Learning is Change

Question 234 of 365: What is the new mix?

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I used to make music mixes for every occasion of my life. For birthdays, for anniversaries, and for Christmas. There was no occasion too small that it didn’t call for a music cd or at least a playlist. A few years, I even attempted a list of best songs of the year which could be sorted in an Excel spreadsheet. I was ambitious about my mixes because I believed that the held the key to chronicling time and making sense of the world around me.

Now, it seems almost tragic to think that I am no longer making those mixes and my world is spinning out of control because of the lack of coherence and preservation that music provided to me. For the past few years, I have approached music in a more utilitarian way. It is in the background so that I don’t have to listen to other people in my office. It is in the car so that I can think more about what I am engaged in. It is on at home so that my children can dance.

I used to make music so that I could put order to the world, and now I don’t because the order has been dictated to me. My daily life is no longer unpredictable. I don’t wake up thinking about whether or not I will go out that night. We have these things planned weeks and months in advance. I don’t require a series of songs to give me a sense of what my existence is like because at any given moment, my life is a lot like the previous moment. While there is most definitely a progression from one thing to another, the haphazard stylings from many different genres that are put together on a mix would hardly be applicable to what I’m going through.

Which is why I am so keen on the album. The album of familiar or newly unearthed songs that I can listen to over and over again is something that much more fits my current lifestyle. I like to see the progression of a single narrative and know exactly where it goes to and from. The single can get me excited, but it never sustains me like a truly masterful album. I don’t want to put things on shuffle. I want to know what is coming next and to see it coming and feel good about it.

Making a mix feels good when you want to introduce someone to a band or when you feel as though there is something at stake. You are trying to make a statement or figure out who you are. You are trying to decipher the relationship to whom you are giving the mix. This makes sense when all of your life is up in the air. But, as things come together and make decisions that set you on a longer path, the long playing nature of an album sweetly cradles you. You don’t have to worry about the jarring transitions or the awkward filler tracks. You are content with the albums you grew up with and the new standards that you spend months with in your car. It isn’t that you are unwilling to change or to mix things up, it is just that you want the friendship of an album and not the acquaintance of a song. You are ready for commitment to a set of artists, instead of jumping from one genre to the next at a moments notice.

So, the album is the new mix, and it is a shame in the era of iTunes that this form of music is dying or giving up on itself. While the digital media revolution of the past 20 years may eventually get rid of the 10 song CD, it may push us out further into never having to listen to an album for 2-3 good songs. We expect more out of the music we consume. We expect every song to be good. And that is why the albums of today are so comfortable. I won’t tolerate a set of music that is only good enough to be put onto a mix. I won’t let those few moments I have for truly solitary music listening to be soiled by either the schizophrenia of the mix or the unevenness of a bad album.

I want only the good stuff, but I want the good stuff to have a story, an arch. I want it to match who I am right now without having to work all of that out in a playlist creator. I want the artists to be like me and I think that is slowly starting to happen. We are all trying to make our way in life, and it requires an honesty of vision and the relentless pursuit of iteration.

I will be better tomorrow than I am today, and I want music that shows that same level of maturity.

(Any albums you care to share with me on this journey?)

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Question 233 of 365: What is a morale dilemma?

My morale is conflicted. In tending the communities I created, I have constructed an almost impossible conundrum for myself. It goes something like this:

I am most happy when I talk to those who need my help and I am most engaged when talking to those who have things to offer me.

Usually there is a certain back and forth that I gain, but lately, it seems to be one or the other. Those that need nohing from me are the ones I am drawn toward. Their ability to create things without my help is incredible and awe inspiring. They don’t require my guidance, although they do seem to at least tolerate it. They start projects that subsist. They are amazing and all I want to do is watch.

And yet, I am most happy when those people are coming to me and directly soliciting my help. When they can’t figure something out or they need a tool to figure out their next move, I couldn’t be more fulfilled. I am conducting the work of teaching and it feels satisfying in a way that is primal and instinctual. Getting a problem resolved in the on thing feels productive, the one thing that makes me feel useful.

So, it isn’t a moral dilemma that I am speaking of, but a morale dilemma. I am conflicted about what I should be spending my time doing.

