Brian Frank » creativity

What My Nephew Taught Me About Nurturing Change

Brian — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:51:04 +0000

It’s amazing how much insight and inspiration can come from babies, as I was reminded after visiting my seven week-old nephew yesterday.

Most of time we were there we listened to “the baby’s music” which is supposed to make him happy (I’m a baby-newbie so forgive me if I’m embarrassing myself), but it made the rest of us pretty chipper too. It sounds like circus music: jaunty and jingly with a lot of irreverent little flourishes.

We laughed about it but we also couldn’t help bouncing and whistling along like goofballs.

I have no idea what effect the music has on the baby — I’m pretty sure nobody does, exactly — but I do know the effect we had on the baby, via the effect the music had on us. All of our playful behaviour affected by the music creates a positive environment of positive energy and contagious smiles.

I don’t presume to know anything about infant development, but think about it as an analogy for nurturing growth and positive change in the grown-up world.

Sometimes we try to change others directly without changing our own behaviour (hat tip @jamesshelley). Without changing ourselves, we might keep sending signals that trigger precisely those behaviours in others we want to change!

I’m thinking this way after reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip & Dan Heath. They astutely observe that, “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” Good people can do bad things and smart people can do stupid things when we’re surrounded by signals that induce that behaviour. By changing those signals, our behaviour follows.

As the Heaths say, change requires tweaking the environment and building habits before “rallying the herd.”

For more sustainable change and growth we need to address the environmental factors that affect everyone’s behaviour, especially our own.

Then we get into cycles of mutual reinforcement that become more resilient and genuine — like the way our cooing and goofy faces make babies smile and their smiles make us even happier in return…

[Note: I'm not always this mushy (must be leftover baby effects). Don't be sad if I follow this up with a pessimistic post about knowing whether our changes are the right changes...]

Consider the changes we hope to see happen. Forget how right we are and what’s wrong with others. Start by turning the dial that will create that change in yourself.

The Meaning of Creativity is Changing, Again

Brian — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:24:10 +0000

Complain or celebrate if you like but you’re wasting your time.

What matters is what we do about this — or rather, what we do with this. Because if promoting creativity is important to you, as it is for me, then I hope you’ll be open to exploring ways to reconceive what it means and how it works.

I’m motivated here by the widely discussed Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis, which paints a scary picture. After learning that creativity scores in school tend to correlate with long-term success through adulthood, we’re told:

Since [1990], creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Some people may wonder if creativity is actually declining, or whether our understanding of creativity needs to change. Jeff Jarvis noted on Twitter that “millions are creating online.” Clay Shirky makes the same argument — essentially the argument in Cognitive Surplus.

But are we really “creating”?

The standard definition of creativity used by psychology researchers is “the production of something original and useful” (quoting Newsweek, but I’ve seen it in the literature from Teresa Amabile and others).

Some would argue that much of what passes for “creativity” online isn’t very original: much of it is simply sharing and mashing up what others already made. But I think that’s a misunderstanding of “originality.” This is the argument mainly Lawrence Lessig is well known for: everything new is essentially a combination of other, older things. When we say someone created something “original,” we really mean they combined things in an original way, not that they summoned something wholly new out of nothing.

As for usefulness, I’m not sure what passes for creativity online stands up quite so well.

But then again, exactly how “useful” were all of Leonardo’s sketches of exotic contraptions — or his paintings, for that matter? How useful were Shakespeare’s plays? Or Mozart’s compositions?

Even when we look at inventions and scientific discoveries, a lot of history’s greatest achievements were created by people who just had a sense there was value in what they were doing, and they wouldn’t figure out exactly what the use of it was until they’d made it. And even then it’s often the case that the person who invents something isn’t the one who finds the best use for their invention. The history of science may demonstrate that better than anything: many people do “pure research” or develop abstract theories that subsequent generations turn into more applied knowledge and tools. Think of how Reimannian geometry enabled Einstein’s creativity (or so I understand: I’m no physics expert), and then the “usefulness” of Einstein’s work isn’t so obvious to me, but subsequent physicists keep using it in their work and eventually the process generates results the rest of us recognize, albeit indirectly.

That’s how the creative process works online: it’s social: someone does something or makes something just to see what will happen, other people with the same impulse repeat the gesture and add their own twist, taking influences from others; eventually someone sees an opportunity to build a platform (or at least a blog), that becomes a social object in itself that others use as an influence in their own creativity…

It’s thanks to the markets built up around silly expressions and apps that a few profoundly useful ones develop. In the culture that emerges, tools like Google’s App Inventor start appearing and we could end up with another whole class of inane creations that are needed to foster the next round of transformative inventions…

So no, we’re not becoming less creative; we’re just creating a new kind of creative culture.

Update: the also-unconvinced Alex Tabbarok points to the website of the researcher quoted in Newsweek… see how much creativity has accomplished since sites like that were made!

My New Favourite Phrase

Brian — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:52:00 +0000

I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!”

But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become famous?”

I soon realized that famous quotes are famous thanks to the person or the work they came from, not simply on their own merits. There’s no committee accepting proposals for “ideas for a good quote.” So I let go of the dream — though I wasn’t the least bit discouraged. Learning the truth and moving on was more gratifying than clutching a few random, pseudo-profound utterances.

My entire life’s narrative is pretty much like that: a few spontaneous thoughts will build me up with high hopes, then after recognizing how absolutely delusional those ideas are, I’ll work them out into a more realistic platform for further growth. All of the divergent, harebrained ideas become material to analyze and practice being critical on, and once all that’s straightened out there are suddenly new opportunities for open-ended experiments, and the cycle keeps going around and around.

A few years ago I even stumbled on a quote to describe this whole process, from Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana:

The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and conquest is for the sake of self-possession.

It probably isn’t something that works for everyone, but it became my motto for a few very pivotal years, marking the moment I stopped inquiring about things separately — finding my bearings, basically — and started reading more systematically, towards long-term goals.

Now I’m due for another change.

The phase of self-disciplined reading and rumination has run its course. Now that the objectives of that phase have been met there’s nothing to provide structure for ongoing discipline, and I seem to be casting around somewhat arbitrarily, trying to find possible uses for my ideas.

