7th
Synthesis
Not long ago I decided to take a break from updating my status on Twitter and Facebook. It was a spur of the moment decision but the urge had been building for quite a while. What I said at the time was: “It’s mediating my conversations and I like the internet when it disntermediates.”
Meaning: Using Twitter and Facebook statuses gives me the action of initiating interactions with the world, satisfying something innate, but for the most part ends the experience there. On one hand this is perfectly fine: Broadcasting the ephemera of life maintains a loose contact, a finger in the ambient stream of ones social network. And every now and again someone will @you or “like this” to let you know that the world rolls on.
On a different hand, by granting a minor satisfaction of the urge to express, 140 characters of news bleeds off the pressure to say something of substance, something with significance, something that synthesizes.
This may be the most telling way in which I’m showing my age: Knowledge trumps Information; though communication is the grist of knowledge generation, action, results, doing, knowing is what matters. When I was at Socialtext and actively engaged with Blue Oxen I had occasion to play in the fields of the lords of Silicon Valley and often thought: All these Californians seem to do is travel from one conference, meetup, retreat to the next. When do they do anything? When is the synthesis? (It does happen, but it is on the fringes of the whirling soup of information being exchanged. People step out of the flow and then return with their synthesized new stuff.)
EEK (of Blue Oxen) and I, in our too infrequent conversations, often return to the topic “What happened to wikis?” Somewhere along the way the popular conception of a wiki transformed from a tool for synthesizing new understandings in a group to a tool for representing topical information which can refined. In many modern wikis, UI affordances emphasize the single page and the fact that it is editable rather than the entire wiki and its nature as an evolving (visible by recent changes) networked (via hyperlinks) corpus of shared understandings. A traditional wiki is a synthesizing tool when it exposes or strengthens the connections between distant concepts and categories. The group using a wiki learns by exposing, exploring and, eventually, refining those connections.
I get bored when I’m not learning, learning requires synthesis and synthesis requires reflection, reflection is something we pause for. Writing a tweet is vaguely like pissing with the wind: off it goes, out there with the breeze; easy, initially satisfying, but ultimately boring. So a pause. I’m sure I’ll return to it eventually but for the time being I need some reflection, some synthesis, and some doing and being.
While looking around for things I’ve thought or written related to this, I found this old email about knowledge representations from 2002 which has a bit to say about synthesis.
