AKMA’s Random Thoughts

In our BlogWalk small-group discussion, we’re talking about the duration of time necessary to make a case for blogging in an organization, which reminded me of the age of this humble site. Three years ago tomorrow, I made my first post (now edited to accommodate an esoteric joke).

At the time, I wrote, “A weblog of my own! Now I can be just like David Weinberger, only more theologically nuanced and less funny. In other words, more boring and offering less reason to read it.” After three years, the flow of tedium continues unabated. . . .

After some frustrating misadventures involving system software upgrades, I resuscitated my iBook and installed iWork. I can’t give a rich explanation for this, but my first reaction is that Pages presents a truly seductive interface; I want to write in this environment. I can’t imagine why this is so, but some editors and I sure hope that feeling lasts, and works.

This would be about the coolest thing since our technology lecture series — a conference-cum-get-together, BlogWalk Chicago, about social software at Seabury — if we hadn’t gotten a foot of snow overnight, with another half foot coming down as I type. Various people have had to cancel including (to my disappointment) Krista and Mr. Boyfriend, but Phil Wolff has spontaneously flown in; I hope he can get from the Hilton to Seabury based on my directions.

We’re going around the room, introducing ourselves (in a good ice-breaking fashion). I already know Jack Vinson and Jim McGee, and I ’ve met Mark and (I think) Denham before (Golly, I feel like I’ve met Denham, but it seems not). Jim McGee observes that until very recently, “more information” tended to correlate to “better decisions”; now, we’re drowning in information. We need not more information, but better discernment of what information helps, and how it helps.

We’ll move into an Open Space phase till lunchtime, based on what Lilia calls a window-wiki, a window with Post-It notes stuck all over it. We’re figuring out how our Open Space groups will divide up.

Right now, we have two main discussions. One started from questions about the definition of “social software” and why it’s a problem, and what kind of problem it is. The other concerns the roles of social software in organizations.

Ooop, that first group just modulated to “why do you blog?” One of the shared topics involves monetizing social software, or — to be more precise — monetizing the benefits of social software. Phil Wolff just referred to the practice of forced blogging simply to satisfy an imposed expectation as “blognosing.”

OK, Lilia is leading us through summarizing. Jim describes a converssation about the changing nature of work, the changing nature of organizations, and where to take those changes. That’s a fair degree of important work in organizations that’s different from the industrial well-defined work taht still dominates thinking. A lot of work tends to be more fluid, more driven by collaboration, even if the tools don’t support that. People are making do, without clear models.

The nature of that change: A conflict in organizations between successes that are emergent, and the impulse to impose that as a top-down phenomenon. How do you bring about emergence, without imposing it? There’s at least an interesting question of whether emergent behavior is antithetical to control-and-predict management. Are there places these tools are inappropriate?

A side conversation involved how [we] monetize expertise in this new world.

There could be value integrating these tools with current processes; some imposed structure, some highlight examples would accelerate the change. These changes take sustained energy being pumped into an organization to reach a change in the organizational ethos. There aren’t a lot of good models. The group debated “good” and “bad” blogging — are there such things, and how would you tell? There’s an economic issue relative to the proportion of a blogger’s company time devoted to contributing to social software. Social software can add tremendous value to an organization in the context of a help center, for example.

Editing and summarizing may catalyze the value of organizational software. Lilia sees a lot of divergence in the discussion — individuals pushing their particular points, with relatively little mutual-contribution interaction. It’s talking like blogging: each of us saying his piece (Lilia’s the only woman here, regrettably— Krista and Judith had to cancel/decline), not changing one another’s minds necessarily. But are blogs really a vehicle for harmonious mind-changing? Just how open are they? In organizations there are real, tangible rewards for making useful contributions; in Blogaria, the rewards are vague and intangible.

In the other group, people disagreed about the very definition of social software. The money-blog relationship came up there, too; bloggers undervalue their writing because they love doing it (they’re starving artists). Blogs deliver tremendous value to their readers (look, measure the amount of time spent reading blogs).

How do you know who’s the expert, and who’s the village idiot? If you read their weblog for a while, you learn about them. And the village idiot about sales may be the expert about baseball, and vice versa.

Now, we’re having a lunch break, during which I flipped a slice of deep-dish pizza over onto my (formerly white) keyboard. The “walk” part of BlogWalk is a snowball fight out in the parking lot.

Pictures available at flickr.

Oh, baby! Turns out that my geeky desire will be fulfilled when the iWorks package arrives today: according to MacInTouch, Pages saves files in an XML-=compliant format. W00t!

That outburst reminds me of a tired joke I heard at last summer’s Lilly educational technology conference, to which I thought of an alternate answer, viz.:

Q: What’s the difference between God and a technologist?
A: God doesn’t think he’s [sic] a technologist.

I realized, “And God sometimes answers prayers. . . .”

Here’s another time I think Dave Winer got it just right: “[T]here is no ‘the’ blogging community. So many people think they grok the wholeness of it, but are only looking at a small part.” We see this in big-media representations of blogging (over-simplified to “cats and politics” or “teenagers and dweebs”), but also in the recurrent effort to define blogging; most characterizations and definitions end up excluding [atypical, hence especially interesting] examples in order to establish an authorized, conventional set of data.

