social-networking | Learning is Change

Question 292 of 365: When can we speak freely?

Published on October 19, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Blog.

US Military protocol is almost entirely unappealing to me. The hierarchical structure and the chain of command really don’t adhere to my ideals of hyperlinked networks and free communication. The idea of classified documents or need to know information is counterintuitive in an era of Open ID and Web Search. And yet, there is one thing that continues to intrigue me: The simple custom and protocol of asking to speak freely when in the presence of superior.

This is such a valuable tool and it has almost no corollary in civilian life. Perhaps it is because we lack the rigid chain of command or code of conduct, but our expectation is that we can speak freely. In fact, we regularly go on about our opinions for most of the meetings and conversations we have with one another. We don’t hold our tongues or seek the guidance of others before we speak.

And it is this fact that we lack a line in the sand beyond which we cannot speak that we are perhaps even more bound in our speech. Because we do not know our place and time to contribute, we end up subconsciously filtering what we say along to coincide with all of the platforms and expectations already in place within our institutions. For example, if I am being overtly collaborative and sharing a Google document with others, I have to consider each domain and email address I am inputting. Even if I am sharing it as a link, others see where I created it from and what the context for that creation was.

We are tied to our context in a way that both does not require us to ask permission to take part and does not grant us permission to say the things we would if we weren’t an extension of our company or school district. We are the outstretched hands of our entities and we can’t escape that. Our meetings would be more collegial if we could ask one another for permission to step out of our own roles and speak as individuals.

Even if we are relaxed and social, even if we don’t have to worry about insubordination, and even if we aren’t working on the types of sensitive information that military officials claim, we need a system for asking one another to be unaffiliated, to be human with one another. Opinions are not all equal unless we can ask for them without bias and agenda.

Perhaps we just need a signal, a sign on the door or a label in digital spaces: “Free Speaking going on in here. Be people, first and foremost and last of all.”

Or, perhaps we need to designate a specific time and space for free speech, where everyone agrees to the rules of abandoning hierarchy and institutional pretense.

I have great respect for the leveling that happens in Twitter and on Blogs, but I still think that we are tied to and weighed down by our public identities in those places. We need a way to say “Permission to speak freely ” with one another and have that mean something. We need to be able to define the lines that we assume aren’t there because we are on the civilian side and then we need to give them up sometimes. We need to identify the limitations of our personas and put them aside when they get in the way. Only in that space and time will we truly be able to share everything and collaborate on what matters most: changing things for the better, no matter where you are starting from or who you supervise.

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Question 213 of 365: Where is the asterisk?

Published on August 1, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

: Image via Wikipedia

I have never understood infomercials. While they may be fun to watch or poke fun at every once in a while, I have never for a moment wanted one of those products bad enough to want to “call and order right away.” I know that there probably is a market for the products that they are selling, otherwise they wouldn’t be so ever-present. I just never could see myself as their target audience. I always just assumed that their target audience weren’t the type of people who looked for an asterisk. They weren’t the folks who really paid attention to the fine print or the incredibly fast talking at the end of every infomercial that explained just how different actual results and the results on the television could be. I have always looked for and listened to such things, even if I did not head their advice.

I first started looking for asterisks when I bought a super long range frisbee called the Arobe (or something like that). It claimed to be the farthest reaching frisbee in the world. I learned very quickly that this claim was pretty false whenever I threw it. Sure, it went farther than most of the frisbees I had thrown, but it was all in who was throwing it that made it a world record holder. I couldn’t propel the thing much further than the length of my parent’s lawn.

That first asterisk led me to be skeptical of nearly every claim that came after, including those infomercials. But, I have been noticing a severe lack of asterisks in the claims that people are making every day now about their value and their contributions. For example, there are almost no asterisks in either the Android or Apple app stores. The apps do what they claim to do, except when proven otherwise. There are no claims of “your results may differ” when it comes to describing or creating the new “killer app.” And frankly, without the healthy dose of skepticism that I have learned from buying frisbees and watching over the top infomercials, I would be buying a whole lot of crappy ideas and applications.

I would like to start seeing asterisks at the bottom of blog posts and news articles with the biases of the author. I would like to start seeing them crop up as links to opposing viewpoints. To me, the web is one big claim that each idea holds the same amount of truth as the next. Every site is proclaiming to have the right information or the right tool or the right context to fit your needs at the moment. But, without an asterisk on each on of those proclamations, there isn’t anything that can be said to be fully true.

