Earlier I suggested we might become more open and more personal about our
experiences in working inside organizations. I would add another question
which may open us up to new ideas and experiences. I take it from William
J. Mitchell's book "City of Bits."
Here's the quote that spawned my question: "The texts that follow
reimagine architecture and urbanism in the new context suggsted by these
observations - - that of the digital telecommunications revolution, the
ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits, and
the growing domination of software over materialized form. They adumbrate
the emergent but still invisible cities of the twenty-first century. And
they argue that the most curcial task before us is not one of putting in
palce the digital plumbing of broadband communication links and associated
electronic appliances (which we will certainly get anyway), nor even of
producing electronically deliverable 'content,' but rather one of the
imagining and creating digitally mediated en vironments for the kinds of
lives we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want
to have."
The last sentence is the one I wish to focus on. Here we have an
electroncially mediated learning environment. There are two thousand
people in this environment. It borders on becoming a community, but, in my
mind, fails to reach that status because of th e lack of "action" within
the group. And so what better group of people to ask the question then us:
What type of lives do we want to live in the electronically mediated
environment? What type of communities do we want to have in cyberspace?
And finally, how will the answer to both of those questions impact our
organizations and our work life and the way we learn as individuals and as
part of an organization?
What have we learned by participating on this list, whether you post
messages or not, that has gone unnoticed or unspoken? What have we learned
about electronic communities that we are not aware we have learned? Has
our experience on this list opened us u p to learning we simply don't know
is taking place? And what does that learning tell us about the present?
And what of the future? Are electronically mediated communities viable and
sustainable over the long run? How do they differ from the more personal,
face-to-face communities we've known all our lives? Do we really want to
live in an electronically mediated environment? Is that our only future?
What other futures might emerge? How would they be different?
These are questions that I think could open all of us to new experiences,
new insights, and perhaps become an unique example of the type of
communities that might emerge in the next century. But we'll never know if
we don't take the first step. And the fi rst step is to ask the question:
What are we experiencing? What have we learned from that experience? What
does our experience help us believe about the future? How can our
experience be improved?
-- Benjamin Compton DWS Computer Consultants "The GroupWise Integration Experts" E-Mail: bcompton@emailsolutions.com http://www.emailsolutions.com
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>