I get a chuckle every time I come across this Creative Commons’ed  web 2.0 graphic I created over 4 years ago as the result of a conference non-sequitur. The above is from a LinkedIn group with 1,800+ members.

From Patricia Fara’s_ Science: A Four Thousand Year History_. She takes a historical and comparative approach to explore the diversity of scientific experience (similar to Karen Armstrong’s A History of God).

If you assume that todays science, along with its technological applications, represents the summit of human achievement, then Islamic philosophers do indeed appear to have ground to a halt after four hundred years [8th to the 12th century CE]. But for Muslims who believe that the quest for spiritual perfection is more important than dominating the material world through reason, then it is the science of Europe that took the wrong track….

Modern science places a great premium on originality. In contrast, [Abū Ali al-Husain] Ibn Sīnā’s [Latinized: Avicenna] writing was valued by his contemporaries not for its novely but for its throughness and systematic organization. Like Newton, Islamic scholars studied the world because they wanted to approach God—and also like Newton, whole swathes of their lives have been cut out of the history books to make them appear as proto-scientists. Ibn Sīnā preached the Islamic goal of striving for stability. For him, understanding nature was not an end in itself, since the physical, divine and spiritual worlds are inextricably twined together. The word islam means both submission and peace, or being at one with God. Ibn Sīnā’s aim was not to pick apart the structure of the universe, but to be led towards the unity of God.

A sensible reply to Slashdot blustering over OPLC’s Nicholas Negroponte’s superficially-nutty statement “Paper books are really dead — they’re gone. And they’re not being killed by tablets, they’re creating tablets”:

…living in a 3rd world country where access to book is diffucult and “piracy” normal (including on books) I think he might be “righter” than we think.

Currently there are “roughtly” 1 billion people living in countries where the majority reads at least “some” and 5 billion who live in counties where only a minority reads. (nb: of course india, china, etc have great literature, and la hogera in santa cruz is trying very hard to get good interesting local writers to the local market, but the realitly is that the wast majority of people in emerging countries do not read for “fun”, they read if they are ordered to by their employers…., because:

If you are poor and a “cheap low quality pirated book” cost 4 to 5 hours of work you will not offer 100 hours of work every year to your child, so the child will not connect “reading with fun” (exept the statistical “lucky” one outlier)).

Moreover there is little avaiability of recent outside book (a hard cover foreign book can cost about 50% of a basic montly salary). So execpt the pirated copies of some blockbusters made popular by pirated copies of foreign movies, you do not read recent foreign books (softcover classics are about the end of it).

But “everybody” has access to computers (mostly of course in cyber cafés) and most students use pirated PDF’s of school books, not just because they cannot affort the 30..40$+ * 10..20 they would need, but because:

• Amazon do not deliver in many 3rd world countries
• and other providers can take up to 2 month to get the book to you (assuming you have an internationally valid credit card)
• and the local bookshop are not very efficient (or just would not bother because they know you will hassle them when they ask 3..4 time the “amazon” price because they have to pay: the book, the transport the customs (40%)..

So ebooks are the best way to get books to these 5B people

At the Transmission Project we’re steadily working towards fleshing out our critique of best practice and the proposal of an alternative: _ honest practice_.

If “best practices” are the standards of excellence within organizations considered high performing, how can it be expected that those standards could be immediately implemented in startup programs? What of differences in organizational culture and constituencies, not to mention technical and information systems? Is innovation supported if funding follows conventional wisdom? How do we know that wisdom is valid when our industry is trained to share only the lessons of success and not of failure?

The difference between honest practice and best practice reminds me of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet”: poets translate underlying patterns and deep truths into the vernacular;  mystics create shallow snapshots that soon lose their greater meaning.

Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these. for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain’s weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere. …

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, —All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, —universal signs, instead of these village symbols, —and we shall both be gainers.

Last weekend I visited Hudson, NY for the Prometheus Radio Project’s first full-power radio barnraising. I spent Saturday morning volunteering in the kitchen: despite all of the consensus-process workshops offered at the barnraising, the kitchen ran as an autocracy. Lunch remained delicious.

Three years ago I told a friend of mine—he having just been hired as a community support manager for a global ICT in education project—to “be manically participatory” as he retells it over dinner this evening. He is now convening their first international volunteer summit with attendees from 6 continents and the event is sold out.

In conversation with a friend, he mentioned his dream for a “No Website” Movement: content should be freed for consumption in whatever format its consumer desires.

This is not a website; it’s a scrapbook, a swipe file and a memory hole. There is no separation between content and design, form or function: all is one. Island 94 looks like a blog insofar as this is the necessary form for its proper function: a legitimating feature and rhetorical device.

Rhetoric is the issue: just as curriculum requires an instructor, information requires delivery. The worst textbooks have always been readers: excerpts disconnected from their authors’ greater work and padded with soft introductions.

