Brian Frank » education

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Brian — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:38:18 +0000

I decided it was time to improve my writing. It felt both forced and stifled: artless, lifeless, joyless and uninteresting.

And my reading was falling off too, both in quantity and quality.

The two problems — with writing and reading — seemed connected. I hoped reading more (and more importantly, reading better) would help me write — and maybe vice versa. Like the way David Remnick said it a couple weeks ago:

You have to learn to read like a writer, in the same way that a doctor looks at a human body maybe a little bit differently or a painter looks at the human form differently than the rest of us.

So “I’m going to read more books that people who read books read,” was how I phrased it: my New Year’s resolution: a deliberate reference to Richard Posner’s famously hostile review of Malcolm Gladwell:

Blink is written like a book intended for people who do not read books.

So no more over-simplified and monosyllabically titled books about “surprising truths!”

By “books” I guess I mean literature, or “literary books” — or perhaps just “respectable fiction.” I was getting too stuck in a marketing mode: too comfortable, gradually losing my imagination. I felt like a car that’s been driven the same safe speed for to long and had lost its ability to pass on the highway.

On the other hand I already spent years reading high-quality stuff — some of my favourites: Jacques Barzun, José Ortega y Gasset, William James, A. N. Whitehead, John Dewey — and it’s been great and challenging and very fulfilling for me personally but isn’t in fashion with the type of audience that’d be willing and able to read what I’ve produced from it. The stuff I really love, the stuff I “curl up with” and lose track of time when I read, the stuff I’m most inclined to emulate (and have in the past), doesn’t endear me to many readers.

So I have to keep reading and working away…

The first name on my reading list this year was Borges. I certainly wouldn’t say I “get” Borges now but even after our short acquaintance I found myself writing differently (or thinking differently when I write). I could suddenly withhold important details to create surprises later on in a story (i.e. actually creating a story) instead of just laying out all the information in the most logical, predictable order.

Writing is about not-telling as much as it’s about telling (or moreso, not-showing as much as it’s about showing). Working the balance between what’s known and what’s not-known is what makes it joyful and interesting.

Something similar happened when I read a couple of Chekhov‘s short stories. I was struck by how much he left out of them. He gives us a few seemingly casual but skillfully sketched bits of info; our minds fill in the rest: enriching the story with a sense of relevance within a larger unknown narrative without quite making us feel deprived at the end.

Recently Robin Sloan shared something that captures this notion pretty well, quoting William Trevor:

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

At the other end of the spectrum is David Foster Wallace, whom I (like a lot of people) have been trying to catch up on before reading The Pale King. I’ve been infatuated with his journalism for a while but I’ve found it tougher to get into his fiction (mainly because almost all fiction is tough for me to get into).

I’ve got Infinite Jest here (the precise location of my bookmark is a detail I’m happy to leave out of this story) but what I really loved was a Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. It’s essentially just a transcript of five days of interviews and camaraderie between Wallace and Lipsky at the end of Jest‘s promotional tour in 1996. Beyond being about David Foster Wallace it’s a glimpse into the business of writing and publishing, and simply just an insightful and fun conversation between two guys I’d like to have a beer with.

(Like most books I’ve ended up loving, I didn’t go looking for it. It caught the corner of my eye — the newest, shiniest object on a pile strewn on a desk — part-way between two points in the library.)

Unexpectedly, I found myself less inclined to want to write like Wallace. I love his style, I admire his skill, his creative process interests me and I’ve adopted some of his influences (lately becoming a fan of Don DeLillo), and I sympathize with some of his experience. But instead of emulating him I’ve found the net effect has been to emulate his courage and confidence — courage and confidence to write like myself.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses for not finishing Infinite Jest.

Yeah, I’m not afraid to give up on a book (though I rarely quit altogether; I just put them aside, hoping for a better time, e.g. perhaps after I’ve read more of what Wallace read). Mainly I feel like I’m a bit too old for the intense romantic devotion it requires but still too young to have read enough of what I need to have read first…

I guess that’s just the nature of wanting to read excellent books. Geoff Dyer describes this dilemma in his wicked essay on reader’s block:

The strange thing about this is that at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov:I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought—and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.

Dyer is another writer who’s helping me write more like myself. Though whereas Wallace helps me by being different, Dyer helps me by coming close to what I’m already trying to do on my own.

