Brian Frank » creativity

Making a Scene, Creating London’s Identity

Brian — Sun, 08 May 2011 17:00:33 +0000

Some of what I said to Randy Richmond for his essay about London’s identity doesn’t quite ring true to me a month after I said it (my fault, not his), but it isn’t wrong either.

[Read this if you're interested in the conversation. It's not at the finished stage of, like, "10 things you need to do for London tomorrow!" But there's a lot of thought behind it (and believe it or not, a fair bit of editing). I might polish parts of it up later. Or I might not. Depends how it goes…For background, here's a list my best older posts about London.]

The first possible mistake I noticed in yesterday’s essay was what I said about youth culture appreciating irony and “celebrating the ordinary.” It’s true that hipsters have embraced some pretty mundane and unexpected things — PBR, fixed-gear bikes — but ordinariness isn’t the most important factor.

It’s more accurate to say that youth culture (I wish I had a better term) has a capacity to embrace anything, regardless of how ordinary or extraordinary it is.

What matters most is that it’s chosen, not imposed or overtly sold by someone we don’t identify with.

Affinity for these things comes down to whether we can reshape, repurpose or reinterpret objects and use them to express (or make us think we’re expressing) who we are as individuals and members of a close-knit group — especially for creative people. It’s about how much autonomy we feel by adopting and incorporating something into the identities we’re creating for ourselves.

Same goes for choosing a city.

Most people don’t seem to mind buying something sold through an overt marketing approach, and that’s fine (I’m not passing judgement; nor do I presume that my argument here applies to everyone). I guess because they more or less would have bought what’s being sold anyway (things designed for mass appeal: Top 40 music, processed food, generic stuff… anything we associate with middle-class suburbia, I guess — including suburbia itself).

But if we’re talking about encouraging creative young people to flourish then the first thing is simply giving them space (literally and figuratively) to create something in. And that includes letting them help create the city’s identity.

Whether it’s entrepreneurship or the arts, support through the creative process is a huge help, but I think (at least in the earliest stages) most support comes more from peers, or at least individuals (teachers, mentors) providing encouragement and guidance outside formal protocols, so all that youthful creative energy doesn’t get stifled by established ideas about what a good idea ought to look like.

Being genuinely creative isn’t just about getting on stage. Setting the stage is where a good chunk of the satisfaction come from.

Think of how punk and grunge musicians repurposed make-shift venues and seedy dives to build their scenes, rave culture came up in warehouses and illegal venues, hip hop came up in self-organized street parties. Here in London a couple of indie collectives — 379 and Open House — have repurposed venues and organized successful events and have played an invaluable role building the city’s arts and music scene (i.e. identity).

We’d be usurping half the value of the city for creative types if we said, “Hey creative people, here’s what London’s identity is, so bring your crayons and you can colour inside the lines we made for you!”

I don’t mean that we should invite everyone to the table to talk about London’s identity. I mean a city’s identity ought to emerge from what people are doing and making.

Of course what a city makes and does should be planned and subsidized to some degree — but I’m just glad I’m not on any committee that might be remembered for making bad plans and subsidizing sub-standard results.

If we look at a city like Waterloo that successfully planned ahead (so people tell me) we have to think of it as making successful bets. Luck had a fair bit to do with it. They couldn’t have really “known” how big tech was going to be. And even in London’s own past I’m sure there are plenty of examples of faulty foresight and bad execution to make us wary of our ability to sit down and collectively make good bets.

I’m a big believer in taking risks and betting on the future but I think it’s best left to people and organizations that can swallow the potential losses without causing too many harmful ripples.

City Hall can and should cultivate an entrepreneurial, artistic and adventurous spirit without taking on the risks and usurping the gratification that goes with actually being an entrepreneur or artist.

That goes for every large institution on-down:

Enable the enablers. Let the process and dialog play out. Observe and listen. See what emerges. Enable the next cohort of enablers to contribute — provide a background to continue from but let fortuitous accidents and discoveries happen — by building on past successes but not necessarily determined by them: let each new cohort give it their own interpretation. Observe and listen again. Keep looking for what emerges. And so on.

At this point it’s important to say that merely telling someone their contribution is important isn’t necessarily enough.

Contribution to a community has to reflect a person’s identity — their competencies and passions — and people need to see their contribution manifested in a concrete way. As in, “hey people are using something I made…there’s where my suggestion was picked up and used,” etc.

“Show, don’t tell,” I wish I’d said in the interview.

And more generally, “underpromise and overdeliver.”

It often it feels (to me) like too many initiatives in London start with a list of brags, and then we decide how to back up our words, instead of doing and making things that are worth doing and then figuring out how to communicate their value to the world.

That’s certainly not an indictment of every initiative. There are a lot of great things happening in London that are genuinely worth bragging about (and more all the time, I think).

And I know that a lot of things do need to be born out of a brag. Maybe it’s unavoidable (I know it happens everywhere, I’ll admit) but if you want to know what I’d most like to improve, this is it — what I feel tends to stifle new ideas as much as anything: the need to package everything into a pitch as soon as possible.

I’d like to see some things germinate a little longer.

(And one final caveat here. If you asked me what my biggest complaint is about myself, I’d say it’s the opposite: I’m incapable of turning my ideas into polished pitches. I never get projects past development. Anyway, we all have something to work on.)

Both in my own experience and as an outside observer I’ve been frustrated to see opportunities to cultivate deeper and broader value trumped by desire to celebrate smaller, immediate, symbolic wins at the expense of longer term strategic vision.

