My advice to the Public Conversations Project (who are awesome, BTW) in response to them posing a question about social media and “Can real dialogue be practiced online, modeled in a way that will shift online conversations from torrents to curiosity, from blame to understanding?”

Don’t confuse “online” with “Twitter”

I think the strength of the Public Conversations Project is not that it starts conversations, but that it creates an environment in which those conversations can flourish, take on meaning, and lead towards transformative action. There are tons of different platforms, designs and approaches beyond Twitter and Facebook. Form follows function and Twitter, Facebook and most of the other popular social media platforms are not designed to create the kind of conversations you want. I would encourage you to still use them for outreach, fundraising and brief dialogue, but to also look beyond them to other online services or platforms that can create an environment that encourages true conversation. Though you may meet strangers on a busy and crowded street, you then invite them inside to a more controlled and comfortable space. I think the Public Conversations Project could play an important role in describing what that controlled and comfortable (yet still accessible) space would look like online—but to do so you would need to look beyond the current social media hotness.

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

I posted this to the Digital Inclusion Network listserv. It’s a synthesis of the spectrum of approaches I’ve seen (and contributed to —you can probably figure out which end of the spectrum I’m on) in the BTOP, and now post-BTOP, media field.

1. What is Digital Literacy? There are several different conceptions, from a task-based approach similar to computer literacy, to a skills/critical-analysis approach more similar to media literacy, and many in between.

2. What is Digital Literacy training? Is it a pre-defined curriculum or a set of learning objectives to be developed locally?

3. What is the role of community based organizations (CBOs)? Are they spaces for training, or are they active hubs and facilitators? Are we building their capacity to offer digital literacy training, or are we building their capacity to remain strong and relevant beyond the broadband push?

4. What is our vision for healthy, broadband-enabled communities? Is it evolutionary (faster, more competitive consumers) or revolutionary (sustainable, cooperative, engaged citizens).

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.”