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.
|
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
0439 979 483