I would probably say that “the blogging community” exists, but is so thin an entity that once you nget past “sometime in the past year I’ve posted an entry in a weblog” there isn’t much “common” held by the community. It’s like “the community of English-speakers” — vast, and utterly diverse.

Generalizations about Blogaria fall into the same trap that besets moaning about A-lists and power laws. Sure — columnists and pundits can gaze bemusedly at the head and tail of the curve, at Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall, at “My Three Kitties” and “What I Had For Breakfast.” Yes, the closer one is to the “power” of the power law, the more you resemble the big media, the more familiar the star trip, the less interactivity possible. But Blogaria has a longer, thicker, more varied and intellectually richer tail than print and broadcast publishing. The elbow of the power law provides the sweet spot for online communication, and bloggers hit that elbow in so many different ways that they wind up defeating the noblest and best efforts to define, to characterize “the blogging community.”

(By the way, in this weird world I almost didn’t post this, in order to avoid the possible conclusion that I’m currying favor with Dave Winer by concurring with him twice in recent memory. After deliberating for a few seconds about how absurd the situation is, I went ahead because I thought the point was worth making. Often enough when I disagree with Dave (and that’s often enough, by all means), I doubt that there’s much to be gained by calling attention to the fact — and I can rest assured that plenty of other people have already ignited their flame-throwers. So, Dave, if the fact that I’m agreeing with you again inclines you to think more favorably about me, be sure to remember a topic on which we’ve argued, and factor that in.)

Lately my days have filled up with obligations and infinitesimal gaps between them, so that there’s little productive to do in the cracks. I find myself getting to bed, weary and conscious that I’ll have to get up early next morning, and blogging has fallen off my radar altogether. I feel like Tom and Ray Magliozzi saying, “You’ve wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk. . . .”

I should acknowledge right away that some of the errands and obligations are my own doing, so I can’t moan at the world. Tonight, for instance, I voluntarily watched Road to Perdition. The family was suffering from Netflix Constipation: you know, the time when you have all three movies out, and you really want to see them, but just now you’d like something else, but you can’t get something else from Netflix till you return one of the three, which you can’t, because now isn’t the moment to watch those three movies, and so on. I had sent for three relatively somber movies, because (at the time) Margaret was away and Pippa had just been on a comedy spree; I felt I was clear to watch a couple serious flicks without upsetting anyone. But (as John Belushi used to say) “No – o – o – o – o – o. . . .” I got sidetracked for a couple of days, and Margaret came home, and she usually doesn’t like heavy movies as much as she likes light movies, and that goes double when her endocrine system is playing malignant games with her mood. So Road to Perdition, Gangs of New York, and Donnie Darko sat on the dining room table, waiting for someone to have mercy, watch them and send them back to their DVD homes. Pippa sat at the dining room table, thinking that those DVDs could be Austin Powers or Batman, if only Dad would send them back to Netflix so her choices could come. And of course, any day I could simply have mailed them back, and put them back into the queue for a later date — but that would be giving up.

Anyway, my notions about marriage have to wait another day.

This morning, I realized one aspect of Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action that really bothers me. Habermas suggests that the tacit “intent to communicate” that every communicative action implies, obliges us to interpret those communications in concord with the latent intent. As I was doing my sit-ups this morning (sit-ups coming back easier than stationary-biking, my mind was clearer), I tried to connect Habermas to the general points I’ve tried to make about signifying practices in general; Habermasian arguments tend to play well among biblical scholars, so I’d do well to have a riposte in view.

What dawned on me is that Habermas tends to define signifying in terms of speaking/writing — to define all signifying in terms of verbal communication. Now, he doesn’t exclude non-verbal communication, but the thrust of his argument treats non-verbal communication as though it were a less-precise version of verbal communication, or a failed (or flawed) attempt at verbal communication. This tendency has bothered me from the time that I began to observe ways that ASL required that I think about hermeneutics in very different ways; this morning, it occurred to me that when a Habermasian approach treats the case of verbal communication as normative, it bootlegs in a variety of suppositions about interpretation that don’t necessarily apply to non-verbal communication. If I’m right in supposing that all we do signifies, and that we can’t control signification, then one can’t simply hold up verbal communication as paradigmatic. . . .too sleepy to finish. . . .

I fully intended to wrap up my musings about Christian marriage this evening, and to talk more about identity and ceremony — but Joi phoned me up to siphon me into his podcast on Self-Esteem.

I am, of course, sympathetic to Chris Locke’s bombastic denunciations of self-esteem as a cultural idol — though Joi wanted to explore the specific effects of a subject’s sense of his or her possibilities. What I know about this topic ran out after about forty-five seconds of conversation, but instead of hanging up on Joi, I grasped desperately for vaguely sensible angles on the topic. I don’t have the heart to listen tonight.

With BlogWalk Chicago coming up this weekend, and David Isenberg’s intriguing-looking Freedom To Connect get-together beckoning to me from the end of March, we may be in for even more hectic days than I anticipated.

