I am a novice blogger. Dave Snowden invited me to blog for a couple of weeks on this website and I decided that I would try it out for fun. However, I feel a bit like a country cousin from Iowa gate crashing a New York fancy dress party. I am hoping that people will not see through the fact that I am not disguised and will actually mistake me for a country cousin from Iowa.
So what’s with country cousins? Well, numerous academic studies reveal that country cousins are rather simple people who speak their minds without malice aforethought. Here, simplicity = absence of malice aforethought, country = not New York, and cousins = relatives that you can’t expect to inherit much from. Now speaking your mind without malice aforethought is code for self-expression. Whatever is on the inside get’s displayed on the outside with little awareness or regard for the sensitivities or opinions of those who are exposed to it. Compare this with communication, the art of saying something so well aligned with what the hearer wants to hear that she doesn’t even realize that she has also swallowed something that she didn’t want to hear. Self-expression is what country cousins practice unwittingly and artists practice deliberately. Communication, on the other hand, is what advertising agencies and politicians specialize in. One of the greatest of communication skills is to be able to fake self-expression. And that, of course, is exactly what I am hoping to achieve by masquerading as the country cousin that I really am at the fancy dress party.
How might this affect my blogging strategy? From the little that I know of blogging, it offers all of the advantages of publication – a large admiring or hostile audience - with little or none of the attendant responsibilities – ie, to either entertain or to apologise for failing to do so. In other words it allows me to pass off what is really an exercise in self-expression as an act of communication – exactly the opposite of what I have defined as a communication skill.
So blogging allows a nested process in which the country cousin wants you to believe that he is skillfully disguised as a country cousin so that he can go on being a country cousin without actually having to pretend that he is so. If you’ve got that, then you’ve got my blogging strategy.
Max Boisot (Dave Snowden acting as secretary)
Comments (3)
Hi Max
My own take is that the blogosphere is a country where communicators learn how to become country cousins - or rather that's the evolutionary pressure.
Posted by Patrick Lambe | October 1, 2007 3:53 AM
Posted on October 1, 2007 03:53
Dear Max,
I have seen this statement attributed to you: "War are in an information race with the terrorists. We are losing."
Was this you? I want to use this comment in the context of working with the intelligence community. The intelligence folks (of which I was one for about 20 years) want to classify everything and tell nothing. On the other hand, terrorist groups such as AQ and their insprired followers post and broadcast as much of their information as they possibly can. This includes technical info and "lessons learned." The single greatest problem, IMHO, is that most terrorists are better informed about what is going on than most intelligence and police organizations. Secrecy is the enemy of knowledge! And knowledge is what is needed to prevail in the face of an asymmetric threat such as terrorism.
tom
Posted by tom quiggin | October 1, 2007 12:15 PM
Posted on October 1, 2007 12:15
Patrick,
Evolutionary theory has also taught us that sooner or later country cousins get 'selected out' if they get too close - ie, incestuous. I myself have cross-eyed country cousins that could do with some selecting out. I'm sure that the feeling is mutual. Such feelings initiate a process of speciation - one reason, perhaps why I tend to think that my country cousins are from another planet.
Tom,
I tend to agree. In my book, Knowledge Assets, I distinguish between hoarding and sharing strategies when dealing with the information economy. Intelligence services have been socialized into thinking that only hoarding strategies work and they have been culturally and organizationally committed to deliver this one strategy. I believe that they actually need a mixture of both and that the critical skill consists in knowing what to share and what to hoard. To take hoarding as a default assumption deprives intelligence services of some important choices. Unfortunately, they have not begun to think of what sharing involves.
Posted by Max Boisot | October 2, 2007 8:46 AM
Posted on October 2, 2007 08:46