📑 And the word is?….

4 responses on “📑 And the word is?….”

1. Many argue that something is not right with social media as it currently stands. This post explores what it might mean to make Twitter great again?

   Responding to Jack Dorsey’s call for suggestions on how to improve Twitter, Dave Winer put forward two suggestions: preventing trolling and making changes. Some of the particulars Winer shares include giving control over who can reply, eliminate character count and allow organisations to curate lists. Although I agree with Winer about some of these changes, I wonder if the answer to improving Twitter is always to make Twitter great again?
   I feel the ways I use Twitter have changed considerably this year. My one word this year has been ‘intent’. A part of this is being more aware of my ‘prosumption’ online. One of my concerns is that Twitter is not the Twitter it once was for me. In short, it feels like there has been an increase in branding, as epitomised by ASCD’s recent spotlight on edu-twitter influencers. There has also been a rise in hostility and abuse. Some of which is automated, some of which perpetuated by crowds.

   Although I have not wiped my account and started again, as Anil Dash did, I definitely started reviewing my practice and participation there. To be fair, my participation on Twitter has taken many guises over time. In the past it was the place where I shared ideas and connected the dots. The problem I found was that although I could dive back into my archive, it was far from organised. If this was my ‘outboard brain’ (as it had seemingly become) it had become rather chaotic. Initially, I adjusted things to syndicate to Twitter using Dave Winer’s Radio3 linkblog platform. I then moved to sending from my own site, however this did not feel right.
   I wondered why I was actually sharing on Twitter (and every other site, such as Google+ and Tumblr), especially after reading Ben Werdmüller’s reflection on POSSE. Maha Bali suggests that sharing is a reciprocal act:

   Giving means bringing something to gift to others … whereas sharing means reciprocity … you bring something of yours to give some to others, but others also bring some of theirs to give you, whether immediate or over time.

   If this is so then isn’t it enough to share via my blog and rely on pingbacks and webmentions for reciprocity? As Kicks Condor describes:

   I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web.

   Posting on Twitter therefore lacked purpose, contributing to something I did not feel comfortable with. As I have elaborated on in the past:

   Often it is presumed that sharing out links and continuing the conversation is always a good thing. However, at some point it can become too much of a good thing. The effort and intention to connect and engage in this situation has the opposite effect.

   I also thought that if these links were for me then why not simply post them on my own site, what Greg McVerry describes as a social media of one. Posting on Twitter has now become about sharing if there was actually someone in particular that I felt might be interested and that was my main point on contact.
   Some have found Mastodon to be the social answer to Twitter’s ills. This is something Doug Belshaw has written about in the past. However, I have never found a place. In part I agree with Ben Werdmuller, who suggested that:

   Mastodon doesn’t suffer from the organizational issues I described above, but by aping commercial social networking services, it suffers from the same design flaws.

   Associated with this, I have tried to engage with Micro.Blog, but feel frustrated by the technological constraints. I love the use of RSS, but personally use my headings for too much to give them up and have yet to crack open the code as John Johnston has.

   In the song Miss Those Days, Jack Antonoff sings about pining for the past:

   I know I was lost, but I miss those days.

   I think this conundrum captures the desire to return to what Kicks Condor has described as a weird Twitter. Although I was not tgere for the weirdest of times I remember my early days of anxiety and axiliration, of constant notifications, questions and check-ins. This is epitomised by Craig Kemp’s image of addiction:

   Although I never set alarms, there was a time when it encompassed a lot of what I did. I do not regret that time, but it is not necessarily something that I miss. My fast food social media diet has been replaced by one managed around blogs, feeds and comments. I do sometimes feel I miss out on some things, but trust that if I need to know something that I will probably capture through some other means.
   What I am left most intrigued by is how my thinking has changed since I started talking with Dr. Ian Guest about this topic. Ironically, I think that his investigation inadvertently spurred my own inquiry. The ever present flanogropher.

