretation of Adolf Eichmann.
God was Bush’s headhunter for the Wolfowitz appointment. *Ordered liberty* is on the march.
Seems Doc Searls liked this post by Dave Winer ( … “puts the future in a blogshell” were his words):
Dave’s Advertising-in-the-age-of-podcasts Manifesto
1. We’re seeking out commercial information all the time. When you look up a movie review, or choose a plane flight, shop for an apartment, pick a restaurant or review your stock portfolio, you are seeking commercial information. So, therefore, there’s nothing particularly bad about commercials.
2. Most TV and radio commercials are ANNOYING. By design. They’re forcing commercial information on you that you DON’T WANT. This is bad.
3. So instead, create commercial information, in any form you like and make it available. This is very different from sneaking it in, or being annoying. Make it available. Then you have a responsibility to be: Informative. Respectful. Entertaining. Wouldn’t that be nice?
4. Sometimes commercials are all that. Then I don’t skip over them on my TiVO, in fact, what I do is play them over and over on my TiVO. So all the new media does is change the rules. Instead of being intrusive assholes, be entertaining informers.
5. Unfortunately for people who are intrusive assholes, there’s not much they can do. Hopefully they made a lot of money in the last century and can retire and be totally puzzled by the way things turned out.
… but got all snarky about a post titled The New Attention-Driven Advertising that I think said pretty much the same thing as this Winer Manifesto. I probably bloviated, though.
Go figure. I guess it helps with the whole approval thing if you’re one of the guys.
March 18, 2005 … 12 noon Pacific Standard Time
7,985,931 blogs
Update
As of 6.00 p.m. PST, Technorati is watching 7,992,669 blogs
I’m off soon to a major St. Paddy’s Day middle-aged drunken Canadian rave, where much-too-good a time will be had by all.
I wonder if there will be 8 million blogs under watch by the time I get home ?
Update 2
It did change over whilst I was away … I didn’t get home until just shy of 4.00 a.m.
Stimulated by Billmon’s playing with scenario building in the eventuality of Paul Wolfowitz’s confirmation as President of the World Bank, and reinforced by Michael Lind’s article in Salon.com (Mr. Magoo goes to the World Bank) about Wolfowitz’s perfect incompetence over the decades:
No summary of Wolfowitz’s catastrophically successful career would be complete without acknowledgment that he was one of the major American sponsors of the disgraced Ahmed Chalabi, whom Paul Bremer’s administration in Baghdad accused of involvement in Iranian espionage. Last but not least, following Wolfowitz’s diplomatic mission to Turkey to obtain support for the forthcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq, Turkey decided to have nothing to do with the war.
Diplomat, military tactician, grand strategist — as I said, Paul Wolfowitz is perfectly incompetent.
We live in a country in which privates are punished for the crimes of generals, so it is only natural that Wolfowitz should be rewarded for the blunders, errors and miscalculations that have cost the American and Iraqi people so much by promotion to the World Bank. That’s the way it is with Mr. Magoo. Whenever he steps blindly out of a building he has accidentally set on fire, a truck is always conveniently passing by.
I found myself wondering whether Wolfowitz will suggest that the best way to spread freedom and democracy will be for the World Bank to become the world’s revenue service, levying and collecting taxes to be put to the use of building and sustaining freedom-generating and democratic institutions and processes the world over …
… a taxation doctrine similar to Pax Americana, wherein the wealthy get permanent tax cuts, trickle-down economics becomes the de facto form of global economic stimulation, and daily subsistence wages become the de facto minimum wage *law*.
From a CNN piece today:
In an interview with AP, Wolfowitz said he really believed in the mission of the World Bank, “which is reducing poverty.”
“It is a noble mission and a matter of enlightened self-interest.”
The nomination was the subject of much debate in Thursday’s newspapers.
The Wall Street Journal commented: “Mr. Wolfowitz is willing to speak the truth to power. He saw earlier than most, and spoke publicly about, the need for dictators to plan democratic transitions.
