I attended an unusual conference in London yesterday - Amplified09. Not unusual for the overall topic - social media/Web 2.0 - but for its organisation. Which was a very intriguing mixture of the virtual, the networked, the architectural and the personal. On one level, something of an exemplar for a 'serious play' environment. But on another level, reminiscent of a very historic phenomenon indeed.
I began with Amplified by going to its wiki (which you get access to when you sign up), and printing off a list of topics that people had posted up there, each with its own number. Not so unusual - except that each topic was prefixed by something called a hash tag. This is a convention that the micro-blogging service Twitter has evolved, by which people who are attending an event, or who share interest in a topic, signal that they're doing so by putting a specific hash tag in their messaging.
So if you'd gone to Twitter's search engine and typed in #uksnow a month ago, you would have seen a nation of tweeples (as they cry themselves) reporting on its snowfall as it happened. What Amplified09 asked you to do, when you were twittering on the event, was to use hash tags that didn't just refer to the overall event (#amp09), but to the number of the topics that someone wanted to talk about (eg #amp 09 #100).
As Toby Moores, Amplified's founder explained at the event, the desired behaviour would be that if there were a few good ideas that struck you from each discussion you were involved in, you would tweet those in a disciplined way (ie, using the proper sequence of hash tags). In this way, I guess Amplified wants to be able to retrospectively map the landscape of ideas arising from the discussion - the hot tables, the good talkers, the consistent themes. And also tie the peaks in those landscapes to particular individuals, who might wish to take further action.
This process promises to solve what often frustrates me about ideas conferences - which is the difficulty of translating rich discussions into useable knowledge. Yes, if we're disciplined, we blog seriously about it - which I did, for example, when I was a "Thinker-In-Residence" at the Bristol Festival of Ideas a few years ago. But my incentive there was, frankly, that I was getting paid for that activity (among other activities). What Clay Shirky identifies in Here Comes Everybody is that social networks enable people to get organised, and contribute to collective projects, for not that much individual effort - small contributions, loosely joined, potentially mounting up to a Wikipedia (or an Obama victory).
Each tweet from Amplified09 becomes that kind of contribution, if the participants are disciplined enough to do so. And crucially, if the organisers then have the resources to be editors and executors of these accumulated idea-flows, presenting them back to the participants in a convincing way, clearly highlighting possible projects and initiatives. (For example, it seems that an 'Alternative Digital Britain' report is going to be a tangible outcome of the day's event.)
I'm still a bit sceptical that Twitter's 140-character message limit (already eaten into by hash-tags) isn't just too arbitrarily small a text-window in which to get a good idea down from these processes. The fact that wi-fi wasn't available at the event meant that people were driven to their smart phones to tweet - and for me, that's not the most comfortable interface.
But what was very cool about the event was the way that its organising principles - where the online and offline easily interweave - transformed what was a rather bordello-like bar in Trafalgar Square (Tiger Tiger) into what Hakim Bey used to call a T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone). No doubt money from the sponsors helped to secure the venue - but it makes you realise how rare a London experience it is (apart from, say, hanging around Tate Modern) to be freely, inexpensively and noisily conversing with your peers, without the expectation that money should change hands at any point. Recession brings the agora back to life? If that's what Nesta's public funding of Amplified does... then that's what it's supposed to do.
I also admired what you could call the 'human iterative rules' of the event - the behaviours that Amplified09 prescribed at the face-to-face level, which would (hopefully) burgeon towards a rich and meaningful collective experience. The one I liked were the 'two ears, one mouth' rule ("use them in that proportion", admonished Toby, "don't grandstand or perform, listen twice as much as you speak"). And the 'law of the feet' rule - that once you feel you've received or added your pearls of wisdom to a particular table, then walk to another one, and fertilize (or be fertilized) by that conversation.
I was trying hard (honest) with the first rule, and I failed miserably with the second rule - partly I think because there were too many diverse and rich groups, and too little time to sample. But it's attractive to know that Amplified's schedule means that people might reconvene around certain topics, across different times and events (I'd very much like to engage with the 'future of the book/future of journalism' topics). Any socially-minded funding body could profitably dedicate one of its cash streams to be simply about making interesting urban spaces available to these netizens, wifi enabled if possible - and then let them coagulate furiously, using all the networked ad-hocracy at their disposal.
Of course I left with a pocketful of interesting biz cards, which I will explore. But the whole day reminded me of some quotes from (tighten the straps, matron) the anarchist David Graeber that I featured in my Play Ethic book. His experience of the anti-globalisation movement was that it was a 'prefigurative politics' - a politics which gave people a tangible sense of the change they are struggling for: this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole.
At the end of the New Left Review article, Graeber makes an interesting point. Why is it that movements for radical change always find sympathy among "artists, musicians, writers, and others" - to which we must add the geeks and hacker classes in full attendance yesterday - "who are involved in some form of non-alienated production?" Why is it that it's often craftsmen and craftswomen, rather than necessarily the oppressed worker (of head or hand), that sees a new path forward? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives—particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap...
Now, calm the horses - I'm not saying there was anything revolutionary going on in the squeaky leather booths of Tiger Tiger on Tuesday (not with the Economist's offices just a brick's-throw away). But I was very much encouraged by the general eagerness to relate any software, platform or infrastructure developments to genuine social need - and by the disdain for corporate and vested interest, and support for small-trader rights, that the Digital Britain report provoked in many conversations. I've been to my fair share of dot-com capital-jerks in the metropolis over the last 15 years, and this was at the very opposite pole from that. Perhaps it's the times - but perhaps it's also the maturing self-awareness of the digital classes
For me, Graeber's vision of networked activism - "being able to envision social alternatives", facilitated by a "less alienated form of creativity" - captures what was beginning to happen over six hours yesterday, and elsewhere in social media activism (see the Social Innovation Camp for example).
Or to be perhaps more reassuringly historical about it, Amplified09 also felt like a 21st century version of those 19th century associations and craft guilds - those who could intuit a better society, and a more active citizenship, by virtue of their immersion in their material and social practice. For awls and hammers, substitute mobys and netbooks: for printers-turned-pamphletters, substitute interaction-designers-turned-network-forgers. And perhaps even, for the rituals and protocols that bound masons and freemen together, substitute the subtle harness of behavioural cues (and hacker ethics) that suffused that venue yesterday.
As Richard Sennett says in his recent book, The Craftsman, "we gain our sense of citizenship in the experience of play - and we often lose it when we work". I felt among soulitarians yesterday, as I call them in the book - or citizen-players, or ethical hackers, or the newly militant creative classes, or "Leadbeaters" even - whatever label sticks.
#amp09 #optimism. And of course, this'll be on the twitterstream in a minute. Serious play, indeed.
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