   NOTE: This post has sat in my drafts brewing for a few months. It involved a range of research. I apologise if it is inconsistent or incoherent, it is a topic that I have been really grappling with. I would love to know if anybody else has any thoughts. As always, comments and webmentions welcome.
   Also posted on IndieNews

   If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.Share this:EmailRedditTwitterPocketTumblrLinkedInLike this:Like Loading…
   
   Let’s Make Twitter Great Again? – A Reflection on a Social Media of One by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

   Reply

2. Reflecting on my year in space last year and my theme of ideas for the new year.

   For a few years now, inspired by Kath Murdoch, I have been choosing a word to focus on each year. Last year I made a change, where rather than thinking about outcomes, I instead turned to inquiry.

   Inspired by a few reflections, I wondered if maybe I was approaching it all the wrong way? Rather than having something with explicit or implied outcomes, maybe I needed a new approach, one focused on an open-ended concept? Although Kath Murdoch talks about nudging you along a path, maybe the nudge that matters most is an inquiring mind?

   Aaron Davis https://readwriterespond.com/2020/02/my-one-word-for-2020-is-space/

   https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks@1/quoteback.js

   This is something that CGP Grey touches upon with the idea of a yearly theme that is ‘broad, directional and resonant’. Although this focus may not have a direct impact on my work and relationships, for me it helps keep me focused when life becomes so busy.

   Last year I explored space. After my focus on flânerie, I had wondered about the space that helps make such practices possible. I had a heap of books I intended to jump into, such as The Production of Space and Assemblage Theory. However, then the COVID-19 hit and ironically changed the space. Instead, my collected reflections seemed to became about online learning, remote work and social distancing.

   Still thinking about some of these things, I felt that an interesting theme to dwell on was the notion of ideas. Here then are some of my initial thoughts:

   History of ideas: How are ideas developed over time?Ideas in space and time: What is the impact of context on ideas?Bad ideas, good ideas and the way ideas produce other ideas: What is the difference between good and bad?Musical ideas: What does it mean to have an original idea in music?Assemblages and ideas: What is an idea and how does this differ from an assemblage?Creating the space for ideas to fester: What are the conditions required for ideas to prosper?Ideas and manifestos: What is the difference between an idea and an ideal?

   So my journey continues from capacity to communication to intent to flânerie to space to ideas. Appreciate any thoughts or ideas about resources on the theme of ideas.

   If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.Share this:EmailRedditTwitterPocketTumblrLinkedInLike this:Like Loading…
   
   My One Word for 2021 is Ideas by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

   Reply

3. Inspired by Kath Murdoch, I have long had an approach of selecting one word as a focus for the year. Last year, my word was ‘ideas‘. I think I had the idea that I would dig into different ideas. I started off reading Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. Although this started many threads, life got in the way to tying any of them together. The year subsequently became a collection of beginnings:

   Once you start grasping how deeply we are products of our time, you can almost invert the idea of genius. Maybe the genius isn’t so much in the inventor as in the age. When an idea’s time is ripe, maybe that idea is just gonna happen: The voltage is so strong it’ll course through several different people at once.

   Clive Thompson https://marker.medium.com/who-was-first-with-a-big-idea-its-often-hard-to-know-d64291cea550

   It’s great starting a project when you’re limited to these instruments and limited to this scale, and you’re working out what can you do with it rather than just, you know, everything being possible. I like to know what I can’t do and then work inside that.

   Alex Ross https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/how-jonny-greenwood-wrote-the-years-best-film-score

   In Graeber’s classroom, such questions of status had little weight. Even the big-name theorists he discussed — in Graeber’s telling, “they were just dudes,” said Durba Chattaraj. One of his Ph.D. students at Yale, she remembers lectures speckled with the personal foibles of the greats. Apart from the entertainment value, there was a message: These thinkers “were smart, but they were doing something that anybody can do if they read enough and think hard enough, which is creating theories about the world around you.”

   Molly Fischer https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-of-everything.html

   The vaccine against monoculture is tolerance.

   Edward Snowden https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/culturalrevolutions

   Many think of punk as a style or a category or a thing, but it’s much more interesting if you think of it as a process, a way of doing things, a disposition, a spirit.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/11/03/punk-is-not-a-style-punk-is-a-spirit/

   CP: What always saves me is that someone will tell me a story, and I’ll spin this other story as a way of escaping that pain. No drug has ever got me as high as a good idea. You get that idea and, oh my gosh, you’ve got nothing else. You don’t need oxygen. That idea is meth. You don’t need sleep and you don’t need food. Because that idea is going to run you for a year. That little idea is your armor and it’s your savior.