“It is the world’s dictators who are the chief causes of world poverty. If anyone can stand up to the Robert Mugabes of the world, it must be the man who stood up to Saddam Hussein.”
me … WTF ?
The Financial Times was less upbeat. It likened Wolfowitz’s nomination to that of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
It called the decision “the second shock this month to Europeans who thought Mr. Bush would present a kinder, gentler face to the world in his second term.”
“Some non-governmental groups fear Mr. Wolfowitz will … seek to enlist the bank in the larger project of building U.S. security by spreading democracy.”
me … yikes !!! Run .. fast …
… pineapple or knife ? … goes a line from an old Laurie Anderson song.
Which is harder … communicating about the mundane aspects of daily life between two people - virtually or face-to-face ?
Groundhog Day points to an article outlining the pros and cons (cons, mainly, I guess) of an unfettered ability to connect and communicate virtually available to American soldiers stationed in many different places in the world.
I have always thought that one of Groundhog Day’s key points to be correct - that we cannot escape the implications or consequences of our incarnate actions and surroundings, and in relating and interacting virtually miss (by definition) some fundamental components and core aspects of our earthly existence (if I have interpreted and captured it correctly). Another key implication, extended from the preceding belief, is that if we want to engage in, participate in, and support significant change(s) in the way things are done in whatever family/group/community/society we live, we must concentrate first on self-knowledge, self-awareness and self-management. This too I believe is correct.
I am less convinced that the use of controls and ways of enabling or allowing virtual contact and communications to members of the military by their commanders is the best example available of some of the early learnings about how we handle interaction and communications in a wired world.
The article in the NY Times titled “For Troops, Home Can Be Too Close”, starts out describing an example of some conflict and stress associated with domestic issues between a soldier and his spouse, and then expands its reach.
The military is taking steps to control the information flow, in part with Internet kill switches at bases to give senior officers a means to enforce communication blackouts. Military researchers, meanwhile, are scrambling to track the broader impact of instant communication technology. Studies under way include the interpersonal - as in the Murrays’ painful collision of household and war zone - and urgent matters of national and military security.
“We are going to learn profound lessons from this war about how to manage these devices to communicate what we really want to convey, and reduce the negative aspects,” said Dr. Morten G. Ender, a sociologist at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
There are a couple of points here that got me thinking. First, the fundamental nature of military work (as I understand it, which is not very well) would mitigate against free accessible interconnectivity and open communications of all sorts, willy-nilly .. and so if it was first offered on such a basis, my sense is that the initial strategic thinking about providing such access and capability wasn’t superb. And, I don’t think it’s any secret that the current US Adminitration favours top-down dynamics … and the culture of any organization is set by, and takes its cues and clues from, the top.
Second, the scenario which opened the article describes a problematic situation of communication between two people of a sort that happnes thousands of times a day, virtual or not .. and I quickly found myself thinking about how many times in the past, when such communications had not been so readily available, people found that after several years apart without all that much connection, re-connecting and then sustaining the fundamental relationship proved to be overwhelmingly difficult.
As an opposing example - the story Suw Charman, who blogs as the Strange Attractor for Corante, offered when she stayed here recently. Her new boyfriend Chris has just moved from Rochester NY to San Francisco to work for SixApart, and Suw lives outside of Bournemouth in Sussex, UK … she said she and Chris happily hang out together - online - most evenings and more (I guess during the day, too) often without saying much to each other, but sensing, feling and having ongoing awareness of each other’s presence virtually (I think they may both have Macs and iSights). She feels (if I recall correctly) that this capability has allowed them to significantly deepen and ground what otherwise would be a trying way to build a long-distance relationship … with the happy intention of not keeping it virtual forever. I’m sure Suw will announce it when she moves to San Fran.
That’s all well and good. The article raises a few more issues, which I agree are symptomatic of the problems associated with relying on virtuality and interconnectivity as the main means of conducting and sustaining interpersonal and collaborative relationships. From the article:
“We’ve raised expectations of instantaneous communications to such an unreasonable level that when we can’t connect, the technology ends up being a new source of stress,” said Dr. Frederic Medway, a psychologist and a specialist in military and family separation issues at the University of South Carolina.
