My writings - and those of others.
New Creations
Technological Creations.
I have been doing two things lately that are connecting – one is serving as a volunteer secretary for a consulting team undertaking a study of a church diocese and its parishes. The other is reading about the nature of technology. These might appear to be unconnected, but that’s not the case.
The participants in group sessions and subsequent surveys of the study reveal several views that are not in the least surprising. They have found the recent years stressful and unsettling. Some are hopeful for something new but uncertain as to what it might be. Disconnects have been noted between leadership priorities and a more practical hands-on solutions to matters on the ground. But one thing no one seems to have noticed or commented on – how we have all been re-shaped by the recent technologies available to us – not just during this pandemic but over the past decade.
Typically I want to look up the new buzzwords, because they are everywhere but often imprecise in meaning. Here are a couple of them. A pivot (noun) is “a central point, pin or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates”. In a business context, pivot (verb) suggests “completely changing how one does things to meet increased demands from customers”. “Pivot” got mentioned from time to time in the surveys, but no one appears to recognize the significance. We have accessed several new technologies in recent years. How have they changed us?
“Hybrid” is also part of our new vocabulary. Here is a recent definition; Hybrid (noun) is “a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions”. I hadn’t thought of one as a person, though I might have done so in describing a plant or an animal with immediate understanding – we have a Labradoodle in our extended family – but a person? Yet two diverse cultures or traditions as an idea resonates since I have been part of both these the church culture my entire life and computer based technologies since the early 1980s . We’re now part of both traditions in this study – institutional religion and technology. So far we are only looking at one of them.
My current reading is a book by Brian Arthur called The Nature of Technology. It is not new but highly recommended, and it stands the test of its relevance since its first publication in 2009. In the introduction, Arthur observes that technology creates itself in an evolutionary process and the book is full of easily understood examples which we seldom think about. The evolutionary process would be helpful to apply to organizations and enterprises as well.
As an example, church buildings closed for at least a full year during the recent pandemic which first seemed to bring their lives to a full stop. When we become discouraged, we might be thankful that the duration was not as long as the Bubonic plague (coming to our attention via Monty Python) starting in the fourteenth century and lasting for 400 years. There might have been far more reasons for continuing fear then, since fleas carried the infection and there were no vaccines. The technologies of the time were limited; no one flew in from a foreign country but the disease was frightfully transmissible.
Arthur sees technology development as a system of autopoesis – a living system capable of self-creation. One might say the same of the institutional church, or indeed any organization. These all have things in common. They arise in response to a human need, which may not always be initially perceived – but when the new thing comes into existence we find a need for it, sometimes turning it into a want. They depend on some form of energy – simple and physical first perhaps – you need some to pound a nail with a hammer - and turning stones into pointy objects for hunting was one of the first cave man technologies. Later we learned to harness other energies. The creations improve with use – users provide feedback on what works well and what doesn’t. They involve combinations of parts that may exist independently at first and then go on to produce a new whole. Original uses also get borrowed for other needs, which may change the technology further. Technologies get applied.
How such things come to being, as well as their implications for use, are vitally important. These are worth exploring in the coming days.
Thinking - new and old
Happy New Year – a little late, but I have been busy.
One of my son’s family gave me an interesting Christmas present last year – called Storyworth. A small publishing operation sent a weekly question and invited me to respond online; it recorded all my writing in a sequential format. The questions were clearly designed for seniors and invited them to reflect on their childhoods, families and work lives. It was enjoyable. At the end of a year, my copy became a book – and in my case. extra copies went to each of the families for further reading.
Now that the assignment is complete, I want to get back to more writing here. While the emphasis originally was on organizational development in the late nineties, when I was still working regularly, it gravitated to an environmental focus. It is likely to change again. That’s the advantage of calling the site, Dynamic Thinking.
I’ve been doing more thinkng recently while serving as a volunteer in subordinate roles in a couple of places; that doesn’t stop some reflecting and rethinking of my own experience and seeing how that fits in now. I also have much more time to read, which also is stimulating with insights worth sharing. Expect to see some of that in the coming days.
Whither Social Media?
Whither Social Media
My compulsive side signs me up for everything. I can’t remember whether I signed up for MySpace, but I probably did. When I first heard of LinkedIn, I thought it was something like Link Eden – a heavenly place to meet like-minded people – an experience I actually had to some extent on Compuserve at the end of the 1980’s. A son’s father-in-law and I reminisced about that one recently. Twitter had an interesting feature at its inception – a limit of characters = putting it into the kind of structure that might appeal to a writer of haiku. I joined there as well. I read about Jack Dorsey and he seemed more interesting than the other computer moguls.
Things are changing fast. The new owner of Twitter is acting as a scoldng nanny to certain mainstream journalists for infringing on his privacy, though he seems less concerned about the transgressions of others. Though he is the sole decision maker here is also polling others to justify it - probablycollecting all the free speech crowd to agree with restricting freedom. It’s like a Wizard taking over a world and we are not in Kansas anymore.
