Andreas Jungherr. 2012. “Spannende Ergänzung.” move moderne verwaltung 10(2): 30-33.

This is a very good natured book on how to approach academic writing. The simplest, while probably also the hardest, advice Silvia offers is to stick to a regular writing schedule instead of trusting the spur of the moment or the occasional inspiration to provide writing impulses. To this recovering binge writer this seems to be very sound advice, indeed. The upbeat prose and some practical tips for the journal submission process makes this a very agreeable and helpful read.

Clay Shirky (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Aged. The Penguin Press: New York.

There seems to be a pattern with me and books by Clay Shirky. I see the talk, like the basic idea and leave it at that, only to return a few months later to actually read the book and find much of value there. This was true for “Here Comes Everybody” and it’s also true this time around for “Cognitive Surplus”. Let’s see if the pattern holds in the future.

In “Cognitive Surplus” Shirky argues that during the second half of last century the majority of people in the West suddenly found themselves with a lot of spare time on their hands. Shirky calls this the Cognitive Surplus. To Shirky social media would enable users to do better things with that surplus than watch TV. Shirky starts by describing the new media environment and the ermergent possibilities to use social media for social good. Still, he does not argue in favor of a simplistic technological determinism the likes of: “We have the tools now they will be used for good”. Instead, he discusses preconditions for the successful use of social media, the strongest being: intrinsic motivation of the contributors and a supportive culture among groups of users. He closes with some rules of thumb of elements that, in his experience, contribute to the success of social media ventures. Usually I am not a big fan of those list, but his remarks seem sensible enough and might actually help in the development of social media services.

As usual with Shirky, “Cognitive Surplus” is a very readable book. Shirky uses well chosen stories to illustrate the possibilities of social media use. He combines these stories with accounts of research relevant to his argument. For me “Cognitive Surplus” works as a very useful addition to his prior book “Here Comes Everybody”. While in his prior book he argued very convincingly in favor of the transformative potential of widespread social media use, in “Cognitive Surplus” he adds some useful conjectures on the reasons why people might be motivated to invest significant time and effort into producing content through social media.

People don’t need what they want, and don’t want what they need. My intuitions about this have been sharpened by reading Vaclav Havel’s new memoirs TO THE CASTLE AND BACK.

[...]

There’s a lot of stuff in there about people being surprised and even flummoxed by the spectacular glee of being given what they want — great things that are clearly good for them. They’re better off by almost every objective measure, and they’d never go back, but somehow they seem to live less.

inkwell.vue.373: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #46 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 5 Jan 10 07:21

While this is definetely an element of Havel’s memoirs. Still, after reading the first pages Havel’s memoirs made me think of something else. I’m reminded of the Red Queen’s race out of Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass. 1872.

Havel writes his memoirs in the year 2005 looking back on his presidency. These short reflective vignettes are interspersed with excerpts from Havel’s memos to his staff which he wrote during his time in The Castle. These memos offer a detailed view on the minutiae of the day to day life of a president and his staff. What is especially poignant are the plethora of mundane details that fill these memos. As Havel puts it himself:

When I think of all those thousands of meetings I held as president, of how many worries and preparations were necessary for every one of them and how many things I had to answer – from the very basic ones concerning the future organization of the world to the most petty ones concerning, for instance, the placement of cutlery or the seating arrangements for some official dinner – it occurs to me that not only will no one ever be able to fully appreciate all that but that today, practically no one knows about it anymore.

How wonderful it is, by comparison, to be a writer! You write something in a couple of weeks, and it’s here for the ages. What will remain when presidents and ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, most likely inaccurate.

Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. 2008. p. 35.

From this perspective Carrol’s Red Queen’s Race finds an uncanny likeness in political life. Good or Bad? Well, this judgement will have to wait.

And so this story goes:

This morning I found the gapingvoid daily cartoon #7 (The new incarnation of Hugh MacLeod‘s Crazy Deranged Fools Newsletter) in my inbox.