The technology can also distort communication. Cellphones and e-mail artificially compress time and space, giving the illusion of chatting almost in the same room. But as the Murrays’ experience shows, context greatly influences how people “hear” what’s being said. Frequency and volume, moreover, don’t necessarily contribute to better understanding. “We are seeing a great deal of information overload in soldiers in Iraq and in their families,” Dr. Ender said.
I have trained myself over the years to look for, and think in terms of polarities. I notice what I call polarities in each of the scenarios and examples reported in this article. And I think that this is representative of the fact that we haven’t yet learned enough about how to use such capability to maximum or optimal ends in various situations … can it be imagined that the wisest use of such interconnectivity and instant access to others will come to be *managed* by oneself and others throughthe use of various forms of *governors*, or self-management rules as to when and how it’s used (for example). We do this in real-life, in meatspace … whether it’s counting to 10, or going for a walk, or sulking, or getting drunk and blowing off steam.
When I write, or try to wax eloquent, about the positive, constructive or utopian aspects of interconnectivity, interaction, blogging, *wirearchy* .. whatever … it is mainly motivated by all the idiocy, lack of responsibility and abuse of positions of power I have seen and experienced, and contributed to, in my life to date. There are relatively simplistic (imo) rules and associated practices related to fundamental hierarchical principles operating in most organizations and social sytems, and I believe that they have not accounted fully (yet) for the presence and imnpacts of interconnectivity and the ease of sharing different kinds of information … and yes, I am encouraged by the possibilites for self-development and constructuive collaboration offered by the at-the-same-level dynamics (perhaps) made possible by the Web and interconnected people.
This does not mean I think all this will solve many, or even any, of my problems, or my friends’ and group’s problems, or my city’s or country’s problems, or the world’s problems.
But I do think it’s a damned useful and hopeful set of tools and capabilities to play with, learn with, work with and discover how to use better.
… just sitting here thinking about the lastten or fifteen years or so, and the preceding post titled “Social collaboration is the future of the Net”.
I hope any readers will pardon me for being so presumptuous, but this just seems so bleedingly obvious to me.
… at the same time I keep being surprised by how deeply anchored in existing structures and the dynamics they generate are most peoples’ consciousness and daily work/life habits.
First, we shape our structures/tools … then, our structures/tools shape us (attributed to Churchill and McLuhan, and others)
I keep thinking about how easy it might be, and how useful and constructive it could be, if people, organizations, businesses would/could just re-frame their notions about buzz-word driven high performance, emotional intelligence, six sigma, talent war, intellectual capital execution, and suspend judgmentabout the pajama-porting, free-think, personal diary-publishing people online, and just try letting and helping people collaborate more easily online (and using telepresence).
How can millions and millions of younger digital natives, used to text messaging, IM, cell phones, sharing whilst playing games or doing their homework not end up using an easier-to-use and more integrated set of capabilities on the Web, say 5 years hence.
For an interesting initiative in its formative stages, take a look at this call to experiment by my friend Chris Corrigan.
… says the last line of David Weinberger’s post today.
He’s reporting from eTech on Jimmy Wales most recent unveiling of WikiCities.
According to David, Wales makes the (seems obvious to me) point that the types of activity of which of Wikipedia and WikiNews are examples will spread to other areas of human activity.
George Bush likes to go around decisively stating that he’s a man off action, focused on solving problems that affect “the people” - especially as applied to the Social Security system
I’d like to know what others think, so … if you want to, please in the comments section rank the following in order of importance of resolution, to ensure that America and Americans can continue to hang on to the mythical American way of life.
I’ll number them, but not in any order of importance that I would assign to them .. just for ease of reference in case anyone wants to comment.
1. The continuously growing, and now at record levels, current account deficit
2. reliance on oil (even if the USA controls Iraq .. and Saudi Arabia)
3. increasing offshoring of both manufacturing and “white-collar” work
4. the ongoing - and increasing - alienation of much of the rest of the world
5. ongoing corporate malfeasance
6. re-vamping Social Security
7. a massive and rapidly growing government deficit
8. weak environmental legislation with respectto water, air and other forms of chronic pollution
9. unwavering support of Israel, combined with continued involvement in Iraq
10. continuously declining quality of public education
How would you rank these, in terms of priority for some kind of fundamental change ?
