Ah, Look what I found: OnlineGroups.Net Blog!
Go for it – it looks great in my Google reader. I know that in that team lies the key to effective collaboration on the net. I hope your blog harnesses new & creative blood into the project!
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.
Google, owner of the means of promotion
I have had a major re-install and have moved from FeedDemon to Google Reader. Seems fine. It takes a while to set it all up, though I did import my old OPML file. I am also keeping a backup of my Google reader installation, I am sick of re-doing everything as I reinstall the OS.
Here is a link to my Starred & Shared items. Anything I particularly like or just may want to return to or share. So far there are just a couple of concluding posts from Thousand Sketches.
The challenge is to narrow it down so I get less but more relevant posts.
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What goes into my brain is as important as what goes into my mouth. In both cases people are spending money to get their stuff in. It cost millions to market a movie, we can make them, and distribute them but to promote them you need millions. They use their power influence my prefrences. Filtering my reading myself seems very important, but I doubt I am getting what I really want, which is more socially filtered versions of the world.
Ironically to fine tune my view of the world I am using a Google product, and thedy are the ultimate owner of the means of promotion.
Depth
That last post is something I have been thinking about for ten years. Here is the proof, a proposal I made for a cybernetic conference in 1997, on the theme of Neccessity & Metaphor
Here is the relevant bit:
Possible theme of a paper could be the — Necessity and Metaphor. Contrary to popular belief ‘we can not think what we like’, words and metaphors have a power of their own. I would draw on the ideas of Jung and Hillman and relate it to metaphors of cyberspace. An example I am pondering at the moment is the word ‘depth’ — is the medium conducive to depth, or only breadth, and height?
So when I listen to Collings (see previous post) these old ideas are stirred. Perhaps proving that cyberspace doeas have depth, especially when old ideas can surface.
William Gibson & everting
One of the most psyberspacy posts I have made for a while, it is in Thousand Sketches – as it relates to my art as well.
The Blogosphere
I have been blogging for a long time – does this count as one: 1997
But I have not used it as an interactive medium, comments never worked well & I have other fora for communication – however with my Thousand Sketches it is a bit different – I want to connect more and I am! My new blog gets 10 time the hits this one does! So that project is putting me more into the nitty gritty of the current Internet. Things to learn:
digg technorati del.icio.us bloglines & who knows whatelse.
I know & use these things but not to their full.
Today it is technorati. Technorati Profile
Lets see how I go!
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Technorati tags: blogging blogosphere cyberspace psyche psychotherapy GTD photos art digital art
OnlineGroups.Net
In the last post I wrote about my Thousand Sketches project – and how it has its roots in many things I have done. One of those projects was “Psybernet” it predates my involvement with the Internet – it began on Fidonet. That project hit me with a bang just like the Thousand Sketches just has. It was the realisation that the online communication I was involved in (in CompuServe at that time) was intrinsically psychological. I was familiar with Psychodrama and knew – from experience – how groups could be an incubator for psychological transformation.
Cyberspace was full of groups! I wanted a group that was consciously exploring this online space in a psychological way and Psybernet was it. That original group began on the Psybernet BBS, then moved to L-soft mailing list, and then to eGroups which were bought out by Yahoo groups.
While my focus has been on the dramas that unfold in groups – I also found out a lot about the infrastructure of online groups. Some software was better than others, and there are many more mature forms now. Caucus is a web forum that is the best I have experienced for conversation online. There are plenty of good email lists, but some do not handle files or the web all that well. For the best of all worlds for online groups using the Web & email is OnlineGroups.Net. It is very good as a web based forum and excellent for email, groups can all be accessed either way, and they can cohere on a site to form a community.
All this is on my mind as I am thinking about Thousand Sketches because the first person I shared my Psybernet ideas with as they emerged in the early 1990s was Dan Randow the main developer of OnlineGroups.Net. He was in both IT and Psychodrama and he immediately saw the online group potential for very productive work. Dan went on to develop a career facilitating groups online for organisations, for a while I worked in the company he established, GroupSense.
The initial philosophy was to use available technology. eGroups were a mainstay for GroupSense, but that went sour when Yahoo! pruchased them. It became much harder to integrate the tech into a group’s life. People needed a Yahoo ID and the messages carried ads. Something new was needed.
That led to GroupServer an open source project which has well a developed implementation at OnlineGroups.Net
I have been using the sevice for may years and have felt at home there for professional & personal groups.
OnlineGroups.Net is now offering sites with groups to the public, this is a new development and I find it fascinating how those discussions over the years with Dan about creating forms to enhance group life has led to us making public our endeavours, though different, at the same time! In the case of Dan, excellent software for groups, and for me Thousand Sketches.
Of course I have an Announcement Group for Thousand Sketches at OnlineGroups.Net.
More than Experiential learning – psychological transformation
The main ways I have explored anything in my life is by doing it. Climbing mountains – living & breathing philosophy in my early20s, relationships, counterculture & politics, psychotherapy, Psychodrama and cyberspace!
This blog, since its to its origins in “Links Pages” is one of the vessels for my experiential learning, a fairy mild one. Psyber-L was another – a really intense mailing list, that for a while was public, until closed at the wishes of its members. The two DreamEvents were powerful spaces to learn in. Doing psychotherapy online professionally is another experience that has given me an understanding of the net.
All of these things I do, with an eye to meaning, purpose and their depth, I can’t help it. If there is a way to go deeper – I sink in! They are vessels for my psyche when it needs to rumble & explode.
My current experiential vessel Thousand Sketches began naively, but I have realised that is a zone for me just like a psychotherapy relationship, a Psychodrama group, or a love relationship. I have not understood till now that the power of the psyche is enabled in our creativity area. The project is the psyche wanting something with me. It sounds a bit grand – but it is probably a simple & every day thing, just that right now it is very alive for me & I need to make sense of it all. Occasionally I am afraid it will drive me nuts.
I am writing this as I am planning an “launch” in Christchurch on 3 November. That is part of this project, it is public. Being messed around by my psyche in public! Public in Christchurch, and in New Zealand as I take this to Trade Me
It feels “Trade Me” is very literally true. It seems very congruent that the project has an auction gallery. I have written here – and extensively about Hermes being the archetype of the Internet. He is also the God of trade. It all fits – he has got me!
Useful psychotherapy page in Wikipedia
Category:Psychotherapy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a different page than the one that appears under Psychotherapy, which is also useful. This is a Wikipedia “Category” and it shows well how Psychotherapy is just that. Psychotherapy is a category like “tree” then there are many species some very different from others. In New Zealand we have one organization that covers all the various modalities, this is rather unusual in the world, even though there is also a World Council for Psychotherapy WCP (A trip to Beijing in 2008 could be a good thing to do!).
While there are irreconcilable world views behind some of the modalities, they reflect the complexity of the mind & soul. No one modality can really capture it all. My own training was in Psychodrama – which has its strengths but is essentially a group method. My one-to-one work is informed also by my training as a Social Worker and through my experience of personal Jungian Analysis.
Google Notebooks
I am enjoying this Google feature. Really nice way to manage all sorts of note taking, and linking to the web. Making them public seems ok, though my notes are mainly for me, bookmarks and tools for my writing etc. The public version does not show the lovely ajax enabled fluidity for managing these notes, showing & hiding them & moving them to different notebooks. Here are my public ones just set up today: