Notes for TEDGlobal

This July, I will be attending this extraordinary conference and am bringing together ideas I have on the theme.

The Theme of TEDGlobal 2009 is “to explore and make visible the Substance of Things Not Seen.” To address hidden influences in our behavior, we need expose these by describing and exploring them, developing a language, applying tools from the arts and sciences to understand these. Each historic moment has a set of such unseen questions that are pressing to explore. Here are some that to me seem particularly pressing to understand today.
 

• Information Technology
  • What if the web is really a social problem-solving system? New developments address deep complexity, and reduce costs of production, distribution and customization of information-based products and solutions.
  • What social problems can we now solve that we couldn’t before?
  • What’s the intersection of KM and Philanthropy? How do we apply business intelligence to philanthropy?
  • Now and in the near future, the web, with engaged participation, is a social problem-solving platform, machine, and environment. The web will surface attempted solutions, collaboratively filter them, and generate an attention-based attraction to relevant problems, then fit solutions are suitably packaged and delivered in actionable form where needed. The internet is a hospitable habitat for solutions to social problems.
• Psychology
  • Cognitive illusions – in economics, happiness, relationships. Could we have a talk that included someone like John Gottmann to bring new knowledge on Relationships into the TED Arena?
  • Dealing with predictability of one’s death – Remember Randy Pausch and his incredible Last Lecture. There’s a growing group of (especially young) people who are told their death is coming by their doctors. What are healthy and transformational ways to deal with this ?
  • Habits – how do we manage the habitforming and habitchanging process?
  • Beliefs—how do we recognize and evolve our beliefs, and recognize the beliefs of others?
  • Greatness, excellence, perfection, joy, wisdom, ecstasy—what do we know about these?
  • Deepening attentiveness to the future and past in the age of twitter, multi-tasking and ADD.
• Philosophy
  • Certainty and uncertainty
  • The illusory reality of future and past time, the fact of how we model these
  • Habits
  • Beliefs
  • Greatness, excellence, perfection, joy, wisdom, ecstasy
• Culture
  • The influence of our cultures on what we do and think
  • Intercultural dynamics, economics, evolution
  • Does ethnocentrism have a future?
• Language/Storytelling
  • How language structures us
  • Whose voices are silent that we need to hear?

Top Social Media Risks

#1 ppl, groups, companies cloak self-interest in claims to represent

#2 loudest most confident/arrogant voices heard over most wise; declarations favored over discussion

#3 limited, problematic editorial function. more access to participate not necessarily equitable

#4 subversion, exploitation, abuse of openness #swf09

#5 social media are privately owned but thought of as public. IP battles still to come

#6 social media confuses the immediate with the important; tiny facts with more complex truths

#7 social media provides inadequate ramps to offline; mistakes chatter/talk for action

#8 individualism and differences diminished by favoring popularity, peer-love, in-group authority

#9 highly contagious context for meme-transmission, yet immature ability to detect dangerous viruses

#10 false urgency created by constant updates sucks undue attention

#11 context for privacy and anonymity and behavioral fault-tolerance has changed but consequences are unclear. When you make a mistake that is published in text, it’s not easy (or possible in some cases) to redact or correct these, whereas voice conversations allow for more forgivability, more experimentation. Anonymity is constructed very differently online than in person.

#12 Rumors or exaggerations travel faster and wider than truthful facts.

 

These were written in twitterese, so please excuse (or appreciate?) brevity. This is also a test of MS Word 2007’s blog publishing feature.

 

Mapping Openness to Cultures

I’ve been thinking about how differently people orient themselves in relation to other cultures. Here’s a range of orientations to one’s own and other cultures. What are the pros and cons of each? What determines a person’s orientation and openness? It’s hard and it’s strange to get to know other cultures. Is it worth it?

Monoculturalist	Cultural Supremacist, Cultural Elitist	Multiculturalist, cultural pluralist	Polyculturalist
Limits perspective and allows input only from within one’s native culture. Other cultures aren’t really considered to exist	Recognize existence of other cultures, but view one’s own culture as superior. My culture, right or wrong.	Multiple cultures exist and are honored as all having some value.	Individuals are fluent in more than one root culture.
Isolationist. Other cultures are inherently and unfathomably foreign.	Interchange is possible only on resource extraction, exploitation or economic terms.	Interchange possible on economic terms, and also on social terms, such as cultural and educational exchanges	Interchange is the normative state.
Intercultural space is unknown	Intercultural space is a struggle for dominance	Intercultural space is a domain and market for learning, negotiation, exploration, shared reality generation.	Intercultural space is normal, comfortable, cultural boundaries are recognized as highly permeable.
Marry someone from your own church	Marry within your village	Marrying across culture and race is ok.	Marrying across cultures is normal.

 

The columns above aren’t mutually exculsive. I’d say I married within my culture, but also feel rooted within multiple cultures and see the world as a polyverse (a space of multiple cultural universes).

I know many who deeply inhabit one home culture, and who don’t venture forth from there, and often I admire them for their steadfast loyalty to their familiar world, and to the clarity with which they see things. I, on the other hand feel like I live in a honeycomb of multiple cultures, moving between them on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. In a day i might be working with Americans online and by phone, discussing with my daughters a creole expression they heard at school, helping them with French homework or talking with a local neighbor or family member. It takes effort and energy to move between cultures and there pros and cons to doing so. At times I envy friends who are deep within a single culture and have a mastery of that domain. 

Yet, as someone who values learning a bit more than certainty, I think I’m preferring and actively seeking out the awkward discomfort of being a novice in a new culture for how that might enrich me over the certainty that I know how things are. I want a wide range of experiences to contribute to my identity. Surely, though, I also limit the risks of being too much a stranger in a strange land, of being lost or vulnerable to an unsafe extent, or on the point of non-comprehension. This is the brink of chaos; of exile, of an impossibility of participation. I think when we learn or when we’re given the tools of adapting to and learning new cultural contexts; of learning other languages and being at home with the unfamiliar rather than afraid of difference, the fearful aspects of these other worlds are far less and we’re more free to find our way in a wider world.

In a life, we make choices to invest more deeply in a handful of cultures, and those choices are limited by many factors. We’re born into a culture, but we may choose (or be forced) to live in different cultural spaces. Raising a family, we choose what culture to give our children and place limits on that as well. Each family in a sense forms or creates it’s own culture.