Johnnie Moore writes today about More Space, the book he co-authored with eight other bloggers.
Rob’s chapter is a great polemic and rousing stuff. I think some of us bloggers have learnt to tone down our rhetoric so as not to alarm the uninitiated – and it’s fun to be reminded of the idealism that actually motivates some of us to keep this up.
Rob is Robert Patterson, the Principal of Renewal Consulting Group. He lives on Prince Edward Island on the fringes of the old economy and at the edge of the new. Like Johnnie Moore, Patterson is an Oxford graduate.
Here is a selection from Patterson’s chapter, available on the More Space site.
Knowledge is more than facts; it is about understanding and participation. Google enables you to find the best person and the best conversation. This is what is behind the marketing revolution. This is what is behind the impending revolution in education and health. Conversation is also the force behind the generation of a new community.
Google provides the connective tissue that will make important conversations and communities the paramount places of informed power in the world and will put dogma back into the waste bin of history.
At the center of conversation is the blog.
At the heart of the blog is the authentic voice. The product of the authentic voice is community. The end game of community is identity. Identity is the answer of the greatest question that any human can ask: “Who am I?”
It is also a generative space in which we can give birth to our lost voice. As we find our voice, we begin to wake up. We start to become human again.
How does the blog awaken us? This open space invites us to speak in public. Hesitant, at first we speak the old way. But now and then the occasional real voice pops out. As it does, others notice and drop by and encourage us. Encouraged, we use our real voice more often.
Community begins to form. This is not about the communities of A-list bloggers with thousands of readers. This is about having a small group of fifteen or thirty strong connections with an inner circle of five to eight. These are magic numbers. They are the core numbers of our ancient tribal hunter-gatherer past. It should be no surprise that we become most human again in the context that we are designed to be most comfortable in, the tribe.
I know what Patterson means. Our tribal core of supporters makes a big difference. It might be nice to think we can affect the masses with our ideas, but the fact that we do reach a core community helps drive this project forward day-to-day.
