Something is happening and it’s hyper: Cultivating a culture of knowledge sharing.
A street chalk campaign on the streets of Sydney has prompted this first post for 2017. While the central theme of this article — cultivating knowledge sharing — might not at first be immediately apparent if you take the time to read through to the end the dots will connect, and that’s the point; making the connection …
In the Summer of 2016 a handwritten word very much in the style of Sydney’s Arthur Stace–who wrote ‘Eternity’ on the city’s streets for over 37 years in a graceful handwritten copperplate–began to appear on the streets and walls of Sydney.
Arthur Stace was the creator of the iconic Eternity chalk-mark that is celebrated in Sydney, so much so that it was the big ‘reveal’ on the harbour bridge during the turn of the millennium fireworks display in 2000. Illuminated and 18 metres high it appeared through the smokey, post-fireworks haze to the delight of the Sydneysiders gathered amongst the millions rimming the edges of the emerald harbour. When asked why he chose to emblazon the word ‘Eternity’ across the Harbour Bridge on the eve of the millennium, with 2 billion people around the world watching, the NYE event director Ignatius Jones, said,
“It’s incredibly Sydney. It symbolised for me the madness, mystery and magic of the city.” (1)
A destitute alcoholic Arthur Stace had his epiphany in August 1930 in Ultimo. Hungry, and desperate, he stumbled into St Barnabas’ Church on Broadway as he had heard there would be free food for those who listened to the preaching. Struck by the people he met that night, the story goes, Arthur got down on his knees, prayed and immediately gave up drinking to reform his life. Some months later, again in church, he heard the ‘take no prisoners prayer-warrior’ Reverend John Ridley cry, “Eternity, Eternity, I wish that I could sound or shout that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney.” And so it began. For the next 35 years in the early hours of the morning Arthur Stace would chalk the word in various locations around the city. He wrote on footpaths, seats, billboards, doorways, on any flat and smooth surface that would take his chalk. Dressed in his Sunday best–usually a threadbare suit, battered felt hat, collar and tie–he was a small, small shadowy figure flitting around in the early morning light.
The regular appearance of the word in chalk around the city piqued the curiosity of Sydney-siders. Who was this Mr Eternity? What did it mean? In June 1956 Arthur was spotted by the Reverend Lisle Thomson ‘chalking’ a footpath. A newspaper reporter was alerted and the Arthur Stace story appeared in the Sunday Telegraph soon after to the delight of the Sydney public. He died in 1967 at the age of 82. (2)
In the summer of 2016–2017 an Eternity simulacra also in chalk began to appear on the streets of Sydney and posts went up to the gram [Instagram]. Instigated by a collective that go by the name of Empathy nation, the group has a vision to, ‘see empathy become a part of everyday life; in families, workplaces and politics.’
The UTS ICI team who reside in Building 15 got behind the ‘Empathy’ sentiment ‘regramming’ empathy nation’s social posts and creating its own version in early January of the Stace-like word on the Harris street facing Level 2 windows.
So why does empathy matter? Why should we care?
Empathy has been referred to as feeling ‘with’, a state where one shares another’s pain and it seems humans are wired for empathy.
Tania Singer, a leading neuroscientist in the field of empathy, has noted that evidence has consistently shown that sharing the emotions of others is associated with activation in neural structures that are also active during first hand experience of that emotion. Our own brain’s ‘empathy circuit’ lights up when we see another person in pain or suffering. (3)
Social philosopher Roman Krznaric describes empathy as the invisible force that holds society together, “It is the ultimate social glue that bonds us to others.”(4) and George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist writes, ‘Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought.’ (5)
Empathy is not faceless. It is not a glance. Empathy is about connection.
The antithesis of an empathetic society is the self-interest that has been and still is a dominant motivator in the switched on 21st century. A world were hyper-individualistic mind-sets framed by the belief in free markets riding a consumer culture have prevailed throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries portrayed rather brilliantly in Hollywood narratives about Wall Street excess via the characters of Gordan ‘Greed is Good’ Gecko and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort. While the performances may be ruthlessly entertaining they also cut to the quick.
