If you're not present, you're absent...

..creativity's dark corners that networks need...

Today @mpesce talked on Twitter about the need for protocols for online networks.  It made me think about a convention and a process for being neither present or absent, but processing.

I have recently been through one of those 'life reinventions'.  Unlike the current 'sexy' portrayal of creativity the process was absorbing, consuming and sometimes dark and scary.  During the process  I switched off from my networks. One minute I was talking, the next I was disconnected. 

It was however a rich and a valuable time, productive and exciting, if challenging and complex.

                                                                                                Photo:  Mark Ramsay @ Flickr

Suddenly one morning...

[Deep in the heart of my insecurities]

"Panic, stress.... I haven't been talking to anyone, I'm a leech, when did I last contribute...

So much has changed, what a chasm...how am I ever going to explain where I've been and how I got here..

Does it even matter?"

photo: Fotolog @ Flickr

...and the question is...???

Networks add value by building on individual capacity, stretching peoples' thinking and then empowering  people to explore their own capacity. So, why, in a period of deep contemplation, did I decide not to share, when surely this would be exactly the time not only to ask for advice but to make the best use of it?"

The creative process is wonderful - at the end.  In the middle I found it complex and contradictory.  My online networks felt too public a place to expose such fragile thinking.  Do online spaces in their ephemeral nature provide pressure to present finished thought?  Is it really ok to be fragmented and indecisive?  How does an avatar portray developing thinking?

I have always thought that networks are non-linear.  Am I wrong though, are they very linear, our online social places being,  not places where thought can evolve, but a place to report the results of the thinking process?

There is no word, no hash tag, no convention for being present but processing.  If you are not 'present' then you are 'absent'. 

I have seen very few people I admire talk about the dark spaces of the creative process. 

My question: are our online networks missing an important facet?  Are they 'safe' enough for  emergent thoughts, or do we do our 'composting'  alone only presenting when we have visible evidence of growth...?           

Seems to me that would be a sad place falling well short of our expectations of ecosystems...

I don't know the answers, but I'm very interested in continuing to explore, what do you think?

I'm not sure - over to you.

(Photo:  seir+seir @ flickr)

Comments

[Richapplefool]

Hi Harriet,
Welcome back ;-)

"dark spaces of the creative process."
...it's like a mini midlife crisis, isn't it?!

I think half baked ideas need convoluted conversations that writing is hard to capture.

Real-time conversations with friends help.

(Otherwise you're left with conversing with yourself in your mind? Hence... midlife crisis!)

Maybe it's the tools... ?

[Eclectics]

IMHO the network is the garden, lots of interesting pollination going on. But the plants need root systems to be able to draw in and prices the nutrients (unless they're air borne parasites) and if you expose the roots to the sun the plant will dry up and wither. At least I think that's what happens. I don't know, I spend all my time in front of computers.

[Harriet Wakelam]

Thanks for the comments.. - yes, that's funny, I hadn't thought of it as a 'mid-life'crisis' - I guess the definition of crisis is the need to move into something different...

Hi Stony - I like your metaphor of network as garden... I'd love to see networks having the tools to provide nutrients too though. I'm wondering if we've modelled them on what we know, instead of what we want!

Thanks.

[o ah]

Whether I'm absent or present,is up to me!