   BLVR: I get that. The little idea is better than drugs because it has an engine.

   https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-chuck-palahniuk/

   Art, by definition, is artifice. It’s fake. It’s not “real” in the sense that a sunset is real, or a trout or a pomegranate. Art is a work crafted with calculation, forethought, and skill to create either the simulacrum of something real (a painting of a sunset, say) or to express an insight into, or attempt to bring order out of, nature or the experience of life.

   https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/12/art-and-authenticity/

   There are endless arguments to be had when new ideas arrive. The challenge is in being clear that we’re about to take a side, and to do it on the effects, not on our emotional connection to the change that’s involved.

   @ThisIsSethsBlog https://seths.blog/2021/09/defending-change-or-the-status-quo/

   Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/08/12/what-to-do-with-your-feelings/

   Feedback is oxygen for your ideas. It will help them grow and get stronger, starved of it, and your ideas weaken.

   @tombarrett https://edte.ch/blog/2021/08/15/feedback-is-oxygen-for-your-ideas%e2%80%8a-%e2%80%8astart-with-a-minimum-verbal-prototype/

   Those of us back here in reality must work together to enact a Gentle Awakening for our friends and loved ones who have gotten addicted to this video game. There is no man behind the curtain, no secret cabal controlling our destinies, no marvelous or nefarious plan driving Covid, vote counting, or global affairs. They need to awaken to something way way more frightening than politicians eating children: shit just happens, no one is in charge, and chaos reigns. There really is no scapegoat — never was. The only way through is to find ways of coming together, instead.

   One step, and one day at a time.

   Douglas Rushkoff https://gen.medium.com/plunging-into-the-abyss-dbb898faa144

   This sets pragmatic genealogies apart from evolutionary psychology’s conjectural depictions of hominin life in the Pleistocene. Pragmatic genealogies prove themselves not through the detailed accuracy with which they depict the actual historical development of our concepts, but through the way in which they help us grasp connections between our practical needs and our concepts. Imagine having to explain to an alien why your car has the shape it does. Instead of painstakingly walking the alien through the stages of the assembly line on which the car was actually constructed, you could explain how its shape answers to a combination of practical needs: the need to move from A to B, the need to stay warm and dry, the need to steer and brake, the need to have a good view of your surroundings, the need to see and be seen in the dark, etc. The best way to show how the car’s shape is responsive to our needs isn’t to work through the distractingly intricate causal process through which the car was actually constructed, but to reconstruct the car’s shape as a response to a series of needs – perhaps through a narrative or an animation showing how, if we start from some primitive shape and successively warp it to meet a series of needs, we end up with something recognisably car-like. The State of Nature does the same to help us understand the shape of our concepts and their relation to our needs. It offers us an idealised, uncluttered model that we can tailor to our interests and tinker with in our imagination.

   aeonmag https://aeon.co/essays/our-most-abstract-concepts-emerged-as-solutions-to-our-needs

   Ideas only travel as far as the minds ready and willing to take them in.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/06/22/bad-ideas-get-stolen-plenty/

   One way to define our identity is to fall in love with an idea (often one that was handed to us by a chosen authority). Another is to refuse to believe our identity is embodied in an idea, and instead embrace a method for continually finding and improving our ideas.

   @ThisIsSethsBlog https://seths.blog/2021/05/identity-and-ideas/

   Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:

   Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books.

   Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.

   https://austinkleon.com/2021/03/29/books-that-suck-you-in-and-books-that-spin-you-out/

   In the end, I actually ended up committing myself to a return to reading (or listening to books). In part for ideas, but really for solace.

   Therefore, having felt like 2021 was something of a right-off in regards to achieving my own desired outcomes, I was not sure about 2022. Like Austin Kleon, I feel dormant. I therefore thought having a focus was not a priority. I thought then that instead of having a word with particular outcomes perceived, I would instead return to a meditation on a theme or topic.

   One of the strange things about the current malaise is that I feel like I both have too much time to think and too little time to do anything. Listening to Damian Cowell’s podcast associated with his album involving diving into his early years, I was led down my own rabbit hole. Associated with this, I started reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This only furthered my reflections on the past. I therefore decided that my word for 2022 would be memories.