Oh, and where is Bin Laden .. anyone heard anything even mentioned in “the news” these days ?
Thanks to that irritatingly itchy but always reliably satisfying Scratchings, I found a new-to-me-blog tonight that kept me reading for an hour (from 2.30 a.m till now), even through the archives. There’s something remarkable about it and I’m not sure what … I found myself thinking that this is perhaps one of the most “this is just me” blogs I have run across in quite some time … well, I also like the poetry, the general diversity of interests and books that require intellectual attention, and I think we have similar views on the miasmic absurdity of the slo-mo fuckup that’s been being perpetrated (not least by themselves, in some form of ritualistic self-destruction) on the USian people … and has been since Ronnie Raygun first started grinning and spinning. If that peculiar mind-set that calls itself mainstream American culture ever has a day (or three) of reckoning … let’s see, which crisis will it take to start the process - environmental, social, financial ? … and comes to some basic understanding of what’s required to re-undo the reconstruction of pre-WW II society that’s been the neocon’s active and conscious project … hmmm, then there’ll be some real wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But I don’t expect that will ever happen in my lifetime … more likely, I think, is that the pinch of starting down the far side of the slope from Peak Oil will cause the great wounded beast to lash out more and more … I just can’t see the basic attitudinal palette changing much … people have to think hard, and also work hard with themselves, wrestle with themselves, to change attitudes … and not just once, but day after day. And that corny, bullshit-and-propaganda based American Myth, or American Dream is just too much entrenched. To change it some idea that will support and sustain a robust and much more aware-and-inclusive belief system will have to come along, be introduced and begin to grow in effective ways. Think that’ll happen ? I don’t. It’s been hard enough to even get Air America operating on a sustainable basis, let alone considering how to change directions or paths for the country (and thereby the world) as a whole.
Thanks to Chris Corrigan, during a skypeversation we were having on the dynamics of networks and the principles that may pertain, for prompting me to pull these together into one post, as opposed to having them scattered throughout the blog.
These represent a draft … please feel free to help make them better, more inclusive, more accurate, more useful …
1. Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has
This fact has large implications for any organization. It means that you can’t hide – anywhere.
Michael Schrage of MIT puts it very succinctly:
Networks make organizational culture and politics explicit
It’s essential, in this interconnected age of instant accessibility to information and knowledge, that as a leader and manager you are aware of the potent force that is contained in networks of connected information and people.
The implications are clear.
People have to understand and believe in what an organization is doing, why the organization is doing what it does, and how it’s doing it.
The messages have to be clear and believable, and the culture that carries out the organization’s mandate and mission has to be flexible, responsive and open.
Fear and cynicism, being driven to perform – as opposed to being invited to contribute your best – can’t carry the day.
2. The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization … more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight
Most organization charts reflect an organizational design that is intended to deliver a strategy developed by a small group of people sitting on the top of an organization.
Evaluating and ordering jobs in terms of their size and importance is often used to implement the organizational design.
Most methods of job evaluation use factors, logic and language that was developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s – perfect for the Industrial Age, less than perfect for the interconnected Information Age.
Often, reporting relationships and chains-of-command get in the way.
Why do you think the Dilbert comic strip has been so successful for so long ?
Probably because people know that lots of time, energy and effort is expended keeping bosses happy – usually at the expense of customers.
Many managers aspired to, and have spent the last twenty years, learning how to become “bosses”. Do you know what prison guards are called by the inmates ? You guessed it –
BOSS
3. People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long
People communicate. That’s what people do.
They share jokes, they send around interesting e-mails and web sites, they help each other get things done.
The nature of work in the Information Age has changed – dramatically. And it’s likely that the nature of work will keep changing.