Read Out of Sheer Rage, for example. It’s a book about procrastinating from writing a book, and in the process of doing everything except write the book, he ends up writing the book in a different but probably more interesting way.

Like Dyer, most of the more creative things I really want to write are that same type of paradoxical, ‘tried doing one thing and failed but by the time I recognized my failure I turned out to have succeeded at something better.’

I’m especially sympathetic to what motivates him:

I wanted to know more – and the best way to find out about anything is to write about it. If I’d known what I needed to know before writing the book I would have had no interest in doing so. Instead of being a journey of discovery, writing the book would have been a tedious clerical task, a transcription of the known.

I’ve been trying to explain that to people for years, but after reading him say it I was like, ‘ok, now I don’t have to, because I know I’m not the only one who thinks and feels this way,’ and more importantly, ‘oh crap, it’s already been done.’

But what’s funny is that the realization of non-originality wasn’t a disappointment; it was relieving. It freed me to move forward and find new things to write about — to find joy in what got me into writing and reading in the first place: not just writing what I know but trying to put together the pieces of what I don’t.

For me, not-knowing is what makes the writing process joyful and interesting — like the experience of reading. It’s most compelling as a sequence of glimpses waiting to be found — glimpses not just of a story or a book but of an author or creator.

We keep compiling influences and references but ultimately it’s how we synthesize and represent them through ourselves, in our own, way that matters most.

Update: This is too relevant not to tack on: Geoff Dyer on David Foster Wallace and “literary allergies” (via @newinquiry) — sometimes there are writers we respect and want to like but can’t read without getting a rash and watery eyes:

Maybe in some homeopathic way reading Infinite Jest would cure me of my allergy. Perhaps I just haven’t consumed him in sufficiently large doses. But even a small dose is, in my experience, an overdose. He’s funny, he’s hip, he has this whopping supply of verbal energy. His braininess and virtuosity are as hard to avoid as a 747 on a runway—and almost as noisy. He’s one of those writers who won’t let the reader get a word in edgeways.

But we’ve all got to try, at least — not just Wallace but anyone. What works out and what doesn’t is often a surprise.

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.

How to Make the Web Better by Sharing Selfishly

Brian — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:42:24 +0000

I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least affect them).

Leo Laporte got this stream of thought flowing on Sunday when he complained about Buzz (and the ephemerality of microblogging in general). For two weeks, nobody noticed that his posts weren’t getting through to Twitter. Here’s one of the money quotes (in case you missed it):

I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void… How demoralizing.

I had the same sort of awakening once, about a year ago: looked at my Twitter profile and saw that two weeks of updates were gone. For a second I was like, “Oh God…” until I realized how little was lost. Nothing, really. So I took a break, re-calibrated my centre of gravity and managed to keep a modest balance ever since: taking advantage of Twitter’s benefits without getting yanked into [too m]any hedonic black holes.

This kind of semi-crisis happens (I imagine) to virtually everyone who works and lives this much online. Robert Scoble went through a similar process last year… And here we are again. Paul Carr put it in (what I think are more widely and deeply compelling) terms of giving up too much of our life stories:

… for those of us who have had reason to look back at the past few years – like me writing my book, or Leo having “woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands” – the realisation is slightly terrifying: by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.

Scott Rosenberg reiterated the same concerns, addressing a specific social network that might “know” more about us than we do, and is keeping it that way:

Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web. Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file.

But I wouldn’t say everything is lost. At least nothing worth keeping…

Part of the problem might be our obsession with efficiency, and our innate aversion to loss. The Web turns thoughts and remarks into discrete, measurable objects. We never missed them much till we could pin them down and count them. We see the theoretical capacity — the Internet can store everything — so we’re inclined to feel that it should be used to its fullest. But nature has plenty of redundancies and processes that go on wastefully, or uselessly for long stretches. Plenty that dies too. Evolution wouldn’t work if everything lived forever. Sucks but that’s how it is. Same with creativity…

My own solution is to think about “inter-temporal sharing” as much as I think about social sharing. In other words, I’m filtering the present for the future, rather than insisting every check-in and tweet be saved for posterity. I’m sharing more links through Delicious — which I can export and keep on my own computer — than I do through Twitter.

