Category: Culture

Below is my response to David Weinberger relating to his latest newsletter that talks about the depressing cultural effect of relativism.

David, regarding relativism, are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? You’ve just explained in logical depths why our current way of thinking now is so flawed (which I fully agree with) but you haven’t mentioned anything about this new way of thinking that the Internet is giving us, that I think is becoming more and more prevalent with each passing day.

I agree that our current culture is flawed because our current way of thinking is emphasizing the wrong values within it. And yet this wrongness you spoke of is something that I think we all feel now and again. We can’t explain it but we feel it deep down inside of us every once in a while. I think we know these values feel wrong though because we are comparing them to the right values that are still in the back of our hearts and minds.

You spoke of words like truth and trust. Aren’t these values that we are told as child to pursue? And don’t these values feel right to us even without being told? They just feel right. Yet as we grow up, these values get pushed back into the recesses of our hearts and minds because those values often don’t work in real life if you want to “succeed” and in turn make money to be able to live. It doesn’t mean that we still don’t value them, its just that they get pushed back by all of these wrong values instead and thus they don’t get accessed as often.

You spoke about diversity and valuing life. Well if you value diversity then you value all life because every single person, no matter who they are, adds to this diversity. Why is diversity important? Because it allows us to collectively solve common problems and do things which a single rigid way of thinking may fail to overcome or take forever to achieve. These many small diverse thoughts, viewpoints, and approaches that the world contains, actually are a benefit because it allows the world as a collective of loosely joined and diverse people to overcome and achieve things together much faster and efficiently than before. Nature is a perfect example of this approach as it has been noted that after a fire those areas of a forest with the most diversity often recover much sooner than other less diverse areas. And hell look at the way natural selection itself works with its multiple diverse approaches to achieving a common goal of survivability for the entire species.

Now do you want to know the really weird thing that I noticed when defining some of these cultural values that feel right to me? I noticed that these values in themselves were not just a collective of small pieces loosely joined that formed an encompassing culture but, more importantly, they seemed to be interdependent upon one another. I found that when you mention one value or trait, another one is often there waiting on the side to connect with it. I mean if I say that I’m an open and honest person, what other values immediately pop into your head? The reverse is also true of these wrong cultural values. If I say that I am dishonest and closed minded, again what other values immediately pop into your head?

And finally, yes, I did mean to repeat the word “feel” so many times above. You see for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why I felt more connected offline, away from the computer, than online supposedly connected with millions of people. It wasn’t until I looked at my question and noted that single word “feel” (i.e. why don’t I feel connected?) that the answer came to me. I believe that it is our feelings and emotions that help us to connect with one another as people. I mean isn’t that what the Web is supposed to be really about? The things that we care about? And isn’t caring a feeling that allows us to connect with others?

Yes, conversations are an important aspect of the Web but they are just the medium to relay these emotions and feelings. Without them, you’re only getting unemotional factual information in the story or conversation that can be as interesting as someone telling you about going to the corner store to get some milk. Who cares? Yet, if you instill those stories with emotions and feelings, like the stories told by those during 9/11, you can’t help but to feel connected with those people and care about them because we all as a diverse group of people share these same certain emotions. Now let’s go back to the milk story. Turns out in getting the milk, the person avoided dying in 9/11. Now how interesting would the details of that story be to you now, how does it make you feel, and how does it connect you to the person? We need to instill more emotion in everything we do. And isn’t that what passion (the number one thing businesses want in their employees) is all about? We can even include our emotions in the technology that we create by cultivating it with these same cultural values that “feel” right to us. Just look at how the Web works and you’ll discover those cultural values that feel right to us, already embedded within it.

In closing, I just want to relay a question that I asked myself a while back that I think sums up this emotional battle that is going on inside of every one of us everyday between this wrongness and rightness of values. The question actually relates quite well to your mention of this culture’s depressing and deadening relativism that seems to stifle our emotions and prevents us from feeling.

“Are you dying to feel alive?”

BTW you may be wondering if we already have these right values in us, why are we not using them instead of the wrong values. It is because culture itself is an environment that we are within. That environment influences and effects us on a daily basis. However, as I discovered myself in the past, a culture can be changed and defined by the people within it as well. And in changing that culture, it will in turn change and influence others within it. However, for us to redefine our culture as a whole, it would require an enormous collective effort on many people’s part to achieve this “tipping point” of change. I believe this buildup of change is already happening though. To see it, you only need to start looking for the ever growing number of conversations by people relaying their emotional feelings about the things that they care about and value. Then just start collecting the common values that they keep talking about and you’ll have the values of your new culture which interesting enough equates quite closely to that of the Web.

I just realized that both of my visions that I mentioned in the past, about forests and streams, both relate to one another. We are represented by the forest and our conversations are represented by the streams that flow through the forest. Our conversations sustain us and help us grow just like the streams sustain the forest and help it grow.

I was just reminded that when I was applying for jobs in the past, I always tried to speak from the heart and tell my story to let the company know who I was and what I cared about (besides the obvious stuff of what I had done and could do for them). Anyways, I’m thinking that I’m kind of missing that. Telling my story that is. I mean I’m talking about my ideas galore on this site but I’m not really talking about me (even though my name is plastered at the top of the site). I think I’ll have to change that in the near future as I’ve always been harping about the importance of emotion in writing to help connect people. Without it, you’re just writing factual information that can be as exciting as blogging about going to the corner store for some milk. “Ya, and they even had skim milk too! It was amazing!”

