Hairy Eyeball on Echo Chambers and Rhetoric
“Echo chambers exist. If you don’t think so, subject yourself to the comments section of Little Green Footballs sometime, or watch some Fox News.And it takes some work to swim against this current. Classical rhetoric offers a solution: simply put, a well-considered opinion is one that anticipates possible counterarguments and prepares a response.”
Yup. Nod. Agree.
This is FANTASTIC! [Excuse the outburst, but I’m really, really excited by this]. You may know this already but it looks as though blogging isn’t really anything new. It’s the connected version of the Renaissance tradition called “commonplacing”. Here are some facts picked up so far …
What is commonplacing?
“Commonplacing is the act of selecting important phrases, lines, and/or passages from texts and writing them down; the commonplace book is the notebook in which a reader has collected quotations from works s/he has read. Commonplace books can also include comments and notes from the reader; they are frequently indexed so that the reader can classify important themes and locate quotations related to particular topics or authors.”
I don’t know about you, but in English classes I was always told to write like I speak, or “find my voice”. And yet when I was taught how to write formal documents e.g. essays I was taught to write in a certain structure, e.g introduction, paragraph, paragraph, conclusion. Unless I’m feeling exceptionally lucid, that just isn’t how I speak.
Jerry Weissman throws some light on this disconnect in quite an interesting (but awfully titled) article here on the use of left and right brain when presenting. [Thanks Jen for this]
Some quotes:
“Building a presentation is a creative process. That means starting with the right brain.Here’s the problem: Most presenters, when developing their stories, tend to apply a left-brain approach to what is really a right-brain process. They try to jump immediately to a logical, structured, linear end product, when their right brain is still caroming around in nonlinear mode.”
Heard a lovely true story yesterday. A grandmother, who shall remain nameless, was watching her granddaughter learn to write on lined paper. The little girl finished her sentence, proudly showed it off, and the grandmother congratulated her. Then she said:
“Now darling, turn over the paper and try writing across the lines. It doesn’t do to feel to bound by convention.”
I’m interested in what I guess would be called audioblogs. It would be a standard blog but with audio links. I went record hunting last weekend, and realised I was pretty much looking either at tracks I already knew or at compilations (with lots of things I already knew on them). And I thought an audioblog might have saved me some time …
That sort of thing. Does anyone know if there’s an easy way to do this in Movable Type? And (I’m assuming there are but I haven’t managed to find them) does anyone know of blogs already out there that do this?
[Update: Alf has left a v. helpful comment to get me started]
Nowadays, computer memory isn’t a problem. You could write for hour upon hour, and day upon day and still not fill up your hard drive. Even then, if you did run out of space - and if your fingers were still up to it - you could get more memory. No - nowadays, the problem is seen in terms of structuring that memory in useful ways. But a couple of recent posts have made me wonder whether, with respect to creativity, the sheer quantity of memory we can access makes everything harder.
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Very slow on this but RSS 2.0 feed is now available should you want it.
http://www.monkeymagic.net/blog/index.xml
I’m getting more and more convinced that the study of rhetoric has something to offer blogging, and more generally information retrieval. It seems to hit all the right notes: audience attention, structure, style, mood, content, authority. Even relevance. I suspect I’ll be posting a lot more on this but for the moment, here is Cicero’s five-part theory of rhetoric.
Inventio
Decide what you want to say. Think before you speak. (Don’t post gibberish)
Dispositio
Decide how you’re going to structure your message. The Classical way of structuring things had the following six steps.
1) Get the audience’s attention (headlines etc)
2) Tell them what you’re going to talk about (make sure the opening para is clear)
3) Tell them how you plan to treat the theme
4) Give the audience the content “hit”, one step at a time
5) Restate what you’ve said in brief
6) Conclude
[Reminiscent of journalism skills?]
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This
is a good thing. Harry Potter has been translated into Ancient Greek. Anything that gets more people studying the basics is fine by me 
LONDON (Reuters) - Harry Potter “Warrior Cup” and his enemy Voldemort “Scaly Death” in a translation of the schoolboy wizard’s adventures into Ancient Greek due for publication this summer.
Retired classics teacher Andrew Wilson told Reuters he had to stretch his linguistic ingenuity to turn J.K. Rowling’s magic boarding school fantasy into a language not used for 1,500 years.
Wilson, 64, was commissioned in January 2002 by publisher Bloomsbury to translate “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” into the Greek spoken in ancient Athens.
All I can say - and I loved translating Greek - is avoid the storytape
Bad news I think…
[Source: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409
John Porcaro posted after what sounded lie a hard day at the office (in this case the Marketing department at Microsoft), and got some great support.
a) Lucky fellow, and b) one of the comments was a gem:
“Your team should not just “listen” to customers, they should SYSTEMATICALLY listen to customers. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of anecdotes.”