If you want to see what work might look like – watch developments in the usability and usefulness of blogs and wikis. Watch younger people as they bring the gaming mentality into the workplace and watch how they communicate using cell phones, e-mail, and IM and the (eventual) derivatives of podcasting.
Watch, too, for developments in telepresence.
Employees are people, too. They communicate just like all the other real people, in Social Networks. They’re the ones communicating with your customers and shareholders.
It’s essential for an organization’s success, and the personal success of each and every one of those employees, that they feel proud of what they communicate. They want to be engaged in positive ways in making a meaningful contribution – to the customers, to themselves and to their fellow employees.
4. Champion-and-Channel replaces Command-and-Control
Thousands of articles have talked about how command-and-control dynamics are less than effective in the new set of interconnected conditions found in the workplaces of the Information Age.
Remember how you felt (or feel today) when commanded by a parent or other authority figure?
All too often, going to work in today’s organizations feels like re-living the adult version of that experience.
Not all organizations are like this – but fewer and fewer of tomorrow’s organizations will be able to function effectively if command-and-control remains the dominant dynamic.
Coaching has become an important response to changing this dynamic. Coaches help leaders and managers listen better, respect other people more authentically, and become more effective at striking a balance between:
Clarity and Decisiveness AND Flexibility and Openness
As change swirls and complexity keeps on growing, champion-and-channel helps good ideas and effective responses come to the surface and get implemented.
Effective leaders and managers know how to, or learn how to, champion and channel.
Bosses are different than leaders and managers - as both a conceptual construct and in the lived experience found in our relationship with them.
5. Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done
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.
The only way to deal with ongoing change is to create and sustain effective conversations – with your customers, with and amongst employees and with everyone else.
Sharing information, and creating new knowledge, in order to respond to ongoing change, is the only way that will work from here on out.
The structure, tools and culture of organizations will have to honor this fact.
There’s no other way it’s going to work.
6. Trust, transparency and telling the truth are the glue that holds it all together
People want to trust, they want to believe – even in the face of large amounts of evidence that the system is being manipulated in the favor of a select few.
In North America, we’re still trying to shake off the disbelief about the blatant dishonesty and fraud demonstrated by some corporate (and governmental) leaders. We actively do not want to believe things may be as corrupt as they seem … institutionalized dishonesty and deceit.
We don’t want to believe that these attitudes and behavior might be more widespread than is apparent, yet somehow we have a feeling that the common corporate culture rewards and supports this possibility.
Many people – checking their 401K’s or stock portfolios, or looking back at the job(s) they’ve lost – feel at best disrespected and at worst enraged that they have been taken advantage of.
The interconnectedness of the Web has created a means for people to challenge blind authority, and to push back. If their trust is abused, many will use this to establih their own authority or fight back
Let’s understand one thing … when people who have been abused decide to get organized and push back, they become a potent force.
Interconnectedness is a potent force for creating transparency and demanding trust, and many are just now learning how to use it more effectively.
7. The Workplace of the Future will be more diverse – in terms of demographics, values, gender, race and language
In the midst of all the interconnectedness and sharing of information, the composition and shape of the workplace will keep changing.
North America and Western Europe are landscapes of a changing population – different waves of immigration keep coming, and each new generation brings fresh change to the workplace. The workplace of the near future will be a sea of people from a wide range of countries, cultures and languages – and they will all be interconnected.
The range of diversity brings with an equally wide range of beliefs, values and reasons for working.
This emerging mix will bring new dynamics of relationship into the workplace – both online and offline
Learning to listen, respect and champion-and-channel will be an essential competency for success.
8. New, integrated and sophisticated technologies are being developed and implemented – and the knowledge workers of tomorrow will be more interconnected than ever
According to the experts, Web 2.0 is on its way to the workplace soon – it’s an infrastructure that’s decentralized and more open than that which exists today.
Remember Napster ? The workplace versions exist and may be coming soon to a workplace near you. Indeed, the wider conversation about blogs and the workplace is only growing, and acquiring useful examples.
Many forms of “smartware” are also on the runway, getting ready to take off. New tools are absolutely essential to deal with the overload of information that already exists – and grows more daunting with each passing week. This “smartware” will find its way into the workplace.
