Psychology
PodcampCT : The Edge Between Knowing and Not-Knowing - #PCCT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 06:46Years ago, I read a fascinating paper entitled Our Best Work Happens When We Don't Know What We're Doing. It had been presented at the 1999 International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations and talked about how “learning involves working at the edge between knowing and not-knowing”.
It seems like this paper provides a useful framework for understanding Podcamps. First, I should make it clear that it is not about trying to do something that you don’t know how to do. Any attempt by me at brain surgery would be unlikely to be some of my best work. Instead, the paper talks about “the edge between knowing and not-knowing”. I should also note that it has been years since I’ve read that paper, so my thoughts may have drifted from some of the original ideas in the paper.
To me, a good podcamp exists on the edge between knowing and not-knowing. It is important to know how to create an environment where people can learn. Podcamps grow out of the open space technology and unconference traditions where learning comes out of treating everyone as an equal and focusing on facilitated discussions instead of presentations.
I write this blog post a couple hours before PodcampCT starts. We still do not have a set agenda. We won’t have a set agenda until after people have checked in and shared there ideas for the sessions to cover. Even then, there will be a bit of flexibility in the agenda. Yesterday, I wrote some initial thoughts about a possible PodcampCT agenda, but the real agenda will form as the people gather, and the list of people attending continues to change as new people register. Even over night, new people registered, and I expect we’ll have people registering at the door.
One person contacted the PodcampCT organizers writing
I'm being asked to pay $25 and maybe more to receive, well, nothing specific, but it'll be about social media. Do I have that right?
The schedule lists time slots, but no definite topics to be covered...
I'm used to implied contracts – when I sit down at a restaurant table I expect to be served food, and I commit to paying for what I order. But I'm a little stuck on this implied contract: if I give you my $25 what, exactly, will I receive beyond the opportunity to interact with other people who also paid the $25 and want to receive some value for it?
Is this kind of transaction a "new normal" for online business: give me money and you'll get, well, something, probably?
The writer received several replies pointing out that, no, they don’t have it right. Participants will received some very specific information about social media. Definite topics about social media will be explored. The issue is that people don’t know the exact details of what specific topics will be covered. The conference itself exists at the edge of knowing and not-knowing.
As an aside, when I pay my $25 at a restaurant, I often sit at the edge of knowing and not-knowing. Yes, I could go to the same restaurant everyday and order the same clams and linguini. Assuming the same chef is there with the same ingredients, I can be pretty sure about what I’ll get. However, I like try new restaurants and new dishes. I like to experience something new, and learn more about what I like and don’t like. The same applies to Podcamp, except that it is a potluck where everyone brings their favorite dishes.
I do not know what I am going to learn today. If I knew it already, I’d probably have already learned it and would get less out of Podcamp. Instead, I am going with the expectation of learning something I don’t already know.
I know a fair amount about location specific social media. I’ll check-in on Foursquare when I get there. I might check in on some other systems as well. I know that some bright people will be there who know a lot more about location specific social media than I do. I hope to sit with them and others seeking to learn from one another and discover something I don’t know about location specific social media.
I also know a fair amount about the use of barcodes in social media. I’ve written a fair amount about QR Codes. I am hoping to sit down in a session talking about QR Codes. I suspect I won’t learn much that I don’t know about QR Codes already, but I expect that some people will ask questions, most likely about use cases, that will cause me to learn something new about how QR Codes can be used.
I know the framework of the schedule, four sessions, probably between five and seven concurrent tracks, with time for networking during coffee, lunch and afterwards for drinks. I don’t know what the group of people who gather will end up thinking is important and I hope to learn something from that as well.
On one level, I know exactly what I’m doing today. I’m going to Podcamp, a chance to learn about social media. On the other hand, I don’t know what I’ll be doing. I’ll be hanging out on the edge of knowing and not-knowing about social media. I’ll be moving that edge for myself and I’m pretty excited to be going.
