Inspired (nudged, prompted) by a recent e-mail from Janet, I’m trying to catch up with that builder and curator of a cabinet of wonders who calls himself Michael Wesch. Watching him and his work is like watching a time-lapse photograph of the Empire State Building going up. Every morning a new story appears. Amazing.
So this morning I got onto his blog entry about “Context Collapse,” actually an excerpt from a paper he’s submitted to a journal, and by the time I realized what was going on I’d composed a rather longish comment. I then wrestled with whether I should leave the comment there, or just post my thoughts here and link to the post. Tired of wrestling, I decided to do both.
This isn’t the blog post I’d planned to write–I need to do a follow-on to the one on blogging, where the comments have been truly mind-blowing and have added immeasurably to my thinking (as well as filling my heart). But I post it here in the hopes that some account of my response to Michael’s post will perhaps add a little to the conversation and, if nothing else, encourage a few more folks to go take a look at what Michael has written and the comments that have followed. And add their own.
Michael,
Fascinating stuff here. I’m eager to read your article and grateful you’ve shared part of it with us here.
Three things come to mind immediately:
1. The idea of “face-work†(great phrase) jibes interestingly with the arguments in Goleman’s “Social Intelligence.†Far from being opaque to each other, in f2f contexts we are almost comically transparent as our brains work below awareness to stimulate complex physical signals that share our subjectivity with each other. The sharing induces synchrony: heart rate, brain rhythms, etc. Massive social benefits emerge from this kind of synchrony, which blurs the lines between physiology, affect, and consciousness. But of course lower-bandwidth connections (webcams, writing, etc.) make these kinds of synchrony more difficult–though also more interestingly concentrated at times, a true paradox. (Call it the “stick-figure†paradox, in which a few bold suggestions of form can be more compelling than complexly realized CGI, perhaps because of the “uncanny valley†effect?)
2. In some respects, what I do when I teach students how to write more effectively is not so much to teach them a set of self-correcting techniques (I do that too, sure) as it is to teach them what it means to do “face-work†in the medium of prose. Language is both highly supple and highly resistant in this regard, difficult to master but capable of intense synchronicities when writer and reader are well-practiced in the varieties of “face-work†available to prose. Sometimes the goal of this practice is called “finding your voice†(necessary for the reader as well as for the writer, I think) which of course is also a kind of “face-work,†one even more intimately connected with the magic land between deliberate action and upwelling response. (Much to say here as well with regard to aesthetic arrest and altruism.)
3. It occurs to me that Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal essay on “Speech Genres†could be mapped onto webcams/vlogging in interesting ways. I’ve always been haunted by his concept of “addressivity,†which he defines as “the quality of turning to someone.†Imagining addressivity, combining it with what he calls “internal dramatism†in which one might say the notion of “face-work†becomes part of the very dynamics of self-presentation and self-expression, a canny nod to the reader that generates not irony so much as a shared awareness of the heroic joint effort in that moment to create a context that, however provisional, will not collapse (at least for now), offers some philosophical/linguistic models that might prove useful.
Thanks, as always, for the work you do.
Perhaps it would be an interesting meme for people to express how we each feel web2 changes wesch’s facets of culture? Here are mine. imho
copyright – a model which has a single point of value and a distributed cost or restriction is non viable in a mesh society. a photo of a class of students has a relationship to the students, their families, the educational organisation, the photographer, the website, the hosting company, the tubes, the grandmother at the other end and her technologies and isp.
None of them should have rights which exclude the rights of the others. Least of all the means of production.
That ultrasounds are copyright owned by the means of production is a stark example. DNA ownership is another nonsense and symptom of disconnection from what these things mean in ways which are not about aggregating potential economic returns.
authorship – we are making great reefs of culture and expression
each contributing what substance we can bring. this isnt ownership, its more like engagement. Attribution has been useful, it still works in contexts where one person is primarily speaking/creating. We ignore their infinite context. But in collaborative spaces even the attribution of direct participants can become noise in a collaborative signal. We need ways to value which are not about fences and exclusion.
identity We are both more faceted and more united.
We are still making spaces for different aspects of ourselves part of our efforts to generate good signal to noise ratio by slicing our voice into responses which are tailored for context. And yet our context is collapsing. We dress and function for work, we relax and celebrate at home, but we are transparent. We are glass.
ethics
by individuals: i am responsible for myself, for my impact on others, i do useful things. it is perhaps harder to anticipate the impact on others in an infinite information space. trolling can be life threatening.
by systems: http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/Collecter08.html
how our data is collected, aggregated, used, whether we can shoose to discard it, or whether the systems can discard our data as a matter of course. many questions around sustainability and locus of control.
aesthetics: frank humanity, candour and reciprocity. finding beauty in the beings that we are and the flow of feeling or ideas which we generate.
love for the morphing potentiality of open practice. a finished thing is
one kind of goal, a living meme or genre or form is another kind of valuable. in some ways youtube is less mediated than face to face negotiation because there is no civil inattention required.
rhetorics: like authorship, debate is plural, many voices, a state of mind which is changing. negotiation, diversity. understanding that right of way is too much to ask in a multicultural open society and that we just need to
negotiate for chocies which are fit for purpose in contexts where we are engaged. eg npov in wikipedia. who is authoritative about the extinction of an indigenous language on wikipedia. the authoritative reference on the article or the language speaker viewing the site?
governance: we can organise to fund or implement change or action which we want to effect. Doctorow has predicted soe of this in his fiction. Also Sayke who wrote some interesting work on liquid democracy which is no longer visible online. Choices again emerging regarding governance by ownership (including ‘intellectual property’ ideas of ownership) and our responsibilities as custodians of ecology and society.
privacy: learning to be gentle or considerate of the implications of sharing. learning to be clear and certain about the kinds of rights and permissions regarding information which should be guaranteed by a service or tool.
remembering to allow space for people who are accessible in a world of potentially infinite correspondence.
commerce: understanding that the things we express are participating in a mesh of value. in which kinds of ways does commerce sponsor our rights or means to express valuable words, and what does it mean for inclusion and diversity of language and expression if there is correlation between valuable expression and the means to speak.
love: for me this feels like agape: selfless love of one person for another without sexual implications (especially love that is spiritual in nature)
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
I am in love with the hive mind, with its potentiality, with the idea of ourselves as one of the networks or synapses in play across the surface of the planet. We need to be able to include a full and useful means of understanding our ecology in this system, but I an hopeful that even the connectedness of people will help us to understand what we mean to each other and to our ecological context. This is a passion but it functions at a different focal length. It is not about skin.
family: biological, conceptual, people who are related by counterpoint, or related by their parallel journeys. there is a sense of trust or relatedness in
journeying alongside someone through the wikispaces, delicious, and mail lists and finding congruence in what we seek and value.
I also feel like there is a familyness about the idea of freedom in the floss sense. Because the concept is about making in a way which ensures that the culture or technology is open for future generations. There is a flavour of person who finds that value proposition imperative.
It is something close to Carse’s infinite game.
If I close my eyes it looks like a kind of sphere of influence, but it is more like a sphere of generosity or value, which means that the person has a broad and timeless understanding of themselves as a part of the context and opportunity space for others. This is human family.