Wild. I just had this wonderful vision. I saw this small village and through the middle of it ran a river. Everyday the people of the village went down to the river to gather water, wash their clothes, or to travel to other villages further down the river. Throughout the day, all of these people near or on the river all talked and had conversations with one another. And when they talked, I saw their conversations flowing from their mouths and going from village to village just like the river flowed between them. What I became aware of was that not only did the river sustain the people but so to did their flow of conversations as well.

Synchronicity? I’m not really sure. I wanted to talk about the importance of promoting a culture of openness and guess what I read on Dave’s Scripting News this morning. A lengthy post about how his interaction (or lack thereof) with companies who are not promoting openness (but instead the typical old business approach of control and exclusivity) left him feeling detached from those companies and not really wanting to have a relationship with them or share anything with them again. Who were these companies? One was Microsoft (which probably won’t suprise a lot of people) and the other was Google (which probably will surprise some people).

All I can say is that obviously a change of culture is occurring at Google. The small personable culture that everyone assumed they had is slowly disappearing and being replaced by that familiar old business culture that we’ve seen in other larger corporations. The following quote taken from their website is proof enough of this change (although I’m wondering how Danny Sullivan got it because Google has an Iron Curtain around their Zeitgeist Conference site and you can only get in with a password).

All speeches and discussions at Zeitgeist are off the record. To ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly, no press coverage or blogging is permitted.

The hilarious thing about this quote is that it sounds like they are trying to promote openness (i.e. “ensure that our presenters and attendees can speak openly”) when in fact they are promoting control, closure, and exclusivity as Dave mentioned. I mean what is so open about, what sounds like, a bunch of fearful zealots huddling within a fortress speaking in secret so that no one can attack them (and question their motives in the press or in the blogosphere). Or are you trying to tell me that when these presenters speak on the record they are not speaking openly and truthfully about things because they can’t? Either way you word this, it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth and doesn’t make you want to trust these people very much or have a relationship with them.

Businesses need to start waking up and realizing that every action they do (and don’t do) defines their culture. That culture they are defining is in turn influencing and affecting others who come in contact with it. If that culture counteracts the culture that others are trying to promote with their own actions then those people will not want to interact with you because they won’t want to interact with the culture that you are promoting. In a nutshell, you can talk all you want about how great a culture your company has but those interacting with you will define that culture by your actions not words.

For example, by relaying most of my thoughts on this site (even the ones I’m not sure about) anyone can take them and build off of them. Potentially this allows groups of people to collaborate and collectively solve problems or discover solutions which may not have been possible before with just one person. By sharing my thoughts and by being open with them, I’m giving them out in the hopes that we can all become stronger through our shared knowledge.

Of course my focus is on creating a better world, not making craploads of money. Therein lies the problem I think. When people start talking money, that’s when the walls are built, fear starts to spread, and people start whispering their ideas behind closed doors. That’s when the old culture of business begins to clamp down on things. When you talk about changing the world though, borders are broken, hope is spread, and people start shouting their ideas from their rooftops to as many people as they can reach.

We need to promote this open culture because it is the culture that every good relationship is built upon. It is the culture of the world.

I’m exhausted and ready to hit the sack but I just had another thought that I wanted to get down before I forget. The more I think about what I’d like to achieve here with this idea of connected communities the more I realize that technology alone won’t achieve this. These are my exact same thoughts I had before when I spoke of businesses trying to blog. I said that just because you are using blogging software isn’t doesn’t mean you are blogging. Spewing out a business press release on a blog isn’t going to make your business look and sound any better, no matter how you package it. For the change to occur it has to come from inside of your company. In other words, it isn’t so much a technological change as much as a cultural change that needs to take place. And as difficult as that technological change is to undertake, the cultural change will be ten times harder. That is why so many companies just don’t get it and, more importantly, don’t want to get it. They don’t want to accept the cultural change which will totally change how their business will work and operate.

So what am I talking about when I speak of a cultural change? Well, I hinted at this before in my post entitled I Work For The Web where I said that “I work for a daring, imaginative, adventurous, sharing, caring, diverse, open, trusting, honest, flexible, responsible, and connected company.” I’m talking about how the Web works and also the type of company I’d like to work for. If you break down those traits and look at them closely, they’ll show you a way for groups of people to work collectively together as equals on shared goals to achieve things that we never dreamed possible before. More than anything, this type of culture breeds passion, something that every Fortune 500 company dreams of creating in their employees because of the efficiency and productivity it creates. But that’s the problem with these companies again. They just don’t get it. You can’t force passion into a person. It has to grow from within them. Their surroundings, the culture of the company that they are immersed within, will help that passion to breed and grow. Therefore to breed this passion, you need to literally change the culture of your company and effectively alter how you work and operate.

Now the thing to realize is that I’m not just talking about businesses here, I’m talking about any organizational structure in our society, be it business, political, whatever. In effect, yes I’m talking about a new way of working and collaborating with one another. Pretty radical to some I’m sure but not as radical when you think about it. I’ve already seen hints of this change underway and groups of people in organizations and businesses already working in this general direction (and talking about it). Over time I think we’ll start seeing more and more of it. As usual, change often doesn’t happen overnight but is like a snowball rolling down a hill, building slowly up until at the last minute it comes out of nowhere and bowls you over! 🙂

And now if I tell you that my psuedo name that I use when playing online is “Gentle Nova”, maybe you’ll understand why I called myself that. You see, yes, change is constant but it may not always be evident. Yet if you stop and listen, more often than not you’ll feel the ground gently rumbling beneath your feet and see the signs of it as it approaches from across the horizon. By then you’d better brace yourself though, because once it arrives there’s no stopping it. 🙂