Author: Ken Smith

These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.

It’s still out there. A fully functioning internet.

Taking up an old-fashioned hobby “helped restore my faith in the possibilities and the basic humanity of the internet,” writes @FManjoo. Being a hobbyist “helped me find a saner, friendlier corner of the internet,” a place of “collaboration, persistence and shared ingenuity…a way to supercharge my training.”

This served as “a reminder that the internet’s most effective trick is connecting disparate individuals into a coherent whole.” Serving as a space where “the online social structure around any hobby” forms and “the collective builds on itself.”

Newcomers “pick up the basics — but by creating new markets for content and equipment, and connecting every hobbyist who has discovered something new to an audience eager to learn every trick, it heightens the experience for people at every level.”

Because their topic fails to attract trolls and bots who intentionally flood the zone with chaos, the internet’s creative mechanism still works within the hobby’s confines.

Within that zone, the internet “opens up a whole new world.”

The academic way

Most academics don’t imagine themselves operating as publishers of their insights day by day in the ongoing give and take of society, of politics.

We academics usually don’t value the chance of speaking directly to a wide audience. We usually don’t feel the need for non-academic forms of media. We put the power of our understanding on hold or out of reach of people who need it. Most of us do and say this:

“I will teach this powerful idea to my 19-year-old students and maybe in a decade one of them will use it in the world.”

And we will not, for the most part, empower students to practice using powerful ideas in the world during the university years.

Blogging in an expert society

We owe a great debt to experts. They got us to the moon before our enemies; they saved my father’s life in the ICU years ago; they made this truly beautiful machine I am typing on right now; they cured the common cold. [Well, not that last one.] Our debt to experts is profound.

By contrast, bloggers cast a ridiculous figure in a society shaped so cunningly by experts. Who are these typists with their stray thoughts, their hopeless, rambling plans, and their thinning ranks? Their informal little essays almost instantly forgotten, their links rotting and, soon enough, cobwebs decorating their servers. Who do these bloggers think they are fooling?

But expertise can rob us of a little of ourselves:

When we use only the lens provided by a profession, there are some things about our fellow human beings we will never know.
When we are guided only by expertly-framed policy, we will from time to time stomp on the souls of other people.
When we speak only in the words of expertise, some people will believe that we are also quietly saying, “Be quiet and listen. An expert is speaking. It’s time for you to shut up.”

At least there are certain mistakes that bloggers don’t often make:

They usually don’t pull rank. They usually don’t insist that a problem can be solved only by a certain kind of expert or talked about only in one kind of language.
They tend to think that people’s experience has something to offer. They assume that tradition or dogma should be challenged by people reflecting on their experiences.
They get riled up, but down deep they like to hear more voices, not fewer. They want their turn to speak, not the only turn. They get really impatient, but down deep they want democracy.

So: we bloggers aren’t entirely serious. That is our weakness and our strength. We aren’t systematic. That helps free us from the ethical failings of expertise. We have no authority and we can’t make people listen. That means that the people who turn our way are free people, making their own choices. Those are very cool people to have as friends. No money changes hands, just ideas and experiences. Nobody pulls rank. And on a good day, interesting things get said and sometimes they ripple out into the world. In an expert society, bloggers give me hope.

Silence 101

A little theory of the weakness of democracy:

Silence is the basic mode of a citizen, largely unallied with others, having no regular civic audience, skilled in no form of public address, possessing no reliable stream of information or one so contested and poisoned and vexed as to be more problem than aid, susceptible to cynicism or despair or indifference or fear every moment that is not spent laboring or consuming entertainment or tending the beautiful or bare walled garden of the private life.

from KS’s 1999.io and http://ift.tt/2EfGxri