You might say that’s more like “saving” than “sharing,” but isn’t saving essentially like sharing something with your future self?

[If you're interested in the theory side of this, read your Harold Innis on temporal and spatial biases. Note: I use "spatial bias" in a completely different way, more consistent with psychology than medium theory. Hat tip to Edward Comor at UWO for re-acquainting me with Innis's ideas. Also see #9 on Tim Carmody's excellent piece on 10 Reading Revolutions.]

Last year I wrote about this in response to some fears about “digital sharecropping“; I advocated thinking of it as an ongoing education and actively taking ownership of it:

Most obviously, there are opportunities for artists, writers, musicians, social entrepreneurs, etc., to nurture projects and enterprises that support our offline endeavours…

Of more universal value is our emerging ability to take responsibility for our own continuing education, and in the process — unlike in the past when “self-teaching” meant being socially isolated, with little to show for one’s labour — we can cultivate relationships and representations (i.e. measurable accomplishments) that allow us to actually use what we’ve learned.

Instead of asking how a link or remark will be received by your friends and followers within the next hour, ask yourself how it will be received by you in the future: Is it likely to be signal or noise?

To do that you need to have a sense of purpose and a mindset aimed at building something, which I think is good in itself, not merely a technique for improving the quality of the content you share. After a while this investment starts to pay off: it becomes the future, and when you’re feeling like you’re not getting enough value from the ephemeral web you can find meaning and relevance in the stocks you’ve been investing in and refining, “sharing with yourself” and turning into enduring objects over time.

Ideally, it won’t be entirely selfish. See the interesting discussion at the Lifestream Blog about changing value propositions and approaches to sharing our “likes.”

Instead of damning or resenting the mob and its whims, understand that we’re each partly responsible for those whims, and if we make an extra effort to exercise better judgement and think about investing our attention over the long term, we should find that we’re building things with our friends instead of helping each other spin the treadmill so fast that people have to jump off.

P.S. Any suggestions for tools? I use Instapaper and I’ve tried Evernote but it never quite clicked with me. My main “tool” is blogging about things and starting to tell stories while they’re still fresh…

“Discovering Narrative and the Value of Beginner’s Mind”

Brian — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:54:41 +0000

Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]:

Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to write it, either. In fact, I try to preserve that state of mind. There’s this teaching in Zen called “beginner mind,” which says if you want to be original and creative, then you have to approach each new project as though you were an amateur, as though you had never done this before. And obviously, it’s not completely possible — or Zen would be easy, but I try to approach a story without knowing how I’m going to — often I honestly don’t know how I’m going to report it; I certainly don’t know how I’m going to write it…

That’s Mark Bowden, a well known long-form journalist and the author, most notably, of Black Hawk Down. His remarks resonated with what I’ve been thinking lately about writing and reading and life in general.

Last night I finally read “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” (a.k.a. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) and before that I LMAOd through “Big Red Son,” a rather over-informative forty-eight page account of Wallace’s trip to the annual porn convention and Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Like Bowden, Wallace wasn’t sticking to a strict plan when he researched and told those stories. No doubt he had a timetable and a sense of what he might come up with, but both stories exude innocence (and no lack of discomfort) as he finds himself participating in episodes he apparently would have preferred not to have been a part of.

The obvious precedent is the “gonzo journalism” popularized by Hunter S. Thompson. He tended to insert himself so far into a story that his presence there became the story — or created the story by taunting hapless bystanders with lies and incapacitating his associates with whiskey and Mace (e.g. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved“).

When Gay Talese used the buffer around the subject as his angle in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” it must have seemed radical. Now I wonder why Gay Talese didn’t spend more time on himself. Now we expect celebrity profiles to include the reporter’s account of calling on the phone to set up an interview, dealing with publicists, driving up to the house, ringing the doorbell, getting hassled by security, being peed on by the dog and having to borrow pants from someone in the entourage, etc.

I wouldn’t say it’s “self-absorbed” (at least not in a derogatory way), because they’re also giving us what we want: we identify with the naive outsider trying to find a way in.

And a lot of us want to be the outsider — an impulse that draws a lot of people to journalism and writing (and science and art and entrepreneurial endeavors) in the first place. There’s something about the human spirit that thrives in the face of the uncertain and unknown…

We’d do well to let this impulse run a little more freely, both for motivation’s sake and for improving the quality of our shared experience. Exercise the beginner’s mind instead of hiding it, learn to discover through adventure and self-discipline instead of locking it in an office [or a fixed plan].