My day’s crowded, so I’ll settle for quick links to (a) Helenann Hartley’s blog, where she reports that her examiners have recommended that she be awarded the Ph.D. (or “D.Phil., as they call it at Oxford) from Oxford (or “Oxon.”, as they call it when they give you a “D.Phil.”).

Congratulations, Helenann! W00t!

And (b) I’m fascinated by the suggestion being bruited about that DigID involve something called “Ceremonies” — Eric called my attention to it (showing that he teaches me not only about more than just hip-hop — but hey, dude, I’m not as “ancient” as all that), Kim “Laws of Digital Identity” Cameron invokes it, and Carl Ellison devised it in consultation with Jesse Walker (mp3 of Kim interviewing Carl here).

I’m fascinated, but the interview and blogposts give only a vague sketch of what a “ceremony” might mean in this context. It sounds promising — but I await further details before adding a vote-yes or vote-no tag to my links.

Mac OS X users: I love Camera Helper, the one-trick memory-card downloader from Script Software. Since I prefer not to use iPhoto (its incomprehensible mandatory file storage system puts me off — I don’t dislike the interface or tools), Camera Helper saves me the multi-step work of detecting, downloading, and deleting image files from my camera. It doesn’t do anything else, but it’s handy to let Camera Helper do these errands.

Pippa gave me this self-portrait yesterday evening, executed to correspond to one that Nate made long ago. Nate’s portrait included a frame with plastic toys glued on around the image; Pippa noticed the other day that they made a vaguely facial pattern themselves, picking up and reinforcing the depiction of Nate’s face. Evidently the idea of “eyes” on the frame stuck with her, as this features googly-eyes all around the frame, and Pippa’s eyes are likewise googly.

This afternoon, Philippa and I rolled down to the Field Museum to take in the Jacqueline Kennedy exhibit. Pippa is an avid student of biographies, and earlier she devoted particular attention to First Ladies. You may remember her Jackie Kennedy balloon at right (included a matching Jack on the reverse of the balloon). When she took out the library books on Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the librarian asked her whether she was going to the exhibit at the Field Museum. We hadn’t been aware that there would be such a thing, so the question became a provocation for this afternoon’s Field trip (so to speak).

We made it to the Field just in time for our 1:30 ticket pick-up (note of advice: Buy tickets in advance online. We coasted past a line that would have lasted a half-hour or so of standing in a winding queue near the chilly vestibule), though the signage for parking at the Field leaves a tremendous amount to be desired. We thus took a scenic tour of the promontory on which the museum, aquarium, and planetarium are situated, only eventually finding our way to the parking garage. Tickets for special exhibits such as this are exorbitant, though if you make it a doubleheader (“Jackie Kennedy and Machu Picchu! Such a deal!”) you save a lot over the cost of separate visits. We didn’t have the time and energy for that, so we contented ourselves with offering our organ donations to get into just the Jackie Kennedy exhibit, then wandering around the rest of the museum as Pippa’s spirit moved her.

The Kennedy exhibit touched me more than I anticipated. I have almost no interest in fashion history, so the array of hats and dresses blurred before my eyes. The letters, films, and memos, however, bespoke a personage of remarkable brilliance of a sort that has to a great extent faded from public awareness, to our impoverishment. Be it granted that the exhibit set out to cast Ms. Kennedy [Onassis] (and Jack) in the best possible light — the discourse of Presidency that the Kennedys enacted diverges sharply from recent presidencies, even though particular policy mistakes may fairly be compared back and forth. The overwhelming impression from the artifacts assembled here pointed toward a literacy and depth I have missed for decades.

In this context, Jacqueline’s cultural alertness, multi-lingual fluency, remarkable taste (not only in clothing, but the arts in general) evoked in me a pang of unexpected nostalgia, but even more profound admiration of this extraordinarily articulate, elegant, accomplished woman.

Her life of privilege certainly made possible opportunities and achievements to which she’d never have access had she been born with similar gifts in rural Appalachia. At the same time, the braying golden asses to whom the Tutor so relentlessly directs our attention represent only one of the fruits of aristocracy; and given the benefits of privilege, Jacqueline Kennedy seems not only not to have wasted them, but rather to have extended herself to make her advantages into benefits for everyone, the true noblesse exemplified by the philanthropists who hang around at GiftHub).

All that being said, boy! there were a lotta dresses. Pippa examined them carefully, read the descriptions (with designer, occasions on which JBK wore the dress, critical analysis of the design), attended to the film clips, soaked up the whole display. When we got home and she told Margaret what we’d seen, she freely supplied details and recounted anecdotes as though she’d been there.

Afterward, we strolled at length through the natural history displays (she gleefully spotted a family of moose, whom she associated with Margaret’s father, and of geese, which she claimed as her own totemic creatures). She surveyed the owls that her great-grandfather loved to etch, and studied the informational panels dedicated to Sue, the Field’s unique Tyrannosaurus Rex, with all the intensity that I used to indulge at the Peabody Museum.