It is the asterisks that make our claims believable. While they may not be entirely convincing with them in there, it is what makes it okay to go out on a limb and state fantastic successes without being delusional. The asterisk is what gives us the freedom to go from ingredients to finished product without having to show all of the steps in between. And yet, the asterisks are so implied online that we forget that they are there at all.

Twitter is not a life stream. (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for all of the times that are not spent tweeting).

Wikis are not completely democratic (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for all of the edit wars and bias of any given article.)

News websites do not have the definitive version of the news (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for citizen journalism).

Comments and Web Traffic are not the measures of success or importance (at least not without an asterisk that leaves room for quiet authorship and appreciation that goes beyond simple popularity).

You get my point. The missing asterisks online are too numerous to count. And I would like to start seeing them pop up so that we can proclaim loudly that “results may vary”, even online*.

*I would like to state my bias for this post. I do not believe everything I read online, but I know a lot of people who do. I look down on those people, and in that sense, I am an elitist.

Timewaster: Asterisk (en.onsoftware.com)
USC: Kindly Ignore The 10,000 Asterisks In Our Media Guide (sbnation.com)
Weird Word Tricks (justanasterisk.com)

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Question 191 of 365: What is the skeptic’s option?

Published on July 11, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

: Image by wburris via Flickr

Everyone who asks questions is a skeptic in one way or another, which is to say that everyone is a skeptic.

I once found my bicycle up in a tree in the woods. It had been placed there by some naughty older kids. They wanted to play a trick on me, although I am quite sure that they had no idea who I was. They just saw my bike in the woods behind my friend’s house and decided that it belonged in a tree. They carefully perched the handle bars on one branch and the back wheel on another. It hung about 8 feet up in the air, which was pretty far out of my 5 foot height at the time. So, I walked home.

I was skeptical about whether or not I would be able to convince my mother that this wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t been careless about leaving the bike in the woods in the first place. I asked myself questions about who could have done such a thing, all the while cursing both the people who had done it and myself for being so trusting of an obviously hostile world.

If Twitter and smart phones and Fail would have exited back then, you can bet that the entire escapade would have been chronicled first by the older kids as a viral video contender and then by me so that I might chronicle the improbability of my bicycle in the tree. I would have tweeted something like “So, my bike decided that the beaten path (or any path) wasn’t good enough for it.” I would have put the twitpic in there too, just for good measure. There would not be much skepticism just then about what had happened or disbelief by my mother. We could have looked up the whole thing and probably gotten a geotagged play by play, complete with facebook profiles on each of the perpetrators because their faces would be tagged.

I tell this story not so that you can pity my former self, but rather so that I can outline just how little skepticism there is for the things that we can see, and how this is bleeding into ideas well.

Right now, it is very easy to like something on the Internet. It is easy to share it and to link to it. It is easy to do pretty much anything except for be skeptical. Sure, there are contrary opinions and lots of snarky comments on Twitter, but don’t really found those and true skepticism. Skepticism is looking something directly in the eye and stating for everyone to hear that you don’t believe it.

I want the ability to not believe again.

Now, all of my choices are to either support or not support (and most of the nonsupporting options are burried in comments). I want the ability to not believe as well. I want to be able to stare wide eyed at the things that hold untruth and disbelieve them. Imwant q universal skeptic button.

This button will be the equivalent of the Facebook “like” button, but instead of converting to page promotion or demotion, it will have the effect of allowing me to highlight the most offensive portion of whatever I am looking at and call it to account. Any time that someone hovers over that text in the future, it will have my record of disbelief and whatever comment I cared to make on why it was untrue. The button will be in ebooks and blog posts, on videos and podcasts too.

The skeptic button will finally make the process of making a case against an idea easier because it will cobble together each and every comment offered and aggregate it for a common purpose.

In the end, I dint want to like/dislike things or even merely comment on them. I want to believe them or disbelieve them. The things that I believe in should be shared in all of the spaces that I inhabit and the things that I do not believe in deserve to connect me with all other nonbelievers. I feel as though we would have a common bond, a network of skeptics.

Right now we are scattered. Someday soon, though, we will rise up and state our intentions for making belief a part of our metadata. We will make asking questions a part of every online interaction.

We will look up at the bicycles in the trees around us and we will start to walk home together to tell someone else the story from memory.

Launceston Skeptics | www.launcestonskeptics.com | @LtonSkeptics (jin-ohchoi.id.au)
I’ll start calling them skeptics when they start being skeptical [Deltoid] (scienceblogs.com)
Skepticism 101: What do you think? [Greg Laden's Blog] (scienceblogs.com)
Purity and skepticism (barefootbum.blogspot.com)
In Brief: Should skeptic organizations be atheist organizations? (secularnewsdaily.com)

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Question 122 of 365: Who yells out during a live recording?