In the long run, is it better to be engaged or happy? While they may be related to one another, they are not the same thing. Both are temporary and both sustain me. The former consumes time, whereas the latter consumes energy.

Obviosly this is a false dichotomy because I don’t have to spend my time doing only one. I can use both to my advantage. But, as I look out into the future, the choices I make are not concrete and the positions I take are not all mine. When I advocate for what to work with most often, should I derive my morale through those I consider my equals and betters or should I be pursuing opportunities to work with those who I can really work with and help to understand what is really possible?

Question 231 of 365: What are the technologies that never die?

The 8 track tape is dead. No one has produced new music on one for a number of decades now. The UHF radio station is dead. Everything over the airwaves is digital. The bbs is dead. The web made sure of that.

And yet…

The record is alive and well. I can go into a dozen stores all around Denver and find new music being released on vinyl. It may be a niche market, but it is a large niche that has a lot of mainstream followers.

The walkie talkie is alive and well. As far as we get into using cell phones and texts, I still see walkie talkies being used by police offices, schools, and any place where two way communication just has to work. This technology has been around for half a century or more, and it remains the backbone of a lot of systems of communication, even as other things have come along with are supposedly better.

IRC chat is alive and well. Nearly every chat system that I see being labeled as web 2.0 is based upon or has it’s roots in a irc chat server somewhere. IRC clients haven’t changed and protocols haven’t been altered for years, but it is still a force to be reckoned with.

And these are the kinds of technologies that will never die. These are the technologies that linger because they don’t fulfill a single fad of our culture, but an ongoing purpose. They are the things that show us what it means to be human.

Records are flawed and easily broken. Not like cd’s or mp3 files that can be copied and last almost forever. They have a shelf life and they are focused only in one time and space. We can share them only when someone else is in the room and that is their magic. They require us to be gentle with them and with one another because if we do things too roughly, they skip and scratch and are no longer of any use. Records are mirrors. They have a story of exactly where they have been and who has played them. Anyone who has ever held the oversized liner notes knows exactly what it means to see lyrics as a book, I soul behind the music.

We continue to play and buy records because they are worth more than the money we pay for them with. They are the sum total of all of our experiences with them. So, get out an overly large set of headphones and line up the needle. There isn’t anything else like it.

Walkie talkies fulfill a different need. They are the chain around us to required communication. They are the untransformed facet of our jobs that requires rapid transfer of information. They are human in another way by replicating shouting across a room or a field. We know that we need to stay in constant and instant contact and we don’t want to think about that process while we make that contact. It is as if we all decided long ago that the best way for people to come together is by stringing up two tin cans and talking into them. We have never moved beyond this even though we got rid of the string. We haven’t moved on because anything more complicated than that and we become something different. We become approximations of people, machines that are capable of taking phone messages or queueing up email. Nope. All we need are some tin cans and some string.

And since the very early days of the Internet we have needed chat. We have needed a single room to come into and speak to one another and log the whole thing for as long as we can stomach it. The chat is universal. We are who we say we are, and that is an incredibly human characteristic. We can pretend so long as we can keep up the charade, just as we would at a party. It isn’t Twitter where we are cultivating followers and some peoples opinions are more important than others. Everyone is equal in an IRC chat room, even if there are ops and others present. So long as you aren’t banned, you are capable of seeing the whole conversation. We want it that way, so that vanity doesn’t get in the way of conversation. Ew get to know one another in chat because those words are being typed out as reactions to ideas that we form and then submit. We are more who we want to be in chat than we could ever be in real life and that is beautiful. It is also why it is still around even after video conversations have become ever more common and social media has become the standard protocol for sharing. Chat will be the backdrop for all of it because there is no way to forgo revealing yourself to just a few other people in a set of conversations which you can keep on coming back to for more learning experiences.

What are the technologies that are recent that are equally universal and long lasting? What are those things that we will be talking about 50 years from now as continually reminding us of our humanity?

Question 230 of 365: What is a proportionate response?

I once found a Nike hat in a Best Buy parking lot. No one was around and it looked to be in pretty good shape. I picked it up and wiped off the little bit of dirt that had gathered on the brim and I put it on. I walked through the store as the new owner of the hat. I quite liked the way that it fit and the story behind it. For a number of my young teen years, it was the only hat I ever wore.

