On Twitter, Agitation and Collaboration (via Radicalism, Regicide and St Benedict)

Last Friday afternoon I was somewhat surprised to find myself sitting in an English parish church musing on the year 1670 and the relationship between St Benedict’s Little Rule for Beginners and Twitter. To explain how it came about you’ll have to permit me to provide some context.

For the English 1660 is a far more recognisable date than 1670. 1660 was the year in which England shut the door on decades of political turmoil and the aftermath of a civil war that culminated in regicide with the beheading of Charles I in 1649 and the ensuing Lord Protectorship of Oliver Cromwell. It was the year the “long parliament” was finally dissolved and at the end of May Charles II, son of the beheaded king, returned to London and the monarchy was restored. (Fans of English letters will also recognise it as the year in which Samuel Pepys commenced his diary on 1st January.)

One individual caught up in the political turmoil of the English civil war was a Cambridge scholar, fellow of Clare Hall (now Clare College) and Vicar of the Cambridgeshire village of Great Gransden. As a staunch Royalist, Barnabas Oley was forced into hiding for his beliefs. Cambridgeshire was a difficult place to be loyal to the King, given that it was Cromwell’s home county and a hotbed of Parliamentarian Puritanism. For several years Oley lived in fear for his life, taking refuge in northern England. It was only the Restoration of 1660 that allowed Oley to come out of hiding, resume his post at Clare and take up residence in Gransden again. He reached the rank of Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, was involved with the University Press, and was responsible, amongst other things, for posthumous publication of the metaphysical poet George Herbert, whose work had failed to get past the press licensors in the pre-puritan era following the death of James I

Most significantly for me, amongst Oley’s philanthropic deeds in his parish was the foundation of a village school in 1670. Although Elizabeth I had granted charters for numerous town grammar schools in England during her reign, rural education was at best ad hoc and was largely non-existent, so in this Oley’s actions were characteristically charitable, radical and ahead of their time. So now, in the penultimate week of every summer term, Barnabas Oley is remembered in Gransden. On Wednesday the final year children visit Clare College. Then on Friday – Founder’s Day – a member of the academic staff of Clare pays a return visit to the school, makes a speech and presents prizes in the church where Oley served as vicar for so many years.

So there’s a thread from the Restoration of 1660, through Barnabas Oley founding a school in 1670 (the same school that my youngest child will attend for the last time this week), to me sitting in a church in 2009 listening to the current Dean of Clare College, the Rev Gregory Seach, explaining Benedict’s “Little Rule for Beginners” to a group of 4-11 year olds. Cambridge academics are not universally skilled in communicating with primary school children, so over my 12 years of attending I’ve heard some variable speeches. But although he now teaches Divinity at Cambridge, Seach is an energetic Australian who taught English and Drama in schools for ten years before training for the ministry. He knows how to attract and retain the attention of children and adults.

Greg told us that in the “Little Rule” Benedict exhorted people to recognise each day as a new beginning with new opportunities for learning. And he also instructed them to work and learn together because humans don’t learn in isolation – but rather with and from each other. Benedict saw learning as a collaborative activity, just as he saw work as one of the essential disciplines of life.

Co-incidentally, the previous evening, I had participated in a Twitter discussion about e-readers co-ordinated by @KatMeyer under the #followreader hashtag. I would never have thought a useful and meaningful conversation on a subject so complicated would be possible in 140-character tweets. I was wrong. I learned a huge amount in less than an hour thanks to the participation of many well-informed people, who were patient and courteous with the less well-informed. (The exchanges should all still be visible by searching #followreader and Kat will also post an online summary.)

Then Friday itself had begun with some vigorous online exchanges with @MackCollier. Mack had tweeted that he felt #followfriday – the convention by which on Friday users of Twitter suggest others worth “following” under the #followfriday hashtag – has had its day and should be let go. Mack is a social media expert with considerable influence online (and offline too no doubt). With 24,434 tweets and 9,063 followers under his belt it’s fair to assume his opinions come from experience. In his view #followfriday has become a routine to promote egos and the already well-known, rather than genuinely widen the real inclusiveness of Twitter.