The process has become divergent again. I’ve got all of these ideas, but my ability to communicate them persuasively isn’t up to the task. All of my practice and thinking about writing has been focused on precision and clarity — though since I’ve been blogging I’ve worked hard at being more relevant and meaningful as well (losing a bit of precision by doing so) and I’ve always followed and absorbed the main conversations around business and marketing, but since I got deeper into philosophy I lost the habit of thinking with persuasion or “stickiness” foremost in mind. I want to get that back.

For the sake of being consistent with the big strategic shifts I’ve made in the past, this calls for a new motto to mark another turn towards discipline.

But here’s the thing: if I’m supposed to be learning to think about writing more persuasively — i.e. constantly trying to develop better turns-of-phrase to capture and express ideas — then I probably shouldn’t settle on a single quote. Instead, I should aim to improve on today’s motto with a better one tomorrow, and so on…

So my new favourite phrase hasn’t been written yet. Instead of something already written, it’ll always be something I’m working on.*

* See “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”**

** See “fake it until you make it.”

The Indispensable Amateur

Brian — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:34:24 +0000

How much do I love Jacques Barzun?

The exemplary historian and teacher, proponent of the Great Books tradition, Dean of Faculties and Provost at Columbia University for over a decade, who also graced the cover of Time magazine for a feature on American intellectuals, etc, etc, etc… wrote this about amateurs:

A world of professionals is an image to shudder at; it would not be a world peopled, and hence capable of novelty; it would be staffed and rolling in accredited grooves. We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateur’s natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.

Taken from “The Indispensable Amateur,” 1949; published in Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940 – 1980.

No doubt professionals are equally indispensable, and Barzun spent much of the essay on professional merits — just as he spent much of his life instilling them in his students. But as a sensible observer, he appreciated that the best ideas, inventions, and works of art (virtually every innovation of lasting value) came out of the dynamic interplay between the two types:

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius—inspired heretics—and orthodox professionals.

Amateurs can do great things but they have to work hard to overcome their limitations:

[The amateur] wastes time, rediscovers what is known, and makes colossal blunders.

(Don’t I know it.)

But professionals shouldn’t show too much scorn for those shortcomings. Professionals have limitations, biases, and blind spots to overcome as well. They can learn from what amateurs bring from other perspectives (perhaps even from their professional experience in other disciplines: e.g. journalists can stand to show a little more respect for bloggers, many of whom are subject matter experts). And as Professor Barzun put it:

No one but a mediocrity has ever been heard to approve his own education…

Characteristic of Barzun, there’s too much good material in the essay for excerpts or a summary to do it justice. I intentionally left out some of the best quotes.

Looks like you can probably read all 8 pages via Google Books.

Tyranny of Credentials

Brian — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:21:25 +0000

This month’s Utne Reader has an article featuring yours truly; the subtitle includes a term that I used, somewhat spontaneously during an interview: “radical self-educators challenge the ‘tyranny of credentials.’” I’ll explain what I meant by “tyranny of credentials.”

(Regular readers may remember the original article which appeared in full at Rabble.ca and TheTyee.ca, written by Steve Howard, Nicole Veerman, and Jim Saunders while they were studying journalism at UWO.)

Much of the article is about the edupunk movement. But note that “edupunk” didn’t originally refer to DIY education. Jim Groom coined it for a more open source approach to technology in higher ed: e.g. using WordPress and other free tools instead of buying sophisticated software that’s often less effective. He isn’t interested in bringing down public education and he’s a little distressed to see “edupunk” coopted by for-profit interests (also see the response from Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U, for another perspective).

My aim isn’t to bring down public education either. I think big institutions can coexist with what I do — and with other approaches as well. By complaining about the “tyranny of credentials” I was aiming at the stranglehold that that whole way of thinking has on the theory and practice of learning. I mean, there are some things that are best learned in classrooms, some things that are best learned through apprenticeships, etc, and then there are things we can only learn by taking responsibility for mastering them ourselves.

It was 2002 when I committed myself to self-education. It wasn’t just something that I decided to do one day, nor was it caused by any particular frustration or resentment of “the system” (though that wasn’t exactly absent). What caused me to commit was simply realizing I was already settling into a purposeful and disciplined course of study on my own. All I did was recognize what I was already doing. Two years after getting a B.A. and trying to narrow down my list of options — I was equally torn between a bohemian-style artistic existence, academic research, a business career, or something socially entrepreneurial (“anything creative,” I used to say) — it occurred to me that I could combine all of those by working a little harder and focusing on exactly what I do right now: reading and working my ass off to develop and advocate a more open, fluid, agile style of education and discourse (for those of us who want it).

I’ve been accused of trying to be a jack of all trades (thus master of none), but if you look closely I’m trying to answer a narrow range of specific questions:

What is creativity?
Why do ideas, cultural norms, values, and institutions evolve the way they do?
How can we learn to manage these changes more effectively?

In essence it’s old-fashioned philosophy: the kind that isn’t taught in any philosophy department, but is sorely wanted by people and organizations facing complex challenges and an uncertain future.

What I see underlying virtually all of our biggest problems (not just in education but in society in general) is a tendency to rest too firmly (and passively) on ideas and practices that solved the problems of the past; by persisting in those ways, we don’t just preserve the same old solutions, we preserve the same old problems as well — something we can’t do forever, as new complications continue to develop, making it harder and harder to either maintain the status quo or update things to suit new realities.

Credentials and titles work like that, sometimes: once representing knowledge and vocational competence, they increasingly represent only competence for working the system and later navigating the politics of large organizations…

We need stability and conservation but we also need flexibility and innovation. Much of the latter has to be learned autonomously, without all the trappings of formal education, which tend to reinforce passive receptiveness (or a habit of exploiting structural weaknesses), and dampen the adventurous spirit that we were essentially born with — and which times like this call for in larger doses.

So no, I don’t want to do away with credentials and formal schools altogether, I want to do away with the passive deference with which society tends to serve them. It blinds us to emerging problems and challenges.

My feeling is that we can’t generate enough openness and imagination to restructure (i.e. preserve) our institutions unless people working inside those institutions can feed off of the energy circulating around outside them, through initiatives and enterprises like my own: entrepreneurial projects (in the broadest sense of the word, not just in the sense of people trying to get rich). We need to learn to appreciate stories of personal goals and accomplishments that can’t be understood exclusively in terms of professional titles and extrinsic rewards. Otherwise we can’t even communicate our aims and lessons learned outside the officially sanctioned formats.

Or maybe I’m basically wrong and this is just my personal bias coming through…

You’ll have to think critically about what I’ve said and judge for yourself — which is, after all, the whole point.

