The Enspiral blog post reads like that of a clever high-school student
or undergraduate who could write well if pressed but who has been
indulged by her teachers. The result is a loose, chaotic, florid style
that hints at deep thoughts which aren't really there.
> I gather there is some element of deliberate intent in the
non-structured way
> this generation is writing. They want to get away from hierarchy, and as
> traditionally, information is organised either hierarchically or
relationally,
> they are trying to find another way.
That explains a lot. Is there an important message that we're just
struggling to understand? Like Christine, I read and re-read this post
and I don't think there is.
There is much gibberish like this:
> An allergy to the sensate nature of the idea of power can paralyze.
> ... to steward from this place of inverse fear
There are paragraphs organised as though a chain of reasoning is being
formed, but it's not clear what the subject of each sentence is or how
it relates to the sentences around it:
> Is this the only way we know to give space to the heretofore un-powerful
> Is this some sort of Tyranny of Structurelessness
> Or is it a midwifing process of letting go and letting come.
> Is it only redolent and recognized in those who have done the work
> or is it this weird passive-aggressive movement of the head and eyes
and slight wave of the hand as invocation to others to step into the space?
The rare times when the author states something clearly enough that you
can tell what she means, it's generally wrong:
> Leadership and power — there aren’t two more loaded words in the language
Of course there are.
There are non sequiturs that sound like the text of a failed Turing test
or computer-generated poetry:
> ... I am a leader, I meditate and listen to podcasts.
If this is intentionally non-structured 21st century writing, then it
looks very much like 20th century bad writing. In fact, it could slot
neatly into George Orwell's classic 1946 essay Politics and the English
Language.
Christine, you're intelligent, highly literate, positively disposed to
this subject, and motivated to read the post carefully. If you can't
grasp its importance it's because it's not important. If you can't make
sense of it it's because it makes no sense.
Stuart
On 7/11/2016 10:36 AM, Christine Kent wrote:
As most of you probably know, I am largely retired, but do still write a few training materials from time to time and I am not retired from trying to communicate with the population at large.
I am politically aware and follow many alternative ways of thinking about and doing things. One organisation I have been attempting to intellectually penetrate is a group called p2p which stands for peer to peer. It started as wiki collecting ways of thinking about computer networks, but grew into something that deals with how humans network and share information, and also possessions. A component of it is “The commons”. I very much approve of what it is trying to do in principle. If you look at the home page you will see how extensive it has become, covering almost every aspect of human endeavour, but in practice I find it inaccessible and impenetrable.
http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/
When I try to read much of the material published on the massive p2p wiki, even in my own areas of specialty, I get lost in words. I read the words, I re-read the words, I experiment with what I think the words may be talking about, and I can find no substance. It is all form – clever words – and no function. Or at least, that is how I perceive it. When I press the authors to give me examples of how their principles have panned out in practice, they tut tut patronisingly and assure me that one day I may understand. In other words, the problem is with the reader. Are they right? Has my brain deteriorated to mush, or are their words really just verbiage in those cases where they cannot be applied.
I raise this with this group because, as technical writers, we are very structured. Our most important skill is our ability to structure. But is it. Is the world changing? Several trainers of my own age I know – people in touch with students at this time, are saying that they are struggling to find a point of connection with the younger people they are training, who no longer seem to think the same way we do. To me, if I stop to analyse what they write, they are writing a collection of non-sequiturs and are not drawing out any relationship between these ideas. I try to fill in the gaps and find the connections between the non-sequiturs but cannot. The net result is that I can find no way of implementing the ideas. My inability to connect the non-sequiturs is apparently down to my own inadequacy and not inherent in what they are writing.
Consider this article. https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/power-1b3dce5f1d29#.jcxmd6fsb
It is published by this NZ group. http://enspiral.com/
It is regarded as being a valid component of the p2p wiki of p2p initiatives worldwide.
This subject is of concern to me because I have been writing training materials on creating innovative workplaces, that get the best out of all their workers by allowing their workers to be the best they can be. So this is something I have been pretty immersed in quite recently, and personally it is something I have dedicated a lifetime to, starting with being part of hippy communes in the 70s. How people do or don’t work together matters to me, particularly as I am absolutely incapable of working in a hierarchy. My livelihood used to depend on concealing that limitation for as long as I could. So I should be able to extract some practical meaning out of the article above, an article that is purporting to have designed a new form of working with others that is not hierarchical. But I cannot. I can extract a few disconnected ideas, but not a methodology that could be applied in the field.
I gather there is some element of deliberate intent in the non-structured way this generation is writing. They want to get away from hierarchy, and as traditionally, information is organised either hierarchically or relationally, they are trying to find another way.
So consider this site. https://redefineschool.com/about/
It is also about how to teach children to be collaborative and compassionate human beings (I think). Again I can read the words and watch the videos, and even extract one or two really good ideas from it. But it is a mess. Their attempt to bypass structure has made it horrifically inaccessible – to me.
I have always worked on the assumption that the brain, in order to store, and just as importantly, retrieve information, needs a structure within the brain to store it. Where we are bombarded with a mass of fractured ideas and given no structure to help us store them, do we find a way to store them anyway, or do these ideas get lost? In this second example, I think they are saying that they spend a year learning how to give themselves the space to be who they want to be, and another year learning how to create space for others. I think that is what they are saying because I have studied facilitation methodologies that specifically deal with how to grant yourselves and others “space”. So I grab the idea that I already have prior data on, and file this away in that filing cabinet. The rest of this website is lost to me.
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Now, the crux of what I am asking is - do communicators need to provide context and tie ideas into neat packages as we have always done, or is there a new brain out there that can somehow store, process and re-use unstructured data?
Cheers, Christine//
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