Earlier this week I noticed a recent article by Ezra Klein on Twitter and summarize what he has to say here. He starts with the common assertion that Twitter is a digital town square. He then dismisses the metaphor on three counts:
Such a place can’t be global. A town has limitations relating to size and culture with hundreds or thousands of years of history that produced it. Different locations have different concerns and ways of relating.
Town squares have governance that doesn’t depend on the views of whims of a single person. The governance of such a town is sometimes the necessary antidote to such views or whims.
It’s not just existence that creates a good town square. Klein reminds us that such places can be used for brawls and lynchings. It’s the character of the participants that determines the practices and attitudes that determine them
And a key attitude of our era for many appears to be victimhood. In some cases this is totally legitimate; but I have to remind myself how lucky I am when the temporary breakdown of the old boiler that heats my apartment building gets fixed in hours, while those in Ukraine don’t enjoy the luxury of an easy repair. The very idea of the pursuit of happiness has led too many of us to think that things should always go our way.
Just because we can have attention with ease, I’m not sure we should. I am sometimes amused by how often some people change their profile picture on Facebook. Does it mean they feel undervalued and a new picture will do the trick? Does one clever tweet or retweet mean that we have made the world a better place? Does my lurking rather than posting in these places make me a superior or better person? Klein has many things to say in the article about the rightful place of attention – and reminds us that it is a collective responsibility - not just an individual one.
What he turns to after that is somewhat surprising – a Quaker meeting. The ritual involves silence and speaking only when one is moved to do so out of a whole other level of consciousness or reflectiveness. I got the opportunity to attend such a meeting some years ago and it was very moving. It was the very opposite of my flitting from one thing after another that even the mainstream news feeds us every moment flooding us us with trivia about the lives of others. I really don’t need to know the reason that the Royal Family is not responding to Harry and Meghan as both the New York Times and CNN want me to think about last night and today – but the fact that this story is covered by both is is a perfect illustration of the problem. How do we guard our attention to preserve the best of us collectively? At very least is means constant recognition of our shadow side and a choice to move away from it. Democracy depends upon that.
Language reveals us
Through the years I have watched Peter Baker on PBS and read him in the New York Times - as well as his wife Susan, who writes for the New Yorker. When the couple recently produced a book on the Trump era it looked like an interesting read. Rather than buying it I put a hold on it on Libby to read on a tablet - and assumed that since it has just recently been published, there would be a long wait - I certainly wasn’t at the top of the line.
And then it arrived. It was some 1200 pages on the device with a limited time to go through it, but I have persevered. I’m not surprised that those waiting for it an anticipating learning something new have given it a rather quick read and are somewhat happy to be freed from it. It would never have been a keeper that I would want to return to for either facts or inspiration. This is what stands out.
The Trump era has mostly been in plain sight, so there is surprisingly little that an American politics obsessive like me didn’t know already from reading or watching the New York Times, PBS, Washington Post and even Canadian news and the Globe and Mail. The main takeaway from their comprehensive reporting is the perpetual use by all the key players is - the F word. It must occur in quoted conversations in the book at least as many times as Trump’s 30,000 plus lies. I suppose there was a time when such quotations were shocking but now it’s just banal.
The authors never comment on this. I have no idea how they feel about it, though they are quick to pass judgment on many other issues in the book. But I will. I grew up in an era when the use of profanity was a shocker when it occurred; it was rarely used even in private. Get on any bus now and the F word has actually replaced “like” as something to amuse one’s self counting.
But words do say something about our society. Occasional profanity in the past suggested that the sacred actually mattered. Using the F word in every sentence means we have moved way beyond obscene - and any kind of violence is okay now. Civil society used to demand something better. It suggested a world of citizens who were polite to one another because others were human beings. There was such a thing as civil rights. Civil law had to do with things that had different implications than criminal law. Those who worked at any level of government were described as civil servants.
As Americans head into mid term elections, our own little news cycle here notes that the provincial government has withdrawn its use of the Notwithstanding Clause of our constitution - due to a good deal of backlash to shut down a strike - and the union has called off its strike of school support workers and custodians - those who support the lives of our children. It’s a small consolation that both will at least return to the negotiating table. I have no desire to be a fly on the wall in that room. But let’s hope for even a small degree of civility. When tempers flair, no amounf of use of the F word is going to make things better. It’s always arrogant because the speaker is always responding to the other. I echo my fellow octogenarian Ursula LeGuin in her wonderful essay in the book, No Time to Spare. “Would you please just F-cking STOP.
Saving Civil Society
Writing on the recent decision to punish Alex Jones for his reckless treatent of bereaved parents by spreading lies and misinformation as well as profiting from it, writer Zeynef Tufekcy offers the following:
“The work of civilization is not just discovering and unleashing new and powerful technologies, it is also regulating and shaping them, and crafting norms and values through education and awareness, that make societies healthier and function better. We are late to grapple with all of this, but late is better than never.”
Making our societies healthier as they face climate emergency also requires grappling with.