Smartware will either “dumb things down” (entering information, and the system does the rest), or “smarten things up” (helping people collaborate and create new knowledge).
Many of these tools will add capability and functionality to the continuing need for effective collaboration – and so will make collaboration more and more possible.
More technology-supported collaboration will in turn increase the need for effective leadership and coaching – champion-and-channel will become more necessary than ever. The game will get sharper again.
Adapting to the new tools will require new forms of social interaction in the workplace. As change keeps coming, and work activities become more interdependent, the required adaptation will become more social and cultural - and biological, in terms of the dynamics - in nature.
9. We’re all in this together
The interconnected Information Age is beginning to show us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.
This principle applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.
New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.
Awareness is the key. Maintain an “open focus”.
Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.
10. There’s no going back to “Normal” – Permanent Whitewater is the New Normal
It’s almost trite to say this – the only constant is change.
However…over the past 15 years or so, there have been enormous amounts of energy spent resisting change – waiting and hoping for things to go back to “normal”.
It won’t happen. It’s useful to acknowledge and accept this, and get started … at learning how to learn, and equipping yourself for constant adaptability.
It’s a good - but not the only - way forward.
At the same time, you won’t survive by trying to make yourself into a chameleon. You can’t be all things to all people.
Connecting to your self – your values, your ways to build and acquire knowledge, and understand and use your intuition – is in my opinion the only way to go.
Via Mitch Ratcliffe’s blog:
Stop shooting and read the ads….
MediaPost Publications Home of MediaDailyNews, MEDIA and OMMA Magazines:
MASSIVE INC., A video game advertising network, will announce today a slate of major video game publisher deals, including established names like Ubisoft, Vivendi Universal Games, and Eidos.
The Massive network will officially launch on March 28 with the release of the anticipated title “Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory,” and the online futuristic role-playing game “Anarchy Online.” “Chaos Theory” is the third installment in the already established Splinter Cell franchise, which features a U.S. intelligence agent fighting various global terrorist threats.
About 4 years ago I spoke at a conference on elearning, and i wondered aloud to th audience if we might not see more and more elements of “gaming” (as we know it in video games) appear in business and work-related applications, and as part of what we do in many areas of activity online.
Here’s a snippet from a post by Flemming Funch, quoting Edward Castronova, an academic specializing in massively multi-user spaces on the Internet (does Flickr come to mind ?). Some of you may remeber that Flickr’s DNA is from a massively-multi-player online game named Gameneverending.
The videogame companies that operate the most popular synthetic worlds – some of which have millions of users – are currently deliberating how to respond: should they try to capitalize on this money flow, or shut it down? If they encourage virtual item trading in real currencies, if only to take a slice off the top, their virtual economies will merge into the real-world economy, with real-world taxation, regulation, and legal obligation being an unavoidable consequence. If they shut down the eBay trade (which, after all, is against the rules of these places as games), they close off a revenue source as well as a part of the game that many users think is great fun.
The lesson for serious people outside the videogame industry is this: like it or not, real life is genuinely and observably migrating online for many millions of people, in its personal, social, economic, and even political aspects. In the new frontier, the features of the real body or the ability to do real-world work are no longer important. What matters is that you can get along with others while doing quite fantastical, quite fun things – slaying dragons, casting spells, performing resurrections, building castles. New frontier, new rules.
You may agree or disagree. I tend to think - nay, I believe - that there will continue to be an evolution of human behaviour in online spaces, for better or worse.
I agree generally with those who suggest that we need to pay deep and oingoing attention to our inner lives, our deepest beliefs, values and needs and continue to learn how best to stay connected to what is important for us and the slices of society in which we live, and …
… I also agree that there are some basic characteristics of connecting and working at building dialogue, shared meanings, and eventually doing things with others whom we’ve come to know via online connectivity, that are important opportunities for progress offered to us by the Web.
….and just recently completed a long-ish (30 pages plus appendices) white paper for a client in Montreal. The white paper is titled The Issues and Opportunities of Digital Network Environments and the Effects on Cultural Dynamics.
