The 18th century, more than many, may remind us of our own time. That period was the culmination of what had become known as the “Republic of Letters,” a shared domain of imagination that lasted from 1500 to 1800.
I love the phrase “republic of letters” and I’m surprised I have not head of it before. In the next iteration of my article: Archetypes of Cyberspace I’ll do some more research and add it in.
I completed this psychodrama thesis in 1999 after working on it one way and another since about 1984. One feature of this paper is the discussion about the sociometric matrix, a notion that influences my ideas about cyberspace as well and were at the root of another essay I wrote – Archetypes of Cyberspace
I stumbled across this better pdf version of the The Group and its Protagonist – linked to it on my Writing page.
I’m wonering if there is some way to publish something based on these papers?
Just got a name for something I have grasped for a long time. I used to call it accidental by products of evolution, and had this idea when I was doing biology aged 15. EG the piano and music itself is a by product of the evolution of fingers. We as humans have gone beyond what was biologically fittest, accidental by-products just heaped upon themselves and interacted with each other to enable creativity and consciousness.
From What Technology wants by Kevin kelly page 50: “These inadvertent anticipatory inventions are called exaptations in biology.”
The point is that in the evolution of technology it is all exaptation. The reason is that the basis of tech evolution is not genetic, the information is carried by social means. Thus nothing goes extinct, and all innovations can be resurrected. In other words we can cut and paste to make new things, that process is far faster and more efficient than evolution in the biological sphere. Sexual reproduction is a form of cut & paste, but still far more primitive than what we can do with our inventions.
Id love to graft the Graffiti handwriting system from the dead Palm onto a current smartphone for example.
To make sense of this post you may need to read my last entry.
Also you may need to know who Barnum was:
And read: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html?src=dayp that my friend Amy just sent me.
Jobs may well be a Barnum, and like Barnum he creates a new medium for communication, but it is not just the man. It is as if humanity is ready for a jump and it finds a vehicle to make it happen. Unfortunately it has to make in the capitalist context, given the failure of the German revolution after World War one. While Jobs is a creative guy, no doubt, and while he is enough of a Barnum to pull it all off in the world as it is, the world was ripe for a new leap in communication, to go beyond printing presses and beyond tele type machines. It took someone to make the next leap actual. Zuckerberg is another such. These steps in the evolution of the psyche are all distorted by the fucked up relations of production. The agony is to live in a sick social system, the actual agony of children in chinese factories and the agony of collusion, alienation and powerlessness for many others of us.
The leap in relations of production that we were on the edge of in capitalist countries at the start of the last century did not happen, history missed its natural turning. If we were in an era of new social relations of production the miserable state of psychological developments would not be the context for these technical innovations leading to huge cultural global shifts sweeping the world. However Rosa Luxembourg was assassinated, the social democrats subverted the revolution, industrial revolutions happens in the name of socialism and distorted the history of possible new relations of production. But that is how it is.
So what of new developments? Everything we create or do is in a backward social system. Creativity is social and public, but ownership lags behind, it is private and coercive and seeks out Dickensian situations such as china to maximize profits and to avoid failure in the market. I don’t think Jobs sold out on his vision, I imagine there was agony in making it happen.
Should he not have made the mouse, the first personal pc? Should we not use the technology? It is tempting as every object contains the labour power of the poor and exploited. I don’t think it it’s the answer to smash the tools, unless there was a mass movement of boycott. Even then the much needed jump is nothing to do with the tools, but in the relations of production, and this not because “we” collude with Chinese fascism, as Mike Daisey implies in the NYT interview. It is more that capitalism went global, that it is alive and well as a system. Not so well actually, perhaps in its vicious death trows. Who will lead that transition we are now on the edge of? We are ripe for another leap.
The revolution, innovation, the next big thing will not be technological but social and political. People who lead this next leap forward won’t be just great writers like Marx or orators like Lenin and Trotsky but people able to lead using the new orality of the Internet, even though its built with an unjust system of production. The screens are not the same thing as the humans who communicate via those screens. Revolution won’t be be because of the the Internet, but it can’t happen if people throw away their telephones and everything made in China, we live in this world.