For customers read blogs and I think it works equally well. You shouldn’t just “listen” to blogs, you should systematically listen to blogs. It’s one of those things that’s been nagging at me recently: I enjoy learning from other bloggers, and I love the serndipity of it all, but I feel I could be getting a lot more out of it. While some of that may come down to better tools, the like of which I can only imagine, my gut feeling is that at least as much comes down to a little more method on my part.
How to be more systematic? Lots of ways probably. Here, in no particular order, are a few that I’m going to try:
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Thinking about coffee houses led me, naturally, to thinking about tea breaks. The Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford have done some work on tea breaks and builders (DIYers specifically). It might be stretching things(!), but I think you can draw some interesting conclusions about about the secrets of successful groupwork from it.
1)Tea is social glue:
“Tea is a means to professional inclusion”, “I feel as if I’m part of the workforce if I’m drinking tea with them.”, “It’s a bonding thing. Everyone drinks tea, no matter what you are. So it brings everyone together.”
Equally, there is no gender divide when it comes to making tea. Putting the kettle on depends more on levels of activity than sex, with men more than happy to make tea “if it keeps her busy.” (As an aside, tea seems to have been socially neutral since its arrival in Britain. In the seventeenth century, while coffee houseswere chiefly for men (e.g. Lloyd’s of Bank of England fame) , tea was introduced as a drink for both men and women, of all classes.)
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Martin Dugage has posted on the four types of “knowledge behaviour”: torch, ladder, web and fortress. His own company seems to be heading towards a knowledge fortress, as far as I can make out.
This is no longer a period of peace - a time to learn together how to satisfy customers. This is a period of war - a time to execute orders from managers who already know what to do.
Please tell me I’m wrong.
Two things struck me about this.
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Interesting article here suggesting that sharing might not be as nice as it’s cracked up to be. [Hat tip to Circadian Shift]
Intriguingly, hungry chimps harassed their neighbour more when the food was cut into small chunks. This could reflect the fact that a beggar is more likely to get a handout if it doesn’t seriously deplete the donor’s stash.
Got me wondering whether the same applied to knowledge sharing. If it does, then presumably those most likely to share are those who feel they have a lot to spare. And they may not always be the experts.
Great article here in the Economist. More history than opinion, but some interesting stuff on the old “penny universities”. What’s especially striking is the number of parallels between coffee-houses and life on-line.
As with modern websites, the coffee-houses you went to depended on your interests, for each coffee-house attracted a particular clientele, usually by virtue of its location. Though coffee-houses were also popular in Paris, Venice and Amsterdam, this characteristic was particularly notable in London, where 82 coffee-houses had been set up by 1663, and more than 500 by 1700. Coffee-houses around the Royal Exchange were frequented by businessmen; those around St James’s and Westminster by politicians; those near St Paul’s Cathedral by clergymen and theologians. Indeed, so closely were some coffee-houses associated with particular topics that the Tatler, a London newspaper founded in 1709, used the names of coffee-houses as subject headings for its articles. Its first issue declared:All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment shall be under the Article of White’s Chocolate-house; Poetry, under that of Will’s Coffee-house; Learning, under…Grecian; Foreign and Domestick News, you will have from St James’s Coffee-house.
Comments(2) | Notes on coffee, flow, groups, History, information, social computing tea I’m not the most political animal on the planet, but does anyone know what’s happened to Saddam? As far as I can see he was found 6 weeks ago and that’s it. Shouldn’t we be being kept up to date with his whereabouts at least?
Have to Try and start proofing before posting … Literacy levels are getting embrassing …
New research has shown that multi-tasking is counterproductive. [via Timeris via Jennifer]. Knowledge workers typically bang away at their word processors, answer phones, talk to colleagues all pretty much at once, but they may be wasting hours every day by trying to do too many things at once. So how are we meant to deal with information overload then? Dealing with one task at a time isn’t particularly flexible. Well, the flipside of multi-tasking is interruption, and thankfully someone in the United States Navy is taking interruptions seriously.
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Ignoramus that I am, I’ve only just come across Relevance Theory. (If you’re as in the dark as I am, here’s a .doc handbook by Deirdre Wilson, one of its originators)
There’s a bundle more reading for me to do to get fully to grips with Relevance Theory, but one thing has caught my eye already: its definition of relevance.
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Have been having a look at Furl and del.icio.us. Both seem great little tools. And there’s a ton of commentary on their relative “under the hood” merits. The functionality seems to be slightly better in del.icio.us - but I’m going to choose furl.
The only reason? Because it seemed easier to get going with it. I’m not codeophobic but when someone else has done the hard work for you …
Watch that sidebar to see quite how much rubbish I’m talking 
[Update#1: Yup. Rubbish. Now I’m using del.icio.us here
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