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 [...]
metaphors
Thinking in the 21st Century: Progress Report
by Brian on 12-27-2009
in business,creativity,culture,economics,education,media,science,web
Metaphors aren’t just literary devices, they affect our intuition and reasoning in ways we’re barely aware of. Which isn’t to say they’re bad; they’re essential — that’s the point. By calling Metaphors We Live By a “landmark” in the previous post, I wasn’t trying to be dramatic, I was simply trying to provide better information [...]
Tagged as: exindustrialism, industry, innovation, intuition, metaphors, think21st, thinking, vocabularies
Continuing the Thinking in the 21st Century series… Great comment by Phronk on the previous think21st post [excerpt]: Autonomy, flow, exploration, striving for material (digital) goods, relatedness, competence, they’re all represented, often in explicit numerical form. And they interact in a complex, emergent way that even the game developers can’t anticipate. See also: Twitter. I’ve been [...]
Tagged as: collaboration, learning, metaphors, networking, research, social science, think21st, understanding
We’ve been hearing for years about “T-shaped people” (with deep knowledge and competence in one or two areas, crossed with wide knowledge across many domains); Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote about “I-shaped people”: These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head [...]
Tagged as: analogies, creativity, education, gurus, innovation, knowledge, metaphors, skills, teams
[Update: within minutes I decided to change the title to "Designing Ideas for Democracy" -- replacing "methodologies" with "ideas" -- which occurred to me after I thought about search results, then realized "ideas" is more appropriate anyways.] This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual. As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that [...]
Tagged as: analogies, civics, creativity, design, design thinking, enterprise modeling, epistemology, ideas, ideation, meta-methodology, metaphors, methodologies, philosophy
In the process of summarizing my last post, Jeff Jarvis suggested I was “searching for a metaphor for what I’ve been calling beta-think.” He’s exactly right — though I wasn’t aware of it when I started writing — so I’m going to take that up with a bit more brevity and focus. The search for [...]
Tagged as: beta, beta-think, heuristics, human nature, language, metaphors, motivation, recursion, relevance, thinking, web, will to relevance
I left a comment on this post at the LFPress Editor’s Blog about the traffic disparity between Tori Stafford-related livestreams (up to over 5,000 viewers) and yesterday’s Beyond the Crisis panel (55 viewers — it would have been 56 if I didn’t have to work). By chance, a food metaphor popped into my head: some [...]
Tagged as: analogies, diet, food groups, information, information diet, metaphors, news
‘Selfless’ and ‘Selfish’ are Both Myths
by Brian on 06-09-2009
My work on the LdnBeta thing really exemplifies my “learning is personal, knowledge is social” mantra. I’ve been putting an awful lot of time into it — which would seem to be a great personal loss — but it’s gratifying be stretched a little. As per Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory it’s great (for a change) to have Direct [...]
Tagged as: altruism, anticapitalism, capitalism, change, cultural evolution, ex industrialism, industrialism, metaphors, post-industrialism, selfishness, selflessness, society
So I just finished a bibliographical outline of the book I’ve been working on for a few years. Sometimes I call it an “autobibliography” because it pretty much took over my life — I don’t have much of a biography apart from this. Around 2004 I got the sense the book was writing itself and I [...]
Tagged as: autobibliography, metaphors, philosophy, writing
I tried tackling this on the weekend, spent all day Sunday and ended up with a 2000 word manure pile of pretentiousness. I even disgusted myself — not that what I was saying was at all wrong, but in that form it was just way too obvious that I think very highly of myself: making grand pronouncements [...]
Tagged as: crisis, economics, growth, metaphors, overachievement, responsibility, society
