One of the reasons I read so many books about modern developments in our understanding of biology and evolution is that there appear to be so many parallels between these insights and my own perception of the changes brought about by the rapid development of the Web and our use of it.

I have just finished listening to a wonderful book, Sex Time and Power by Leonard Shlain, and I'm not sure if the phrase "I couldn't put it down" applies to audio books but that is what it felt like. The book deals with the impact of woman's biology on man's sense of self and understanding of the universe and closes with a wonderful comparison between man and a caterpillar.

Shlain writes of the caterpillar's voracious, and destructive appetite as it eats up and destroys everything in its path. It then of course turns into a beautiful butterfly, a totally different creature, and one of the few insects that man finds beautiful. He then compares man's apparently unstoppable destructiveness towards the planet with the actions of the caterpillar and suggests that mankind as a species is about to go through a similar metamorphosis.

He talks of the accelerating change that we are all increasingly aware of - the fact that the single sided flint axe lasted unmodified for millions of years, the double sided flint axe lasted hundreds of thousands years and yet the rate of change of technologies available to us has increased so rapidly in recent years that we have to keep changing the scale of the graph to represent it. He argues that you can't have such a rapid and increasing rate of change without a radically destabilising effect and predicts that we are on a path to a fundamental transformation of our species.

And people thought I was radical suggesting a modest change in our organisations and institutions!

A question from Dave Snowden on Twitter about what I thought the best semantic search tool was and my rather facetious response "the meatware" reminded me of something I am more and more convinced of. Social networks are about finding stuff. Finding documents, finding people, even finding human contact.

I have often said that the best search engine is other people's collective memory. When people ask on a forum where to find a previous answer tell them to ask the question again. Users will almost certainly remember the question being asked and will point to the previous answer. If you are lucky, and ask the question well, you may even get pointers to various answers any or all of which could be useful. If you are really lucky you will kick off new exploration of the subject and unearth new and more current information.

Twitter is making this ubiquitous access to an outboard brain more obvious to more people and there has even been talk of it replacing Google for some. The point is you can only do this if you have a high quality network of people doing the filtering and collective noticing for you. Building up these networks, and building "credit" by helping others, will become key skills and the people who invest the effort will find the better stuff faster.

via Nigel Paine

I am currently listening to Mark Scouzen's excellent book The Big Three In Economics from Audible. In it he covers the history and philosophies off Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. It is a great primer on the basics of economic thinking over the last few hundred years and, certainly for me, clarifies a lot of ideas that underlie our modern view of the world.

What becomes apparent is that any prevailing economic view is a currently useful, working hypothesis rather than an absolute truth. However, in common with the other sciences and religion, there are those who would have you believe that what is being presented is the absolute truth. Not only is it the absolute truth but, unlike you, they understand it.

The trouble starts when those absolute truths start to fall apart, as they are in the world of economics at the moment. The perception that experts can be right all the time, be basing their comments on an absolute truth, and be deserving of our complete trust, is beginning to look more difficult to sustain by the day.

And yet we feel the need or ways of making sense of things. We feel the need of myths on which to hang our judgements. Maybe this will always be the case but maybe we should all resolve to admit that they are myths and not take them too seriously?

No I am not talking about politics. I am talking about the increasing sense I have had over the past few months that "stating the obvious" is becoming harder. Some of you may have noticed that I have been blogging less over the past few months and there are a number of reasons for this.

Part of it is that working with the clients I do I don't always feel I can write about my work. Not that any of it is secret, but I feel sensitive to their right to choose when and how our work is made public. Secondly I have been blogging for eight years and there is this feeling, that continues to grow that, I have already written about most things - at least once!

The last reason is possibly the most concerning and the main prompt for this post. I feel more watched than ever before. I don't get vast numbers of readers for this blog but the ones I do tend to be smart, vocal and influential. As a result I get more and more concerned about what "they" will think. Will they think I am stupid, will they think I have lost my touch, will they think I have lost my relevance?

Risk is one of the main inhibitors to blogging, especially in a corporate environment. All those voices that you imagine saying things like "Who are you to say that?" or even "Who am I to say that?" or as an older relative of mine once said "Oh yes - blogging - that's just people expressing their opinions" - get ever louder and more difficult to ignore. Giving in to these sorts of risks though is why people stop saying what they think - and sometimes even stop thinking! It becomes easier just to stay quiet and let things pass you by.

Well, it may or may not come as a relief to you, dear reader, to know that I am going to resist these pressures and renew my efforts to state the obvious and continue to fill this blog with the inane burbling you have come to expect!