The reflection I’m making, if it is not obvious, is that there are mighty forces at work, and that no one man Jesus or Jobs is really the cause of them. There is always someone who gives expression most fully and effectively to a collective urge. The power of leaders is not only because of what they do or say, but because of the ripeness of the culture they speak to. The culture chooses leaders.
There is meant to be a way to put this on my blog, not (only) on the Storify site. But it does not seem to work.
Never the less, this is a slice of the Moranien psychodrama mentions on the net on July 9 2011. Some good stuff there. (I thought I’d posted this before? – perhaps it was one of the ones that got lost in the db crash?)
What is this blog about? It might be all over the place but this picture shows how my filter works.
At the heart is a patch where there is a psychological, or soulful aesthetic, cyberspace phenomena that makes the world a better place.
Evolution does not happen evenly. It may be gradual, but it goes step to step. Sometimes a small change opens up a whole new range of possibilities.
• the opposable thumb
• fire
• alphabet
• law
• printing
• Internet
• next?
I’ve left out a few, but you get the idea, some things change everything.
Ways of organising ourselves into groups to educate and heal have evolved over centuries. There are modalities like psychoanalysis, and TA and Alcoholics Anonymous and the Red Cross and so on, that all have methodologies and the persist with a sort of DNA that allows these ideas to hold together and spread. My hunch is that one of the big changes coming up, and needed, is that there will be a new way to speed up the process that has been working in an ad hoc way. Imagine there were ways to find tool kits online for running groups that were freely available and could be edited by their users (Wikipedia style). Imagine that these could be classified and rated, and they each had their advocates and practitioners who beleived their group could make the world a better place.
I can imagine such a social network emerging from the need to change on the one hand , and our ability to learn from Wikipedia, Facebook and Linux on the other as well as the fact there are already thousands of thriving forms that each in their own way work towards major social change. Could there be one network that transforms all of this into something new? I say one network because some things tend to towards there being only one, and one works best, for example Google, Amazon and the Internet itself is the best example.
I find the actual typing ok, and it can be even better with the bluetooth keyboard. The problems lie elswhere.
Pages
Apple’s word processor
Pro:
It works.
I can use styles that convert to Word.
Cons
No Dropbox or other way to use the file in two places. The ones offered are not ones I want to use, like iWork etc. get terrible reviews. iTunes is clumsy. Maybe it will be the #1 way access the file from any device when iCloud arrives. Just a few hours before we hear!
Documents to Go
Pro
I can see the files I have stored in there on Dropbox. Sharing works well.
Con
Looses style formatting in Word format. Makes it unworkable for the work I do.
From an email from David Allan, GTD, below, first a comment from me.
David’s comments below make total sense to me. I see all of this as part of psychological integrity. Relationships are important, and an email connection is not a substitute for relating, it is integral to it. Good communication means good communication online. That means embracing online literacy in the way one might embrace emotional literacy. How far does that go before it is no longer in your domain? You don’t need to be a linguist or a Shakespeare to be a good communicator, but it helps to know the difference between a thought and a feeling, to know the difference between a judgment and an observation… In the online world it means knowing when to reply to all, and keeping to one subject matter, described clearly in the Subject line. And how to manage the email inbox.
Knowledge workers are paid to bring their intelligence to bear on input, and improve things by doing that. The decision about what to do with an email and its contents, what it means in terms of the work and standards at hand, is knowledge work.
We’ve noticed that it takes an average of about 30 seconds to process each email—decide what it is, delete it, file it, respond to it quickly, or defer it to an “action” file or list. For someone with 100 emails a day (more and more common) that’s 50 minutes just to get through a day’s email load. That doesn’t count memos, phone calls, voice mails, conversations, and meetings that must also be processed.
A typical professional these days must factor in at least an hour a day and an additional hour at the end of the week (for a Weekly Review). And not as “Hey, it would be nice if I could…”—but as an absolute requirement to manage their life and work with integrity.