We absolutely need small symbolic wins — but not at the expense of the small symbolic failures that can help us learn and understand and adapt to bigger challenges: i.e. failing early on small projects, when it’s relatively harmless, to root out new opportunities (new ideas, new ways to organize and collaborate) to avoid bigger failures down the road.

There are simply too many questions we can’t possibly answer until we try things and see what happens.

Much of the ongoing visioning process requires an ability to work with uncertainty: comfort moving forward without knowing exactly where the destination is, yet being willing to move forward on hypotheses — “strong ideas, weakly held” — combined with a keen eye for clues and signs along the way, ingenuity to navigate and adapt with an emerging landscape, the ability to perceive and describe general patterns, and finally, decisiveness. so we don’t languish in ambiguity forever.

I’m not entirely sure how to execute it at a group level, but that’s my experience, at least. I know that vision definitely does not mean, “let’s spend 6 months coming up with something overly-comprehensive, which presumes too much [and then 10 years gradually forgetting about it and finally deciding it was entirely wrong -- and eventually using the example to make a false case for futility]“.

The tail wags the dog when try to assume too much about a distant destination we know very little about.

We don’t know what the world will be like 20 years from now. We don’t know what the best opportunities will be in 10 years. We don’t know which industries will grow or decline the most. We can’t foresee disruptive events around the world (whether oil prices, trading boundaries, etc. will be more or less congenial). We don’t know what will happen with Detroit and other cities on our map. We don’t know what future federal and provincial governments will do. And so on.

On one hand we can’t assume too much with any certainty (no decision or investment is guaranteed to pay off). On the other hand, we can’t navigate all that uncertainty without at least some sense of who we are, what we’re good at, where we came from, and where we want or need to go.

Working that balance between holding fast and letting go isn’t something to be afraid of. Even something as simple as picking up your pen requires flexing some muscles while relaxing others.

Vision is an ongoing process. It’s a balancing act, like everything important in life.

Don’t smother it but don’t let go either.

Like love and fishing (two very different things, obviously, but the same in this regard), chasing something that isn’t ready to be caught is often counterproductive. Watch, feel, and adjust accordingly.

Just get on with it, make things, enable others and get far enough out of their way, pitch in when you can without becoming a barrier, ask better questions, pay attention for answers and keep going forward.

Design Update: A Dialog

Brian — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 04:19:39 +0000

“You changed your website again?”

“I know, I can’t help it. Once a year I get bored on some Saturday night so I start tweaking stuff and one thing leads to another and 10 hours later I’ve been up all night changing basically everything.”

“Haha — you’re an idiot.” I love her honesty. “I like it! I wish I had the time to make my site look pretty. But you know, I’m one of those people who needs sleep.” :) “Do you actually know what you’re doing when you do your website?”

“Nope,” I said with a proud-guilty grin, “not really.”

She tilted and turned her head, giving me all of her raised right eyebrow.

“I mean, I’m learning as I go. Most of it’s just basic settings and plugins that don’t take much, but sometimes I’ll see something I like on someone else’s site and I’ll search for tutorials and discussions in forums for how to do it. Usually I screw it up — which is why I accidently stay up all night — but I mean it’s kinda good because I like to learn by doing things myself and solving problems.”

“Like what?”

“Uh–”

“Like, what was the hard stuff you did for your site? What did you learn?”

“Oh, uh, probably the hardest part for me was just getting stuff in the header and footer. I guess ‘hard stuff’ is maybe a strong word, I mean it’s relative. It’s more like — people who know what they’re doing probably do it easily — um, like I’ve always just cut-and-pasted things where a tutorial told me and then I just had to go, ‘Ok, this looks like it changes the colour, so what happens if I change this to something else? Nice, it worked. And maybe if I delete this line that weird space will go away,’ and that type of thing: just trial-and-error. But this time I’ve actually been reading up on it so I’m not just trying random things and seeing what happens.”

“Cool, yeah, I should learn more about that too. I noticed you don’t have your blog on your main page anymore. What’s with that?”

“Oh,” I said, “yeah, I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. The problem with the blog, for me, is that I keep posting on very different topics. One week about creativity and psychology, the next week about politics and media, two weeks later about philosophy. I think I should do a post about these design changes but I’ve been thinking of turning it into a creative writing exercise to make it more interesting… Any post by itself could give someone the wrong impression. I used to always feel like I had to write a new post because I thought the last post sucked and I didn’t want it to be the first one people saw. I don’t have the juice or time to keep doing that forever to I made the switch so make sure people saw my About page instead of a bunch of complicated and maybe controversial posts. It’s the same reason why I show Related Posts instead of Recent Posts in the sidebar now.”

“Or you could blog about the same thing all the time.”

“Yeah, no. I tried that and it didn’t happen. I ended up with like five different blogs. Instead — I’m not sure how many people notice — 95% of my posts are pretty focused on recognizing our own fallibility, working with uncertainty and articulating change.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I noticed ‘articulating change’ on your main page. Is that like your slogan now?”

“I’m afraid to use the word slogan anymore, but I guess so. It’s a quick way to describe what I do, and it covers what I do as a freelance writer for clients plus what I do with creative projects, as well as advocacy and activist-type stuff. It’s all about the same thing: making the most of change by knowing how to articulate what’s happening at a given time and place — not relying on abstract theories or old habits.”

“That’s what your book is mostly about.”