   Whether it be reading more memoirs, such as Tony Martin’s Lolly Scramble, writing reflections of my own, such as my post on Changing Tracks, or simply diving into the idea of memories in general. I am going to dedicate this year to letting go of setting stringent expectations on myself and commit myself to letting my mind just wonder. Start often, finish rarely?

   So what about you? Have you got a word or any thoughts on memory. As always, comments welcome.

   If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.
   
   My One Word for 2022 is Memories by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

   Reply

4. Something happened today that led me to finally write this reflection on my ‘one word‘ for 2023, I accidentally marked all my posts in Inoreader as read. This in itself might not seem like much, but for so long my RSS feeds have been the dots that have seemingly helped me make sense. I have worked tirelessly over the years to collate my list. Yet, lately, something has not quite seemed the same. Althought I had seemingly given up keeping on top of my feed, I was still going through every now and then to flick left and right. However, after clearing my lists, that is no more.

   It feels like so many have spoken about quitting Twitter of late and moving to Mastodon. That is fine. However, I think there has been a bigger change in the social media space for me beyond the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. Although with a focus on RSS I may not be constricted by the usual templated restrictions associated with social media, I have come to feel that my habit of staying on top of my feeds has come to serve as its own sort of restriction.

   For nearly seven years I have maintained my Read Write Respond newsletter. This involved reviewing all ‘my dots‘ across the month to identify the key points. This served as a regular point of reflection. Although there have been changes in that time, such as including quotes, a focused section, extending the summaries, writing a monthly update, over the time I feel that the dots and habit itself have somehow come to take more precedence than the greater purpose that they were meant to serve. I was intrigued by a comment that Ian O’Byrne wrote about his newsletter:

   Each week I write a love letter to the Internet. You can subscribe here. Spoiler alert!!! It’s not all good.Considering the Post-COVID Classroom | Dr. Ian O’Byrne

   I had long described my newsletter as:

   My newsletter of ideas and information associated with all things education, mined and curated for me and shared with you.

   I just wondered if this really mattered anymore? A few years ago I wrote a piece on ‘becoming informed’:

   I would argue then it is a constant state of becoming more informed. In an ever changing world, with goals forever moving, it is a case where we can never quite be fully informed.Secret, Safe and Informed: A Reflection on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the Collection of Data | Aaron Davis

   Although I still agree with this, I wonder if the real challenge is learning to live in a world where you do not and cannot know everything? I feel that my newsletter had become my means of trying to control the present, rather than admitting that it is ok to not know that latest update regarding artificial intelligence or whatever it maybe. This is not to say that artificial intelligence is not important, but that maybe in trying to stay informed about everything, you never really know anything.

   So to return to the beginning of this piece, for a few years now, I have been choosing one word as a focus for the year. As the new year comes and I am not sure what the new word will be, I always feel there is something that stands out. This year, the word that stood out was ‘vulnerability’. This was solidified while reading Nick Cave’s Faith Hope and Carnage. I was struck by Cave’s discussion of vulnerability and the willingness to being open to failure:

   It’s not so much the creative impulse itself that is so compelling, but rather doing something that feels challenging and vulnerable and new, whether that is ceramics or a different-sounding record or The Red Hand Files, the In Conversation events, Cave Things, this book, whatever. There is a risk involved that generates a feeling of creative terror, a vertiginous feeling that has the ability to make you feel more alive, as if you are hotwired into the job in hand, where you create, right there, on the edge of disaster. You become vulnerable because you allow yourself to be open to failure, to condemnation, to criticism, but that, as I think the Stoics said, is what gives you creative character. And that feeling of jeopardy can be very seductive.Faith, Hope and Carnage | Nick Cave | Page 224

   I think that over time I have become wedded to the present, rather than opening myself up to going deeper into various ideas. Therefore, some of the ways that I envisage being more vulnerable include:

   Putting my newsletter on hiatus.Write for myself and when I can, rather than feeling I have to.Reviewing the dots and feeds that I consume, accepting that sometimes it is ok to miss out.Read more books and get deeper into ideas, a return to responding.

   As always, please let me know if you have any further suggestions.

   If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.
   
   My One Word for 2023 is Vulnerability by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

   Reply