Flotilla Thoughts
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 17:24I have been a member of a mailing list of group psychotherapists for many years and am fascinated by group dynamics as they take place online. A week and a half ago, a member of the list sent an email about Hitler’s Children, a fascinating dialog between children of perpetrators of the holocaust and the children of the survivors. The conversation drifted to The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and a great discussion on the psychology of conflict resolution. I’ve been pretty busy with other things over the past few weeks, so I’ve only been skimming the emails. However, the recent news about the attack on the flotilla headed towards Gaza brought a new twist to the discussion as psychotherapists from Israel, the United States, Turkey and other countries made efforts to understand what had happened. With this as a background, here is a message I sent to the list.
For the longest time, I've tried to find ways to describe what I do. I've worked with political campaigns helping them generate spin. When I visited my daughter's kindergarten class I described my work as helping people tell stories on computers. I've since refined that to call myself an Internet Raconteur.
It seems like 'spin' is just a slightly cynical word for stories, although, perhaps there is good reason for that little bit of cynicism. As I try to help people tell their stories online, I try to help them find their voice and to speak authentically. This is a very different way of telling stories than current press releases or many of the main stream media stories. Main stream media stories are supposed to feign impersonal objectivity. Yet in doing so, they destroy what make the story real, what makes it come alive, what makes it authentic.
Because of this, I distrust any attempt to find an objective recounting of what happened to the 'Freedom Flotilla'. It might be that someday the clouds of war will lift and we will know the 'truth', but perhaps that doesn't matter so much. Perhaps what matters are the stories of people involved. I have friends that could well have been on that trip. They are idealistic, passionate. They have deep concern for the people of Palestine and what they see as injustices brought upon the Palestinians. Perhaps a few would even have been willing martyrs to bring attention to this grave injustice. I have friends who are the parents of such idealists and I can imagine the shock and horror they have felt as they wonder if similar fates might await their children.
I also have friends who have served with distinction in the Israeli Defense Forces, people who have committed their lives to defending the State of Israel, people who have been torn by their love of peace and their belief that the only way to obtain that peace for their beloved country is through the controlled use of force.
The stories of these people are the authentic stories and the stories we need to hear. They are the stories we need to help other process and understand. They are stories we need to hold as our own. Just like the great story of the King of Denmark, we need to proclaim that we are all idealists on the freedom flotilla and we are all members of the Israeli Defense Forces.
As I think of what happened, the words of Jonathan Donne
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
To that, I add the words of Walt Whitman,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
Projecting Onto Means of Communications
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/25/2010 - 08:37There are no accidents, but sometimes a cigar is a cigar.
I’m on a mailing list that recently has had some communications problems. People have written emails to test if the list is working and have responded in various ways. Others have talked about their feelings when messages are not responded to. I wrote an email to the list sharing some of my reactions to the discussions there and this is a version of that message adopted for my blog.
I've been fascinated by some of the discussions on the list over the past few days and thought I would add another one of my typical, out of left field, responses.
When it comes to text based computer mediated communications, people often comment about the disadvantages that a lack of non-verbal cues presents. On the other hand, some argue that having just text makes it a much richer environment for exploring projections. I've been fascinated by this viewpoint and always enjoy hearing discussions about this. Yet it struck me this week, that there may be projections not only on the words, but on the form of communications itself.
This line of thought started as I wondered why we have these various bursts of "Test" messages. What are they really all about? Are they reflecting some sort of need to stay connected in this world that seems increasingly connected via online communications? Years ago, I would not have expected to hear from people in Austria and Australia. If by some chance, I had established a connection like that, I suspect that a delay in communications of a few days would be less likely to be noticed. Before the days of air mail, a letter would take many days to make it half way around the world. A delay of a few days would be unlikely to be noticed, and I would also suspect that I would have been more likely to expect messages to get lost in transit. I probably wouldn't have sent a letter back saying "test". Now, if we don't hear something we quickly suspect something is amiss and often quickly become frustrated.