Read the rest of Bowden’s talk. HT The Browser. There are more great magazine articles via Kevin Kelly’s collectively compiled list.

Digital Natives

Brian — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 06:31:44 +0000

There’s an astonishingly bad article at Spiegel Online citing some research that has got a lot of discussion, arguing that notions like “digital natives“ and “the Net Generation” have been wrong because young people say that the Internet isn’t important to them.

But the evidence all seems to confirm the ideas behind the “digital native” metaphor:

Young people have now reached this turning point. The Internet is no longer something they are willing to waste time thinking about. It seems that the excitement about cyberspace was a phenomenon peculiar to their predecessors, the technology-obsessed first generation of Web users.

For a brief transition period, the Web seemed to be tremendously new and different, a kind of revolutionary power that could do and reshape everything. Young people don’t feel that way. They hardly even use the word “Internet,” talking about “Google”, “YouTube” and “Facebook” instead. And they certainly no longer understand it when older generations speak of “going online.”

Reminds me of this little parable, by way of David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Self-reports on all kinds of questions are notoriously untrustworthy. I don’t think high schoolers can assess the effects the Internet has on them any more than they can assess the effects of — well, anything. I hardly see how kids’ indifference about the Internet is a damning indictment of the “digital natives” argument. They’re indifferent about almost everything, except their friends (as Paul Sham noted on Twitter). Teens still love music, for example, but I don’t expect them to be any more enthusiastic about iTunes than previous generations were about HMV. What matters has always been the experience, the content, the relationships, and their own sense of self within all that…

In fact, I read these findings as verification.

My understanding is that this is exactly what being a digital native means. It isn’t that the Internet has gone out of style; they don’t waste time thinking about the Internet because using the Internet is normal to them.

Here’s more:

Occasionally the teacher will ask his students big-picture questions about the medium they take for granted. Questions like: Where did the Internet come from? “I’ll get replies like, ‘What do you mean? It’s just there!’” Scheppler says. “Unless they’re prompted to do so, they never address those sorts of questions. For them it’s like a car: All that matters is that it works.”

Exactly!

HT @rtraction

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):

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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.

Return to the book’s main page.

Follow my RSS or Twitter feed for my “short list” of recommended reading, and related stuff I’m still working on.

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.

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…

Motivation Reconsidered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirit of Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

And up to each of us too…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Book About Truth, Will & Relevance

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

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

Description:

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

Reading Options:

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

Background:

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

So now?…

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

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

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

Books That Have Influenced Me Most

Brian — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:18:48 +0000

Tyler Cowen started this meme, which I noticed via Michael Martin. Arnold Kling took it up as well. I’ve already written a very long post about all of the books that influenced me.

The books on this list are by no means the ones I love or respect the most. Some of them influenced me in funny ways (i.e. I’ve forgotten what’s actually in a lot of these).

[Listed in the order I read them in]:

1. David Foot, Boom, Bust & Echo » While I was high school this got me in the habit of thinking about the future by focusing on social factors, rather than technologies and policies as if they’re separate from people’s lives.

2. J. D. Salinger, Catcher In the Rye » Over and above the usual reasons for listing it, Catcher crystallized my fascination with psychology and may have led to everything that followed (until then I wanted to be an architect).

3. Thomas Petzinger, The New Pioneers » A lot of the counterintuitive ideas about business in the 21st century are outlined in this book. It set me in the right direction relatively early.

4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media » Not so much for the content. This is here because it’s the book that started my habit of taking careful notes and following up on the bibliography — otherwise I might not have read any of the books listed below.

5. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea » Maybe the most substantial influence on my thinking. Like McLuhan’s, this is a great bibliographic hub that opened up a lot of insights and opportunities for further study. More importantly, it taught me to think about everything in evolutionary terms.

6. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets » I read this to learn more about Goethe, loved it — I’m still living by some of the quotes — and then when I tried learning more about Santayana I was introduced to William James and Charles Peirce and they kept me pretty busy studying pragmatism for the next few years.

7. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality » I only read the first section (where he outlines his whole cosmological scheme). I don’t think I understand it, but in the attempt to grasp it I gained a whole new appreciation for how our minds affect our ideas about time and space.

8. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis » Another very useful bibliography, it gave me a lot of evidence-based corroboration of ideas I had already derived from people like James and Dewey, giving me the confidence to keep moving forward.

9. Jacques Barzun, The Modern Researcher » Barzun really helped elevate my discipline at exactly the moment I needed it — bringing everything together after years of intellectual grazing… I imagine him standing over my shoulder telling me I’m doing it wrong.

10. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self » Another great bibliographical hub. This helped me connect most of the dots, connecting ideas from a lot of different fields [and finalizing much of the vocabulary I needed to articulate my thinking].

Honourable mentions: Thinking Learning For One’s Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought, by William Theodore de Bary; Destructive Emotions, edited by Daniel Goleman; Authentic Happiness, by Martin Seligman; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, by Richard Rorty; The Malaise of Modernity, by Charles Taylor… and a whole stack of books by Whitehead, John Dewey, James, and José Ortega y Gassett.

Generativity & Prosperity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Practice of Theory, Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning as a Craft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking in the 21st Century: Progress Report

Brian — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 23:31:13 +0000

The premise of this series is to work out a new way of looking at our changing world»

Part of the reason we’ve had so much difficulty making sense of the complex events of the past decade is that our ways of thinking — specifically, the metaphors, analogies, and images we resort to — have not caught up to the technologies and practices of our age.

We live in a world that consists of distributed, decentralized, and constantly-changing networks of real-time connections, but we still think in terms of simple one- and two-dimensional polarities, velocities, pressures, and collisions.

It’s like we’re trying to draw three-dimensions without knowing anything about linear perspective. It would be easy if someone could just show us the tricks — but nobody has quite figured those out yet.

Overcoming the old habits, learning new ones, is an incremental process. Think of it as replacing planks on a platform one-by-one rather than tearing the whole thing down. We still need something to base our thinking on, it’s impossible to simply clear everything away at once. Or you can think of this as either bootstrapping or disentanglement: we need to get the new ideas through the old; ratcheting ourselves up gradually, using the old habits as leverage for learning new ones.

Specifically, digital media needs to serve as a metaphor for appreciating the new ideas about human nature; at the same time, the updated understanding of human nature is required to fully appreciate a socially dynamic world connected by digital media… back-and-forth until both aspects become intuitive.

The series itself was inspired by a more recent post about social media and the creative/intellectual cycle»

Everyone has a slightly different interpretation, with a slightly different vocabulary (that is constantly evolving). Batches of books keep coming out that say essentially the same things in different ways, suited to slightly different needs (which is natural). There’s a lot of corroboration and consistency but it’s mostly tacit and subjective, difficult to get an objective grasp on.

So when we find ourselves in disagreement — like Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble recently have (see here and here) — we have to be nice to each other, agree to disagree, and wait for new features to come along and reframe the disagreement or make it irrelevant. We lack the basis for objectively placing each other’s interpretations in relation to each other.

Most disagreements don’t even matter very much because people inhabit different spaces within the domain. That helps everyone get along, but a lack of friction also indicates a lack of scientific traction. There’s no rigorous, canonical framework for figuring out who’s right and decisively eliminating the bad ideas (other than watching them try and fail).

There’s little in the way of unifying structure — no definitive map, no architecture that shows exactly how everything connects.

We’re well into the digital age but still camped in tents.

That might be acceptable (and probably necessary for a time) but I don’t think it’s optimal or sustainable. It has to change eventually.

A new lightning rod

There’s a lot of electricity in the air.

It’s going to ground itself somehow — whether we wait for sparks to fly or whether we construct some kind of theory, structure, or apparatus for conducting it in the most generative (or least destructive) way.

But it isn’t just about social media or even the web. I’ve been working on the “grounding” thing since well before I began blogging. The web definitely factored into it, but as one of many other cultural aspects, e.g. as I wrote in my first post, a week after the start of 2007′s credit crisis that transpired towards 2008′s financial collapse… I expressed concern that our ideas are on the same shaky ground»

It’s the same with ideas as it is with money: it isn’t wise to go from fad to fad, investing with borrowed wealth; we need long-term vehicles for learning and understanding that retain some of their value when markets lose their footings — or rather, such long-term enterprises are the stabilizing force that markets need.