I admit weakness in the face of emancipated content—I love my RSS reader and happily feed the beast—but that is only vane productivity. Enlightenment, if it is to be found on the web, shall come from unity, not incoherence.

From the New York State Constitution:

Article 1, Section 17. Labor of human beings is not a commodity nor an article of commerce and shall never be so considered or construed.

As a result of this  Newshour report on the Mott’s worker strike: “Workers who feel they’re now being treated as a commodity in a land of excess labor.”

From Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers—whose quoting by me here is the result of coming across another example (via GiftHub) of the (false) metaphor of the tube.

My account of meaning is grounded in what real people do when they speak and write. When people speak or write successfully with each other it looks as though there is a transfer of meaning: the speaker puts the meaning into the words and the listener takes it out at the other end. If you look at it from the larger perspective this account is fair: the listener ends up knowing what the speaker wanted him to know and ends up knowing something he never knew before, and so it must be that the words put this knowledge into his head. But it is important also to take a closer perspective and realize that, strictly speaking, words cannot contain meaning. Only people have meaning. Words can only have meaning attributed to them by people. The listener can never get any meaning out of a word that he didn’t put in. Language can only consist of a set of directions for building meanings out of one’s own head. Though the listener’s knowledge seems new, it is also not new: the meaning may be thought of as structures he never had in his head before, but he had to build these new structures out of ingredients he already had. The speaker’s words were aset of directions for assembling this already-present material.

To change the metaphor. Meaning is like movies inside the head. I’ve got movies in my head. I want to put them inside yours. Only I can’t do that because our heads are opaque. All I can do is try to be clever about sending you a sound track and hope I’ve done it in such a way as to make you construct the right movies in your head. What’s worse, of course, is that since neither of us can see the movies in each other’s head, we are apt to be mistaken about how well we are doing in trying to make the other person show himself the movie we have in mind.

We can let ourselves talk about words “having meaning” and even “carrying meaning from one head to another” as long as we now realize these phrases denote something complex: the words don’t transport the contents of my head into yours, they give you a set of directions for building your own meaning. If we are both good at writing directions and following directions for building meaning, we end up with similar things in our heads—that is, we communicate. Otherwise, we experience each other’s words as “not having any meaning in them,” or “having the wrong meaning in them.”

The question is then how these meaning-building rules operate in ordinary language. Meaning in ordinary language—English, for example—is midway on a continuum between meaning in dreams and meaning in mathematics. Dreams may be hard to interpret, but the nature of the meaning situation is very simple because there is no audience. Dreams are all “speaking” and no “listening”: dreams are for the sake of dreaming, not for the sake of interpreting. Therefore, though dreams or dream-images have particular, definite meanings, they can mean anything. They have whatever meaning the dreamer of that particular dream built into them. The rules for dreaming are as follows: let anything mean anything. (We could be fancy and say that the meaning-building rules for dreams are the rules of “resemblance” and “association.” But everything resembles everything else to some extent, and anything is liable to be associated somehow with anything else. Thus anything can mean anything.) If we dream of a gun or a steeple, we may be talking about a penis, but then again we may not. And we may dream about a penis with any image at all. In dreaming you can never make a mistake.

At the other extreme is a language like mathematics. Here people have gone to the trouble to nail down the rules for building meaning into symbols. Something may mean only what these publicly acknowledged rules allow it to mean. In mathematics there are mistakes, and any argument about what something means or whether there is a mistake can be settled without doubt or ambiguity. (Perhaps there are exceptions in some advanced mathematical research.)

Meaning in ordinary language is in the middle. It is pushed and pulled simultaneously by forces that try to make it fluid and dreamlike but also fixed like mathematics.

The individual user of ordinary language is like the dreamer. He is apt to build in any old meaning to any old word. Everybody has just as many connotations and associations to a word as he does to an image. Thus, as far as the individual is concerned, a word is liable—and often tends—to mean absolutely anything.

To illustrate this dream-like fluidity of ordinary language, notice that words do in fact end up meaning anything as they move through time and across mountain ranges. “Down” used to mean “hill” (“dune”), but because people said “down hill” a lot (“off- dune”), and because they were lazy (“adown”), finally hill means down. Philology, it has been said, is a study in which consonants count for very little and vowels for nothing at all. A word may change its meaning to absolutely anything.

But the mathematics-like force for order is just as strong. That is, though words in ordinary language can mean anything, they only do mean what the speech community lets them mean at that moment. But unlike the case of mathematics, these agreements are not explicitly set down and agreed to. That is, our rules for building meaning into words are unspoken and are learned by doing, by listening to others, and even by listening to ourselves. It’s like one of those party games where people get you to start playing before you know the rules of the game and indeed part of the fun is learning gradually to understand the rules after you find yourself following them. When you pick up the rules you can play—you can send and receive messages with others who know the rules. These rules for building meaning may be thought to be written down in dictionaries. But dictionaries are only records of yesterday’s rules, and today’s may be somewhat different. And dictionaries don’t tell all the meanings that speakers send to each other in words.

