Communicating WITH or AROUND Each Other Online
I noted a while back that a friend of mine, Dan Oestreich, has started blogging on leadership. It has been so much fun to watch him take off like a rocket, but even better, I now have access to his amazing writing.
Friday afternoon, as I continued work avoidance mode, I read a post that directly spoke to me of the underlying dynamic that I have felt this last week in the Online Facilitation group.
First, he pointed us towards a poem by William Stafford called "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" (A beautiful poem on its own), particularly this part: If you don't know the kind of person I am
A bit later in his post, Dan wrote:
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star"So let me voice this premise -- opposed as it is to all the fine human relations training you may have received: If I feel that I cannot talk to you about you, directly, and if I cannot talk about about me, directly, then there can be no real "us," no "our star." Under such conditions, the domain of our relationship may narrow to allow only a slim passage of competing ideas whose credibility depends on avoiding what is most sensitive and undiscussable -- which is you, which is me. And right here we begin the awful dance of becoming politically smart and interpersonally unreal. We learn to communicate around each other, not with each other. Inevitably we talk in the background about the very things that should be part of the conversation. We talk about others to others we believe are safe without ever talking to the those who can do something about the problem. "
From an online facilitation practice perspective, this speaks to me of the challenge of the environment where it is so easy for us to communicate AROUND each other. The time, effort and skill it takes to communicate WITH each other often makes us pause... is it worth it?
In a large, diffuse network with disparate motivations, the answer is often, "no." In smaller, more purposeful groups, it is easier to answer yes.
So my question is this. Is it possible to facilitate a large, open network (and I mean facilitate in the most open sense... not just one person doing X, Y and Z) so that it is both worth and easier to communicate "with" rather than "around?" Or should we reduce our expectations in larger networks, and focus on smaller groups?
If the latter, should we be paying attention to how larger groups can self-organize smaller groups (sort of the Dunbar number)? It seems that the recent trends in online interaction software (aka social software) follow this line of reasoning.
But something inside of me thinks we can learn more about the larger network interactions and find ways to make them more connective.
posted by Nancy White at 9:44 PM
1 Comments:
Thank you for the kind words, Nancy. To those of you who don't know, it was Nancy who served as my first guide as I got started blogging. And I am very grateful for her patience as I fumbled and fumed, "How do I do that?" many times over. You are very gracious, Nancy.
I think the question you are asking is incredibly important because it requires we find out a great deal about the culture of online interaction. Perhaps, you've already walked down these paths, but it seems like good questions would be about the culture (patterned, taken-for-granted behavior) that characterizes online groups, no matter what their size, and what if anything we'd change about that within our own group. In other words, what is the default culture, what do we like about it, and what might we want to change in order to release the full potentials of people and their technologies? Then the process would be one of voluntary individual and group learning to match the intended shift (the tricky part) -- with lots of "grace" space and some meta-conversation (talking about talking) as we move forward together. Is there a size limit? I don't know, but I do know it would involve people helping one another to be very aware of HOW we are together, not just that we are.
For example, there are lots of us blogging, but some of us are blogging ABOUT blogging. This begins to illuminate a particular worldview and also begins to set up invisible rules of preferred interaction, such as what's okay to talk about, how much conflict is tolerated, what levels of personal disclosure are acceptable. Can we make these rules visible? I think of Euan's great post on Blogging as therapy on The Obvious? and Claire's fascinating post, What happens when you replace the word "blogging" with "thinking"? at Organised Chaos. These posts define edges and frontiers and in doing so begin to map the territory of online interaction. We are all out here mapping right now, and that means we can pay attention to where and how the paths to community are being built.
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