Preserving Our Problems vs Changing to Learn

Brian — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:15:01 +0000

A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate:

Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But over time as capital increased in complexity, unions complexified as well, until unions needed management. The two became one system — union/management. So now the problem with unions is that they are locked into the old framework, the old system. They inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need management to offset them, and so the two became co-dependent

But I think it goes even deeper than institutions and bureaucracies. It isn’t just organizational, it’s conceptual: it’s personal

Consider Shirky’s claim that in bureaucracies, “it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one”; now consider that our minds are organized in complex ways, and it tends to be easier to make our ideas more complicated than it is to make them simpler — because making them more complicated only requires attaching new imperatives and exceptions, whereas simplification requires reorganizing everything in relation to everything else: unlearning a lot of what we’ve learned, killing a lot of our “darlings” (ideas and projects we’ve become personally attached to), and in some cases re-aligning our social and professional affiliations.

Then there are the burdens, which can actually make us feel more important — especially if they’re the conceptual kind. When we have to constantly work to keep our complicated schemes in order, that feeling that “this would all collapse if I wasn’t here to keep it together” is a source of meaning and personal pride.

To put it in terms of the model I developed in Truth, Will & Relevance, we come to rely on the sense of efficacy and relevance that’s generated by being an integral part of a sophisticated system.

It requires a lot of discipline to be wary of these hazards while we learn to use new tools and develop solutions to emerging problems. I’ve noticed this in conversations about open government and citizen engagement. I’m seeing people focus too much on the old problems, or adopting new tools without adopting new mindsets and goals.

Look at a lot of politicians who’ve adopted social media but keep broadcasting the same old messages. For those people, Twitter and Facebook accounts merely add complications and burdens. Instead of using social media adoption as an opportunity to reset their whole approach, to learn to communicate more openly (which is ultimately simpler than trying to be controlling and clever), by merely glomming a new set of practices onto existing systems they’re making it even more difficult to change when it finally becomes do-or-die.

Which is why most people and organizations don’t manage to change fundamentally: instead, they become irrelevant.

As I’ve become more involved in these things I started to notice myself getting caught up in ideas and affiliations that would lead down that road. We get seduced by awesomeness and novelty and before we know it we’re becoming the old guard, incomprehensibly defending institutions that aren’t sustainable in a world of new challenges. Because along the way, rules develop, roles and relationships become structurally defined, and then you can’t change in a fundamental way without affecting the networks of trust and relevance we rely on. In other words, it would piss people off and turn them against you — and then you become powerless and virtually nothing positive is accomplished.

Instead of being seduced by any particular concepts or schemes, I’m attracted to what might be behind them. If something isn’t generative — if it doesn’t afford opportunities to learn, change, discover, or create something new; if we aren’t actively exploring those opportunities — it isn’t merely uninteresting to me, it’s dangerous.

Update: deleted part of first sentence, June 18.

What I’m Reading

Brian — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:02:47 +0000

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration.
A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which are cut-and-pasted and paraphrased from others (in most cases the reader has to flip to the end-notes to learn who).
My must-read list has grown by at least a dozen books after this…

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail

I picked this up from the library a couple of days ago while wandering aimlessly through the stacks, kind of frustrated that I’m having trouble being interested in anything. I gravitated to the shelf of “big history” something I’ve wanted to read for a few years and finally got nudged towards after watching the doc based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel last week (excellent, btw).
It combines history, anthropology, neuroscience (and other disciplines) into a very fascinating account of how we cope with “deep time” — i.e. all those hundreds of thousands (or millions, or billions, depending on where you decide to start your story) of years of so-called “pre-history.” The notion of a Deluge was a way to deal with all of that uncertainty: people didn’t have to explain much of what came before (other than the cause of the Deluge itself) because it wouldn’t have effected anything that happened since. More recently, historians talked about the Dark Ages as a point at which history was apparently reset. I’ve noticed the First World War can be presented with Deluge-like qualities in some accounts of 20th century history.
No doubt the time we’re living in right now will have the same sort of effect on future people’s historical consciousness…

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

I skimmed this at the book store enough to know I’ll have to sit down and actually read it. It isn’t merely a rant or an expanded version of his famous Atlantic essay. The takeaway from most of the reviews I’ve read is that Carr makes a fairly good case, but he leaves some very big questions open: “So what?” and “What should we do about it?”
Ultimately I think when we try to answer questions like those, we’ll end up discarding much of Carr’s argument as essentially moot. At the very least it’s supposed to be well written and apparently a pleasure to read, and I’m grateful we have at least one source of lucid and somewhat sensible dissent…

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Not out in Canada until next week, so I can’t say much about it.
Shirky’s concept of “cognitive surplus” (which he presented at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo) was a great boost to my general point in Truth, Will & Relevance. I get a sense that my thinking is very close to Shirky’s — albeit lacking his brilliance in formulating simple phrases to convey complex, moving ideas.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

The promotional push behind this book focused on their “obesity is contagious” idea.
The single-word title led me to expect Connected to be a the kind of non-fiction book that only needs to be 25 pages long but stretches out with + 175 pages of anecdotes and repetition, but there’s a lot of sociological substance in it — more like Bowling Alone than Blink.

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida

Skimming the book and reading the reviews suggests it brings together much of what Florida was blogging around the worst of the economic crisis in 2008 (much of which I re-blogged here).
I’m honestly having trouble motivating myself to read something I assume I’m already in full agreement with — though I certainly recommend it to anyone else…

Notes on Satire

Brian — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:42:17 +0000

I worry I enjoy ambiguity, irony, “meta” and satire a little too much.

I’m worried my last post about copyright laws might seem too resentful (it is somewhat resentful — regretfully) because I genuinely sympathize with all sides.

In the case of copyright, I appreciate the economic [and social!] stability it enables, and I want to explore ways to sustain that in the most generative way possible.

I usually resort to satire when I want to take a side in a debate but I also want to recognize the contradictions and negative aspects of what I support (as well as the other side’s positive points). To really commit to something requires a kind of blindness: a willingness to lie to oneself, or circumscribe and settle on an arbitrarily small selection of imperfect knowledge.

We pick a side and then we find the facts and arguments to support it, unconsciously overlooking contrary evidence and considerations. Then we argue. Nuance gets trampled and kicked aside. We get pissed-off and energized by the confrontation, and the confrontation itself generates a sense of justification for our original ideas, and we come back harder.