The dynamism between the dream characteristics and the math characteristics in ordinary language is important: there is a constant tug of war. The individual is tending to allow words to mean anything—just as he allows dream images to mean whatever he builds in. Not because he is naughty but simply because he is a meaning-building creature and cannot refrain from constantly building new meanings into everything he encounters.

But the speech community is constantly curbing this looseness. When an individual speaker means things by a set of words which the community of listeners does not “hear,” he tends to give in to the community and stop meaning those things by those words: that is, when they don’t build in at their end what he builds in at his, he either stops building it in or else remains unconscious of meanings of the words. Similarly, when an individual listener hears things in a set of words which the community of speakers do not mean, he also tends to give in to the community and stop hearing those meanings or stop being aware of having those meanings for those words. (The exceptions to this process illustrate it well. When there are listeners who are especially eager to know what is on someone’s mind—someone like a specially loved child or a poet such as Blake—they will learn to interpret his words even if he talks like a dreamer. If there’s enough utterance and enough care, the code can always be cracked.)

The history of meaning in a language is the history of this power struggle between dream characteristics and math characteristics. Rules for meaning-building change when some speaker is somehow powerful and makes people “hear” in an utterance what they never used to hear in it. And even a listener can be powerful in this subtle way (be an unmoved mover) and make people “mean” in an utterance what they had not meant before. When, on the other hand, the community holds its own, meanings don’t change. Humpty Dumpty put his finger on it:

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knockdown argument,’ “Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “who is to be master—that’s all.”

—Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

The picture is oversimplified, however, if we talk of only one speech community. For actually there are many overlapping speech communities for each individual—building up to the largest one: all speakers of, say, English. Smaller subcommunities are in the middle in this power struggle. On the one hand, they exert stabilizing force upon the individual’s dreamlike fluid tendency of meaning. But on the other hand, they are not as strongly stabilizing as the larger speech community is—that is, I can change the meaning-building rules of my friends sooner than I can do it to a larger community. And so, in fact, the smaller communities turn out to act as forces for fluidity upon larger communities.

This model implies that meaning in ordinary language consists of delicate, flexible transactions among people in overlapping speech communities—peculiar transactions governed by unspoken agreements to abide by unspecified, constantly changing rules as to what meanings to build into what words and phrases. All the parties merely keep on making these transactions and assuming that all the other parties abide by the same rules and agreements. Thus, though words are capable of extreme precision among good players, they nevertheless float and drift all the time.

Elbow does a better job than anyone in characterizing non-converging processes: change just is. And this is just about the meaning of words; add on to that form, structure, medium, authority and all the other trappings of rhetoric that are themselves constantly reconstructed.

But that is why I’m a language nerd: it’s enjoyable to float on your back in the warm ocean with the sun on your face and feel the lapping of a million tiny waves pushing you about (and imagining the millions of tiny waves pushing them about and so forth). As long as you can balance those thoughts with the vigilance necessary to keep from drifting into the surf zone or floating out to sea, searching for a stationary spot on the beach can’t compare.

A comment I made back in April on a blog post entitled “ 4 Poor Excuses for Avoiding Social Media” that asked the question “Are there good reasons to avoid social media?”:

Not to be a hater, but how about: “Social Media is based upon an exploitative business model that seeks to monetize your relationships and personal/private information.”

I totally agree that Social Media can be quite effective at reaching out to people. But I also think the business model that enables social media services (like Facebook and Twitter, or other “free” services that are ad supported) undermines the social change work some nonprofits are attempting to bring about. While on one hand social media strengthens your organization’s ability to organize and mobilize for a cause, on the other hand its strengthening massive media, advertising, and data-mining companies who will use the money they earn from your participation to act and advocate against your social interests.

Social media might be a necessary evil, but I think its important to recognize that there is an “evil” involved.

And a response in followup to this being a topic that “rarely gets mentioned outside of geek circles”:

I think you’re right that this barely gets mentioned outside of geek (and media literacy) circles. That’s what makes it pernicious. It’s not obvious how these tools work and who they enrich.

I presented a grant proposal last night at an anti-racism foundation. One of the other presenting groups was a community group that was organizing to make sure that stimulus projects were going to local/people-of-color contractors. They would drive around their community looking for those big “America Works” signs and then ask the contractors where they were from and record the gender/race makeup of the workers.

Unfortunately, with a lot of media tools its not that easy to know who is behind them. Facebook’s Board of Directors, for example, is entirely white men. Their Executive Leadership team, of 13, is 2 women and 1 person of color.

I don’t think a boycott is the right thing to do. But I think there should be broader awareness and dialogue about how the new Internet economy can reinforce existing structural inequalities and injustice.

That last point is the important one: we spend so much time talking about the relationships social media creates between us and our constituents that we sometimes forget the relationships that are created between us and the social media providers themselves. Who is using whom?