I’m referring to both ‘knowledge markets’ and financial markets: the former is a foundation for the latter…

To address arguments that thinking is a waste of time and action is universally superior to theory, I made a case for why ideas need to be managed» (while accepting it’s ok if most people don’t want to do it).

This idea of investing in and managing ideas was elaborated most fully in a post outlining a new kind of pragmatism»

Think of how much life goes by without being harnessing for educational or intellectual use. There are ways to turn anything towards more generative, sustainable, and manageable ends. All experience is in a sense learning experience, but it is predominantly undisciplined and unproductive; we tend to let most things come and go without effecting us or our ideas and habits.

Meanwhile, we allow ideas and habits become important parts of our lives without accounting for them. We learn some of our most influential habits, preferences, and beliefs by accident. Most people have no clue how these were formed, nor would they know how to evaluate or correct them. When these habits, preferences, and beliefs are challenged, people will stand up for “who they are,” they’ll go to war over “what they believe,” but they are hardly able to make any account of the sources of their identity or beliefs, nor make the even the minutest adjustments needed to turn a destructive confrontation into a generative conversation. Instead, most people are content merely to be “who they are,” and “agree to disagree” with anyone who’s different. This goes nowhere.

The ultimate good of pragmatism is not profit or truth; the ultimate good of pragmatism is social. Pragmatism is the attitude by which individuals humanize the organizations and institutions where they work, learn, and live. As these institutions become more humane, it becomes easier to be humane ourselves. As we “unstiffen our theories” we are better able to communicate and collaborate – resolving differences, overcoming challenges, and addressing new opportunities, both in our private lives and as part of larger public enterprise.

A ‘pragmatic plasticity’ is required to be both tough and soft – rigid at times and malleable at others. On one hand we need to use hard facts and rules to avoid or overcome subjective excesses. On the other hand, the desired aim of life is subjective well-being and freedom.

So I’m going to suggest a couple of terms to describe two complementary aspects of the pragmatic approach to working, learning, and living: ‘open objectivity’ and ‘tempered subjectivity.’ Tempered subjectivity is the supposed end, and open objectivity is the means to that end.

Open objectivity recognizes that we can’t accomplish anything together unless we have hard structures and facts to serve as common points of reference. When disputes arise, we need to be able to say, “Well, let’s see how X turns out, then we’ll know if either one of us is right.” But this is no way to enjoy life; merely knowing what’s right and following hard rules is not the whole point of living, so this objectivity needs to be open-ended, incomplete, liberating.

The point of working, learning, and living in those objective structures is to develop enough personal knowledge and competence so that we’re not totally bound by those structures. The aim is to learn how to make spontaneous decisions and evaluations that are just as fair and effective as those calculated by objective instruments. This is what I mean by tempered subjectivity, whereby free thinking has been (in)formed by objective structures and facts, and those structures and facts are always readily available to keep thinking from wandering back towards past mistakes.

Creative freedom is both experienced as enjoyable in itself and serves practical necessity – just like owning your own home. At its simplest, a good and happy life is about having the freedom (which, don’t forget, also means having security and stability) to enjoy spontaneous moments of beauty, discovery, laughter, and love.

At the same time, emergencies and surprises inevitably occur, whether we want them to or not, and these cannot totally be accounted for by objective means in advance. The most effective response to new realties is performed by people who have been trained to just know what to do without being paralysed by analysis.

Ultimately, a society of human minds is smarter than anything we could ever design. But our minds can’t function without conceptual facilities, and these facilities are designed. If they’re designed poorly, we think poorly; if they’re designed well, we think well.

A lot of what I’ve written since then is an attempt to refine and rephrase and illustrate those points in relevant contexts. Most prominent is my attempt to frame web as our way to understanding»

I’ve been learning a lot more from the web than merely web-stuff — and so have you, whether you know it or not.

First, our tools, activities and surroundings literally teach us how to think. We constantly absorb metaphors and images that go on to inform our intuition and reason. [...]

In the past, the most dominant metaphors in civic and commercial spheres were from machines, war, and sports. Now the metaphors are becoming more organic (e.g. concepts like “streams” and “cloud computing”). As life and work gets more networked and dynamic via the web, life and work via the web also supplies the metaphors for making sense of the new structures and systems.