This little cartoon immediately put a smile on my face and reminded me of one of my favorite quotes on storytelling. A quote which, until recently, I always attributed to the manic mind of screenwriter David Milch:

Every story that works is a story of great distances and starlight which takes place in a moment of mania and is of deep delight.

Milch said this during a series of lectures on “The Idea of the Writer” which he held over the course of five days at the WGA theatre. To me this short quote collects all the pleasures of storytelling, be it as an author or listener.

Little did I know that Milch paraphrased the American poet, novelist and scholar Robert Penn Warren. In his poem “Tell me a Story” Robert Penn Warren wrote:

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

And allthough I do not see starlight just yet, this travel (from a cartoon of blogger Hugh MacLeod in 2010 to the lecture of screenwriter David Milch in 2007 to the poem of Robert Penn Warren in 1969) surely was of deep delight.

Colin Delany [@epolitics] gives an interesting perspective on the question whether leading politicians should use Twitter:

But I’d also argue that Twitter is fundamentally a bad match for a Chief Executive, for exactly the same reasons that so many other people are drawn to it. Like the rest of the social media universe, Twitter is effectively unfiltered, with a low wheat-to-chaff ratio even if you’re careful whom you follow. In many ways this is a strength, since part of the fun of the service is that you get access to so much information and opinion coming in from so many directions.

This argument focuses on the value of unfiltered vs filtered information for politicians:

While unfiltered information is valuable for bloggers, journalists and those of us with short attention spans, it’s not usually the best thing with which to fill your time when your actions have real-world consequences for, well, the entire world.

This argument does not address the elements of mediated intimacy, access or public conversations that are quite useful to politicians using Twitter. Still this argument is probably a reason for the social media “glass ceiling” which the Belgian blogger Clo Willaerts [@bnox] identified last month in her talk at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe. Her term describes the phenomenon that even social media savvy politicians stop using social media channels once they reach a certain level of responsibility.

Maybe Delany’s argument will give some pause to the All-Politicians-Online-All-The-Time Pundits.

An Internet Politics Index to David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win

Colin Delany once again: In this post Delany gives a very useful index of passages that deal with the internet and politics in David Plouffe‘s account of the Obama campaign The Audacity to Win, a book that I’ll address in more detail later this month.

Tom Peters: Cool Friends Interview with Garrison Keillor

As a nice diversion from politics I’d suggest this interview with Garrison Keillor. In this piece he talks among other things about his writing and editing process:

[...] as you get older, you learn how to throw it out without much thought, without much pity. You look at a piece that you’ve written, and you take those first three paragraphs, and you dump them. You just rip them out. Usually, that’s the part that needs to be thrown out, the big windup, the big introduction. The first page almost always can go. You learn to do that without regret. I edit myself much more quickly and mercilessly now than I ever could have 20, 30 years ago.

Other topics are his show The Prairie Home Companion, the director Robert Altman, public speaking and the durability of sonnets.

If by any cruel twist of fate the name Garrison Keillor means nothing to you have a look at Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes or listen to his News from Lake Wobegon.

From Cool Hunters to Chief Culture Officers: An Interview with Grant McCracken

While preparing a talk on the role of convergence in the online campaigns of various German parties in the run up to the German Bundestagswahl 2009 I turned once again to the work and blog of Henry Jenkins. There I stumbled on this great talk by Grant McCracken at the Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference. In this presentation McCracken introduces his concept of the Chief Culture Officer and its potential for companies:

Corporations have been notoriously bad at reckoning with culture. They manage the “problem of culture” with ad hocery of many kinds. They call on ad agencies, consultants, gurus and cool hunters and, when all else fails, the intern down the hall. But there is no single person and, worse, there is no senior manager. Even as culture grows ever more dynamic, various, demanding, and participatory. So that’s my argument: there ought to be someone in the C-Suite who’s job it is to reckon with culture and to spot the opportunities and dangers it represents.

McCracken’s book just made it on my to-read list.