Sense-making in multiple dimensions
Summary
Luis Suarez has started blogging again after a three year hiatus, and has posted several reflections on his dissatisfaction with social media (one factor in his withdrawal), combined with a desire to recapture the conversational essence from the early days of blogs: In the comments Luis and I have been discussing the importance within sense-making of allowing for slowness and reflection (e.g. multi-speed sense-making or #SlowSocial). For me this cross-links to Mike Caulfield’s metaphor of the Garden and the Stream where he advocates wiki-like media (in particular Federated Wiki) as “a different way to think your online activity, no matter what tool you use [and] a different way of collaborating as well”. An adaptation of Caulfield’s views is offered by Frank McPherson who considers the true characteristic of the Stream as being ephemerality rather than the fact of it being presented in a time-based way. When you consider these two characteristics, ephemerality and time-based organisation, whilst platforms such as Twitter fit absolutely within the Stream metaphor, a blog can straddle both ends of the spectrum depending on how it is used. For Caulfield there is a deep power in media that allows topological relationships between concepts to emerge, and (perhaps a little rhetorically) he asserts: As often happens, when I looked up the Caulfield reference I started looking through some of his other posts relating to different uses for Federated Wiki, and found this compelling account of a classic “join the dots” moment, characterised by Mike as “collaboration with ourselves across temporal boundaries” Underlying all of these metaphors is a sense of connecting ideas through multiple dimensions: At least two of these are in themselves multi-dimensional (how do you map the topology of ideas to each other, or the relationships between different actors?)