Learning Aesthetics

Welcome to 2012

It’s tempting to forget that what you see is indeed what you ask for, but the asking is always already filtered. Here’s a complicated reminder from the Microsoft Research Social Media Collective Blog.

I’m not sure whether language or culture is more at work here:

Checking with an old friend, who is checking in with an older one:

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

Charles Bukowski

Perhaps part of the difficulty is that what I’m struggling toward isn’t really implementation, but rather evolution. Someone recently pointed out that you don’t change societies by changing laws. Instead the most effective way to produce social change was to introduce a new technology into the culture. Of course it’s hard to predict exactly what kind of change you’re going to effect. What’s critical is recognizing the effect early and leveraging it to a business advantage. This isn’t trivial because all nature, including our own, is inherently conservative and the tendency is to preserve the status quo. There are, however, likely to be things that implement themselves. All of which is related, in my mind at least, to a post on The Technium on how Google does science.

“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.’ ”

Hermann Hesse- The Glass Bead Game

A long hiatus often indicates a formal life change; such is here the case.  I have a new job: Director of Learning Environments and Media Production; a potentially unfortunate acronym though perhaps accurate.  We’ll see how things develop.  I’ve been at it (formally) for about 3 weeks and not surprisingly things have been a little rough.  Again not surprisingly, most of the difficulty stemmed from underestimating from and change.  In other words I spent the first 2.8 weeks acting like a manager rather than a director, and it turns out that there’s an order of magnitude difference.  To resort to a military metaphor, it’s the difference between the classes of NCO and Officer (in the Navy there’s an odd concatenation: Warrant Officer, which may point semantically to a significant difference between the Navy and the Army). Managers (NCO’s) are responsible for getting things done; Directors, CIO’s, and the like are responsible for deciding what things need to get done, when they need to be done, and more than occasionally how they need to get done.  It’s the last that’s tricky.  There’s a fine line between “getting things done” and “doing things”, particularly when you realize that the common tools in both cases are people who report to you.  Gathering firewood is easy; getting others to gather firewood is a bit more difficult; knowing when there’s enough firewood for the entire camp is a responsibility; making sure there’s the right enough, not too much, firewood to go around is a full time occupation.

Privacy means not having to explain.

I’m going to be going to one of those HR how-to-be-a-better-(fill in the blank) things next week; this one titled “Crucial Conversations”, which I assume has something to do with honest-communication or unafraid-plain-talk. Remember those? Put me in the re-mind that all these sorts of things are about: Affective Change, and that for the most part “intellectual realization” doesn’t help in mammal-space. “The therapeutic process cannot begin until the patient is willing to share his or her masturbation fantasies.”  To which Shel said, “Jesus, why does everything come down to sex with you?” It doesn’t; exactly.   MFs aren’t in this context about sex, but rather about personal space and privacy.  How much do you trust the other; how comfortable are you with yourself?

It’s facile  to say things like, “Privacy is dead;” I’ve been guilty myself, but as usual things are more multiplex.  danah boyd and Alice Marwick have useful draft: Social Privacy in Networked Publics:  Teens Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies

Can’t let a month go by.  This from mpesce:

The mobile telephone spreads connectivity directly to the person.  The mobile creates the phenomenon of direct human addressability.  The mobile is an inherently personal device; each mobile and SIM is associated with a single person.  With this single innovation, the gap is spanned between tribal and urban organizational forms.  Everyone is directly connected, as in the tribe, but in unknowably vast numbers, as in the city.

I find myself reading The Best Music 2009 which leads to Michael Pisaro

Perhaps as Giles Deleuze says about philosophy, Art is not communication.  It’s always trying to subtract its relation to communication in the service of a remainder: something we hear or see or experience that “says” nothing so that it can “do” something (or nothing).

Which you’ll have to admit requires a bit of unpacking, but form do tend to follow function and vice-versa.

I’ve been thinking about short, really short, Twitter short fiction for a while now, and as usual if you wait a bit it will present itself.  Note to self: The key may well be context, again.

Eleven very short stories about SXSW

Here’s my pick:

I was out of his room by eight o’clock, just in time to make the first panels. No point waking him up, so I didn’t.

Still, I left him my business card. I’ve got 300 to get through, and a little networking never hurt anyone.

Leads to: BBH Global