“Yes! The book is really — it’s like the operating system for everything else I might write. I think, I hope, if people get that then everything here should seem more coherent. All along I thought of it as an investment — a bit of capital that can do stuff for me instead of like a blog that has to always be updated.”

“I like your blog posts,” she said.

“Thanks!”

“Except the dialog about your design is a little corny.”

See Who’s Using the Internet to Make Life Less Meaningful

Brian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:59:26 +0000

I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link.

The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing collection of crafted pieces by good writers who don’t get it.

I used to agree with Lanier, for one, but here’s what happened: I stayed open, I was still curious, I kept looking for bright spots, I kept trying things, I adopted the best and rejected the worst, I found ways to make it work for me, I kept learning from mistakes; I cultivated a productive, rewarding and meaningful way of working and living with the internet.

Like everyone else who actually understands it.

What works will be different for everyone. Facebook works for some but not others. Twitter works for some but not others (or not even most). Even within Twitter there are as many different ways to use it as there are users. The people who know the most about the hazards and challenges are the people using this stuff and learning from mistakes.

I went along with the skepticism for a long time and I appreciate ongoing criticism, but these people (Gladwell too) who are standing around outside, watching us instead of jumping in and learning how to swim, fretting, “OH NO, we all might drown!” keep looking more and more ridiculous.

Smith tried Facebook and didn’t like it, so she quit after two months. Well same here. It wasn’t right for me at the time but I’ve changed, Facebook has changed, the world has changed, I went back and approached it differently. It’s working ok for me now.

Don’t just give up if you swallow a big gulp of water the first time you jump in. You can either keep trying or leave it alone. But if you walk away you can’t come back with a diatribe that basically argues what we already know: it isn’t perfect…

These sentences from Smith’s NYBooks piece finally put these fears into perspective for me:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

I think I see where the problem is now.

Have you ever met anyone who has been reduced to data? Do you know anyone who’s had their desires, their fears and messy feelings get swallowed up by Facebook? No. What happens is, when some aspects of our lives become data, we expand — we use that as part of a platform or framework to create new opportunities and objects for new kinds of fears and desires.

In other words, humans will always find new ways to be human.

We’re not just resilient, we’re ingeniously assertive. Our species has been surviving for ages: crawling through deserts, trudging through swamps, climbing over mountains, hacking through jungles, sailing across oceans, careening down rapids, launching into space, clawing in the dirt, driving as deep as we can into any visible challenge, making our mark on the world however we can, fabricating tools with whatever we can find, etc.

After all that and more for thousands of years, do you think Facebook is really so dangerous?

If love and friendship are so delicate that Facebook can undermine them and consequently tear apart the fabric of humanity, would they be worth saving? Or is this just about particular kinds of love and friendship that happen to be near and dear to some people at one particular place and time?

Whatever makes us special is too deeply engrained in our nature to clearly distinguish and articulate. Facebook and Twitter aren’t going to take it away from us — nor, conversely, is it so adjustable that Zadie Smith or Malcolm Gladwell or any philosopher can swoop in and save it.

They’re not against technology being used to objectify and reduce human behaviour; they’re merely against any new kinds of reductivism emerging to surpass their own favourite brand of it.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of people who’ve become “gadgets” — reduced and enslaved by two-hour movies and two-hundred-page books.

Elsewhere people have feared that photography and the written word would steal souls. But instead of reducing the breadth and depth of human experience, technologies keep creating opportunities for expansion and enrichment. I don’t see any reason to assume this time will be any different.

Here’s our choice: moan about the inevitable and miss our chance to grow, or look for the bright spots and make the most of our opportunities. Pretty easy, I think.

Part of me wants to be diplomatic, but another part is getting tired of so many fussy, timid, whiny, precious complaints coming from otherwise intelligent and talented people.

Pushing forward into the unknown, using the internet won’t reduce the meaning in life; it’s in many ways the most meaningful thing we can do.

The Social Network Movie as a Social Application

Brian — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:07:10 +0000

I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin:

I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.

I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort of a wannabe screenwriter myself — just enough to have wrestled a lot with attempts to balance accuracy and meaning. I look at this as just being the Internet’s turn to be misrepresented by Hollywood. I mean, does Hollywood even get itself right?

Sadly, truth isn’t as important as we like to believe. If truth was important, Hollywood wouldn’t exist. What matters most in the long run is a compelling story.

Apply a kind of Darwinian principle to it: there’s no iron law dictating that the stories that survive have to be true; they just have to be coherent, attractive, adaptable, resilient, and reproductive (of course truth helps most of those, but it isn’t necessary and is sometimes counterproductive when based on complex facts that the audience isn’t familiar with).

“Fidelity to storytelling” essentially means giving the audience something they can take home with them and use in their own social interactions. That’s what makes stories and movies successful: people can “remix” them into their own personal, social stories and conversations (think of how much meaning can be communicated with a single quote from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, or Shakespeare).

Here’s the irony: this is pretty close to the principle on which the social web works. It’s the insight that Zuckerberg understood early on: content is merely a means for people to connect; create a platform where people can exchange social objects and “likes” and the network generates its own value.

If The Social Network was absolutely true to reality, far fewer people would see it and even fewer would have much to say about it. It would lose its social function. It would only serve a small elite that simply wants to preserve their authority and control, afraid that the ignorant masses might make things impure and imperfect…

Sound familiar?