A Huntsville area man was on the CBC news last week saying he was going to join the protest against the G8 summit because he didn’t want protests in his quiet community. Activists are seeing security efforts as verification of their cause — or rather, the barriers become a focal point that galvanizes a broad variety of grievances.

Then security folks point at that sentiment and say, “See, this is why we need all of these barriers.”

I have to laugh…

Some of us see these ironies and nuances and have trouble picking a side. It makes us awful leaders — and even worse followers. So we criticize and try to triangulate positions towards some kind of resolution (or dissolution) of the conflict.

But sometimes I find myself already within the conflict — as is the case with debates about the Web (see my first attempt at satire) — and I feel obligated to defend or promote my own interests. I have a hard time doing it with blinders on. The urge to articulate the nuances is still too strong.

It isn’t necessarily due to a higher degree of integrity; I think I just enjoy identifying and describing situations that are paradoxical or otherwise absurd.

And then again, maybe that sense of enjoyment points towards a deeper love of truth.

Satire Humour helps sweep away stock ideas. Occasionally events happen that either, in their purity, can’t be rationalized — like a guy getting hit in the balls – or create tensions that compel us to reconceive our stocks of ideas.

Sometimes the process hurts. The instinct to laugh and satirize ideas is like an intellectual anesthetic: it helps us work through these painful episodes, rather than letting wounds fester until they’re inoperable.

Besides, ultimately our victories afford us the freedom to share laughs. Let’s make time to pause and laugh along the way.

In Praise of Copyright

Brian — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:42:46 +0000

Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.”

The dispute comes down to different perceptions of “rights.” One side claims primacy of the right to share and participate in the creative process, rather than consume info and entertainment via the terms carefully chosen for them by the wisdom of corporate and governmental bureaucracies; the other side claims primacy of the right to own and control bits and pieces of information and experience. One side is composed of (or at least ideologically infected by) parasites maximizing their own ends thanks to the creativity and information provided by others; on the other side are people who are primarily motivated by creative, intellectual, and social development.

What the impatient hackers and remixers don’t appreciate is that not everybody can be as creative as they want to be: some people just want a 9-to-5 job, some people just want to be rich, some people just want the sense of status and control conferred by a job title. Organizations have evolved as comfortable nests for many of these people to sit on their eggs. A lot of these organizations are in industries affected by copyright — think of record labels, TV networks, publishers and newspapers — and they absolutely depend on all of the barriers and constraints provided by copyright law for their survival.

Of course it’s somewhat ironic that copyright laws originally protected writers and composers from exploitation by printers and distributors; now it’s the means of distribution that are being protected. Anyhow…

You only need to walk into your local cineplex, or turn on the radio or watch network television for an evening to recognize how much cultural value is being produced by large organizations and protected by rules and regulations. And look at the artists themselves: it’s hard to even argue about the system’s fairness when Ben Stiller and whatshisname from Harry Potter can each make over $40 million in one year.

These are the sorts of realities that copyright rules are meant to preserve. Especially in Canada. Our creative economy has become a safe and comfortable place for a lot of executives, administrators, lawyers, IT and HR staffers, various people who like clip-boards, PowerPoint, and a sense of orderliness, occupying offices owned by deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates that are apparently more innovative and aggressive than Canadian companies. It wouldn’t be very nice if that system changed and all of those people had to give up careers they so dearly and passionately love.

Now that writers, musicians, film-makers (and people inventing whole new categories by mashing-up different mediums) can easily produce and distribute their work independently — now that organizational structures are becoming increasingly outdated and redundant — if we want to conserve the non-creativity of our creative economy it’s imperative that the Canadian government empower organizations with the ability to maintain the artificial barriers and conditions of scarcity on which their existence depends.

/satire

Motivation Reconsidered

Brian — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:18:38 +0000

Eric Schmidt shared this video via Twitter, depicting the gist of Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us:

I feel like it shouldn’t be such a big surprise. Maybe I’m an extreme case, but most rewards seem offensive to me — like bribes — or condescending: “Hey boy, go fetch!” They have always turned me off (and my whole project here has essentially been an attempt to understand what motivates me — i.e. “what’s wrong with me” — and how it relates to conventional styles).

So I felt a real sense of affirmation when I found Deci & Ryan’s work on intrinsic motivation a few years ago. Pink explains it in a recent interview Wired conducted with him and Clay Shirky:

Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in “if you do this, then you’ll get that”—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

But I don’t think they go far enough, or deep enough, or comprehensive enough, or ambitious enough. I’ve been all over these ideas for years. The more I see and learn, the more confidently I keep returning to the concept of “will to relevance.”

It underlies almost everything I write (first described in detail here; used earlier here and here), and is at the core of the book about truth, will & relevance I published.

“Relevance” incorporates “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” onto one axis — one value we can use to effectively assess why one experience will be more motivational than another, or how likely someone is to be motivated by something.

If physicists seek a single unified theory, why not psychologists?

Spirit of Learning

Brian — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:51:55 +0000

Ken Robinson’s 2010 TED talk is up titled, “Bring on the learning revolution!“ (via @hjarche)

Of course it is full of moving sentiments and wonderful ideas, presented with great wit, and I’ll recommend it to everyone (not that I have to, as it recommends itself)… but I think it falls short on substance:

Criticizing schools is easy (which is not to say unjustified). Saying we need a “revolution” is easy. Talking about doing what “resonates with your spirit” is easy too — and too easily parroted by people with less genuine intentions and appreciation than Robinson’s.

While the education system certainly needs to be updated, focusing all of our attention on the system itself is, in some ways, perfectly counterproductive. The autonomy and creativity we want to foster is inherently defied by any type of systematic scheme — even a revolutionary one. The way to teach autonomy and creativity is to just become a model of autonomy and creativity, allowing others to observe and mimic while enabling or complementing their self-driven attempts to cultivate personal mastery.

In the classroom there are techniques teachers can use (which I know nothing about, except through casual conversation with teachers) to nudge students, and no doubt there are many anecdotal cases indicating a teacher can intervene successfully to put a student’s life on the right track, but I think those are exceptional cases (balanced by perhaps just as many negative outcomes), impossible to repeat and replicate on a mass scale, so we have to say it’s ultimately up to each student to learn what their own story is and follow through on it.

And up to each of us too…

(Matrix fans will jump in at this point to say, “I can show you the door, but you have to walk through it.”)