I wasn’t particularly into Nike clothing, but I did have an affinity for free and storied items. So I wore it with pride, on long biking trips over to friends houses and while playing baseball in the cull-de-sacs around my neighborhood. It was because of this very affinity that led to my freinds stealing the hat and playing a big game of keep away with it. Because they knew that I wanted it back, they knew that they had quite a little bit of leverage on me. They kept the hat away from me, passing it back and forth to one another for what seemed like forever, but I’m sure was only about 10 minutes.

After those 10 minutes were up, though, I went into my friend’s house and unplugged his zip drive from his computer. I took it outside and I held it high above my head and told my friends that I was going to break it if they didn’t give me back my hat. They immediately complied. However, I was also asked to leave.

It seems as though that was not a proportional response to having your hat taken away. They told me that I was ruining a perfectly good game with a very uncool act. I told them that I wanted my hat back.

Even though they complied, I knew that there was something inherently wrong and unfair in my approach. I knew that I was not entering the right variables into the equation in order to get my hat back. Rather than waiting until they tired of the game, I escalated into extenction. It worked, but it also distanced me from anyone else participating.

And that to me is the problem with a disproportionate response. You are never really a part of the conversation. You are always just looking for a way out. There is no negitiation, there is only victor and victim. We have taken ourselves out of emotional response and problem solving that doesn’t require an adversary.

Which is why when tending a community, I do not ban. I do not remove accounts. I do not send emails off to supervisors or parents. I make myself a part of the conversation and inject my own influence into the actions of others. My response becomes measured through the act of using words to describe disappointment and to propose solutions.

Communities don’t require wholesale policing. They require community leaders. They require real people to model for them the right and wrong way to do everything. They need a little help from their friends.

No amount of rules is going to change this equation. The best communities are self regulating. The best communities recognize the game of keep away before it gets to the zip drive level. They value every found hat for the story thst it brings along with it. Because in the best communities, stories are currency.

Question 229 of 365: Who started it?

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Illustration depicting thought.
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Sometimes the best ideas are not our own. Definitely not mine, anyway.

Sometimes when we check into our communities, we realize that they have gone on without us. They have brilliant ideas about what should come next and they don’t require us for much of anything. The ideas abound. Ones that we would have never considered, or at least considered useful. Others can and do create what we would have thought too difficult to manage or attempt.

And yet, we can and do jump in. We take one look at the big plans that others have started in motion and we take part. We tend to our communities and it becomes something that is a part of us as well. I’m okay with the plans that others people have for me, or the ones that we co-author over time.

Today, I checked in on one of my communities and they were working on creating a broadcast, of the community itself. How is it that they came up with that idea before me? How is it that they started developing it, sharing phone numbers and emails? How could they have figured out how to advance the community beyond the current set of messages going back and forth?

And yet, I injected myself into the conversation. I created a collaborative document for them to help plan. I encouraged them to fill out their roles and their ideas for the project. I gave them ideas about how to broadcast and which tools would help them to make it valuable to the rest of the community. I made myself useful, sure. But, it wasn’t my idea in the beginning. I didn’t start it.

And that is a pretty wonderful feeling, all around.

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Question 228 of 365: How much do we want to see something spectacular?

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Apple QuickTake portrait - 1997
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I get the feeling that we want the next big thing so badly that we see it in everything we do. We want the planets to align and for a vision to come down from the heavens more than anything else. We want to see what it is that will be our indelible mark on society and we want to see it now.

In every interaction we take part in, there is the glimmer of hope that it could turn into the one thing that makes us memorable. It could be the one thing that allows us to rise above the fray and scream out into the future for someone to hear what we believe.

We want to see the that our treasure is worth something in an absolute sense. That there are things we are holding in our hands that are worth a gamble. We want them to be, at least. We want the two pair that we are holding to be enough to turn around our meager fortunes.

We amass evidence that supports our theories. We train ourselves to believe that we are creating amazing artifacts and hopeful creations. But, are we?

Do we want so badly to be the shining example of all that is right in the next generation of ideas that we can’t see that some of what we are selling just isn’t good enough. Are we so confident in our approach that we can’t feel how wrong it is to want something that isn’t ever going to happen the way we envision it?

