The future is not what it used to be


I am (still) reading Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction I enjoy the quote that opens it by Paul Valerey. Sounds like Mcluhan, but he is talking (Benjamin too) about shifts due to mechanical development – reproduction, now this needs updating with an essay about art in the age of electronic production.

More Paul Valery quotes follow, including the bit I have paraphrased above from the Benjamin essay.

Continue reading “The future is not what it used to be”

1000 sketches completed!

I have just posted up the last sketch in my project:

1000

Thousand Sketches

It is satisfying to complete something so big, it has been big in my life and it is part of this larger journey of exploring psyberspace.

With my habit of regular blogging established, I think there will be more posts here. There is a lot that the theme here can cover, everything to do with the psyche as well as everything with Cyberspace.

Art, digital, the physical & their relationship is something that I have explored experientially for a year. It is a good foundation to build on.

I will be setting up creativity coaching in addition to my online psychotherapy. Psychotherapy and Creativity Coaching Online. I will be writing about the role so f the artist and creativity, this blog will be the base!

And I am wondering it I will keep the more personal stuff here including “sketchblog” stuff? Who knows.

Punctuation attitude

Paul Robinson, The Philosophy of Punctuation

Rules are important, no question about it. But by themselves they are insufficient. Unless one has an emotional investment, rules are too easily forgotten. What we must instill, I’m convinced, is an attitude toward punctuation, a set of feelings about both the process in general and the individual marks of punctuation. That set of feelings might be called a philosophy of punctuation.

I like this sort of stuff!

Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique

Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique

Abstract

“Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx’s concept of a ‘general intellect’, suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment, closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information.”

Now that is along the same lines as the thing I wrote after the discussions with Josh – will link to ot in the next item. It all sounds plausible to me, but nothing is a sure thing.

Ivan Illich Transcript

WTP – Ivan Illich Transcript van Illich with Jerry Browe We the People, KPFA – March 22, 1996

“Brown: This hour we have a very special privilege and opportunity. We have here in the studio in Los Angeles Ivan Illich and Carl Mitchum, two friends of mine who I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation. Listen in. You’ll find it instructive. Ivan Illich is the author of a book, very famous in the 1970s, called Deschooling Society, another book called Medical Nemesis. He’s also the author of Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, Gender, and now his most recent book called In the Vineyard of the Text, a commentary on a 12th century scholar and saint, Hugh of St. Victor. Along with us here in the studio is Carl Mitchum, a professor of humanities, presently Visiting Scholar at the Colorado School of Mines and on a more permanent basis a professor at Penn State where Ivan Illich and his friends and fellow scholars meet every year for a few months to study these ideas that over the next hour we’re going to do our best to elucidate and share. Ivan, why don’t we just start with the book that I first encountered when I became aware of you, and that is the book Deschooling. Can you reflect on what you were thinking about when you wrote it and how you might see that reality today because we’re still struggling with schools in this society. There’s still a dependency on professionals that seems to have control of how we learn or don’t learn and I just have to wonder have we made any progress in creating the context where people get the sense that they are in charge of their own learning?”

Interesting discussion. Does the world a context sensitive help? Not in schools which subvert that. Xenos – Zeus and hospitality? Acedia the inactivity which results from seeing how enormously difficult it is to do the right thing – is it a sin?

There is also insight into the interface – the pupil of the eye which takes in with its psychopods the other person. But they do not really grasp the potential of the medium for – conviviality and friendship.

Later Saturday, 7 May, 2011

I don’t understand a word of my own comments either.

The link above does not work, but I’ve put the whole item below. Found here:

http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/ivan_illich_jerry.html

Continue reading “Ivan Illich Transcript”

Psychological roots of political life

Free as in Freedom
Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software

The whole of this book is online.

amazon

“”If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution,” Stallman wrote. “Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.”

I like that line from Chapter 7. I think that reward could well come from taxes – more govt payment for free software.

Edit: 20 April 2002

“I really admired the way Richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern,” Sarah said, explaining her attraction to Stallman.

My wife immediately threw back the question: “What was the issue?”

“Crushing loneliness.”

Fascinating comment… the idea we do political things for personal reasons. I buy it. I am glad RMS has such a psychologically minded friend – I hope it is working out for them. But there would be an interesting twist to entertain: He had to set up a life of crushing loneliness so that he could fulfil his destiny as a political leader.

Collaborative Design

The Road to Natural Digital Collaboration
By Elliott Masie, The MASIE Center

Just as there is a process of Instructional Design for developing instructional experiences, we believe that there is a parallel process of Collaborative Design to create the best uses of digital collaboration technology. We need to learn how to assess the needs of the groups involved and select media that is appropriate to the outcome objectives. And, we envision the development of collaboration templates that will embody a design for ideal use of tools in a given situation (e.g. A template that walks the group through a highly interactive video conference for an employment interview, including application sharing of resume and job description documents.)

Finally, there are new roles that we must invent and perfect to make Digital Collaboration really soar. Facilitators, community builders, virtual coaches and other roles will evolve that will make Digital Collaboration work effectively and naturally.

This is a great time to start the experimentation process. We should find teams within our organizations to lead pilots for leveraging existing and new technologies for effective collaboration. It would be great if the “owners” of collaboration technology were not techies but rather process-oriented folks in the HR, Training or Business areas.

Community of Practice

Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier
by Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder

Note: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 – That link does not work but I just downloaded this: http://www.stevens.edu/cce/NEW/PDFs/commprac.pdf

A new organizational form is emerging in companies that run on knowledge: the community of practice. And for this expanding universe of companies, communities of practice promise to radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change.

A community of practice is a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise. People in companies form them for a variety of reasons — to maintain connections with peers when the company reorganizes; to respond to external changes such as the rise of e-commerce; or to meet new challenges when the company changes strategy.

Regardless of the circumstances that give rise to communities of practice, their members inevitably share knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems. Over the past five years, the authors have seen communities of practice improve performance at companies as diverse as an international bank, a major car manufacturer, and a U.S. government agency. Communities of practice can drive strategy, generate new lines of business, solve problems, promote the spread of best practices, develop people’s skills, and help companies recruit and retain talent.
The paradox of such communities is that although they are self-organizing and thus resistant to supervision …”