For those who haven't yet subscribed to my newsletter you can get the May one here and can sign up for the next one here!

I am always aware that RSS is still a bit arcane for your average web user and I do believe that more intuitive, user friendly ways of finding the good stuff need to be constantly sought after. Steve Gilmor kicked off a bit of a fuss recently by claiming that RSS was dead and that we now use Twitter to find things. I believe he overstated his case deliberately to trigger the firestorm that ensued but I do know what he means.

In terms of keeping across things that might be interesting but that don't fall into my own horizon, I use a combination of Twitter and various other tools, synthesised in Friendfeed to help me scan what is out there and find the good stuff. However RSS is such a core part of the plumbing of the web, enabling content to migrate and flow far beyond the control of the originating sites that claiming it is dead is nonsense.

During a very interesting event organised this week for the Carnegie Foundation by Suw Charman on the subject of Civil Society, we discussed people's willingness or otherwise to engage in social media and the new ways of organising and influencing the world that it is making possible.

One of the participants gave the example of a friend of his who he claimed didn't really want to think too hard about things. He was content to do his job, get paid, watch television, and sleep. I found this more than slightly patronising, although it obviously wasn't intended as such, then suggested that perhaps people were content to live a quiet life without burning ambition because they had been trained to be such by school systems designed to produce cannon fodder for a Taylorist world of work that appears to be dying.

On the other hand in my own reaction I was reminded of one of my favourite sayings - "to rescue someone is to oppress them". In other words, taking a decision on someone else's behalf that they need "improved", or that their own decisions on how to lead their lives are not as good as our decisions for them, is equally unattractive. I am very sensitive to the risks of a small group of social media zealots knowing what is good for the world whether the world likes it or not.

And yet, as will be clear from my own desire for people to think more for themselves, as expressed in my previous post, I worry that what I see as an organic, complex adaptive system - i.e. the world - needs each individual or cell to operate to their full capacity and as autonomously as possible. These thoughts are captured for me in the following section, quoted in Chomsky On Anarchism, from Wilhelm Von Humboldt;

The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power; to heighten this power is the only way to supply this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of the power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when bonds are relaxed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no man on earth - however neglected by nature, and however degraded by circumstances - is this true of all the bonds which oppress him. Let us undo them one by one, as the feeling of freedom awakens in men's hearts, and we shall hasten progress at every step.

 

It never ceases to fascinate me how much of our lives we spend asleep. I don't mean those hours when we are meant to be asleep tucked up in bed, but rather the hours when we are apparently awake going about our business in the world.

So much of these hours are spent elsewhere - in the future, in the past or frankly nowhere at all just letting it all pass us by. Today I had one of those all too infrequent moments when I felt fully awake and intensely aware of everything around me. I was driving through the beautiful countryside here in the Chilterns with my two wonderful daughters in the car with me and I was suddenly, intensely, aware of how amazing it all was. That I was here, that they were here and that the bright green. lush countryside around us was here.

I also thought for a moment about what a short time any of this is possible and renewed my resolve to be awake for it as much as I can.

Dave Snowden has a great post today about the balance between experts and mob rule.

... we have the new approaches that have become possible since technology matured from process control and information flow to the networked, fragmented and semi-structured worlds of social computing. Here as communication flow increases, patterns of meaning start to emerge. We start to see the possibilities for navigation, pathways that look interesting, areas that however attractive look dangerous.

Dave once accused me of being evangelical about my own views while being critical of religious evangelism to which I responded that I really, really don't care what people think - but that they should be encouraged to think and to talk to each other about what they think as I am confident that if they do so we will all end up somewhere cool, possibly even somewhere better than where I had imagined we would get to.

The comments thread on my previous post is worth a read too if this stuff interest you.

In the old days there were physical constraints on the world of work. The speed at which the postman could bring memos to you, the size of your in tray, the fact that the cleaners expected you to be out of the office by a certain time and the need to be in your boss's physical presence to be confident he knew you were working.

These days all of those constraints have gone and people have to decide for much more for themselves when they are working and when they are not. They also have to decide "how" they are working too as the number of ways in which we can process information means that the nature of our attention can change from one moment to the next and the quality of our connection to the tasks at hand can vary with it.

As Joshua-Michele Ross writes in a recent blog post:

 

The ability to pay attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation of business leaders.

In a post this morning Dennis Hewlett refers to Andrew Keen on institutions and makes the comment that "What is clear is that unfettered, society and professions could run into many difficulties." I, rather facetiously perhaps, commented that "It’s not as if “fettered” institutions haven’t been managing to “run into many difficulties” themselves recently!"