2017 is still firmly in the era of ‘me and mine’ yet there is a quiet evolution, which could potentially become a revolution, underway.
The vibe and undercurrent for — well at least a desire for — change and re-connecting with each other is real and tangible. It is manifesting in the upward momentum in social good advocacy projects like the Empathy nation street chalk campaign and the ‘Make Empathy Great Again’ tees and caps that sprung up in online stores in direct reaction to the Trumpian ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan– a phrase that bristles with subtext.
In the first month of 2017 the vibrations of the global pendulum shifting as one hundred-plus-year-old paradigms tilt and bend in the face of new ways of thinking and operating in business and daily life are palpable.
The Women’s March on Washington’s Independence Avenue set to take place on January 21 is a stake in the ground for democracy, ‘honouring the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice.’ The numbers are predicted be seismic what with the sister events that have burst up all over the globe in solidarity of the intent.
Dig a little bit deeper and you will see that seismic change is already here. It is hyper linked and hyper connected.
In labs, research centres, homes and communities around the globe alternative models of operating are being tested and trialled. Zero Marginal Cost Society, The Internet of Things, P2P, the Collaborative Commons and Connected Intelligence have been prototyped, beta-tested and are on the ascendant. Researchers, academics, thought leaders, visual thinkers, data enthusiasts and proponents of the commons society movement have been tinkering, researching, refining and interrogating alternative ways for society to do things and their work is emerging from the ivory towers and password protected platforms.
Democratisation of knowledge and information is an iteration of this movement. Just like the Women’s March in Washington, power can come from the collective. The proponents of knowledge functioning as a shared resource for communities and the commons is a point of view that is diametrically opposed to the gated world of big business and big data.
Spoilt-for-choice and perennially switched-on in 2017 consumers, influencers and individuals are more demanding, knowledgeable and in control than ever before. They are also more anxious and cognitively dissonant than ever before. In just the last couple of years the rise of social media platforms has seen everyday folk encouraged to curate and edit their ‘personal brand profiles’ on social platforms. Business values and ‘Marketing Speak’ has infiltrated and co-opted daily life. ‘Why you need a personal brand’ posts fill feeds and implore visitors to career websites to get on board because ‘a personal brand is ESSENTIAL!!!!’ [exclamation marks for effect].
Pressure to curate, edit and maintain prescribed personal branding, resulting in ‘identity labour’ and anxiety are real. All the while in the background insights and metrics are opaquely driving the actions and decisions for and by businesses and individuals as we go about our daily lives.
This opaque near invisible mining, sifting and storing of data is an area of concern for those in the know. Automated big data algorithms are already determining not just what you see in your feed but also who gets a job interview, who gets insured and who doesn’t. Invisible computations are increasingly controlling our world in a language–code–that most cannot decipher.
Interestingly it was a great, big data centre run on the principles of a lean start-up that was the driving force behind Trump being given the opportunity to ‘make America great again’. Jared Kushner the son-in-law of the President–elect told Forbes magazine, “We played Moneyball,” referring to the obsessively data-driven approach to running a baseball team, “very cheaply, very quickly.” Insights collated by a team of 100 data experts holed up in a warehouse in Texas drove every strategic decision made in the final months of the campaign shaping decisions about fundraising, advertising priorities, where to hold rallies and what to say at them.
Enter the filter bubble, that hybrid child of data-crunching algorithms and harvesting of personal data. The bubble is a type and flow of information that is aggregated and rolled into personal feeds aided by machines that are so finely personalised that all other perspectives are blinkered out. Filter bubbles simultaneously enable and create feasts and famines of information and perspectives.
While it is true that we have always surrounded ourselves with like-minded folk and move within tribes of shared values and points of view on issues, topics, interests and information there was still always the opportunity for serendipity, that moment where you would stumble upon and be exposed to facts, details, opinions, and ideas outside of what you customarily chose to engage with and consume. It was was there for the discovering.