I've also found, especially in my younger years, that if someone did not respond to me, I quickly assumed it was because of some flaw of my own. People didn't respond because they didn't like me. Yes, I struggled a lot with my own insecurity when I was younger, and perhaps it comes back to haunt me today. When I send an email to the various mailing list and get no response, I am still perhaps more likely to assume it is because I said something stupid, than to assume it is because there are problems with the mailing list servers, or perhaps even, that it is because other people on the list are really busy with other things. Yes, I want my words to be more important than server problems or other important things going on in my friends’ lives. The same applies to my reactions to no comments on my blog.
As a technologist, I have made mistakes adjusting settings on servers and made it difficult for people to get their messages through. Perhaps these were accidents. Perhaps they were the result of me being too tired, distracted or inattentive to make the correct serve configuration adjustments. Yet at the same time, to the person wondering why they haven't gotten a response to their emails, it may be because of mistakes by me or other technologists and not a reflection of some character flaw of the person sending or receiving the email. The undelivered email might not be an accident, but it might not be a cigar either.
When technology doesn't do what we think it should do, it might not really be telling us anything interesting. However, or responses to problems with technology may be very rich material to explore to learn a little bit about ourselves.
Thoughts?
You are What You Eat; the Cortisol Addiction
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/15/2010 - 09:22I’ve always thought of the adage “you are what you eat” in terms of physical food and the shape of our physical body. If we eat healthy food we are more likely to have a healthy body. If we eat junk… Yet it seems as if there may be much more to the old phrase than that. What about our media diet? How does it affect who we are as people? How does it affect us physically? I’m beginning to think that it may be much more substantial than many think.
A couple years ago, I went to a group psychotherapy conference where a keynote speaker said something to the effect of, “The self exists at the intersection of our internal neural network and our external social networks.” As a person fascinated by both neural networks and social networks, I really liked this idea and I’ve thought about how what is going on in our social networks affects our internal neural networks.
On a mailing list recently, a good friend talked about hearing Andrew Weil speak at “The Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference”. He suggested that to maintain one’s health one should stay away from the news. This brought an interesting response where one person responded quoting Pastor Martin Niemoller, “They came first for the communists…” We need to pay attention to the news, lest there be no one paying attention to the news when they come for us.
Yet what should we be paying attention to? In this world of constant partial attention on our social networks, of advertisers trying to grab our attention, perhaps even to repeat their message and help it go viral, it becomes harder to find what we really need to hear. This is perhaps most pronounced in the political entertainment industry with commentators breathlessly talking about what we need to fear in politics.
Fear has always been a great selling tool, whether it is fear that our smile won’t be bright enough and we won’t have any friends or fear that someone is going take what we cherish most, whether it be our guns, our right to make our own choices over our bodies, or something harder to nail down, like ‘freedom’.
Fear and the stress it produces can cause our bodies to produce cortisol, “the stress hormone”. Cortisol, in proper amounts is beneficial and can help blood pressure, memory, immune functioning and so on. Yet too much cortisol increases blood pressure and screws up our metabolism.
In the fight for attention, news organizations, advertisers, and perhaps even our friends on our social networks, feed our cortisol addiction in an effort to gain attention in this increasingly competitive attention economy. This is just not good for us. So, what do we do about it?
Cortisol is useful in a fight or flight situation. We need to find ways to get our cortisol in real fight or flight situations where we can act on the situation and then let it go. Even on American Idol, the fight or flight situation when our favorite star is chastised by the judges provides an opportunity to respond. Text your votes to… News reports that have suggestions about contacting elected officials provide an opportunity to respond. Yet neither example wants you to let it go afterwards. You need to stay tuned to keep your cortisol up.
There have also been discussions about blogs and anonymous comments on online newspaper articles. Much of what goes on there also seems to be feeding a cortisol addiction without any meaningful opportunities to do anything other than call our opponents Nazis, Socialists, or Communists.
Likewise, it seems that so much of prime time television is about feeding our cortisol addiction. Do you get your cortisol rush from Lost or 24? Is it good for you?