There’s a bit of “what goes around comes around” here. Some of the most outspoken proponents of blogs, wikis, and creative commons — e.g. Jeff Jarvis and Lawrence Lessig — are also the most outspoken critics of The Social Network’s creative liberties.

As far as I’m concerned, creative liberty is creative liberty.

Either we let ignorant, bitter trolls comment on news articles and write Hollywood pictures or we don’t. Either someone has to be an expert to participate or they don’t.

We could say, “fine, they have a right — but then we have a right to challenge them with criticism,” which I 100% approve of.

But there’s another irony here. Read this post by John Hagel — with lots of interesting points and a conclusion with which I sentimentally agree — and see if you pick up the dissonance:

… the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity. It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

But the new media’s caricatures of the filmmaker’s motives seem every bit as distorted as the caricatures described in the film’s reviews, and both sides are advocating on behalf of a revolution or regime. It isn’t one constructed old media narrative vs. the righteous Internet; it’s two narratives clashing with each other — both resorting to simplistic cause-effect explanations and two dimensional characterizations.

Jeff Jarvis accounted for the filmmakers’ motives with statements like ”old media resists change” and “these guys want to deny the internet credit for it.” Scott Rosenberg quotes Mark Harris’s description of the movie as “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media,” and added he thought “it’s more than that — it’s a big lunging swat of the old-media dinosaur tail.”

I think those are fairly valid, but far from the whole picture. I can’t imagine Sorkin single-mindedly rubbing his hands together in anticipation of sticking it to the Internet any more than I can imagine Zuckerberg creating Facebook simply out of spite.

They’re handy caricatures for telling more compelling stories. We couldn’t do much without them.

Of course a Hollywood movie isn’t the most generative platform — but then again, neither is Facebook.

If we keep working at it, eventually we’ll stumble on the right story.

What’s the Future of Reading & Writing?

Brian — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 06:56:52 +0000

“Books are being replaced by reading,“ to borrow a phrase from Jack Shafer. Digital technology “distances us from the old magic conjured by books” by giving us better ways to get what’s inside them.

Of course the tactile experience is lost, but that’s only a sentimental attachment — not without genuine value, but not without considerable influence from purely subjective historical and sensory biases either.

We seem to be at the same stage of this discussion that we were at about music when the iPod really took off: we’re finally certain that the new hardware will be with us for a while, but not quite ready to let go of the old, and not sure what implications the change in distribution and storage will have on the content itself. I was still buying lots of CDs in 2005 — I “liked the experience” of looking for them in music stores and displaying them at home — but that ended abruptly.

I’m still buying a lot of books (almost all used, for a few bucks each) because I’m poor and haven’t invested in a digital reader yet, but based on my shift in music consumption I have to assume that my book habits might change pretty suddenly, pretty soon — which isn’t to say I’ll completely stop buying them. There are books that are about more than just reading.

For example, a few months ago I stumbled on a used, two volume edition of Plato’s complete works — in inferior translations I struggle with, and with expired copyrights that enable them to be available freely online. But that big old block of atoms pays me back in the form of inspiration, decoration, and meditation, even if it’s an inefficient way to store and find information.

Pertaining to the points of inspiration and meditation, I often find myself pacing around, trying to generate words and ideas; picking up books, physically looking for pieces of information and insight, turning and scanning pages can occupy the conscious mind just long enough to clear the head of whatever’s blocking the way. The manner of interaction in those instances is more important than the content, so I expect I’ll always have books — but then again, I can get rid of 99% of my current library and still enjoy the same tactile benefits with a few essential, personal selections.

Now I don’t want to float too many predictions but it’s worth reading Kevin Kelly’s description of the sensory experience of his own fresh physical book — exhibiting his proposal that embodiment is a quality that’s “better than free.” I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rise in “collectible” publishing, like the increase in vinyl record sales. Not an original suggestion but there it is anyway.

More interesting to me than buying and reading is the way books will be written.

Kelly developed What Technology Wants over the course of years putting ideas together on his not-quite-a-blog. I’ve noticed Eliezer Yudkowsky deliberately taking the same approach (to very difficult, complex subject matter); I did the same to develop my own book; Seth Godin’s Linchpin was largely composed of advice that first appeared on his blog. David Weinberger is currently taking a slightly different but related approach: not developing the content of his book on a blog, but thinking out loud about the process of writing it.

And it isn’t just the books themselves that are being developed in public, but their readerships — in some cases (e.g. Godin’s) consisting of a core group of fans who buy multiple gift or loaner copies, and are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to hear the author speak in person.

I’m not that kind of fan — at least not of Godin’s — but after following Kevin Kelly’s progress for years I’m intellectually and emotionally invested in his book. It’s as if I watched it grow up: I want to see it do well — and I’d love to own a physical embodiment to display and thumb through from time to time.

I’m not suggesting this is an original line of thought. I’m just trying to probing and re-synthesizing, hoping to turn over an insight…

There’s a lot of brain power going towards figuring this stuff out. Godin notably announced he’d published his last traditional book and would move on to explore new formats. I’m also thinking about bookfuturism, recently described by Tim Carmody as “not just about books as such, but a kind of aesthetic and culture of reading, literacy, history, in connection with (only rarely in opposition to) other kinds of media culture.”

Note that we’re not just developing more formats and distribution channels for books as we know them; we’re reconceiving what we mean when we say “book” — perhaps from something completely static to something more dynamic, or at least from something anticipated and aimed for to something that’s gathered up and left behind as a landmark, like an Inukshuk…

I don’t know.