As soon as I get permission, I will be glad to share this paper in pdf format with anyone who might like to take a look at it. Just let me know, below.
Via The Obvious ?, discovered a wonderful post from David Weinberger’s JOHO on The Internet as the Infrastructure for Strengthening Democracy. I assume that it may apply differently in different parts of the world, notwithstanding that “freedom and democracy are on the march”.
Regardless of the rhetoric about the bloodthirstiness and cynical desire to kill freedom that we are told “terrorists” possess, there are some who continue to believe that terrorism has deep roots in injustice and oppression … and there has always been significant evidence that injustice and oppression are primary mechanisms used by powerful nations and states to gain power and control over situations, geography or resources that are seen as advantageous. And it’s the hierarchies of power and control that make and effect such decisions, not the citizenries … they swallow and follow.
Hyperlinks do subvert hierarchy.
What is less often explored is how hyperlinks can support constructive dialogue, over time. Now, I know that conventional wisdom is that polarisation prevails, and it’s clear that much of what currently occurs in the form of conversation in the blogosphere is more like discussion (heaving of ideas at one another) than dialogue (creating a flow of meaning).
And I also know that much has been analysed, written and proclaimed on the two-wayyness of the Read-Write Web
What I often wonder about, which may be less explored due to our proclivity for instant analysis and linear extrapolation, are the accumulated effects of linky thinking and the weight of evidence that remains available to all for examination. It’s not surprising, really, that the first-order response on the part of powers that be is an accelerated manipulation of language and image, carried out by corporate television networks and newspaper businesses.
I think many peoples’ hopes reside on the accumulation of the forces for transparency and ‘truth” … one does wonder how long governments and military structures can keep on informing people only what it is deemed they are supposed to know.
If you can’t trust governments …
and you can’t trust corporations …
and you can’t trust churches …
and you can’t trust mainstream media … the televison and newspaper news machines …
and increasingly you feel you have to be wary of other people you don’t know …
what’s left ?
Via The Observer section of today’s Manchester Guardian Online …
… dedicated to all those who suggest that blogging and online interaction is just so much banal chattering (which of course much of it is, including this forlorn space right here).
Why chattering classes have nothing to say
Amelia Hill, education correspondent
Sunday February 20, 2005
The Observer
The art of conversation is dead but the artistry of chatter is thriving, with Britons overwhelmingly admitting they rarely talk about anything more serious than traffic and television.
According to a survey of more than 2,000 adults, almost two-thirds of us admit to indulging in shallow chit-chat at the expense of weighty dialogue - even though we secretly long for more meaningful exchanges.
‘Brits have lost the skill of conversation,’ said Ronald Carter, conversation expert and professor of English Language at Nottingham University. ‘Considered communication has been the first casualty of our rushed, modern lives.
‘We can’t exchange thoughts and opinions reflectively when we’re in a hurry and so we resort to banal banter,’ said Carter, who has published more than 20 books and 100 papers on different aspects of spoken language. ‘We have got used to chatter and have stopped making the effort to reach any more significant conversational depth.’
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I’ve always said (oops .. excepting political beliefs and points of view … I’ll never join with those who have Darwinian notions of how societies should function, even if they beat me and others into the ground).
The full article is here.
A fundamental history lesson on Lebanon, Syria and the greater Middle East … and a challenge to the USA government’s rhetoric about “people power”
The full post, which in my opinion is a “must-read” is here on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment.
An excerpt - the last two paragraphs:
Much of the authoritarianism in the Middle East since 1945 had actually been supported (sometimes imposed) by Washington for Cold War purposes. The good thing about the democratization rhetoric coming out of Washington (which apparently does not apply to Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Uzbekistan, and other allies against al-Qaeda) is that it encourages the people to believe they have an ally if they take to the streets to end the legacy of authoritarianism.
But Washington will be sorely tested if Islamist crowds gather in Tunis to demand the ouster of Bin Ali. We’ll see then how serious the rhetoric about people power really is.
