In response to¬†my post yesterday aboutKelly’s ‘We Are The Web’, Dougald sent me this lovely Netfuture article by Stephen Talbott which outlines lucidly and powerfully the concerns I found myself struggling with so incoherently. The mistaking of technological advancement for positive value and the attendant risks of cultural self-destruction; the confusion of our increasing identification with technology for technology’s becoming more human. I’m glad someone is thinking about this other than little me.

He goes on to discuss the West’s growing realisation after the end of the Cold War that “post-Soviet Russia was not going to transform itself overnight by implementing a tidy set of democratic and capitalist mechanisms”. Simply applying what has worked elsewhere to a living culture will not act predictably on that culture. Rather,

“The mechanisms have no positive meaning¬†at all except insofar as they can be wrestled into productive dialogue with the values, ideas, aesthetic judgments, qualities of selfhood and individuality, habits of private initiative, and communal experiences that
are the substance of democracy and capitalism.”

To mistake mechanisms for culture is the same error as to mistake connectivity for connection. Though a virtual town hall meeting may be more interactive than nothing, he continues, it’s still¬†not a patch on an actual, physical meeting of human beings.

That brought me back to the final point of yesterday’s post about Pick Me Up and my experiences navigating the tricky fields of¬†authorship, quality control and collaboration on and offline. My conclusion was that - though it took place mostly online - Pick Me Up both worked and, ultimately, petered out because of the human relationships that it narrated and in some cases created. We had several meetings where we tried to jump-start it. But the fact is, no-one wants to make it happen right now. And so let it rest in peace

It told stories of unusual, creative, funny or poignant things that people had done, were planning or needed help with. Pick Me Up itself was nothing but a lot of ones and zeros landing in people’s inboxes: the value was in the relationships it documented. Had the production system been automated, so that Pick Me Ups were somehow automatically created from aggregated content without the need for any of these relationships,¬†it would have no value whatsoever. I think in that realisation lies a fundamental message about the right relationship of technology to human endeavour.