All this was on my mind as I shifted gears from the digital world to the story of Benedict’s Little Rule. In making a school prize day speech, I found Greg Seach articulating one aspect of why Twitter is such an engaging forum. Within the group of publishers, authors, readers, writers, journalists, industry professionals, friends, family and other tangents I am following and meeting online, there is a sense of a group endeavour. Yes there are egos present, individual agendas followed and corporate profits sought – within a cocktail made all the more punchy by the participation of self-styled enfants terribles such as @ajkeen who don’t hesitate to disrupt – but even that disruption is productive because it is questioning and deliberately provocative. Even in our modern secular media we need agitators and catalysts to make things happen – as Barnabas Oley well knew. And by working and learning collaboratively we learn better and faster – as Benedict of Nursia pointed out in the 6th Century – and Twitter still proves in the 21st.

On Conches and Conversation

The change of time zone that comes with my current business travels in the US allowed me to take part in the Twitter Book Club discussion (#tbc) on Monday 15th June 9pm EST. Although there is nothing to stop me taking part from the UK, I’m not entirely sure in normal circumstances I’d want it to be visible to my friends, family & colleagues that I’d been wide awake tweeting between 2-3am GMT. Insomnia is public in Twitter.

Monday’s #tbc was a fascinating hour (anyone on Twitter can see the exchanges posted by searching on #tbc). The discussion was of Lloyd Jones’ novel Mr Pip, first published in 2006 – so a book that has been doing the rounds for some time. (I embarrassed myself by enthusing about it at home last week whereupon Ellie (15) rolled her eyes and replied “I read it last year and told you it’s great….”)

Mr Pip was a smart choice for #tbc. Short, compelling, well-paced, full of ambiguities and unanswered questions, redolent with literary references (which while they can enhance enjoyment of the book, don’t detract if the reader is unfamiliar with them). The hour-long session produced some intriguing posts (not least the revelation that @MissLiberty has her mother up for sale on Craig’s List). But I’m not sure I’d call it a “conversation” in any conventional sense. Was it a book group? Well – in one sense, yes – we were a group of people focussing on the same book at the same time. And yes I’ve taken away some new ideas and thoughts that have increased my enjoyment of a great book that were not derived from my own individual reading.

Yet discussing a book with others in Twitter in a compressed time frame presents a number of challenges, the first of which is simply remembering to include the hashtag in each post. Forget the hashtag and no-one in the group will see your comments unless they happen to be following your tweets anyway. Using Tweetdeck helps as it enables the participant to create a separate #tbc column. Furthermore it seems to me there are four simultaneous and sometimes counteractive pressures in play when participating in such an event in Twitter: listening (reading), posting, chronology and speed. As the tweet stream emerges, framing an intelligent response in a 140-character bite quickly enough for it to arrive in anything like a logical juxtaposition to the tweet that prompted it is extremely challenging. Indeed it could be seen as an interactive art form all of its own. Forget Haiku: 140 character posts under speed in response to others are more difficult than 3-5-3 or even 5-7-5 syllables. The result is almost like the transcript of an intriguing discussion that someone has taken a pair of scissors to and randomly reorganised.

For those who haven’t read Mr Pip, I don’t want to give the plot away. However I will say that it is set on an island torn by civil-war and includes a violent scene including butchery and pigs. At one point I tweeted that both islands and pigs are freighted in literary terms because of the reference to Lord of the Flies. Since then, re-reading the #tbc tweetstream, I have realised that the whole #tbc concept has another fundamental parallel with Golding’s novel. Whilst I enjoyed participating, and will certainly do so again, insomnia permitting, at no point was it clear who was “holding the conch”. In a face-to-face group there is a joint focus on each person as they speak that simply is not possible in Twitter. So as things stand I’m divided over whether I’m frustrated by the limitations of or excited by the possibilities for using Twitter to encourage engagement with books. Why not join in and let me know what you think…?