The kind of education system Robinson gestures towards can’t exist within a society that still works on old assumptions. Kids aren’t going to learn to think dynamically and critically if everything outside of school is still framed by fixed rules and linear goals.

Approaching it from the other direction, if students live in households and communities that are open and generative (in Zittrain’s sense, not just Erikson’s) then schools should naturally evolve that way as well, as they are immersed within that culture, from which they take not just demands and ideas but also staff and leadership, importing generative norms and behaviors with them.

It goes both ways, and it might seem hard to know where to start. Education has always been a bit of a “chicken and egg” thing: schools make people while people make schools. But it only looks that way when we make the problem abstract. When we look at the challenge in context rather than in the abstract, the question of “what comes first?” dissolves into “what can I do now?”

What you can do now — i.e. while you wait for some super-genius to concoct a brilliant scheme for revolutionizing education — is simply start challenging yourself to keep learning new things: pick up a book on a topic you’ve always been fascinated by, or try answering a question you’ve always wondered about, or try making something to find out if it really works. What you learn will naturally lead to new questions and interests — which is exactly what we want. We want this ongoing learning process to take on a life of its own, influencing others and softening the rigid barriers to personal growth that ossify in our schools and workplaces. It builds positive feedback cycles as the evolving institutions become more hospitable to autonomy and creativity.

Having a sense of purpose helps; eventually it isn’t enough to go from one book to the next without a sense of coherent mission.

What worked for me was, ironically, trying to invent a better way to learn (and account for learning). I figured, what’s the worst that could happen — even if I “fail,” I’ll still learn a lot about learning!

So if you’re looking for a purpose, try answering these points and let me know how it works for you:

Explain exactly how you learn most effectively (when self-directed).
How do you demonstrate or account for what you learn that way?
How might you teach others that way and scale it into a “system”?

Maybe you learn best in a traditional school environment. If that’s the case… why did you read this?

More via my Best On Education page and my book, Truth, Will & Relevance.

A Book About Truth, Will & Relevance

Brian — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:16:13 +0000

My book is finished and available for purchase, download, or reading online. Sorry if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, where I already mentioned it a few days ago. This is the formal “announcement.”

Description:

Truth, Will & Relevance outlines an innovative way to understand human nature and conduct — conceived specifically to address today’s complex opportunities and challenges using the technology that defines our time.

Reading Options:

purchase the printed soft-cover book priced at US$9.99 at Lulu.com
download a free PDF via Scribd
read chapter-by-chapter online

Background:

This is a unique book. On one hand, much of the content originated in the form of essays and blog posts; on the other hand, most of the research and tough thinking behind all of them — the “heavy lifting” — was done earlier, before any of these essays were written, with an eye on eventually fusing everything into a single, “big picture” argument.

So now?…

The rest of my writing will focus largely on the ideas outlined in the book, which is really a germ or a seed from which to expand. A lot of sources, arguments, and elaborations were left out of it — consciously (though somewhat unwillingly), knowing that I would have ample opportunity to develop those in blog posts and maybe articles.

In the process of putting this together I also managed to spin off a couple of rough outlines for books with more mass appeal, as well as more comprehensive rigour, which I would approach in a more conventional way, i.e. looking for financial and editorial support.

Thanks to everyone who provided comments & encouragement along the way.

Conceiving an Open Society

Brian — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:49:50 +0000

The whole process relies on failure. People have to be willing to accept failure and admit to mistakes, or the process won’t work properly. If we artificially hide information to deny failures — whether it’s done in the name of positive thinking or is simply a manifestation of anti-social self-interest — then the process becomes toxic and corroded, errors fester unnoticed, and catastrophic chain reactions are set in motion.

As long as we live in a world in which there are barriers and profound disincentives to saying, “sorry, I don’t understand,” or “I screwed up,” the economic problems we’ve seen are going to persist — or get worse.

This brings me back to the refrain I’ve used throughout this book: the process of creation and discovery is itself the answer. When it’s ok to love learning for its own sake — rather than assuming education is merely something that goes on a résumé — then we don’t have to worry about how to motivate people to solve unexpected problems, because solving unexpected problems is intrinsically rewarding.

But to be able to solve emerging problems and create new opportunities effectively, we need access to all of the pertinent information. The process doesn’t work if a few organizations artificially maintain their own relevance and control by erecting barriers and witholding information.

My ideal is summed up simply by Karl Popper’s description of an open society as a society that “sets free the critical powers of man.” Popper’s ideas and criticisms were an attempt to infuse the whole public sphere with the spirit of science — not as something that presumes to find out what the truth will always be (which would be an excuse from critical responsibilities — which is perhaps precisely why that attitude is so compelling to some) but rather as a process of constantly testing and refining our assumptions.

More importantly, science means allowing others to test and refine our assumptions as well. This is where my belief in open government comes from: not some vague, principled need to let everyone express their opinion, but rather a process of submitting decisions to scrutiny from more perspectives, to reveal where subjective biases and false assumptions might be affecting the process, to ensure the whole system doesn’t become vulnerable to the intrinsic fallibilities and weaknesses of a few individuals….

[Excerpt from my forthcoming collection of essays, Truth, Will & Relevance.]

Apple’s Problems: As Long As We Care

Brian — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 06:33:44 +0000

Steven Johnson has an excellent column in the New York Times, on the iPhone and the mixed merits of open and closed platforms.

He begins with a reference to Jonathan Zittrain’s work on “generativity,” (familiar to readers of this blog) i.e. “the ability of a self-contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate or produce content without any input from the originators of the system.” [Wikipedia]

Zittrain wrote The Future of the Internet after the iPhone was released but before Apple launched the app store. He introduced the book with the story of how Apple went from making products that exemplified generativity, to the iPhone, which exemplifies “sterility”:

Rather than a platform that invites innovation, the iPhone comes preprogrammed. You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you. Its functionality is locked in, though Apple can change it through remote updates. Indeed, to those who managed to tinker with the code to enable the iPhone to support more or different applications,⁴ Apple threatened (and then delivered on the threat) to transform the iPhone into an iBrick.⁵The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted. Whereas the world would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple would innovate for the iPhone. (A promised software development kit may allow others to program the iPhone with Apple’s permission.)

Well the development kit was released, the app store was launched, and Zittrain quickly made qualified concessions (which he had already left the door open for) — calling the iPhone a “tethered appliance” rather than a completely sterile one: an improvement, but not ideal. It’s far from open.