How do you recalibrate, learn, grow and evolve if you only consume information online that is mediated via an invisible yet all-enveloping filter bubble?
UTS ICI has recently hosted two global thought leaders in the P2P and Connected Intelligence realm via its Beautiful Minds Talk program.
Back in October 2016 Michel Bauwens was the first though leader to deliver a Beautiful Minds talk. Founder of the foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, Michel works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He is also founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier which organises major global conferences on the commons and its economics. Michel shared his philosophy of reconstructing society with distributed infrastructures, shared resources and related livelihoods as well as connecting the dots within the commons as a response to the structural crises of the global system.
On January 18 global ‘knowmad’ Ishan Shapiro delivered a second serving of Beautiful Minds on a hot Sydney summers day. Ishan has been a part of the globally distributed community of knowledge sharing for a number of years collaborating with the likes of Michel Bauwens, our first Beautiful Mind thought leader and Simon Buckingham-Shum, now the director of the UTS Connected Intelligence Centre.
Sharing his experiences collaborating on peer-to-peer open culture projects Ishan foregrounded the Meta Maps project an invite only, free and open source platform designed to visualise complex knowledge systems in real-time. An online platform that literally ‘maps’ networks of people, ideas, resources, stories, experiences and conversations across a range of applications by designers, developers, facilitators, practitioners, entrepreneurs and artists MetaMaps is visual, intuitive and a prototype for alternative forms of value creation created and maintained by a distributed community passionate about the evolution of collaboration, collective intelligence and the open culture movement.
The work of the UTS ICI unit and its sister units and centres across UTS (a few of which are also housed inside the walls of Building 15) and the interconnections between all started blinking and winking brightly in a swirl of connectivity, as Ishan elaborated on the how and why of collaborative knowledge communities.
A virtual meta-map lit up. Connections were firing and in coming into focus.
Empathy on the Harris street windows constructed of blue post-it notes was not a random act at all. It is all connected with Ultimo at the centre.
The fields of practice Ishan Shapiro shared during his Beautiful Minds talk; storytelling, wicked problems, the spaces in between, distributed collaboration, the creative intelligence of individuals, blockchain, P2P and the commons aligned ‘beautifully’ with the inroads and fields of inquiry that we have also been pushing and pulling with these past twelve months.
This dwelling in the sweet and liminal spot of the ‘in-between’ resonated and rung true.
This time we are all living through of unprecedented access to information via the world wide web is information dense, however it is also a time of knowledge and information being increasingly subjected to ever-greater restrictions be that intellectual property legislation, patents, paywalls, licensing, overpricing, limited access and or lack of preservation.
Pursuing a collected, connected and creative intelligence approach means we could bridge some of the gaps that lay in between ‘mine’ and ‘ours’.
If we apply a human-centred approach to data science as proposed by UTS Director & Professor of Learning Informatics Simon Buckingham-Shum a space where knowledge functions like a democratic commons and a shared resource the way could be paved for limitless opportunity and social good.
We are all for progressive thinking.
More about Beautiful Minds
Beautiful Minds is a free public program curated and delivered by the Innovation and Creative Intelligence Unit. The short daytime talks are intentionally intimate gatherings of likeminded thinkers keen to hear from genuine thought leaders who are breaking new ground via their ideas, learnings, thoughts and passions. Beautiful Minds talks are irregular and serendipitous timed around the schedules of the guest speakers designed to catalyse passionate innovators.
Image attribution: Image 1: Photo by Picture Nick Cubbin sourced form the Daily Telegraph. Image 2: Via Building 15 instagram profile. Image 3: Original drawing supplied.
sources
1. https://australianyarns.wordpress.com/mr-eternity-the-sydney-legend/
2. 1. https://atributetoaustralianchristians.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/arthur-stace/
3. Hamilton D. Why Kindness is Good for You Hay House UK 2012
4. Krznaric R The Empathy Effect: How Empathy Drives Common Values, Social Justice and Environmental Action. 2015
5. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/empathy-sotomayor-and-dem_b_209406.html