On Roadmapping the Future

Yesterday's Huffington Post included a blogpost by Don Tapscott on the impending demise of universities. It is a subject of some interest given that I work in academic publishing and my eldest child is almost 16, so the university years lie ahead for her and her siblings. As ever the comments following the post are as interesting as Tapscott's typically iconoclastic piece, divided as they are into some voices of support and a number wondering where Mr Tapscott has been for the past couple of decades. For me neither blogpost nor comments ask the crucial questions which focus around how we facilitate change management conducted in an economically viable manner within long established businesses and organisations. And I mean viable for the individual institutions that need to change - and viable for our society which requires an educated and enabled population.

The post was placed on the Huffington Post specifically to solicit feedback, as Edge, where it was originally placed, does not publish reader comments. True to form I read and I commented. Only to find (infuriatingly) that what I had written had exceeded Huffington's maximum comment word count (by 311 words). So I have decided to place it here instead...

Dear Don
I read your post with interest as it addresses what are currently two of my most pressing (and parallel) personal and professional concerns, viz
(i) what sort of university education should I be envisaging for my (currently young teen) children, and,
(ii) where will academic publishing be in five years time.
Regarding education I am torn between a sense of excitement about how much more interesting and purposeful learning is becoming, and, watching my children, a despair that although they know how to source, interact with and dissect information intellectually, they find it very difficult to write and structure a sustained analysis. As an employer I still value the skill of written analysis.

I find it useful to think about publishing and education together because both are businesses (often long-established, frequently old-fashioned businesses). Yes, educational establishments are often semi-public sector businesses but nonetheless they have budgets to meet - and it helps to remind ourselves of this when considering their future. Universities and academic publishers are faced with markets that are evolving by the hour in their demands for new delivery channels and methodologies. Both are being rapidly pulled into a world where they are increasingly driven by the requirement to respond to the ways in which changing and emerging technologies are modulating what students and employers want and how they want, it rather than being driven by traditional pedagogy and academic values.

So far, so good - and nothing wrong with this. I am all for dragging academe into the real world. The crux is how to effect such change at the same time as remaining a viable business. The problem is that educational establishments (like publishing companies) are restricted by their histories, their funding models, their obligations as employers, and multiple other pre-existing social and commercial contracts. It is all very well to comment that they have to change - but they have to be enabled to change - and at the moment the impedimenta of their histories (and their business models) is making that difficult.

Seeing where they need to go is not that hard. There are plenty of visionaries and change evangelists out there - yourself included - who are thinking, writing and speaking about what needs to happen. However what we are remarkably short of is people with the skills, the insight and commercial acumen needed to chart the roadmap from "here" to "there". How does an institution or business with a model built around a pedagogical approach remain a viable enterprise whilst rapidly adapting to deliver - or rather enable - learning in a completely different style, channel and model (subject to rapid change and therefore ongoing cost to adapt and develop)? Just because the future of education could be significantly Internet-based, that does not for one moment mean that it will necessarily be cheaper.

The interesting question for me is not - "do we have to change?" That we do seems axiomatic. Much more important is how we free up institutions and businesses to be able to adapt quickly in a way that does not destroy what is still inherently valuable in them. The education and publishing establishments urgently need advanced change management skills of the most pragmatic and enabling sort. In both publishing and education if we don't find ways of roadmapping and structuring the change that is required within viable business models, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Of Success and Salt (or dare to fail not fail to dare)

Twitter and its simultaneous capacity for both linear and lateral information flow remains very much in the (book industry) news (and on my mind) at the moment with the NY Book Expo Tweetup being the talk of the fair and over here in the UK Salt’s Just One Book campaign attracting attention.

That I am a Salt groupie and therefore hopelessly prejudiced in their favour is a well-established fact. But you don’t have to be a fan to discern that Salt make beautiful, intellectually rigorous books in collaboration with authors who like being published by them. However Salt have yet to create a robust business model even though they have been pushing boundaries to achieve this – most particularly in their innovative use of social media to promote the company and its authors.

