Last weekend, I was privileged to participate in a weekend Symposium in Waiheke. It was convened by Lisa Galarneau and John Eyles of the EON Foundation to further the Neosophy notion that they have been exploring. It was a delightful and stimulating experience. The venue, setting and food were wonderful and the participants were diverse, stimulating and lively.
The question that we explored was the relevance of the digital age to the five competencies that have been cooked up by the OECD and are being adopted into the NZ curriculum.
Here are some things that I learned on this weekend…
Not everyone is as optimistic about the online world as I am. To some people, the idea of deep human contact occurring online just doesn’t make sense. To them, the idea of people substituting online relationships for physical ones is appalling. Collaboration in MMORPGs seems like people “ganging up and killing things”.
I got to thinking about the notion of positive feedback received from a computer (say in a single player game) being somehow as nourishing as that received from people. It seems slightly shocking, even to me. What about the self-esteem building that can occur shooting baskets in the yard or hitting a fence-post with a stone? Of course, the inanimate objects are simply mediating social phenomena. Stone-throwing was once (and in many places still is) a highly valued survival skill. Shooting baskets can provide entry to the good team which then gangs up to try to beat the others.
Have you ever noticed how cut-throat sport is? Sure there’s collaboration within each team but there is no second prize at the end of the game. It often horrifies me how even kids’ teams will keep racking up goals when they are obviously mismatched with their opponents. And it horrifies me, the callousness with which players sacrifice pawns and even bishops in the abstraction of war on the chessboard.
To me, the gore of killing monsters in a computer game is actually less shocking than some of those things.
I am not an unqualified optimist, however. I know that psyberspace is a boundaryless and uncertain place. I know that inhumanity can occur here as much as humanity can. One area that particularly concerns me is the shortage of public space on the Web. OK, I can blog here and you can come and go. This is pretty close to public. My photos, however are on flickr and I don’t know that I could get them out. OK, I’ve got copies but not of my tags. My daughter spends lost of time on MSN where she has photos, blog posts and message archives (though I don’t think she can access those). To her it’s all free and just works. What is the price that she pays?
I want to use our software to build public spaces, a commons on the Web. I want it to be as easy to take your content out as it is to put it in. I want people to stay because they want to and not because they are locked in.
OK, there are ideas for some other posts here but this is what I have returned from the Symposium thinking.
Dear Dan,
I would like to meet in the first week of March to begin some serious planning for how we can make mediascape interactive. I have lots of ideas. I am sure you will too. Public space to discuss issues is the plan….
ruth
Dear Dan,
…and I remember the physical joy of swimming through light filtering water in a space that is truly four dimensional, eating good food with intelligent thinkers and watching them add to each other’s ideas, …and being confronted by the fact that some of the most humane people have met in many months also believe in the power to use a digital environment for good. Tom Standage talks about a strange thing called chronocentricity. With chronocentricity comes a fear of transforming change. I suspect that for some people this is panic at the loss of ‘meaning’.. and for others it is caution surfacing as a moderating influnece over euphoric beliefs in the power of new technology.
Whatever the reason, caution can also be used for good, when it moves beyond fear and becomes insightful critique.
Pabic says something about religion that I believe applies here [and it builds on your observation about Psyberspace not being inherently bad]. He says “An idea is not resonsible for the people who believe in it.”
…ditto the net