QUOTE(Somey @ Tue 3rd October 2006, 11:50pm)
QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Tue 3rd October 2006, 10:01pm)
I tried to start a more nuanced discussion of the communication process involved in this situation under the heading of
Transversality : Communication Across Levels Of Experience, but the Citizendium Forum quickly degenerated into a techie chat room with no real dialogue on core social issues.
Well, this is really the crux of the matter, isn't it? These are fundamentally
social issues, not technological ones, and technological solutions to social issues can only take you so far. (And in many cases, they can make bad situations worse.) ...
Yes, it's social. It may even be biological, to judge from the persistence of it. Observations that I made this summer indicate that the behaviors in question may transcend species:
From:
QUOTE
I think that too many people who talk the wiki talk are fixated on (1st) the content that they wish to create, and (2nd) the technology that they wish to use to create it, when it’s really that (3rd) thing, the group dynamics of the people who aim to use (2) for the making of (1), that always takes the whole biz down the tubes qwikier than 1, 2, 3.
Here's a little allegory that I recently wrote on that very subject:
Humming, All Too Humming
Every Spring we hang a clear red plastic globe — shaped and colored vaguely reminiscent of a large translucent strawberry, with yellow plastic flower-portals on a subtended green plastic calyx — on a cast-iron scrollwork post in our rose garden, and we fill it full of sugar water on a biweekly basis. Now, the instincts of hummingbirds are clearly plastic enough that they go right to it and sup the refined sugar nectar from where it wells up in the faux-flower ports. But the funniest thing, and it cracks us up all Summer long into Fall as we peek through the bay window that peeps out over the roses, is this — there's more sugar water in a single filling of that globe than the whole gang of hummers in the 'hood could possibly consume in a month, and yet their instincts are not so plastic that they'll ever leave off blustering and dogfighting and just plain enjoy the mix. Moral of the Story? Ay, there's the rub.
Jonny
This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 4th October 2006, 2:10pm
On the Nature and Sources of Expertise, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Wiki Systems
Wed 4th October 2006, 1:26pm