Fear and loathing of Apple’s authoritarianism has been climaxing since the company solidified its commitment to control with the iPad. It’s hard not to be swayed by critics like Cory Doctorow:

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

… intensifying this past week with announcements placing further restrictions on app developers, including effectively banning Flash development — just one episode in that particular battle.

This is complex stuff. People’s beliefs can be unambiguously pro or con, but when we talk about what we should do about enforcing or encouraging openness, we get into these nasty paradoxes. Consider the net neutrality debate, for example. As as Jeff Jarvis put it:

Here’s the rub: On the one hand, I do not want government regulation of the internet. On the other hand, I do not want monopoly discrimination against bits on the internet. I see it as a principle that all bits are, indeed, created equal. But how is this enforced when internet service is provided by monopolies? Regulation. But I don’t want regulation. But… That is the vicious cycle of the net neutrality debate.

So what do we do? [One way is to] “let the market decide”: if developers want to develop mobile apps in Flash and they’re afraid Apple will potentially do harm to the generative internet if they keep doing things this way, then developers can make apps for Android and Blackberry and whatever else, forget about Apple, and the company would be worse off for it — at least until Jobs sees his market share slide, recognizes the error of his ways, and tears down his closed app ecosystem’s wall.

Hypothetically.

For now things seem to be working out pretty well for them — not just in terms of sales, but in terms of generative innovation, as Johnson points out in his piece:

… by just about any measure, the iPhone software platform has been, out of the gate, the most innovative in the history of computing. More than 150,000 applications have been created for it in less than two years, transforming the iPhone into an e-book reader, a flight control deck, a musical instrument, a physician’s companion, a dictation device and countless other things that were impossible just 24 months ago.

Johnson gets down to the notion that innovations can come from constraints (as I’ve discussed in depth). Creativity cycles between open and closed, divergent and convergent, evolving and developing, etc.

What can be interpreted as freedoms taken away by Apple may also be interpreted as giving app developers freedom from having to think about things that don’t directly go towards making the best possible application.

As long as we’re talking just in terms of “freedom and democracy,” we’re just going to perpetuate disagreement and confusion (see Matthew Yglesias’s recent post about how the right often opposes free markets, and

political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate”

Anything can be construed as being free or unfree, democratic or undemocratic by people merely trying to get ahead. John Gruber noted that Adobe and Apple are both jockeying for market control (for the full background, see Tim O’Reilly’s overview of all of the maneuvering to eventually control the “internet operating system”) so who’s really the champion of openness? Google? Maybe — but could we really trust any competitor’s rhetoric?

Talking about openness is a little better, but still vague. This is why I write about it in terms of generativity and innovation: at least then we’re talking about results, which we can talk about and evaluate more objectively. But generativity isn’t enough — or at least it isn’t enough in itself.

What we need to be talking and thinking about is critical responsibility — by which I mean, actually caring about qualitative outcomes, paying attention as the process plays out, thinking critically, trusting our own judgement about what’s good, right, and beautiful (and actually working at cultivating good judgement before we fully trust it) and being willing to change our minds.

This is what Apple has that sets them apart. Steve Jobs cares a lot about the quality of the products his company produces: [the spirit of craftsmanship is alive at Apple.]

It’s also what Jonathan Zittrain and Cory Doctorow and the best critics and theorists have too. [They aren't trying to score politically (at least that isn't their primary goal -- though they might try to get political traction for the sake of promoting what they genuinely think is best for society). They care about the outcome and the process itself, not just how much money and control they'll have at the end of it.]

It’s what we should all aspire to.

I think ultimately we’ll overcome the current challenges when we develop a better vocabulary — concepts for talking about the process in qualitative terms, exercising personal judgement, and engaging in genuine dialog, rather than having to base our assessments entirely on either profitability or abstract principles — both of which are far too easy to game for the sake of hidden, political, acquisitive purposes.

For now I’m just happy to be reminded every day that people like these care about quality, whether it’s the quality of a product or the quality of our society — or both — as well as the quality of our conversations and debates.

I thank Jay Rosen and Felix Salmon for the link.

Minor changes made April 11, 2010 for elaboration and clarity.

Why Organizations Don’t Experiment

Brian — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:31:34 +0000

Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.

Quote from Dan Ariely’s column in the Harvard Business Review, via Robin Hanson, who writes, “Apparently actually improving decision quality is way way down in the manager priority list.”

Indeed — somewhere down on the list below avoiding saying “I don’t know,” not giving people reasons to doubt your laser-like focus on performance, not getting fired…

Ariely suggests two reasons for the unwillingness to experiment:

1) Experiments require short-term losses for long-term gains — a trade-off companies aren’t inclined to make.

2) Answers from consultants and focus groups lead to action, while questions require more thinking… despite the fact that “asking good questions and gathering evidence usually guides us to better answers.”

I’m inclined to boil it down to the fact that the whole attitude of experimentation is in stark contrast to the attitude that leads most people into business in the first place — that is, a performance-driven mindset by which the future is clearly defined by goals and win/loss outcomes (or rankings): “there’s the target, go get it.”

By comparison, designers and scientists tend to have a more discovery-oriented mindset, by which the future is more of a question mark — not just of how one will perform relative to a goal, but a sense that something is missing, or a new opportunity might be opening up…

[Ultimately I think we can understand it as a variety in our levels of comfort with uncertainty -- not just comfort creating uncertainty, but comfort with how uncertain a lot of things really are.]

Convergence of Social and Indie Media

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:23:43 +0000

If you’re in London Ontario this Saturday afternoon come to the Central Library for the Indie Media Fair. I’ll be doing a workshop at 3 pm on the convergence of social and independent media.

I didn’t come up with the theme but it certainly resonates with me. I went to the fair last year and was sort of surprised by how analog-centric it was. Open House Arts Collective and From My Bottom Step were the only exceptions I know of remember [correction needed?].

It led me to write a rant about how we ought to be using the web to document the city’s culture and ultimately recognize the best of it:

There’s a false assumption that blogs [and any use of social media more generally] are these fleeting, in-the-moment things. That’s certainly how they are made, but in the process they also leave behind concise threads of enduring information…

Social media bridges between us better than anything else (hence calling it “media” — what mediates our experiences). It’s no replacement for meeting face-to-face, but before even getting to that there’s no better way to identify shared interests with people we may have assumed were completely different. It happens to me every week. It’s amazing to learn how much we have in common with so many different people.

