Following up on some thoughts from last night.
I notice Suw has published her mindmap notes from last nights talk and her own notes on the event at Strange Attractor.
Suw takes issue with Johnnie's view on speakers:
I disagree, however, with Johnnie's dislike of having speakers. Yes, having speakers stand up in front of an audience does create an us-them dichotomy which is especially false when you are in a room full of your peers, but in an ideal world that's because the speaker knows something the audience doesn't, and the audience wants to find out what. As a speaker, I don't feel that I seize the authority to stand up in front of people talk about the stuff I talk about, I feel that I am granted grace to do so by the audience and that I had better damn well say something interesting.
On this point I agree with Suw that a speaker doesn't seize authority and I also agree with Johnnie that engagement and involvement are what more speakers should try and do. Its difficult when you are brought up on a diet on lectures and yet move into a world of blogging. Perhaps when I get up next to do a talk I should remind myself of this.
The aspect of authority itself though is most telling. The different definitions of authority being traded with both Johnnie and Adriana using the same dictionary.com reference to multiple meanings of the same word - just like blogging offers you multiple views of the world. Authority comes when we allow it to, whether internally from being the author of your own life to giving legitimacy to speakers, bowing to greater experience.
The emergence of this authority in blogging and of etiquette and behaviour modes is fascinating - at one point someone (apologies as to who) said that we have a means of dealing with other people, its called politeness. Well yes but then as James pointed out subversion is fun too.
So is questioning and so is storytelling. Right now blogging is interesting and fun and cool and disrupting and as Alastair Shrimpton and others suggested, going to be so not cool when it hits the real mainstream and yet still full of authority because we will give it to ourselves as affirmation and to others as little dances, with passion and with enthusiaism.
The blogtrain is running, some have seats, some will stand, but we are all going to get there, because the network and linkages are king.
It reminds me of the old adage 'content is king' - is it more so now that personality with content and linkages are king? Or is it interativity - the ability to have somenthing to do when you get to the endof that link i.e. post comments in a blogging context?
This is one conference that actually has me thinking more after the event than during it and that's good. Maybe it engaged me more than I thought, maybe it affirmed and empowered me more than I thought.
The one thing i wanted to say last night and didn't manage to get it out was that people long to make connections, and last night I made some relationship connects and some intellectual connections.
If I had a moodometer on the blog it would say VBG.
Posted by Paul Goodison at June 29, 2005 04:30 PM | TrackBack