Unlike a lot of what I write, there’s almost nothing abstract about this for me, or you. We’re both engaged in an experiment by writing and reading this.

We’re into a phase in which every act of writing and reading is affected by uncertainty and speculation.

The sooner we discover opportunities and make all the necessary mistakes, the sooner we can get back to stable traditions — albeit different traditions than we have now.

Cee-Lo Green: Quality vs. Hype

Brian — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:57:29 +0000

Bob Lefsetz wonders whether Cee-Lo’s “F**k You” is going to be another here-today-gone-tomorrow novelty. He uses the song as a jump-off to appeal for music with more staying-power and quality.

His point of comparison is the popular series of TED talks:

These TED talkers didn’t start yesterday, most have spent years dedicated to their field, to the point where they could be selected for a TED speech. That’s the new paradigm. Don’t ask how you can accomplish world domination right away, but keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

It’s the right sentiment but I think he picked the wrong analogy.

We can’t compare “F**k You” to the whole series of TED talks; we have to compare “F**k You” to one TED talk — and there have been a few instant sensations, if memory serves. I saw more links in my Twitter stream when Jamie Oliver’s talk came out then I’ve seen of Cee-Lo’s song so far.

In fact people make the same complaints about TED that Lefsetz makes about “F**k You.” Nassim Taleb comes to mind (most recently: “I am starting to get uncontrollably angry when I encounter TED-style phony humanitarians.”)

Photo by Scootie

And isn’t Cee-Lo Green’s career a model of this advice?

… keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

He started releasing critically acclaimed music in 1995 with Goodie Mob (a group known to me for years mainly as ”that other group from Atlanta,” being close with OutKast). There was some attention and maybe some minor hits (“Closet Freak“?) but it took more than a decade for him to find the mainstream with Gnarls Barkley and “Crazy” in 2006 — the same year he released a greatest hits album!

Now I know Lefsetz probably knows all of this, and he doesn’t explicitly say Cee-Lo exemplifies shallowness, and I agree with his overall sentiment, so I’m not going after him. I’m trying to develop something here.

I think what we ought to take away from this is that we don’t have to be the same artist or the same creative person/group/organization all the time. We can accomplish different things with different projects: we can use some projects to cultivate enduring quality and then we can use others to, you know, pay the bills and get people’s attention so we can keep making quality stuff.

There’s nothing wrong with silliness and hype. Getting excited about things once in a while is good, even if the excitement doesn’t last.

It’s only a problem for people who can only generate hype.

But contrary to a lot of fears, I don’t think the Internet is going to make things worse. I don’t think it will diminish long-term quality. I don’t think it will increase the volume of “mere hype.” Counterintuitively, it’s the proliferation of mere hype that’s going to eventually kill it.

At some point (if we aren’t there already) it’s going to be too costly to keep up with constant turnover: it’s too chaotic; it’s fatiguing. Once we cross that threshold, people who know how to develop long-term value will be the ones getting and holding people’s attention. I think we already see this with emphasis being placed on reputations and relationships online, rather than merely focusing on the last thing someone did.

We ought to let ourselves love the last thing someone did without fixating on it — without sitting there waiting for more hype to fall in front of us. We can use the rare successes as opportunities actively get into what they did before and explore the stuff they like and so on…

And so now speaking of which — this f**king song is awesome:

Beyond Entrepreneurship

Brian — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:22:56 +0000

A few years ago I started developing what I call the “open conceptual enterprise.” The idea is that we need to rethink our basic assumptions about business not just in the context of different kinds of businesses but in the context of all types of human enterprise.

By “enterprise” I mean the general impulse to go out into the proverbial wilderness, to go on a quest and take risks, hoping to come back with something of value: Exploration is enterprise. Invention is enterprise. Science is enterprise. Art is enterprise. Social missions can be enterprises. And of course commerce is enterprise. It’s been fairly hypothetical, but the way the Internet is opening everything and mixing up the old categories, I’m getting a better sense of how to explain this stuff in more concrete terms.

Look at Google’s recent failure with Wave. (For the record, I was a fan.) The Google narrative has corresponded with the attitude that failure is good (or at least useful — or at least unavoidable) but with more and more episodes like Wave and Buzz, that story is moving into a new chapter.

Jeff Jarvis captured it pretty well here, I think:

The reason these efforts were busts is because Google didn’t think them through, didn’t have the corporate discipline to find and execute on clear-eyed strategy. I’m all for beta — I learned that lesson from Google — but you can’t just spend your life throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. Eventually, you’re knee-deep in shit. But you can do that for a long time — if you have lots of money. A poor startup uses betas to learn precious lessons because they can’t afford to fail. This rich company is using betas, I fear, rather than making hard decisions up front — because it can afford to. So Wave may have ended up dead anyway but if it were run by entrepreneurs it would have struggled long and hard before taking its last breath.

And he goes on to express “worry that Google isn’t an entrepreneurial company anymore… it may be too big for its own good.”

Here’s where we need to think more generally about what it is about entrepreneurism that is so essential for sustained success. Entrepreneurship is about innovation and autonomy. The innovation aspect is about maintaining the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” without which organizations tend to accumulate a lot of dead weight, making them susceptible to total destruction.