Thomas Cermak at LondonFuse is one example of someone I stumbled upon through the web — and he’s the one who approached me about participating on Saturday. We’re of the same mind when it comes to the need to bring a broader mix of people together.

This is where I understand the idea for a workshop on “the convergence of social and independent media” came from. Just as I was surprised by how analog the Indie Media Fair was last year, the indie media milieu seems to be equally unsure of what to make of the Geek Dinner crowd. It seems odd to have this split — after all, both groups tend to be both social and independent.

I’m looking forward to the discussion. I’m not quite as preachy as I was when I ranted about it last year. I’m hoping to kickstart an actual dialog — and hopefully cultivate a little more convergence. It isn’t a big city; there are a lot of fascinating opportunities to complement each other’s efforts…

Are there any related ideas or issues you’d like us to address there?

The other scheduled workshops are:

• 1 pm » Kane X. Faucher — “scholartist” — how academic and artistic work can be made to contaminate and resonate to produce new media forms.

• 2 pm » Iconoclast on “intellectual self-defense”: combating propaganda in our society.

Tables to showcase your creative, independent work are only $5. Contact indie.media@lpl.london.on.ca or 519-661-5100 Ext. 4986.

Generativity & Prosperity

Brian — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:37:52 +0000

Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic.

There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America:

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

The recession is technically over but we know the situation is more complicated than that. There are no economic models for seeing where we’re going. These are unprecedented times; our thinking will have to be unprecedented too.

Regardless of what you expect from the future, the best way to deal with uncertainty is to make things with ”an independent ability to create, generate or produce content without any input from the originators of the system.” That’s what generativity means.

Technology provides the clearest examples of how generativity works (think of how the internet developed through many contributions that combined in unexpected ways). The concept is often associated with Jonathan Zittrain. Lately there’s been a lot to write and speak out about, with controversies about net neutrality, and open standards, closed vs open platforms, etc.

Look at the iPhone. Much of its success is due to the additional value offered by third party apps. No company alone — not even Apple — would have the imagination or expertise to produce more than a fraction of these.

But Apple’s approach isn’t completely generative. While not completely sterile either, it’s still what Zittrain calls a “tethered appliance.” Dave Winer has been on a role about this dilemma. I think his post on whether we should trust the iPad captures it pretty well. On one hand the iPad is an interesting (and downright seductive) platform to develop for. There’s going to be some awesome stuff that we’re not even able to conceive yet. But on the other hand, Apple controls the platform (and it’s also not tinker-friendly), which puts constraints on how generative it can become.

Putting artificial constraints on generativity can stifle growth (imagine Twitter without third party applications, e.g. TweetDeck, or user-generated syntax, e.g. @replies and #hasthtags), and it can also introduce the risk of wiping out an entire creative system all at once. As Winer pointed out:

The problem is this — if Facebook goes away — and it could, so does everything everyone created with it.

The same might be said about Twitter, but in their case many of the third party applications are already working with similar services, and the service can easily be replicated elsewhere.

As for users, if you’ve merely been collecting subscriber counts, then you run the risk of instantly losing years of work; Twitter might suddenly cease to exist or kick you off by changing its terms of use. But if you’ve been developing genuine relationships with real people, based on the exchange of real value, then you’ll have generated connections beyond Twitter and you’ll have the means to recovering the community you helped build. In that case, change won’t be such a problem, and may even present some great new opportunities.

Note that genuine and generative (as well as genius) come from the same root: “beget.”

Relationships, complex competencies (developed through experience and understanding, not merely simple techniques and repetition) and communities of practice are generative things we can invest in that don’t just retain value in an uncertain future, but tend to create it.

Think about losing your job. What do you have left? It’s best to invest in generative possessions — relationships, reputation, mastery — things that go beyond the bounds of any particular office or shop. These are the things we need to focus our time and energy in. Human civilization has always thrived through generative processes (and keeps failing whenever things became too sterile and closed).

Technology might provide the clearest examples of generativity, but the truest examples are family and community.

Predating the concept of The Generative Internet is the term’s use in the context of social and psychological development. Psychologists Erik Erickson and Dan McAdams are associated with it. David Brooks invoked it a couple of weeks ago in a column about the need for older generations to help the younger ones — not just for the sake of young people, but for the good of society and their own personal well-being:

One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.

Working with the next generation isn’t about giving them (us) absolute freedom, nor is it about controlling or trying to have them do everything as you did before. It’s about providing the framework, then stepping back to see what independent creators will make of it… then stepping in with an updated framework, then stepping back, and so on.

We’re different people in a different world, addressing different challenges, creating new opportunities. You can set certain conditions for growth, but ultimately the best outcomes are generated when those conditions are deliberately open enough for people to play, learn new tricks, make new models, and discover new forms of interaction and value.

No specific solutions are guaranteed to get us through whatever’s brewing for the next few years… whether the next few years turn out better or worse than people expect, we know at the very least a lot will be unprecedented.

The very least we can do to prepare for an uncertain future is give ourselves the freedom and discipline to build — something original — on what came before.

My forthcoming book will elaborate, with a lot more background on this. Make sure you subscribe by RSS or by email or follow me on Twitter to stay in-the-know (hint: it’s in the design stage now).

The Practice of Theory, Revisited

Brian — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:20:45 +0000

Of everything I’ve written, I think The New Pragmatist has retained the most value.

I told someone two years ago I was going to clean it up and publish a PDF, but I got pulled away from it by too many new ideas to have any patience for futzing around with something old… until now:

There’s another post in the archives called “The Practice of Theory,” but it isn’t directly related.

I’m using that name here because that’s what I’m calling the book — which is finished except for the final design and publishing. I’m hoping to get it out via Lulu by the middle or end of March.

Since this is just the start of a long process of understanding (and improving) these ideas — and because I’m genuinely worried about the holes in my amateur approach (which doesn’t make the broad shape of these ideas any less valid) — I set up yet another blog to keep the conversation going.

It’s at PracticeofTheory.com running the Commentpress theme, which enables people to comment on specific paragraphs. It’s something I’ve wanted an excuse to play with; this is a good opportunity.

The other 17 chapters will be posted there when the book comes out.

The Problem With Protest Rallies

Brian — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:08:36 +0000

First I’m going to straight-up admit I don’t have the disposition for them. I just don’t like sitting or standing in any audience or crowd. But I have reasons as well.