So to the mailing list discussion, I suggested that we need to think globally and act locally. We need to listen for news that we can do something about and then we need to act locally and move on. Beyond that, perhaps we need more opportunities to de-stress, to try and lower our cortisol levels and our addiction to cortisol.
What do you think? Does this make sense to you? What affects your cortisol levels, both for better and for worse?
Update: A friend on Facebook commented about this pointing to a very interesting podcast about what's happening in our brains during times of stress. For more information, check out Yale Stress Center. More food for thought...
Large Groups and the Political and Media Ecospheres
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/05/2010 - 20:54A recent email discussion about the earthquake in Mexico and people’s reactions to it have caused me to spend a little more time thinking about how political and media ecospheres are virtual environments were large group behavior, for better or worse, emerges.
In the 1990s, I was working within a complicated matrix management structure for a large international bank. To increase my effectiveness, I hired an organizational consultant to coach me. Her doctorate was in psychoanalytics as it applied to organizations, particularly in the tradition of Tavistock, Wilfred Bion, A.K. Rice and others called Group Relations. I became fascinated by Group Relations and read extensively on the topic, as well as attended various Group Relations experiential conferences.
A key part of Group Relations experiential conferences is the large group. The attendees of the conference gather with tasks like “learning through experience how groups function, how leadership in groups takes place, and how the participants can become more effective leaders within their organizations and communities”. It was fascinating to watch people in the group take up roles that they might otherwise not have taken up, due to pressures from the group as it reacted to the anxieties of the group.
I became particularly interested in this as it took place online and was invited to write an article about the Internet and the Large Group for the Journal of Group Analysis back around 2001. Technology has changed a lot since then, and there are many more people online now than a decade ago, but still people have similar reactions as members of large groups online.
With this long introduction out of the way, let me explore a discussion on the mailing list of group psychotherapists that I participate in. One person noted, “This is an unsafe world. Don’t you think it’s becoming less and less safe every day?” A graphic in the Los Angeles Times provided a good illustration of this. The first two months of 2010 showed fewer earthquakes of magnitude four or greater than the previous four years, but more earthquakes with a magnitude of six or greater. Looking at U.S. Geological Survey data, the first two months of 2010 showed over twice as many magnitude six or greater earthquakes than the average from 1900 until the present.
Others suggested that the daily media blitz, focusing on the ‘disaster du jour’ is what makes things seem worse. If anything, the media ecosphere with its focus on, “If it bleeds, it leads”, may be creating a dangerous feedback loop in the large group of media viewers. The ‘disaster du jour’ is what boosts viewership, so media corporations seek out the disaster du jour, which feeds the group’s anxiety addiction.
Yet with a large group at a Group Relations Conference, there are ‘consultants’ to the group that will, from time to time, share observations about what is going on with the large group. Perhaps bloggers can take on some of this role in questioning what the traditional media is doing, and if it is feeding some sort of anxiety addiction. I flirted with this idea a few years ago in my blog post, Are bloggers Group Psychotherapists?.
I ended that blog post with:
Ultimately, bloggers are no more group psychotherapists then they are journalists. Yet just as bloggers can learn a lot from journalists, they could learn an awful lot from group psychotherapists and could help bring innovation and healing to problems that our towns, cities, states, countries and world faces.
This returns me to my reaction to the email discussion. There, I suggested that the real issue is perhaps not whether or not the world is more or less safe than it was in previous years, but how we deal with anxieties that it might be less safe. It seems like much of the political discourse these days is focused on people’s fears about this world being less safe. In fact, the discourse may in fact be contributing to a less safe world, just as a large group, running wild with its anxieties can become a more dangerous place, without someone helping people contain the anxieties.
So, my question to bloggers, journalists and politicians, are you able to step up and help contain anxieties instead of fan them? To any group psychotherapists that might read this, can you help people in media and politics learn how to contain anxieties and process them into more helpful reactions? Can you help transform our media and political ecospheres into safer holding environments?
What do you think?