More importantly, the human spirit needs adventure, i.e. enterprise. We need to feel like we’re going somewhere, and we need at least some sense of uncertainty in the outcome — or at least the journey there — and we need to feel like our presence matters. The latter can be accomplished in different ways: we can experience it through self-determination or by belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Optimally, for sustainable enterprise, I think we ought to strive for a combination of both, as they’re not mutually exclusive. As long as we have a sense of autonomy (i.e. we haven’t been coerced or subjected against our wills), and we’re recognized and treated as the unique persons we believe we are (i.e. our uniqueness is appreciated and we’re compensated appropriately), and we’re able to have a visible, positive effect through our actions.

There are ditches on both sides of that road: two extremes at which the spirit of enterprise can be lost. If a culture is too conformist, then everyone gives lip service to their shared purpose but since everyone is shallowly feeding each others’ egos, people realize the ego reinforcement they’re receiving is pretty much meaningless. But conversely, if a culture is too individualistic (the way in which entrepreneurship leans), then everyone is too busy doing their own thing to provide recognition and feedback for each other.

I get the impression that Google may be slipping into the former latter (I speculate here reluctantly, with no first-hand knowledge): people are free to develop their own ideas [in their "20% time"] but a lot of employees feel like nobody’s listening [again, speculating], as indicated by the high-profile defections of some of their biggest former stars.

So counterintuitively, if they moved away from their divergent, entrepreneur-minded culture, they might actually gain more motivation and momentum as an enterprise by emphasizing the company’s core purpose, articulating the path towards it, and reinforcing employees’ efforts that are convergent with that – something more along the lines of science and social enterprise. (I owe the recent OpenIDEO launch for some of this inspiration.) With this change of mindset, the “shit” they’re standing in looks less like refuse and more like fertilizer and soil they need to cultivate sustainable growth.

For example, Google could, as a whole company, focus on the problem of how they can make this shift, as a kind of “moon-shot,” to use the cliché. What tools can they build [or refine] to facilitate more focused, company-wide collaboration?

Remember this is exactly the problem which the Web was invented to solve: to connect the vast expertise among thousands of researchers and engineers across an awkwardly large organization. I know Google already does this to some extent, but clearly, judging by all the gaps and redundancies across their mind-boggling array of apparently-could-be-terminated-at-any-moment projects, whatever they’re doing isn’t working... or not as well as it could, at least.

So my challenge to Google is: instead of just asking what email would be if it was invented today, as they did with Wave, ask what a corporation could be if it was invented today… combining the best features of all the old categories into a powerful new platform.

Bibliography

Brian — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:56:11 +0000

Here’s the completely unrequested bibliography for Truth, Will & Relevance (minus a few cosmetic references):

