c.Figallo

Archive for June, 2009

I once helped create a community where we agreed to start everything from scratch. In Monopoly, they say “return to Go,” and that’s what we did in terms of both the social and physical manifestations of our living situation. We agreed to invent our own village and our own infrastructure. We borrowed from models that we knew were archetypes – houses, roads, water systems, communications – and we built them, using “pre-owned” materials and equipment, according to our own idea of what local economy and self government should or could be. We were true “amateurs” – lovers of whatever technology and practices we could adopt.

We made plenty of mistakes, of course; none of us had ever done such an audacious and difficult thing in our entire young lives. And, as we discovered our mistakes, we made corrections. It was slow work. We had no formula or method for iterative lifestyle development. We didn’t have the luxury of funding for planning and r&d, so we had to live with our errors, sometimes, for years. Looking back on those years, most of us can see where we went off track, but it’s too late now for do-overs. The community disbanded for the most part in 1983.

In 1986 I began managing an online group discussion system called the WELL. Again, we were a group of people with some basic resources to share and work with. Instead of land, we had disk space. Instead of saws and tractors we had UNIX and a database program that structured our conversations and privileges. And, again, we were starting from scratch, inventing our own community. But in this case, we could make mistakes and fix them almost instantly, at least in some cases. It took us a couple years to be able to afford to replace the original CPU, which was ill-suited to multi-user sessions. But in terms of improving the features of our online social environment, we could make changes pretty quickly. As newcomers to what was then known as Cyberspace, we were amazed at the malleability of our digital village. And that was just the beginning, whcn a relative few were able to work socially in a software universe.

We tend to get jaded when we spend much of our time on the Web, but if you think about it, we have become acclimated to iterative culture. Our way of relating to one another through this collection of media relies on tools and conventions that are constantly under beta test. No platform, no user interface, is a finished product. Either because of competitive business pressure or the hacker imperative, every product – from the most successful to the striving to be successful – is constantly in flux.

Iterative culture is adaptive, though much of that adaptation may be ill-founded. Not every attempt to enhance, replace or invent offers us practical improvement. Not every brilliant idea gets noticed and adopted by a critical mass of users. There is wasted energy and creativity, and not every successful (in terms of mass adoption) product is the best of breed. But the overall trend of frenetic creativity is a good and necessary thing. Humanity needs this rather than any form of complacency. Looming over us are challenges that demand strong social invention muscles.

Iterative culture demands that many of us buy in and be part of it. If, indeed, the entire Web is a beta test, we are all beta testers, so we should be cognizant of our role and contribute at least a bit to the feedback that is necessary to follow paths to improvement. We have not, by any means, reached the promised land. Our economic system needs a radical overhaul, as do our political and environmental systems. These are much bigger challenges than getting hundreds of millions of users onto Facebook.  But participating in iterative culture on the Web is good practice for a time when iterative culture comes to our regions and neighborhoods.

Like learning to fly an airplane on a computerized flight simulator, we can make mistakes with little damage on the Web, while we learn what it’s like to collaborate on the design and function of our social environment. Resilient communities where we actually live may require a lot more collaborative skills than we are currently exercising. We need the practice.

Many in the Twitterverse are transfixed today by the uprising in Iran following the contested presidential election there. Suddenly, an online platform has become a window into national drama with international implications. Twitter – a technology invented in the U.S. – has become the reporting channel from within a dictatorship out to the rest of the world.

A similar information wave rose up in China around the protests that peaked in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. Then the technology being used was USENET, a pre-Web messaging network that a few academically based computers and modem-connected computers could access to reach the world outside of China.

It’s when leading edge technologies play key roles in world-changing events that we tend to notice the power they have in affecting human life on the planet. This was also the case immediately following the tsunami of 2004 when photos and videos of the event and its aftermath were distributed around the world.

We are amazed and grateful when our digital inventions plug us in to big events and movements. In between those episodes, many of us may find the latest communications technologies to be useful, helpful, handy and entertaining, but we don’t seem to be able to use them to generate change on the scale that we see in crisis-driven usage.

The technology is more difficult to employ impressively in the causative direction than in the effective direction.

We face what could prove to be a global scale crisis from a combination of economic and political trends combined with the impacts of global warming. We could mobilize millions of people to a degree of intensity comparable to that happening in Tehran for the purpose of preventing or at least mitigating these crises. But the social use of technology has not reached that level of sophistication.

Crisis first. Then exemplary use of technology. We need to learn how to reverse this order of things.

With humans, community is only there when the intention to make it so is being exercised. Community is a survival mechanism, but it shouldn’t be hard to swallow, like nasty tasting medicine.

You might think of a community of plants or of wildlife in an ecosystem and yes, that does translate across to humans, but much more is expected of us. We can choose to form communities.

Most of us live, now, as transients and transplants. We haven’t stayed put, developing longitudinal relationships over time and through changes.

Most of us have not had occasion to bond with our immediate or town-level neighbors through an event or notable incident. We may know these people in passing or through our kids, but how many of us have worked in a civic spirit to make tangible changes in our home communities?

Community is an awareness, a sense not unlike to the one we feel toward family. It’s an extension of ourselves as individuals and – if developed – it brings an extra layer of comfort, like another blanket over us on a cool night.

Where there is no community, no one cares. Maybe somebody cares, but the rest pay no attention.

Robert Putnam wrote about the erosion of community and the social capital that active community generates in Bowling Alone. I see the need for a reawakening of community spirit and awareness in the increasing dependence we have on our localities. The relocalization movement is beginning to build, but it requires a sense of community if it is to take hold.

Communities take root with a core of true believers whose commitment and persistence make things happen and draw attention. These core groups should be in communication, learning from one another and providing mutual support. Such a network is something I’m working on.

With this first post, I begin pulling together my scattered interests and activities into a single, integral Cliff Figallo. Gradually, other outlets of my rambling will wither and biodegrade into the bandwidth.

It’s true, though, that like many, I’m deeply interested in a wide variety of things – climate change, sustainability, helping veterans, helping farmers, wilderness, experimenting with new software and gadgets, taking photos. But those can and will be covered through this single personal blog, which hopefully will prove useful and interesting to others.

There’s probably enough about me on the About page for you to decide if I’m worth reading.

The most important things happening through the web are productive conversations. Everything else is tinsel. I will try hard to avoid hanging any tinsel here.