 28 Mar 2007 @ 05:36, by Robert Oveson
The Tyee is Vancouver's online daily newspaper, that is an alternative to Canwest the neo-conservative mainstream. Vancouver has the biggest media monopoly in North America. The Tyee was started a few years ago, it has content that is applicable to local politics, and each article has a comments section. The site has some good comments along with the usual lefty righty squabbles. A couple of weeks ago I joined to meet up with local people and to make myself know. This blog post is a copy of my introduction, and a post on syncronicity and dialogue.
Introduction in an article called Blogged Out
The sociology of cyberspace. Damn but I used to enjoy those type of discussions. Started out over at Utne Cafe about ten years ago. The Motet software they used was/is great, it had a lot of navigation and organizational features that reduced the cognitive overhead; for example it would keep track of what you had already read and not clutter the screen with it, and you could construct enumerated lists of posts after the fact that allowed you to extract individual threads from the chaff, and it just had that "flow" that enabled multiple in-depth discussions.
I've found that the significant discussions often take a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand posts to ferret out the taboo, and then that is when the interesting discussion starts. The trolls attempt to confuse the issue before the taboo can be identified. It is nice to have software and moderators that enable the discussion to progress to the crux.
So why am I here? Mainly because this is a local board, and there are people here that I might hook up with out in the real world to work on various causes. I've been at Tyee for a couple of weeks, dropped in a few times over the years but always got frustrated by the limitations of the software, and I'm not sure how long I'll stick around. Good chance I'll be here for awhile, but only hanging out in the threads that particularly interest me.
I'm not sure what label I am, probably an anti-neo-con for the short definition and much much longer to define what I am for. For the most part I think that Left and Right are the good cop bad cop of Empire, the former wants to control the people by making them comfortably numb on dependence, whereas the right prefers to control through fear and intimidation, but neither has any interest in empowering the grassroots. I've very rarely met an anarchist that didn't come across as a self indulgent yahoo with no appreciation for order or obligation. The magnitude of their impact however makes them a lesser evil than the capitalists with their psychopathic idolatry of the dollar. I guess I just have a problem with Western Civilization in general. Chavez inspires me and gives me hope.
When six billion people allow ten thousand to control them they get what they deserve, which isn't to say that it isn't too late to change that condition. We need to rid ourselves of this "individualistic" bill of goods that we've been sold so that we can unite to engage collectively in the larger issues and challenges. The biggest obstacle to this is the propaganda machine of the main stream media which is owned and controlled by the elites.
Blogs don't have the solidarity required, and groups seem to be either isolated or co-opted. I'm hoping that perhaps a cultural evolution arising from an emergent mythology might do the trick.
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Couple of comments on article on Education
If you want an education you can get one for free at the library. If you want to be credentialized so that you can get a high paying job in the priesthood of aristocracy then you have to shell out the money. The degree isn't so much to indicate that you have competent knowledge, since the half life is getting so short that most of that will be obsolete within a few years of graduation, but rather to simplify the hiring process and to provide some ensurance to the employer that you can endure at least four years of bullshit without quitting.
Backing off a bit from that extreme position I will acknowledge that there are minimum requirements for most professions. However, it isn't intelligence, competence or knowledge that is the limiting factor, but rather maintaining a scarcity so as to keep the wages high, particularly in the professions of law and medicine. Ask yourself how come a tiny country like Cuba can educate tens of thousands of competent doctors, and yet North America is plagued with malpractice suits. Or how come almost every lawyer that is admitted to law school graduates.
Personally I think that if you want to go through the McJob Factory you should have to pay full cost since you are buying an investment, however if you are taking a liberal arts program for the betterment of society then that should be like a job, with free tuition and a "salary" of ten grand a year, and if you can't maintain a B average you're fired. Required courses would include critical thinking, history, and how to do independent research. Also, that any knowledge produced in a university should belong to the public domain, and that corporations shouldn't be allowed to have patents on this knowledge; which is how it used to be just a few decades ago before the learning institutions were usurped by big business.
I think another alternative that should be investigated is reinstating the guild system upgraded to our modern requirements.
Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005) given at Stanford where he extols the virtues of being a university drop-out is a contrary opinion to the norm.
[second comment after favorable response]
Thanks for the positive feedback. I was offline for most of yesterday, and probably today as well. A lot of these divergent threads have been coming together however and I'll try to sum up some thoughts, which I think qualify as syncronicities of the noosphere, or if that is too woo woo for you, indicators of an implicate order as described by the physicist David Bohm.
I got the Steve Jobs link from a website on spiritual inspiration that gets an average of three new links a day and it arrived the same day I posted it here. A couple of days ago on another site I found a link to this MadTV parody on Jobs. I'm not a Steve groupie, never owned a Mac, find the touch pads infuriating to use, and have a general aversion to how he caters to the cult of cool at an extreme cost premium. I give him begrudging respect for being a bona fide capitalist, unlike some of the poseurs on this site, whom I suspect confuse capital with money, and capitalism with managerialism; the terms described in John Ralston Saul's "The Collapse of Globalism: and the reinvention of the world", which I'm two thirds of the way through and which was overdue at the library as of yesterday. Not that I'm giving capitalism a free ride here, aligning more with anarcho and GWest, but capitalism is not the same animal as the cancerous consumerism combined with neo-liberal economics that has emerged over the last few decades, which more people would be aware of if we had been truly educated rather than indoctrinated.
Both Lynn and The Brain commented on the significance of how The "less sure about everything" periods of one's life, in retrospect, are often such a real gift. About a week ago I syncronicitcly came across this graduate thesis from a Chicago Business school on Social Origins of Good Ideas which provided some sociological context to this thought. People that occupy positions in the overlap of two or more organizations are more likely to have creative ideas and have those ideas acted upon by the management. These are sometimes called "loose connections", or "structural holes" because they allow information to leak out of, and also into, what would otherwise be a homogeneous group. This source of creativity isn't based on deep intellectual ability, but rather on creativity as an import-export business, where the value is determined by the recipient rather than the source. Page 7 has some good quotes on the importance of contact with persons dissimilar to yourself, and how without le vide the emptiness of concept, there is no unexpected things and no creation. The more control the less creation. I think these were benifits that were recognized in the research done by SharingIsGood.
I think the true capitalists are also recognizing social capital as being the wellspring of the knowledge age, and that they will take a stand against the managerialists gorging on the seed corn to satisfy their addiction to total control. Capitalism has yet to be given a fair trial within a knowledge based economy because managerialism came to dominate around the same time that knowledge succeeded manufacturing. Maybe I'm a dreamer but I see hope here.
To conclude this post I'll address the point that Moat raised about the importance of face to face interaction in education, the going beyond the library, by linking to a couple of blog posts I wrote a few years ago. The first is on a Critique of Debate which along with its more civil cousin of "discussion" is behavior that spans the spectrum for online interaction. The second is on Dialogue and behaviors that support dialogue such as: suspension of judgement when listening and speaking, respect for differences, role and status suspension, balancing inquiry and advocacy, and to focus on learning. Extremely difficult and enough to try the patience of a saint. To come full circle David Bohm & Dialogue.
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