A lot of the recent talk about what’s going on in Tunisia and Egypt, about organizing today, digital media, anxieties about political organizational transitions… this all reminds me of this passage:

“Losing control is more important than trying to gain it. One distinguishing characteristic of the digital world is that power is [...]]]>

"Thursday 10 February 2011 - Day 17 Al Qasr Al Aini Street, Cairo as doctors and nurses walk peacefully on one side of the street, others take video from mobile phones in the other side of the street." photo by sierragoddess. cc-by-nd

A lot of the recent talk about what’s going on in Tunisia and Egypt, about organizing today, digital media, anxieties about political organizational transitions… this all reminds me of this passage:

“Losing control is more important than trying to gain it. One distinguishing characteristic of the digital world is that power is being pushed to the edges away from organizations and towards people. This shift is good for organizations that need to engage many people in their work; yet to successfully power the edges, organizations have to be willing to lose control.

“Losing control” is a frightening phrase; it connotes flying through space without a parachute or a net. In this respect, social media are kryptonite for people who feel a need to control their efforts too tightly. But the reality in our connected world is that spending energy trying to control what other people do and say is counterproductive.

Organizations still need to be intentional about their efforts, they still need messages and plans, but they also have to expect that people and organizations in their ecosystem will march to their own drummers. More important, imperfectly coordinated efforts can be enormously successful, even exhilarating, as they unfold in unexpected ways.

Only by letting go and throwing off the yoke of control can organizations unleash the power and creativity of many people to do amazing things on their behalf. …”

– Beth Kanter & Allison Fine, The Networked Nonprofit

Some group of outside commentators frame changes like this as “chaos” or fog. But isn’t change the norm in life, and stability the exception often accomplished via some spectrum of repression? As the pre-Platonic adage goes, we never walk through the same stream twice. Where are we? We’re in an “unscripted time,” as Harvey Sarles has said in his essay “Responses To Change“— “a moment in history in which our ideas of the future seem really murky, unclear, unsure”— and what some in grappling with this recognition over the past 30 years have labeled: The Third Wave, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Blessed Unrest, or the Gutenberg Parenthesis.

Those involved in the the Egyptian and Tunisian protests are operating with a new spirit— the spirit of this age we’re in— and are doing amazing work to accomplish simple goals that have been articulated widely and for some time… a social code perhaps most eloquently documented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and adapted and focused in on for local context. Some people focus on freedom to communicate, or freedom from want, or freedom of representative choice, or all of this and more.  How we’re doing this now has augmented, morphed, or in many ways is renewing long standing ways of human association that have been repressed via the narrow abstraction of printed words.

“Leaderless organization” is another phrase for networks. “Chaos” as used today is another word for networks, often used by idealist print-centered minds who’ve yet to reboot their awareness with actual human communication reality.

What can an organization learn from these recent events? The value of articulating outcomes and improving skills in sharing them, to then learn and co-create with like-minded peers… that’s the positive phrasing of what is meant by “losing control.”

That shock we feel over and over these days?
Sparks from reconnecting networks of human trust.

“Clearly there are some new channels for outreach and new channels for listening to what people are telling you. Barack Obama built a really effective platform with mybarackobama.com—and it is really important [...]]]>

Photo by Daquella manera

Tim O’Reilly said the following about Obama’s use of social media in a recent Q&A on one of IBM’s business marketing sites.

“Clearly there are some new channels for outreach and new channels for listening to what people are telling you. Barack Obama built a really effective platform with mybarackobama.com—and it is really important to understand that it was a social media platform. If you went there you could set up your own blog, you could set up your own events, you could run a fund-raiser, so it was really a platform for organizing. In some ways you would have to say that mybarackobama.com was the most successful start-up of the last couple of years. After all, they raised $100 million dollars and then used it to take over the world’s largest company.”

Putting aside O’Reilly’s corporatist metaphors for another time, from what little I know Obama ran a “50 state” campaign, in pursuit of taking the national office. He and Axelrod used a social platform to run a state-based strategy, with a national effect as a result.  What else do we mean when we say that “all politics are local”?

I keep observing how we’re increasingly living in a more tribal environment, or in socio-political terms a more republic/state/city/group-centered game, rather than the federalist/nationalist game.  Maybe the republic of farmers that Thomas Jefferson envisioned have not turned out to plant seeds so much as grow code, media, music, global networks that are actually small networks (regional or niche subject based) of interested people…. growing consciousness.

I don’t have research citations to satisfy the quantitative appetite, just a gut feeling from the sieve-like life I eek out. This gut feeling though seems non-trivial.  In my own trans-cultured experience (family histories with so much restless seeming immigration & colonialism, mixing, new world, old world, indigenous) and in academic media work I’ve been reading, what I keep hearing/feeling is that nations are really artificial, concepts, more than deep social human realities.  This matters a lot, we need to build social media environments that resonate with the reality of human experience, not ones based on artificial/ideal/false notions that came from the past if we are to make the epic changes needed now in the face of global environmental challenges of extreme proportion.

“Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar” –Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Mass use of movable type helped homogenize culture. (Marshall McLuhan and others have talked at length about this.) Distribution of cheaply reproduced printed texts was instrumental in making a preferred language dialect and accent normative and other dialects or accents “lesser”, etc. Easy enough to do when people were ruled by texts and submitted themselves to texts via unquestioning belief, and looking at history this happened all too quickly– only 16 human generations since Gutenberg… and we each directly know 2 to 3 prior generations.

Today, now that we’re clearly moving away from print-centered environments, and into multimedia centered modes (with massive generational tripping along the way; just look at the publishing industry), we’re arriving again at more oral centered environments (as Lance Strate mentioned recently), we’re more tribal… clear shiboleths abound in our network-converged global culture, and are continually created as people evolve them to maintain each tribe.  McLuhan’s conservative side in part feared the tribe I think, but today we see that we’re waking up to a new paradigm based on observing our social selves, together, in ways that only the social web makes visible, reintroducing us to our selves. Following flags seem less important than following friends. Yet big questions remain. How do we make the big changes needed to mend the gap between the reality of our crumbling health & environment and the unsustainable & depletist nationalist dreams we’ve been stuck in for far too long? How can we re-connect?