Published on May 3, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

: Image by commondream via Flickr

One of my favorite bands of all time is Ben Folds Five. There was always a certain nerdiness that went along with listening to them that I never really could explain away. The one song that resonated with me longer than any other during early high school was “underground.”

It is a song about not fitting in as well as about finding a niche somewhere within which to be happy. While I no longer feel the need to seek out the underground of life in order to be accepted, there is a part of the song that continues to intrigue me. At the beginning of the song, Ben Folds does some spoken word magic to tell the audience about how he was never cool in school. In the studio version of the song, everything goes swimmingly and the song begins on cue. However, in the live version on Naked Baby Photos, there is an incredibly inarticulate heckler that screams out reactions to Ben’s statements. Things like, “who the ______ are you” are given their own time and space on the record. They are paid as much respect as the song itself, in fact they have mostly changed the song for me in that I can’t even play the studio version without his harsh words making their way into my mind. It makes me even more uncomfortable each of the times I have seen them live when they play this song. Other folks have tried to mimic this character hundreds of times, and I can’t imagine just how annoying it has all become for Ben.

And that is why I wonder who the person is that is willing to ruin a song and an experience for millions of people. I wonder just who is able to put themselves out there on the side of forgettable discourse. I wonder who is even thinking about placing themselves in fronton the world just to tell everyone that their worth can be summed up in leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

And ye tit is this very phenomenon that is stilting our ability to go on the record for much of anything. It is the fact that we know that almost everything is being taped for posterity that makes us not want to yell out at all. We don’t want to be put into the meeting minutes as having a contrary opinion. We don’t want to be recorded in a webinar as going against what is being officially proposed. Conference calls are even worse because the action items almost never resemble exactly how harsh or interesting the actual recording would have been.

We don’t shout out loud anymore knowing that we could be influencing the mixing of information for years to come. We find satisfaction in an approximation of what we said or worse still, in self-censorship. The gag reflex kicks in way too early for everything that we do now that being a part of a lasting record doesn’t really seem like an option.

Our options have been whittled down to staying silent or becoming q chorus of similar voices. We become the audience for a cult of personality, instead of leading our own performances that may conflict with the stated purpose of the event.

Now I am not sanctioning heckling or yelling out profanity at those who are willing to be up in front of others, what I am simply suggesting is that it should be possible for us to scream out valid critiques of what is going on. Not only possible, but necessary. And, I am not talking about Twitter. You can yell out profanity in that microblogging service easier than broadcasting it any other way, but there is very little chance of it being mixed down into the final version of those events as you have stated it.

Rather, I am talking about yelling out in person. I think that it is all about push back. It is all about going on the record as asking questions and providing solutions. It is about being loud about your reservations for the topic at hand.

Because at the end of the day, you don’t want anyone to be able to think about the events you shared without hearing your reaction to them in their head. That is the real stickiness: to be remembered in the context of important work.

While the heckler in “Underground” has ruined the beginning of the song for me forever, It gave me the opportunity to question just what I believe about the words being said. Because of him, I may have figured out just how unimportant underground ideas really are (at least ones that stay there).

Saturday Night Video: Ben Folds Live Chatroulette Improv (benzinga.com)

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Question 112 of 365: How do we show up now?

Published on April 23, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

: Image by Simon Lieschke via Flickr

I didn’t miss a class in college. Not the early morning british literature class with the English woman who hated students that “shouldn’t be english majors according to their lack of ability to write.” Not the earlier still poetry course with the stroke victim teacher who required tuning into her particular brand of accent to understand anything clearly. The story of Beowulf never sounded so discordant, I can tell you. If 90 percent of success (or life) is just showing up, I was well on my way.

And yet, that wasn’t when showing up really mattered. I could have skipped a few of those courses. I could have not read the material beforehand too. The only consequences were grades and a little bit of self-esteem. I am finding that showing up means so much more now. Not showing up for meetings or not getting included in a conversation can mean that entire ideas get taken off of the table. It can mean that many things that I hold dear will not have a satisfactory outcome. Even as showing up has become more important to me, though, I think the whole notion has rightfully been turned on its head.

I show up without showing up now. I show up via e-mail. I show up via Google Doc. I show up in blog posts and phone calls and web presence. My words are brought forward as if I were there without having to worry about making time. And that is pretty weird. It is an odd sensation to be held responsible for decisions without actually voting up or down. Ideas are held on trial in absentia because of someone’s interpretations of my priorities. While this has always happened, now they have more to go on. Now they have a serious body of evidence to support their claims about where I which side of an issue I would support.