In a way, the bigger the crowd, the less social it becomes. Of course it’s social in a really basic way, but there isn’t much genuine interaction.

Everyone’s attention is fixed on one figure at a time who’s front and centre. They tend to degenerate into recitations of the most simplistic slogans. Ideas are made blunt, words are rendered almost meaningless in order to reverberate and hold everyone’s attention. There’s very little openness or freedom to converse or break off and reorganize around emerging themes. Planned speakers say what they more or less planned to say. Everyone is subtly or not-so-subtly pressured to agree — if they didn’t already. Everyone goes home having reinforced the same ideas they went in with.

These anti-prorogation rallies around Canada will probably accomplish something, but they’ll also perpetuate the same old problem of politics-as-theatre that prevents genuine conversation and collaboration from occurring.

There are times when protests are very helpful, there are times when protests are necessary (though I’m not sure where exactly to draw the line), but they are never sufficient and I worry they distract people’s energy away from doing other stuff that might be more effective — even if less noticeable.

The web is a great tool for bringing people together, but that’s just the beginning. The web can do much more than bring crowds together to complain. Where the web is really maturing as a medium is in its ability to bring people together to learn and create something new.

We can and should use the web as a platform for collaboration, to share information and improve our ideas, to suggest problems to solve, attracting participants and identifying experts, deliberating and assigning tasks, signaling intent, cultivating mutual trust, facilitating ongoing feedback and discussion, and aggregating everyone’s progress with different aspects of complex projects.

This is what I meant when I wrote about reseting the agenda for democracy. We haven’t nearly explored the full potential yet. We have a long way to go.

We have more than just a voice, we have imagination; let’s start using it.

*** Update @ 3:35 ***

Attended the #noprorogue rally here in London — primarily to observe, but also to see if I could meet a few like-minded people and promote a more collaborative approach (unfortunately I was reminded I am not a natural activist, nor politician; I ended up mainly observing).

I was hesitant to go because the list of speakers made it look like an NDP event. That ended up being more or less accurate (apart from a speech by one Green candidate and some remarks from Glen Pearson, read on his behalf). Someone was handing out NDP signs that were made for the occasion, and a number of union flags flew above the crowd.

Most of the rhetoric was straight-up anti-Harper and anti-Conservative. Not much in the way of non-partisanism or trying to build anything. Tim Carrie from the CAW even brought up the damn gun registry, before starting in on pensions and putting people back to work in manufacturing. There were more than a few corny inflammatory jokes — the same kind that conservatives make about left-wing politicians — to which the mostly left-wing crowd responded with the same sneering exaggerated laughter you’d see at any party’s own convention.

But there was at least some diversity in the crowd, albeit queit for the most part.

When Cory Morningstar from the Council of Canadians went on for 10 minutes about climate change, saying Harper is turning the planet a “living hell” (giving a speech that may have been prepared for another occasion, at one point saying “this is the third year I stand in front of you” about this issue) a small pocket vocally reminded her the rally was for Canadian democracy. The majority encouraged her to continue, which she did.

So far, politics as usual.

I hope during the time off we’ll have more discussion about a) cutting the rhetoric, and b) brainstorming and trying a few blue-sky ideas of what democracy can be, beyond what it is now.

I don’t want to see this merely become an opportunity for other parties to gain points in the same old game.

We can do better. We deserve better. We need to do better to address the issues that otherwise risk tearing the country apart.

Learning as a Craft

Brian — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:00:54 +0000

Read The Craftsman by Richard Sennett — one of my favourite thinkers. This book gets right to the heart of things. From the publisher’s description:

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

The same day I finished it I participated in a panel on do-it-yourself approaches to education conducted by a group in the online journalism class at UWO (the edupunk episode will be part of a series that launched last week at Rabble.ca and The Tyee).

On the way there I started feeling a connection between the book and the discussion to come.

Education is itself a craft — over and above (or underlying) everything else.

Learning is something a lot of us have an “impulse to do well for its own sake.” Some of us have the same impulse for teaching too.

Yet institutionalized education is premised on the idea that students don’t or won’t learn unless they’re lured and prodded through a network of corrals. It messes with our natural motivations», and actually gets in the way» of learning.

That premise is self-perpetuating. If you teach people in a way that assumes they don’t want to learn, then they’ll learn to not want to learn, they’ll learn to wait to be prodded and pulled…

During the discussion Jim Groom brought up The Wire — an amazing show that depicts cops (among its many characters) trying to fight crime for the sake of fighting crime, but find themselves up against institutional dysfunction (and individual corruption) at every turn.

“Real police” like Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon damaged their careers by investigating crimes too well, rather than letting criminals slip through for the sake of artificially inflating the department’s statistics.

Likewise, in learning, by discovering or creating something new you create more work for everyone else. Institutional “zombies” (to use David Hall’s word) tend to mobilize against initiatives; they’re there to meet whatever institutional metrics have been imposed for the sake of a paycheck.

There’s a scene in season 4 of The Wire in which one of the characters has been paid to round up truant students and take them back to class. He thinks he’s doing it for the sake of the kids’ education until someone explains they only need those students for a couple of days to get funding; after that the school lets them go back to work on the street corners.

Every kind of organization has problems like this. New people come along and say “we can do better” and people start moaning. It isn’t just more work people are afraid of, people are also afraid of failing and looking stupid.

Institutional rules and guidelines serve to deflect criticism — promoting the wrong kind of responsibility»:

People working for failed companies might say “I was just doing my job” (i.e. “carrying out my responsibilities”), but that doesn’t excuse them from Responsibility. Likewise, “I was just following orders” doesn’t necessarily excuse soldiers from Responsibility for inhumane acts.

It’s time to relearn the best kind of responsibility — responsibility for rules and conventions, not merely responsibility to them (i.e. a willingness to stand up to them and change them).

It’s time to relearn the love of learning» for its own sake — the same kind of love we had as kids when we learned to walk and talk and make things.

Nobody had to force you to learn that stuff. It’s no mystery; the motivation for it is no mystery, just humanity. The real mystery is why we turned things around and got so good at squelching it.

Brian Frank » creativity

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Apple’s Problems: As Long As We Care

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Why Organizations Don’t Experiment

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Convergence of Social and Indie Media

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Generativity & Prosperity

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The Practice of Theory, Revisited

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The Problem With Protest Rallies

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Learning as a Craft

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