(The hot dog vendor prepares the hot dog and gives it to the monk. The
monk pays him and asks for the change. The hot dog vendor says: "Change
comes from within".)
"beyond the ability to make cogent and effective critiques of more established
and influential institutions and individuals like Big Media and powerful
politicians, the Blogosphere is able to do something that is at times far more
difficult -- criticize itself. [...] While Big Media consolidates its various outlets -- promoting too much of a "get
along, go along" philosophy that is oftentimes not consistent with the need for
self-correction -- the Blogosphere is made up of so many different blogs with
different outlooks that the ability for self-correction is built into the
practice and system of blogging."
I think the blogosphere is a rare example of a large-scale "organism"
that is rich in connectivity but whose pieces are largely independent -
as opposed to, say, a large corporation. Observe that it does not need
to be "of one mind" in order to thrive. Are there other examples of
this?
Jay Cross points to a terrific Seth Kahan interview with John Seely Brown,
touching on storytelling, innovation, creative abrasion, and
the dissemination of ideas. He quotes this incredibly clear paragraph on
the connection between stories, emotion, and personal change:
"Why storytelling? Well, the simplest answer to your question is that
stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind. You can't
talk a person through a change in religion or a change in a basic
mental model. There has to be an emotional component in what you are
doing. That is to say, you use a connotative component (what the thing
means) rather than a denotative component (what it represents). First,
you grab them in the gut and then you start to construct (or
re-construct) a mental model. If you try to do this in an intellectual
or abstract way, you find that it's very hard, if not impossible, to
talk somebody into changing their mental models. But if you can get to
them emotionally, either through rhetoric or dramatic means (not overly
dramatic!), then you can create some scaffolding that effectively
allows them to construct a new model for themselves. You provide the
scaffolding and they construct something new. It doesn't seem to work
if you just try to tell them what to think. They have to internalize
it. They have to own it. So the question is: what are the techniques
for creating scaffolding that facilitate the rich internalization and
re-conceptualization and re-contextualization of their own thinking
relative to the experience that you're providing them? Put more simply:
how do you get them to live the idea?"
On
why, somewhat counterintuitively, strong internal social capital in a
group is not always all good because it can result in the buildup of a
membrane around that group and push members into "us vs. them" thinking:
"We all talk about social capital,
but some of the worst labs that I've ever been in had extraordinarily
high social capital within the lab. But social capital can create the
feeling, "I'm better than anybody else," and this creates dysfunctional
work relationships. It creates the idea that "you're a bad guy." One of
the best ways to build social capital is to have a common enemy. If
that enemy is in the outside world, then guess what? You'll have a very
hard time transferring ideas from the inside to the outside. So, social
capital can work against you. Communities of practice are not
necessarily very open. They can become very rigid structures, just as
rigid as hierarchies. Look at the guilds in medieval times, like the
stonecutters. They were very exclusionary. They were seats of absolute
power. They were evenable to challenge the church!"
Speaking of JSB and stories, there's a page I've been
meaning to link for months now. I figure if I don't do it now I'll
never get around to doing it. It's a great bike-riding story he told that illustrates tacit knowledge. Read it - I promise that you'll be surprised.
I had read Dan Bricklin's illuminating essay "The Cornucopia of the Commons"
(key quote: "increasing the value of the database by adding more
information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own
benefit"), but just discovered another one by David Bollier with the same title
that is equally interesting. It draws parallels between the gift
economies of the NYC community gardens that sprang up in abandoned lots
in recent decades, of the hacker and science communities, and of blood
donation. The self-interest angle is in there as well - here's a quote from the conclusion:
It is
a mistake, also, to regard the gift economy simply as a high-minded preserve
for altruism. It is, rather, a different way of pursuing self-interest.
In a gift economy, one’s “self-interest” has a much broader,
more humanistic feel than the utilitarian rationalism of economic theory.