My favorite new way to show up, though, is in a collaborative document. When someone has put out something for review, I get to write in what I believe and then check back to see whether my changes were accepted or not. I get to attend the revision party without actually having to prove myself worthy of taking up space in the room. If I can type my way into a policy or change a single viewpoint from with the written word, I have shown up much more so than if I would have just spoken my mind.

And that is the real change in showing up. It is no longer a simple process of being party to the talks, you must propose a new plan every chance that you get. You must put into writing what it is that you believe is most right. And you must support it, too. Otherwise, your signature on the sign-in sheet isn’t worth anything. Showing up now means getting things done. If you aren’t making the decisions and setting out action items (half of which should have already been accomplished during the meeting), then you aren’t doing it right. While showing up is 90% of life, that 90% is now so much richer than has ever been previously required.

That 90% is a beautiful cascade of responsibilities and agenda points. And yet it is more than that. Because you can choose your own way to show up, you are no longer bound to be what it is that other people are asking of you. Because you can design the space in which you participate, it means that you can be as prepared or lazy as you like. Showing up is an art form now. It is one part initiative and one part persuasion. Equal parts preparation and creativity.

Attending an event in your pajamas is now just as okay as it was to come to an 8 O’ clock class in them. Being in the room matters, but only if you have attacked what is going to transpire in that room. Only if you understand all of the ways that you can be in the room.

I can be on the walls in a twitter stream or well crafted pitch. I can be in the hands of the movers and shakers, the laptops buzzing with the series of links I have sent out which carefully traverse my point. I can even show up in the heads of those attending by way of creating an experience with a piece of technology or a story that somehow grabs hold and will not let go of the long-term memory centers.

Unless you understand all of those ways to show up, you might well not even come.

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Question 5 of 365: How can you eliminate noise within your network?

Published on January 5, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

I am constantly reminded of just how many people are following one another. Daily I get messages from twitter telling me about someone new who is choosing me to follow along with 4000 other folks. While I don’t doubt that some people could have 4000 contacts, the regularity with which this occurs makes me think that there are more and more people who are living with an immense amount of noise within their network. So much noise that they probably have to tune out almost everyone and they use their network only for brief moments of consumption or creation.

Now, the easy answer to this question is that you can eliminate noise by simply following less people or having fewer “friends”. The brief explanation would include ideas of pruning back your contacts and really focusing on people that actively engage in the kind of thinking or discussion that you would most like to take part in. But, I am not interested in this answer because it doesn’t get at the bigger problem of having too much information to consume and too little time to consume it. What I am looking for are better filters. What I am after is a real way to channel all of the good things going on in my network and make it more usable than just turning on a fire-hose and pointing it directly at my mouth.

PostRank does a good job of saying which RSS feeds to pay attention to as well as which posts to read, Filttr lets you limit the number of tweets to words you want to hear, and things like Nambu and Tweetdeck allow us to create our own just-in-time searches, but the noise still exists. It is still the human process of eliminating waste from our networks.

So, what is the answer? Do we just wait while other people invent ways of pruning or should we remain vigilant and cut back our Reader accounts once a month? No. Instead, we must redefine the noise. We must take a look at the 4000 followers and really think about how it is that the network has changed what it means to “catch up.” The true noise of a network is in the things that actually “seem” important but are not. They are the things that take a lot of time to read and digest but in the end, they lead to no better solutions or ideas. I believe we are getting very good at being the filter for tweets about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So much so that this now only makes up the gentle background hum of the everyday network activity. What we need to take a closer look at are why we are in the network in the first place.

If you are using a network to broadcast your latest blog posts, your noise may come from comments or in tending all of the thing that you “could” write about. If you are using your network to check up on your family, your noise may come from the distractions of of “long lost friends”. If you are using your network to ask questions, your noise may come from the debate rather than the answering of those questions.

Whatever your noise, the only way to eliminate it is to adhere to why you are taking part in the network. Everything else stems from that. I believe that there are too many people who are traveling aimlessly through Facebook and Twitter. They follow and friend so many people because they lack a purpose for being there in the first place. They are there because others are there. So, the filter I am looking for is simply an understanding of purpose. If I stop to ask myself why often enough, I don’t find myself frustrated by the noise, I find it relaxing and invigorating. In fact, I find that I just might need to make some noise of my own.

If my network is a fire-hose, I plan on putting out some fires.

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