It isn’t wrong to want more than we have, but sometimes we need to be okay with the struggle and the satisfaction of learning from trial and error. Sometimes we need to create what is possible. It isn’t a defeat. It is redefining what we see as spectacular. We need to find our own identities as the spectacle. We need ourselves, with every flaw, to be the special sauce that stains every shirt it comes in contact with. The truth is so much more glamorous that all that we may wait for and want in the meantime.

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Question 227 of 365: What is genuine?

We are all works of fiction.

No matter how truthful we may try to be, our own stories betray the characatures that we let stand in for us. It is all an internal monologue playing itself out in front of us. Somettimes it is surprising and sometimes it is mundane. But the only thing I know to be true is in holding on tight to another person and letting that be enough.

It is awkward and fruitless sometimes, but the holding of hands or the hugging of shoulders is the only genuine act that we feel on a daily basis. We talk and we tell, but we never actually connect. The labor of friendship is solidified and the relationships are made concrete by prolonging an embrace.

I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but in a world so full of phonies and charletens, the intertwining of fingers is what makes the chaos go way. It is what makes the real possible. It is what truth itself calls upon for verification.

“All you need is love” is an abstraction. All you need is one open palm and another to place inside. Keep it there for as long as you can because everything else in the world is going to change around you.

Question 226 of 365: What speaks to us?

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The journey of tweet
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I have a web alert set up for “social media” in my local area. Anything, whether it is a job or blog post or simply a quiet mention on the local news sends me an e-mail calling my attention to it. Usually, it turns up things that I am already aware of like a school’s new twitter account or a new business working their way through their newest iteration of “viral marketing.” I don’t often feel as though the things that I am interested in are really interested in me. Much of the time, the social media that is happening around me is much more concerned with broadcasting information rather than engaging in a conversation. Yesterday, though, was different. I felt as though someone was reaching through the screen and tugging at my shirt, employing me to come and act on what was going on. This is what it said (formatting is mine):

You are a natural communicator and a master of the written and spoken word.

You know how to convey complex topics in ways that both novices and experts will understand.

The power of your words influences people and shapes their opinions.

You can write case studies, white papers, press releases and other marketing collateral in your sleep.

Importantly, though, you are not old-school.

You embrace social media and its viral power.

You had a blog before most people knew what they were; you were on Facebook and Twitter before they were cool.

You spend your waking hours blogging and tweeting.

You understand and use a variety of social media platforms and outlets, and a lot of people follow you to hear your insights.

While I might never boast about myself in such terms, upon reading those words I couldn’t look away. I was drawn to the potency of being so direct. It was as if someone was taking the journey that I am on in these 365 days and splaying out on a table. While these words could be used to describe others, their urgency is arresting. All at once I wanted to be the one that these words were describing, to feel validated and unencumbered by these talents that seemingly so few people see as talents.

Each one of these statements struck a different chord within me and I wanted to explore exactly why that was.

When I think back to when writing was hard, I had to set aside a specific time and space to find an elusive muse. Now, I pull out a cell phone, iPad or laptop and the words just come. I don’t lack for stories to tell, pedagogy to analyze, or technology to dissect. I pull construct ideas, turning them over in my mind until I can figure them out. I find images and links and all kinds of media that speak to my experience, and nothing is out of bounds. Most importantly, I question. I question what is possible and I question what is good. I lend value to the words and seek out the truth in identity. I think about all that has come before and I know that I am not alone in a quest for expression or commentary. I know that the network of creation around me is supporting my efforts, one word at a time.

When I speak, it isn’t to obfuscate the world that I am co-creating. I seek to educate and to let simmer the ideas I find engaging until there is only flavor and further inquiry left. I do not dumb down, either. But I understand how to frame conversations and I do so until the only thing within that outline has a rich context, no matter who the viewer is. I do not stick to a single form of expression or arena of influence because I do not see value in arbitrary barriers to learning. The tools for presentation are all at my fingertips and I mix and match at will. I find audio resonant with audience, video triggers value, and words awaken the mind. Nothing less is worth our time.