Like nothing else, social media provides a working model of life’s yin and yang»

Imagine there are two essential aspects of everything (that go by many names): space and time, body and soul, object and subject, rest and motion, permanence and change, solid and fluid, stable and dynamic, being and becoming, existence and experience…

These two aspects exist for each-others’ sake. Space couldn’t happen without time, while time couldn’t be measured or observed without space. The object can’t exist without a subject experiencing it, while the subject couldn’t experience without the existence of objects, etc.

Think in the practical terms of the web: if a site isn’t used, then it dies; if an event occurs but doesn’t leave a permanent record, then it dies too. The optimal arrangement is events-generating-artifacts, artifacts-generating-events.

The importance of the subjective, moving, living aspect should be self-evident: we’ve all experienced it — especially people who’ve nurtured relationships online before meeting in person…

Conversely, we sometimes forget how important it is to make permanent stuff. It’s more of a long-term investment (or maybe just an insurance policy that could never pay off — but just might…), the benefits of which aren’t immediately evident. It’s great to just enjoy life but activities that generate artifacts and monuments tend to be the ones that spread, replicate, repeat, and survive.

If necessary, I’m not afraid to get deeply cosmological to address the life’s vital and flowing character»

To understand why we do things, we have to appreciate why things happen at all.

It’s ridiculously simple: things happen because time exists.

I’ve found this principle to be a useful heuristic for grounding uncertainty and making random occurrences continuous with the rest of experience.

If something weird happens — e.g. someone acts crazily, markets go haywire — rather than guessing wildly at causes or dismissing the event as completely unexplainable, we can start by reminding ourselves that “something had to happen” and organize our thoughts from there.

It isn’t so much an explanation as it is a way to overcome some of the old ideas and biases that prevent us from recognizing and understanding new opportunities. On the deepest level, we need to be careful we’re not resting on false assumptions of concrete objectivity»

There is no logic that compels us to explain everything logically, there is no purely objective account of why or how we can be purely objective; instead we have deep undeniable feelings that we must make ideas objectively explained.

Start with that simple fact and work backwards: instead of obeying the rules of objectivity, account for them.

Evolution is the ultimate explanation for all of our knowledge and beliefs.

It’s about what’s practical — whatever works in the long run, whatever manages to survive and succeed.

We’re the species that happened to acquire imagination and memory capable of transposing the real world into a conceptual world of symbols — abstract objects that aren’t subject to the physical laws of change and motion affecting the rest of reality.

The impulse for manipulating abstract objects and transposing them back into real-world action eventually developed into principles and laws, which in turn provided frameworks for civilizations.

Civilizations themselves are conceived as objects that come into contact with other communities — “the barbarians,” etc.

History indicates that (at least where and when the environment allowed), civilizations which accommodated the most complex systems of abstract objects tended to persevere and succeed over those that used less complex abstractions.

Occasionally there have been exceptional disruptions, but in general the civilizations which dominated have tended to have the most effective systems of ethics and discipline, the most sophisticated mastery of science and engineering, and the most powerful religious symbols.

A hypothetical pre-historic group that wasn’t comfortable with abstractions like “freedom” or “justice” (or “me” or “us” and “them” — or truth itself) may have been more empirically sound but they wouldn’t have been as effective at communicating and collaborating.

Such a group would have found it more difficult to surviving — especially if they lived in the same area as proto-humans better-developed systems for working, living, and fighting together.

But eventually our objective systems reach a point of diminishing returns.

At some point, rather than expanding, the system starts to require more and more energy to merely maintain the integrity of the structures, rules, and information they already have.

Large empires find themselves with infrastructure and other resources that need to be protected. Monuments deteriorate and need to be rebuilt. Institutions acquire their own momentum, making them difficult to steer.

Meanwhile knowledge accumulates and becomes hyper-specialized.

One teacher might have a hundred students, each working in their own narrow sub-specialty. When the teacher passes away there’s nobody left who remembers how all the paths once parted — and anyone who tries to reunify the field will have to contend with ninety-nine accusations of ignorance and meddling.

I’m afraid this is the point we’re at now: earlier generations built amazing things, but as we work with the ideas and institutions they passed onto us, nobody knows how how it all works together.