The power of Twitter and #hashtags is that suddenly, off the back of Just One Book there now exists a fast, simple mechanism to search and follow others who are also rooting for Salt. (And the same applies for thousands of other special interest subjects that people are using hashtags to flag up for others.) Through this mechanism Twitter has led me to a variety of postings about Salt including ghostwriter Jane Smith’s blog (not one I would normally visit, aimed as it is at authors). What drew my attention was not the fairly brief post (23 May) – but rather the fierce debate that ensued in the comments column. One anonymous reader (who subsequently identified him or herself as "Rae") had been dismissive of Salt’s campaign as a “gimmick” and was rounded on by a number of Jane’s more regular followers some of whom are Salt authors. However I was struck by the remarks "Perhaps Salt Publishing should try publishing books people want to read rather than resorting to emotional blackmail…” and – on the Salt website - “There are just too many steps for the uninitiated, other book websites are not quite so cumbersome - I guess that's why they aren't having problems with sales”.

I found myself pausing to reflect whether there is something of the emperor’s new clothes syndrome going on here. Are those of us deeply engaged with books and publishing so blinded by our beliefs and our self-belief that we can’t risk seeing ourselves through the eyes of others? The comment thread reveals both an unwillingness to tolerate criticism and some of the unwritten expectations we have of the way in which people comment on blogposts and in discussion fora. This is not the first time I have observed a dissenting voice raising the ire of a committed and converted community of followers and in doing so often terminating a discussion.

It seems to me, however, that Rae raised three most apposite points -

1. "Perhaps Salt should publish books people want to read...”
This is a statement freighted with assumptions – first and foremost that people are aware of Salt’s books in the first place. According to the Salt Confidential blog, Chris Hamilton-Emery has been humbled by discovering just how little awareness there is of Salt outside those with a real commitment to poetry. It is evident that for all of their Facebooking and assorted innovations, Salt have remained outside of the mainstream and consequently many active book buyers remain unaware of their lists. The reasons for this are too diverse and numerous to enumerate here. Now the real crux of the matter is that the exposure the Just One Book Campaign grants them will get books and authors into new hands, or rather in front of new eyeballs. Ergo we will soon see whether Salt are publishing books people want to read if – after Just One Book – sales can be sustained at significantly higher levels than before the campaign. If not, maybe it tells us something that we don’t really want to know.

2. (re website) “there are just too many steps for the uninitiated…”
Here was genuine feedback from someone who had made the effort to visit the site. And it was slightly shocking to read given that many of us in the industry envy Salt’s content-rich web site. But because we are engaged we don’t need to evaluate the site objectively for its new-user-friendliness (and how many of us are guilty of that in relation to our own sites). If writers and publishers resent and reject such useful feedback from first time visitors – then we deserve to fall victim to our own hubris.

3. “…other book websites… not having problems with sales”
Of course many other book websites are run by large retailers and not by independent publishers. The fact that Amazon, B&N and The Book Depository set the standard for the online book purchasing experience is a real problem for under-resourced independent publishers (not to mention everyone else in the supply chain). The rest are playing catch-up. (As an aside, the assertion that others are not having problems with sales is debatable and unanswerable. Are we talking about publishers or retailers here? Other poetry publishers may well be having problems with sales – but if they are part of a larger group there may be other resources deployed to support poetry, and then of course some others have long-term public funding arrangements in place.)

As a result of watching the Just One Book campaign, I am renewed in my belief that just because a company publishes wonderful books, it does not follow that they are a successful publisher. Production and editorial values alone do not make for publishing success. Publishing, as practised by commercial publishing ventures, is about creating lists that successfully reach a paying market (which may or may not be the end consumer) and are therefore profitable. The required scale of that profit is for the publisher to determine according to their own objectives and shareholder or stakeholder pressures. But whilst there are many measures of creative and artistic success in the form of literary gongs and industry awards, Mr Micawber’s advice about what represents financial success still holds true today.