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams, 1918.
Ariely, Dan; Norton, Michael; “Conceptual Consumption.” Annual Review of Psychology, 60. 2009.
Argyris, Chris; Schön, Donald. Theory in Practice. 1974.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869.
Barzun, Jacques. Of Human Freedom. 1939.
Barzun, Jacques. Clio and the Doctors. 1974.
Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll With William James. 1983.
Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence. 2000.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. 1907. Mitchell, tr. 1911.
Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Andison, tr. 1946.
Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. 1999.
Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories. 2009.
Brockman, John, ed. Creativity. 1993.
Brown, Tim. Change By Design. 2009.
Christakis, Nicholas; Fowler, James. Connected, 2009.
Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator’s Dilemma. 1997.
Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. 1946.
Cowen, Tyler. Create Your Own Economy. 2009.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Evolving Self. 2003.
Dash, Anil. “Nobody Has a Million Twitter Followers.” dashes.com. Jan 5, 2010.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 1976.
Deci, Edward; Ryan, Richard. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. 1985.
Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. 1991.
Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. 2003.
Dewey, John. “What I Believe.” 1930.
Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. 1916.
Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. 1929.
Dray, Philip. Stealing God’s Thunder. 2005.
Dweck, Carol. Mindset, 2006.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Plato.” Representative Men. 1850.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “History.” Essays: The First Series. 1841.
Florida, Richard. The Great Reset, 2010.
Freeman, Eric; Gelerntner, David. “The Lifestreams Software Architecture.” 1997.
Galison, Peter. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps, 2003
Gelerntner, David. Mirror Worlds. 1992.
Gruber, Howard. “An Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.” Gruber & Wallace, eds., Creative People at Work, 1992.
Hagel, John; Seely Brown, John; Davison, Lang. “Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows.” blogs.hbr.org/bigshift. Jan 27, 2009.
Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail.” Psychological Review. 2001.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006.
Hanson, Robin. “Wanting to Want.” overcomingbias.com. Oct 28, 2008
Haque, Umair. “The Builders’ Manifesto.” blogs.hbr.org/haque. Dec 18, 2009
Heath, Chip; Larrick, Richard; Wu, George. “Goals as Reference Points.” Cognitive Psychology, 38. 1999.
Hodgson, Shadworth. Time and Space. 1865.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651
James, William. Pragmatism. 1907
James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. 1912.
James, William. Principles of Psychology. 1890.
Jarvis, Jeff. What Would Google Do? 2009.
Jarvis, Jeff . “Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture.” buzzmachine.com. June 7, 2009.
Kahneman, Daniel; Slovic, Paul; Tversky, Amos. Judgement Under Uncertainty. 1982.
Kaufman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe. 1995.
Kelly, Kevin. “1000 True Fans.” kk.org/thetechnium. March 4, 2008.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962.
Lakoff, George; Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. 1980.
Lapham, Lewis. “The Gulf of Time.” Lapham’s Quarterly. 2008.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. 1979.
Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. 2001.
McAdams, Dan. “Personal Narratives and the Life Story.” Robins & Pervin eds. Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. 2008.
McAdams, Dan. “The Redemptive Self: Generativity and the Stories Americans Live By.” Research in Human Development. 2006.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. 1964.
Nakamura, Jeanne; Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. “The Construction of Meaning Through Vital Engagement.” Haidt ed. Flourishing. 2003.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886. Kaufmann, tr. Basic Writings of Nietsche. 2000.
Noveck, Simone Beth. Wiki Government. 2009.
O’Reilly, Tim. “Government as a Platform.” Lathrop & Ruma eds. Open Government. 2010.
Ortega y Gasset, José. History as a System. 1941.
Ortega y Gasset, José. Man in Crisis. 1962.
Ortega y Gasset, José. What is Philosophy? 1964.
Ortega y Gasset, José. The Origin of Philosophy. 1967.
Ortega y Gasset, José. Historical Reason. Silver, tr. 1984.
Page, Larry; Brin, Sergey. “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.” [link] 1998.
Pais, Abraham. Niels Bohr’s Times. 1991.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “The Fixation of Belief.” 1877. Collected Papers V. 1934.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” 1878. Collected Papers, V. 1934.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Man’s Glassy Essence.” 1892. Collected Papers, VI. 1934.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Evolutionary Love.” 1893. Collected Papers, VI. 1934.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “The First Rule of Logic.” 1898. Collected Papers, V. 1934.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Pragmatism.” 1905. Collected Papers, V. 1934.
Peterson, Chris; Maier, Steve; Seligman, Martin. Learned Helplessness. 1993.
Pfeffer, Jeffrey; Sutton, Robert. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. 2006.
Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. 2007.
Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate. 2002.
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge. 1958.
Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. 1966.
Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 1962.
Prigogine, Ilya. The End of Certainty. 1997.
Raney, Colin; Jacoby, Ryan. “Decisions by Design,” Rotman Magazine. 2010.
Raymond, Eric. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. [link] 2000.
Richards, Robert J. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. 1989.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 1979.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 1989.
Runco, Mark. “Creativity as an Extracognitive Phenomenon.” Shavinina & Ferrari eds. Beyond Knowledge. 2004.
Schelling, Thomas. “The Mind as a Consuming Organ.” Choice and Consequence. 1984.
Schlesinger, Arthur. Crisis of the Old Order. 1957.
Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 1942.
Schwartz, Barry. Paradox of Choice. 2004.
Sennett, Richard. Culture of the New Capitalism. 2006.
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. 2008.
Shafer, Jack. “What’s Really Killing Newspapers?” slate.com. Aug 1, 2008.
Shermer, Michael. “Darwin Misunderstood,” Scientific American. Feb, 2009.
Shiller, Robert. “A Crisis of Understanding.” project-syndicate.org. 2010.
Shiller, Robert; Akerlof, George. Animal Spirits. 2009.
Shirky, Clay. “Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus.” edge.org. 2008.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. 2008.
Simonton, Dean Keith. Origins of Genius. 1999.
Sternberg, Robert; Lubart, Todd. Defying the Crowd. 1995.
Sunstein, Cass; Thaler, Richard. Nudge. 2008.
Swann, William; et al. “The Allure of Negative Feedback: Self-Verification Strivings Among Depressed Persons.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 101. 1992.
Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan. 2007.
Taylor, Charles. Malaise of Modernity. 1991.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. 1989.
Twenge, Jean. Generation Me. 2006.
Warsh, David. “That Newspapers are the Central Banks of Social Currency.” economicprincipals.com. 2008.
White, Robert. “Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence.” Psychological Review, 66. 1959.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science in the Modern World. 1925.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. 1928.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. 1933.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Essays in Science and Philosophy. 1947.
Wordsworth, William. “The Tables Turned; An Evening Scene, on the Same Subject.” 1798.
Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. 2008.

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Our Sense of Awe in Perspective

Brian — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:59:02 +0000

Lately I’ve been missing the old sense of wonder and enthusiasm I once had for the future. It seems to be a natural development in the life cycle: it was easier to get excited “when I didn’t know any better,” or hadn’t “seen it all before.”

I’ve been able to get some leverage on that since reading an essay called “Awe and the Machine,” by Christine Rosen. She wrote that “we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called ‘machine-made helplessness.’” Her point of historical perspective is the experience related to us by Henry Adams upon seeing a dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition:

… to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power,—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

By comparison, Rosen points out that “our machines are often portable and are such a central part of our everyday lives that we barely notice their presence.”

It’s a very convenient comparison in support of the essay’s sentiment.

The paragraph I excerpted above, from The Education of Henry Adams, is one of the key passages of one of the greatest non-fiction books of the 20th century, written by an intellectually ambitious historian who went out of his way to experience such moments as part of his personal quest to understand the general “motion” of history. It was written as a sequel to another book, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, about ”thirteenth-century unity” represented by cathedrals and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. That’s when culture seemed to have been unified to the same degree it had since become fragmented and pluralized. As he explained in chapter 29,

From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: “The Education of Henry Adams: a study of twentieth-century multiplicity.” With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better.

In other words, it doesn’t represent a normal person’s experience. People certainly marveled at machines, but few people were as transfixed as Adams. To compare Adams’s once-in-a-lifetime experience with how we feel (or don’t feel) walking walking around every day with iPods in our pockets is a bit of a stretch…

It’s important to take in a bigger picture, rather than thinking in terms of individual iPods and Kindles. The device itself can’t be separated from the larger system that distributes sound and images to it — not to mention the multitude of other services available. And consider e-books that allow us to read half of a book on one device, and when we open it up on another device it knows which page we’re on. It’s the aggregate effect that’s most impressive.

