if ya'll want to subvert some hierarchies, including the one you see me in now, I'd like to help

I just love that quote from Doc Searls. A meme is mutating thru a number of universes that I travel or lurk in - voices as divergent as Ashley Cooper, Doc, Danah Boyd, Barak Obama, Rachelle Mee-Chapman and Andrew Jones have all been musing on the growing pains of networks and the people who populate them.  While some these POVs are geeky, most of the discussion is in the human, rather than technical, realm. 

Hugh at Gaping Void captures what seems to me like a truth of the evolution of networks:

There is only "Shirky's Law":

Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two.

[From Clay Shirky's seminal essay on power laws, "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality":]

Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

... Once a power law distribution exists, it can take on a certain amount of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to retain its form even against external pressures. Is the weblog world such a system? Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes.

In networks that have an aspirational component to them (like the emerging church, progressive politics or social computing), so many people who have been on the margins invest a great deal of hope in an equitable, fair & open opportunity to be involve.  As this week's New York mag notes, it seems like a human trait that we establish gatekeepers.

In the midts of this tension, there seems like a tremendous potential for new life and creation.  David Wilcox and Lee Bryant recently posted a wonderful chapter called Some Lessons from Web 2.0 for Participation and E-democracy from an upcoming book to be called Involve (hat tip to Johnnie Moore) - here's an excerpt:

So what lessons can we learn from these new, alternative approaches, and what role, if any, can online technologies play in participation?

Perhaps the most surprising thing to say about current developments in the online world is that their greatest contribution is probably cultural rather than technical. There has been a significant increase in online participation and involvement over the past couple of years, which has marked what some people have called the transition from Web 1.0 (publishing ‘pages’ within a broadcast model) to a new phase dubbed Web 2.0 (the network as platform, remix culture and network effects). Interestingly, this has not been driven by sophisticated new technology, software or hardware, but rather it is the result of a critical mass of connected individuals doing some technically very simple things together. For example, Weblogs are technically little different to the personal homepages that proliferated in the early days of the ‘net, but the difference is they are now at the centre of millions of connected conversations that are taking place between individuals without mediation by mainstream media, traditional organisations or IT departments.

Whereas leading Web sites used to focus on pushing information to individuals (one-to-many), proponents of Web 2.0 are building what they call an “architecture of participation” to support many-to-many interaction. In the jargon, it is about creating social affordances based on network effects - i.e. new things are possible with a critical mass of connected people and content that we could not do before. Crucially, this process has a human voice - it places great importance on the value of conversation rather than just information sharing.

There are several key cultural aspects of Web 2.0 thinking that have been key to its growth so far, and that may be useful reference points for a new approach to thinking about participation:

Open source, open services and the remix culture
Aggregation and Syndication
Co-production
User-driven language
Intelligence at the edges
Personal ownership, agency and voice

What all these themes have in common is the question of power: in a networked world, power lies with the network nodes, not the centre.

I do not if you are like me, but more of my experience is in models where power at least pretended to reside in the center.  The cultural shift to recognizing and engaging in this changing world is much greater than the technical details.

So how are we to navigate these often snarky & volatile waters ?  As is so often the case, Chris Corrigan sheds some light for me in a very simple & personal way:

From Jack Ricchiuto's blog:

I want to riff off the comment on the 'Free Speech' post by zenmaenad: In my experience, when the issue seems to be free speech, the deeper issue usually has to do with responsible *listening*.

It surfaces a significant distinction between free speech disconnected from listening and free speech that flows from listening.

I've been thinking about this in a variety of contexts, but the one that comes to mind is the kind of listening we do when we are receiving a teaching. Traditionally, in First Nations communities and in other traditional settings, when Elders are teaching, listeners engage in a kind of deliberate discernment. The point is to hear the underlying truth of the story being told, to believe not the truth of the story's "facts" but the truth of the myth itself.

This came up elsewhere this week with a post at Anecdote as well, about the truth contained in narratives. I think this arises largely because in the west we have forgotten these practices of listening to stories and observing the world as interpretational acts, in which we see everything around us as a teaching. The history of the past 500 years has been the history of trying to figure out how to reach an objective consensus about things. This weighty cultural thread has created a situation where conversations about stories, if they are conversations at all, seem to be about clarifying the facts.

The deeper truths, the embedded teachings, are lost if we put too much weight on this. That's important because if you are setting out into the world to learn something, whether it is a personal quest, or with a group, on behalf of an organization or as a member of an inquiry team, simply getting at the facts does nothing to propel your trajectory to a new level. Instead, you are left solely with the facts and very little else to suggest how one might transcend the situation that gave rise to those facts. Developing the capacity to hear all stories as teachings is an incredibly valuable practice.

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