Syndicated

Being a person

3 min read

I've taken to the Known platform for Connected Courses partly because I've seen good examples of Known in beta release and I'm curious to see if I can figure it out. Jim Groom speaks highly of it, David Kernohan makes it look easy, and Ben Werdmuller is right up there in my pantheon of top helpful souls.

See, this is how things work. There's such a torrent of new stuff out there, and one of the few ways those of us with no coding skill or particular technical aptitude can sort through it is by recommendation and example.  And this is flat out the easiest way to work out who you trust online, among all the people you've never met in person. It's a calculation about heft: whose counsel weighs on you in this floating world?

This is why I was struck while listening to the affable pre-course video for Connected Courses that "being a person" came up so early, because I'm thinking about exactly this: what makes us trust one another online? Why this person, why not that person? It's not just all the bots and fakes and trolls that make us jumpy, but it's something that I think Bon Stewart is getting at in her beautiful meditation on the death/undeath of Twitter:

We don’t know how to deal with collapsed publics, full stop. We don’t know how to talk across our differences. So participatory media becomes a cacophonic sermon of shame and judgement and calling each other out, to the point where no identity is pure enough to escape the smug and pointless carnage of petty collective reproach.

Bon and I ended up having a conversation about the attention economy, which isn't just about clicks and eyeballs, but also about the ways in which we selectively tend towards each other, and tend each other's thoughts--it's an economy of care, not just a map to markets. We came to this through the meaning of attention, which is lovely: it comes to us with a history of thinking about stretching towards, and caring for, that in our world of haste has been reduced to a kind of dumb and exploitable rubbernecking.

So I'm sitting alongside Connected Courses because I want to understand more about this process of attending, in order to see how it fits into my own future as an educator and writer—in other words, my future as a person.

If you want to know more about where I am with knowns, unknowns and what turns up, you're welcome over at Music for Deckchairs. But for now, I'm going to hit the blue button and see where this ends up.

#ccourses #trust #attention