It isn’t so different from the sense of awe we experience when walking into a cathedral: what matters most is the imperceptible way that so many different elements work together: the mosaics, the sculptural relief, the structural geometry, the ornamented pillars and arches, the light coming in through the stained glass… A network of digital devices (not to mention content and users) generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than Adams’s dynamo a century ago, just as a cathedral generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than the Great Pyramids. Instead of standing outside, marveling at the direct and instantaneous experience, we have to enter into it, actively, inter-temporally, repeatedly adjusting our focus between particular components and the emergent sense of the whole.

And there’s no reason to assume we won’t see something invented this decade that’s more appropriately analogous to the dynamo. I’m roughly half the age Henry Adams was in 1900. I’ve spent years trying to understand technology — something I wouldn’t do if I wasn’t awed by it in some way. By comparison, there’s little indication that Adams had much interest in machines at all. Politics, history, and art induced most of his fascination. He was apparently more interested in geology.

A useful point of reference is Adams’s statement that in 1900 he was “almost exactly the same age” as the locomotive steam engine. He was 62 (actually younger than the locomotive). So let’s say the Internet is to us what the locomotive was to Adams. There are a few dates we could give for the Internet’s birth, but let’s be generous and say it’s 1969, when the first connection was made between two nodes on ARPANET. That puts it at 41. That means we have almost two more decades to find something that produces a sense of awe analogous to what Adams felt beside the dynamo.

(Noting that awe may or may not be diminishing, but patience certainly is.)

It might have happened to you already: e.g. while playing a massive multiplayer game with countless strangers, following “the raw feed of history” as breaking news about a big events arrives instantaneously from different directions, waking up to find your blog post or video suddenly discovered and shared by thousands of people, seeing a Wikipedia article updated within seconds of news confirming someone’s death, noticing someone you know “liked” an article you were reading (and thinking it was sheer coincidence — before you realized “the Internet knows” you know each other), etc…

None of those experiences alone is likely to generate the profoundest sense of awe, but by meditating on all of them and seeking, like Henry Adams, to understand the “forces” moving around them, eventually (if you’re lucky) we might have a profound experience on seeing something that symbolically brings it all together.

But Rosen nevertheless raises an important thought, with is very much worth addressing: something has changed about our attitude towards technology. What is it? Will it be good or bad? Does it indicate we’re stuck on a giant hedonic treadmill, looking for more, more, more, more, and more information every minute? (Numb to the power of our machines while hyper-sensitively tuned to the most mundane experiences — to use a cliché, “OMFG the best cat picture evarrrrr!!!!!!!”)

Are we in the throes of an accelerating addiction? (As Paul Graham recently asked.)

Or have we outgrown technological naivety that led people in past generations to marvel at machines and associate them with utopian possibilities? (As Virginia Postrel recently argued in a piece about Americans’ declining interest in expositions like the one Adams visited in 1900.)

By reading and thinking about history, I’ve been able to find some answers (or a sense of confidence that will suffice). Coincidentally, among my biggest influence I’d include The Education of Henry Adams, as well as much of the work of Jacques Barzun, who Rosen quoted about “machine-made helplessness.”

Barzun is critical of technology and progress — but he’s critical of everything, very nuanced, wary of utopian fallacies (e.g. lamentations about the loss of simpler, better times), and just as critical of other critics and most of what came before our time. While he expressed concern about the social effects of machine, he expressed optimism as well — or what he called “spirited pessimism”: an appreciation that “experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth.” That is, after all, the spirit that led Henry Adams to lurk around the dynamos — not just in awe of the machines themselves but of what they represented. My assumption is that it’s the same spirit that will ultimately make the most of what we have now, and create the next great, awe-inspiring objects.

Barzun expressed that hope himself at the very end of From Dawn to Decadence, his massive study of Western cultural life from 1500 to 2000. His treatment of decadence doesn’t dwell on decline; he also emphasizes rebirth, or literally “renaissance” — not unlike the rebirth and reformation that happened five centuries ago — enabled by centuries of accumulated knowledge and artifacts, sparked by new technology (then it was the printing press) and kindled by , sparked frustration and boredom, until finally a few members of some generation decide enough is enough and start rediscovering their past “and [using] it to create a new present.”

That’s where I see us right now.

It isn’t simply that enthusiasts like me “don’t want to admit” that our machines “ensure that we directly experience less,” as Rosen claims. Whether or not it’s true, it’s a trade-off we’re willing to accept and in order to explore our unique, unprecedented advantages. And to many of us, too many awe-inspiring spectacles and direct experiences had already lost their allure — being too generic, contrived, impersonal, over-intoxicating, non-generative, and unsustainable — and we consciously turned to digital technology as an opportunity to develop positive alternatives.

Awe is something we naturally get over with experience. Having written this I’ve been reinvigorated not by generating naive enthusiasm but by coming to terms — realizing that it’s those of us who grow bored with our own time and place who create the most awe-inspiring inventions… to say nothing of the most enduring histories.

Thanks also to Arts & Letter Daily for linking to Rosen’s piece, and Alexis Madrigal for Postrel’s piece (at the promising-looking Big Questions Online).

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.

Brian Frank » creativity

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