When people link to me or retweet my work, they lend credence to a version of history that shifts with everything I consume and learn. I focus attention on what matters to me, and it never ceases to amaze how many others feel the same. I know this because I am a part of a conversation and a community. We are engaged in the act of rebellion, always. It is rebellious to influence others. It is rebellious to write and persuade. It is rebellious to have an opinion and to support it with everything you author. It is my responsibility to rebel in such a way. I’m not sure I know anything else at this point.

And I research. It is never the world according to Ben Wilkoff, but rather hyperlinked vignettes that aim to reinvent the world. There is polish in a PDF, in a slide deck, in action research. Collaboration is drafting, and publishing is posting. The process is an act of courage for finding an authority all my own. And in moments I feel that authority. In moments, I feel like final drafts are for people who have stopped exposing and promoting what is ongoing. So, I iterate. I never stand on a case study or white paper for very long. They are stale from the first time they get’s saved to a hard drive. Links are substantial. They allow you to rewrite history and focus attention on the next day’s rather than yesterday’s news. Knowing what is still relevant is my work every day.

And sometimes I use a typewriter. Sometimes, I know the tools of connection so well that it makes sense to bring a solitary notion back into the equation. I do not engage in echo chambers. I write because that is what is new. New media isn’t merely about comments, aggregation and syndication. It is about having a new perspective and articulating it through those means. The new school is about assimilating who we are and were into who we will become, and anticipating what we will need when we get there. It is a blend of tactile and transformational. It is creation wherever people are. It is more about those people and their connection to others. We are the links. We are the words.

When I watch the traffic of a single tweet as it bounces around among friends, I see action within each bounce. One annotates and one embellishes. One retweets and one reminisces. There is no single path that a meme can take, but each shows the value in tracing influence and challenging convention. Social media’s goal is to subvert convention and hierarchy. It is to go use the spaces that already exist to proliferate and saturate those that are already savvy and those who have yet to get on board. Social media makes those who do not engage feel as though they are missing something. That is virality. When the old networks of email and phone calls get mixed up in the madness of sharing what is new and bold. When grandmothers are suggesting video to their grandchildren, we know that we have changed the order of things. And that is what we must do. We must continue to use leverage legacy systems and inject them with the networked values of the blogosphere. The power of social media is in being social with media, not the media itself. It is in creating the context for the things that we have always done. It isn’t optional, and no one will do it for us.

Everyone has a journey and here is mine:

  • I joined my first social network in 2003… along with 3 million other people.
  • I first blogged in the winter of 2004… at least 4 million other people beat me to it.
  • I sent my first tweet in 2007… by then 8 million others had sent theirs.

Being first doesn’t matter. Having a presence does.

I don’t sleep until I have posted my questions and ideas of the day. I don’t read or watch without thinking about sharing, commenting or annotating. This is the way my mind works. Anything that I can’t rate, clip, or link to has little value to me as a learning tool. Technological silos aren’t of interest to me because they have taken themselves out of the absolute value equation. They have already lost in the game of competition and reflection. My identity is wrapped up in what I can write and think about. If I lose the pulse of what is going on, I feel as though my own pulse is lost. While Virginia Woolf believed in a room of one’s own, I can only advocate for a blog. It is the one space that sanity and understanding of self can happen in public. That can be a person or a company, the blog is the public face that we wish we could have had with us all of our lives, crafting it and changing it to suit everything we have tried on or tried to make work. We are public institutions, and it is time we all start taking control of it.

I think that it all comes down to understanding.

I use social media because it is essential. I pick the voice and the vehicle, and I push it out to those who are most ready to hear what I have to say. The idea that others find value in what I do is powerful. The audience is what makes it authentic as is the greater purpose for creating change within what I see around me. And that is why these words spoke to me so much. I feel as though they were authentically crafted and offer up a reality that resonates with my own experience. The fact that it happened to be a part of a job posting is all the more engaging. It means that the change I seek is making its way into exactly the right places. It means, we are on the right track.

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Question 225 of 365: Are you pumped?

I have heard this phrase a number of times in the last day. I’m pumped about that.

I think we are in hopeful moments when the thing we feel is pumped. We are balloons, flying. We are satiated and full. We are bolstered and unhinged in a wonderful way.

New school years, even if you aren’t in school, have this effect. It is not the only thing you can feel. But if you feel anything else, you are doing it wrong.