Commentology #5

PREVIEW

It is easy to be enamoured by the sound of our own voice.  Yet it is far more difficult to hear that voice.  The content is not important at all, what is important as personal exploration is the transformational experience of the content.  Getting caught up in quotes, sentences and words is when we have lost the script of our own lives.  Seeing a broader view of life where the context is one's own existence, then becomes a measure of relationship with ideas and values.  I am at the beginning of this journey, I do not know what it will change within me but all creative effort, in whatever form or whatever way is useful.

The Original Americans

July 29, 2009 at 3:54am by Emeri Gent

Because all of this sounds simple it is difficult. This still makes great sense at an individual level because their is deep wisdom and sophisticated nuances in tribal rituals.

If these ways of seeing and thinking are not more common at the individual level, I doubt they will transfer to the group level (unless it is a highly intelligent group).

What is in this article is something that has been passed down over generations and therefore represents a lifetime's work. I always wonder how our modern training systems try to put lifetimes of work into a spoonful of change direction.

Unless one is prepared to study the culture and be more understanding of the sacrifice made by native populations to accommodate those that have since emigrated to lands that they never said they owned but which they understood - an understanding we are rediscovering with the advent of concerns about climate change.

e.g., Diversity of the Original Americans
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Twitter Birdbrain? Twitter Rat Race?  What is Twitter?

July 28, 2009 at 11:07pm by Emeri Gent

Any online application can become whatever one wants it to be. Social Media is like China.

In the heartland city of social media everybody knows what it is, but as one travels further out in concentric rings of attention, their greater mass called "Mother Earth" would see the city of social media no differently to the way a city is viewed from space.

There was a time when likeminded people talked about digital have's and digital have nots, but that conversation has been consumed by an all out infatuation with connecting to systems. When statistics reveal the truth that many people don't even know what blogs are, that is not a strange reality, that is the reality of a new world of mass attention and an old world of the masses.

What we need to focus on is how people use new media intelligently. There is plenty of evidence of that and then it is a question of how to build the bridges of intelligent net worth into the wider world, rather than turn an industrial machine civilization into techno machine civilization.

e.g., Alan Watts Noise to Socializing Signal Ratio
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My freeflowing response to another Fred Wilson blog about "Comments"

These are rhetorical questions to elicit thought over the long term than a mad rush of answers in the short-term: Why should the power law curve apply to comments if our own thinking is the one thing we can control? Are comments a commodity or they a personal expression of who we are?

Isn't 1200 comments to Paul Krugman really still many-to-one? If comments are a commodity, then if a social community really cares about farming human expression, then just as wikipedia gathers its information, then why not a "commentpedia"? or why not produce a comment "mind-map" - i.e. lets fundamentally change the meme of how we look at comments. Is it a right brain approach to dealing with comments a fundamental or impossible shift in how people think?

If comments are a commodity, is the thinking I am doing right here, right now, is that disposable? And then who is disposing of it? The instant porridge answer for that is that it is I who am disposing it because it I who have turned into a disposable consumable.

Since my comments are personal, the first place they go is to my own personal relational database, where I decide how and why I am going to file them. After that step, then I have thrown my words in the community and there I want to be an invisible force, I don't want to be His Masters Voice, or the Expert or even deem to declare that I know what I am talking about. My victory is in the change made in my own brain/life because I have exposed myself to a new or smarter ideas.

What I am saying here is comments currently do not possess lifetime value. They should. What we do instead is anoint comment makers, crown new kings of expressions and here comes the crunch: we then have new media being operated through old media mindsets. We need new media that we learn to see through developing our own "new media mindset" - that is a revolutionary thing and not simply social education. It is turning comments into seeds of intelligence and planting them in new ways to create new energies.

Actually, thinking out aloud is going to submerge me unless this particular comment invokes respectful silence. Because if it invokes silence, then in much like an Alan Watts way, we are finally thinking artfully rather than pouring out multi-colour brushstrokes of our thoughts.

Apologies for the long comment, but it will go right into my database and I will return to it, not in terms of days but over years. Comments today have tribal value, but they have to be more evolved than that tomorrow especially in a semantic web universe and beyond ...

e.g., Innovation
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OVERVIEW

It is ironic how different environments illicit different responses.  When I read the native indian article from the first issue of FC magazine, maybe because it was so well written, it left me with a feel of pseudo-wisdom, as if I had touched some important aspect of ancient humanity and it had rubbed off me.  Then I engaged the twitter posting and the posting at Fred Wilson's blog and here I was making stuff up on the fly.  Of the three experiences, the most touching and more reflective was reading about the native indian culture.  I think we focus to much on the tribal aspect rather than the intelligence stored within a specific culture.  I am focusing on the pure intelligence, by trying to strip the traditions and artificacts away.  More importantly the chief balance which is still out of whack is my failure to sleep, not my failure to understand more and more complex ideas. 

e.g., My Online Space is at "The Cave" @ http://tiny.cc/M52ey

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