After an interesting Twitter discussion with Robert Jackson (@parallax00) and Tero Karppi (@karppi) as well as beginning to read Martin Weller’s The Digital Scholar), reading Nigel Thrift’s thoughts on blogademics… some (half-baked) thoughts.
This site(blog) doesn’t attract many comments. I wouldn’t say it’s crowd sourcing my research, let alone my thesis. It provides (to follow my consultancy business‘ favourite metaphor), the library model. It is a place for clients, students and hopefully employers to find my work, be wowed or just sufficiently intrigued by it to… well open a content relationship. Despite spending most of my career talking about the Live Web and its network effects, the conversation economy et al, my work has never really become the ‘conversation attractor’ that I talk about or necessarily connected with other conversations. That doesn’t mean I am not talking to people in my area of interest, it just means this has not tended to be the space.
Robert and Tero were talking about their fears for putting stuff on blogs that was ‘half-baked’ or too early. As far as I am concerned it is the process of writing here or in Scrivener or in Evernote or in my little black notebook that is important. I think through my writing. It is only in writing ‘stuff’, creating word-objects, that my ideas form, reform, connect and reconnect within other word-objects. Look there I go again. I hadn’t thought of that until I wrote that sentence.
I don’t care whether that paragraph comes back to haunt me, embarrass me or anything else. This is not a religious creed but a live thinking-writing-action, creating and connecting objects and seeing (Arcades Style) what happens when they connect. For that to work they need to be half-baked. Partly so that others can help bake them, but even if there’s no-one out there, so I can let them simmer and bake as I throw new ingredients into the mix.
Her’s to the half-baked rag ‘n refuse…