It’s time we take a close look at all of our ideas and institutions with an evolutionary appreciation.

The ideas and institutions of the past aren’t permanently true and good, they simply worked for some time. Now it’s time to reassess whether they’re still as generative and sustainable as they once were.

But we also need to be careful of new ideas and institutions.

We may recognize a problem but then become attracted to the first new abstraction that occurs to us — and sometimes we might be attracted to a new abstraction even while the old ones still work fine.

We have to assess every idea that occurs to us by reminding ourselves how powerfully attractive abstractions can be to our imaginations — especially the simplest and most obvious ones — and evaluate every idea with the question, “What are the real effects of this idea?”

Even the idea of object bias is subject to object bias, we have to consider this as well.

By turning the idea of object bias on itself you might send yourself in seemingly endless circles.

It might seem meaningless and futile.

It isn’t futile.

It’s possible, with practice, to overcome the discomfort of uncertainty. It’s possible to cultivate the habit of doubting ideas without dismissing them altogether. The hard-earned ability to manage ideas is more valuable than any idea will ever be.

Accept it and move forward, develop techniques to take advantage of concrete objectivity without trusting it absolutely»

It’s by working with the static slices of time and learning how to interpret them that we learn to understand what’s happening.

Understanding isn’t a thing we hold, it’s an activity we learn and maintain through practice.

It’s also worth considering that putting data and intuitions together isn’t just prescriptive, it’s descriptive; i.e. we never handle facts without affecting them with emotions or intuitions. [...]

That’s the ultimate verification or falsification we should be watching for: not just how accurate the ideas themselves are themselves, but how effective we are at managing our ideas.

That idea of managing effectiveness isn’t just prescriptive, it’s based on a basic fact that personal efficacy is what actually motivates and gratifies people»

A number of theories have extended that insight. Probably the most widely known is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow (1990), which means to become fully absorbed in a challenging-yet-doable activity that requires concentration and skill but seems effortless, involves goals, and generates constant feedback and growth.

Complementing flow is the notion of intrinsic motivation, specifically self-determination theory described by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985).

As with the ideas of White and Csikszentmihalyi, the need for competence is key to self-determination theory. Deci and Ryan also emphasized the importance of personal autonomy — i.e. to recognize that outcomes result from personal decisions, not from external interference.

Deci and Ryan also include the need for relatedness, or “organismic integration” — a process of assimilating environmental elements inwards and accommodating oneself back outwards to the environment.

The reason why those ideas from psychology have not had as much influence as they deserve in business, politics, economics, etc, is that we haven’t had the metaphors and models to make them intuitive.

But we do now — thanks to the social web and its well-defined networks of relationships and ongoing interactions. A couple of years ago I proposed we should think of ourselves as motivated by a kind of will to relevance»

The problem with the simplified good-evil accounts of human nature is that they treat people as hard, static, well-defined mechanical units — wealth maximizing machines — whereas our behaviour is affected by all kinds of dynamic, ongoing, subjective processes and interactions that are difficult to define and control.

So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation fromdomination and control to connectedness and meaning. Mind you, connectedness and meaning may just happen to manifest itself as domination and control, but connectedness may also manifest itself as altruism, etc.

In my original notebook entry from March 1, 2005, I wrote that “the tendency of individuals persists to an (unknown) end of maximum social relevance — peer-level connections.”

Google’s search engine (especially PageRank) acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.

And it isn’t just the search engine itself. Witness all the effort that goes into maximizing websites’ “relevance” to increase and sustain traffic. It isn’t just search engine optimization: consider the absurd amount of friending on MySpace, whereby people accumulate tens or even hundreds of thousands of “friends”; or witness bloggers jockeying for “authority” ratings on Technorati by exchanging links and RSS feed subscriptions (which, if you read any of the countless blogs devoted to the topic of how to make your blog popular — another absurdity — too many bloggers seem to value stats far more than actual readers).

But relevance means more than just maximizing connections and links, it’s also about optimizing the appropriateness, context, integrity, vitality, richness, and reciprocity of those relations: it’s about how effective and alive our connections are. The value of the subjective relevance of “1000 True Fans” may be far greater than the value of the objective relevance of 10,000,000 “friends” in MySpace, or “authority” points on Technorati…

This is where I’m at… much more to come.

Brian Frank » education

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