In an uncanny coincidence I am currently reading Noam Chomsky on Anarchism and specifically the Spanish Civil war. He discusses the way that collectivisation by the anarchists was portrayed by both communist and fascist governments as chaotic and unsuccessful. In fact this would appear not to have been so clearly the case and Chomsky explores the tendency of those in power, of whichever political persuasion and sometimes bizarrely even in collusion with each other, to create the impression that without a select group of grown ups in charge we would all run amok!

Discuss .....

There comes a time in any organisation's use of blogging, and for that matter other social media tools as well, when someone feels the need of a line in the sand. A blog post from James Dellow at Headshift Australia brought back my own "line in the sand" moment at the BBC, the moment when having some "official" view from the organisation about this new field of staff activity felt like a good thing to do.

The thing is, a blogging policy can range from "Don't be stupid" to a multi-page legal document with every possible variation in between. The document says at least as much about the people writing it as it does about the people it will affect. The neat trick we pulled off at the BBC was to make them largely one and the same thing. We encouraged collective responsibility from the start. It wasn't one group of people telling another group of people how to behave. Attempting to do so rarely works in online environments and indeed government legislation often falls prey to this. One group, who have status and power and feel the need to control, writing legislation intended to apply to a sphere of influence and activity of which they have little or no experience.

The thing to remember is that bad laws are hard to enforce while good rules pretty much enforce themselves. There are loads of different examples of blogging policies out there that you can learn from but make sure you don't just copy and paste or worse still fall into the trap of letting someone else write yours!

Welcome to my shiny new blog home. Well. I say shiny new but I have chosen to keep the look and feel of it much the same. However I have now been able to move the address to my own domain and to use the very impressive Squarespace to manage the blog along with the rest of my site.

Commenting and the other usual blog features work pretty much as before but Squarespace allows me to set up all sorts of new cool stuff very, very easily so I will probably end up tinkering a bit!

It occurred to me that what I am doing when I find interesting people who point to interesting stuff, add them to my networks in the various social tools I use, then subscribe to the best of them in FriendFeed - is building a big fishing net with which to catch the good stuff of the web as it floats by.

I have just started publishing a newsletter and the response to the first one has been very positive. I am probably going to write them once a month and will include stuff that catches my eye relating to social media, particularly in the enterprise, books that are worth reading and tips on how to get the most out of your use of social tools.

Someone commented that this was a slightly Web 1.0 thing to do but I did it in response to comments from people who are not yet into RSS or reading blogs regularly - or who just like email as a way of keeping up.

You can see a copy of the last newsletter here and if want to receive a copy of the next one sign up here - and do pass it on!

"Yet all forms of industrialism are on one hand attractive to humans and on the other intolerable to them. Partly, that's their revolutionary character. It is in the nature of industrialisation that markets rise up and disappear because new technologies rise up and disappear. So whole industries vanish, with some of the ways of life that are associated with them. People have to move or change their skills, or find other things to do. It's not a transition to a stable state. It's permanent change.

"It's not really about capitalism. Industrial civilisation itself is inherently dynamic and revolutionary. I think Marx got that right. That's partly what human beings like about it. That's what's attractive. What's unattractive is that it is very difficult to reconcile its actual operation with the human needs for security and stability. People do want security and stability. But they also want possibility and thrills. They do want happiness, but they also want excitement, which is quite different. And these are ubiquitous human conflicts."

From a great interview with John Gray in The Independent

Andy Gibson has pulled together a great list of 45 propositions for those interested in getting involved in social computing. They are all good but my particular favourites are below:

# Empowerment is unconditional. Telling people what they can and can’t do with your platform is like an electricity company restricting what its power can be used for.

# You can’t learn to fly by watching the pilot. If you want to understand new technologies, start using them. Dive in.

# Don’t centralise, aggregate. Do you really need data centralisation? Well do you? Use lots of different, disconnected tools and then pull the content together into a central location.

# Your users own the platform. If they feel own it, they will trust it, help sustain it, and find ways to use and improve the tools; if they aren’t interested, no amount of pushing will help.

Thanks to Rob Paterson for pointing to this Natural World documentary from the BBC. What struck me watching this wonderful film was the degree to which arrogance and fixation for imposed order was what got us into trouble in the first place and how much humility and willingness to learn from apparent chaos is what will get us out of it. Any parallels you may draw with organisational life are totally intended.