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So many things that we are told are “bad” are in fact great motivators. Johnnie Moore brought up the idea of Shame as an experience while we were chatting the other day and it had a great impact on me. The idea that emotions and ideas which were once “negative” are really positives in our lives, because they can be instigators of discovery and new.

Moving in to uncomfortable spaces, absorbing uncomfortable ideas, exposing ourselves to uncomfortable risk, they are all powerful motivators to encourage us to grow. Social computing spaces are the first places inside an organization, and outside and organizations, that we can reach that level of nonequilibrium.

Your comment is such a succinct way of putting it.

Kind of like tolerating and accepting as useful input the intelligent questions and rebuttals in the crowd that is an organization, versus encouraging or demanding a crowd full of yes-men and women …

So manty good ideas and useful concepts (and warnings that would have saved a lot of time and money) are cut off too quickly.

Debate?
All I see is at social networking sites is one bunch of people yelling “God is cool,” and another yelling “there is no God.” That’s about it, apart from people trying to get laid by the kind of total strangers who seem like the sort of people who would have a frezer full of dead heads in their garage.

Is this debate then?

That may have been your experience Ian but all I can say is that my my own has been very different. Yes you can find nonsense anywhere on the web but I have had many worthwhile and ongoing debates on various online forums and certainly in a work context the signal to noise improves. For us the amount of worthwhile exchanges made the process very much worth embarking on and there is no way it would have lasted as long as it has, and kept growing, if all there was on there was inane twaddle.

The name of Ian’s blog is cute … Little Nicky Machiavelli.

Why do you blog, Ian ? And use the blog.co.uk Friend’s Profiles widget and del.ici.ous and gather.com ? To find more yelling or to help people get laid ?

And wow, what a long, long list of tags … peripatetic, I’d say

Anyway, sure there’s loads of crap and goofy people on the Web … just like the loads of crap and goofy people you’ll find on the high streets of every town and city, and in every workplace.

Roads, cars, buses and trains help people move about aimlessly just to amuse themselves, but are also useful to help them get somewhere they want to go or are important for them to reach.

Probably a stupid or clumsy analogy, but one must consider the source

Ummm, Ian, you don’t need social networking to get the stuff you mention….

Euan — I think the gold dust is *what emerges from difference and debate* or, put differently, that social computing allows something to emerge from difference and debate.

Indeed on both counts!

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