In 1999 (co-incidentally the year Salt was founded) I attended my first Independent Publisher's Guild conference as the newly appointed Secretary of the organisation. From the Platform, Michael Schmidt, publisher of Carcanet, said something that lodged in my mind and has remained with me ever since: "I take a forestry ecology approach to publishing poetry". So saying, Michael recognised that successful publishing needs first and foremost an enthusiastic, informed audience that values what is published highly enough to be prepared to pay for it (a market). Whether Schmidt and Carcanet have been successful in husbanding or enlarging poetry’s habitat is a separate question, and not for now.

If you are paying attention you may recall that in my opening sentence I asserted that Twitter is lateral as well as linear. Even better, the lateral can link back into the linear in serendipitous ways. A couple of days ago a random retweet threw up a perfect example of this by leading me to a blogpost by Mack Collier (@MackCollier) entitled “You will fail at social media.” Intrigued, I read on – and I thoroughly recommend that you do too. Embedded in the post is a video of a TED lecture from Sir Ken Robinson whose 15-minute presentation on why education matters posits that creativity demands we have to dare to fail in order to succeed. This short video has radically altered my thinking about my childrens’ education and training and education in the company I help to run. I can't recommend it highly enough. Sir Ken’s thesis observes that children dare to fail until adults educate that courage out of them – and that this traditional approach to education is disastrous in the context of the global creative economy we live and work in.

Then it dawned on me that what Chris and Jen at Salt have been doing for the last ten years is daring to fail. And when it looked like that failure was complete (in commercial if not artistic terms) they dared to be brutally honest about it – and apply their own brand of wit and creativity to facing up to that reality. How ironic it will be – and how salutary – if that failure is the birth of a level of success they could never previously dream of achieving.

On (the value of Tweet)streams and silence

Aside from a return to the blogosphere last weekend also provided some badly needed R&R in the form of a day in the Kent countryside. We were meant to be walking but as rain threatened we took detours to the homes of two remarkable men. First Down House, home and laboratory to the naturalist Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species radically altered our understanding of mankind, provoking a debate between creationists and evolutionists that continually resurfaces (and has been much in the news this bicentennial year). Then to Chartwell, creation of Winston Churchill, a man who lived multiple lives as a journalist, soldier, politician, trade-union-card-carrying bricklayer, artist, Prime Minister and Nobel-prize-winning author in just one legendary incarnation. Both visits have caused me to dwell on the nature of thought, ideas, information and work.

Since returning to my desk on Monday I’ve been amused to realise that my comments about Twitter being a river of information seem to be somewhat on point (a refreshing change). In past three days I’ve read numerous references to “stream” and “flow” in the way people talk about what Twitter and for that matter Web 2.0 is about. Of course thinking about information as a flow is not new: thread, flow, train, trail, stream are all words historically applied to the way in which information is shared between people. There is a commonality in the imagery deployed – a visualisation of information as being something linear and continuous or connected. What’s different about Twitter is it is not a thread but rather a medium for parcels of discontinuous information of almost infinitely variable usefulness, relevance and quality, to move along at various speeds and in multiple directions or even dimensions. Since loading Tweetdeck I’ve discovered that it is perfectly possible to sit and watch a stream of information parcels flowing in front of my eyes.

On a good day I feel like a heron perched on a rock watching the tweetstream flow by and choosing which is the plumpest, most promising fish to dive for. Conversely on a not-so-good day I feel like I’m in the Matrix, watching ribbons of code wash down the screen, and wonder whether I’m being reprogrammed or reconditioned as it flows in front of my eyes. Then of course there’s the suggestion that Twitter is “crack for the easily distractible” (apologies to whoever tweeted that remark, I didn’t have the wit to favourite it and I'm yet to discover a time-efficient way of swimming upstream to fish it out again.) Whatever one’s view, it is clear that Twitter and other media/ social media/ electronic networks are capable of transforming the way in which humans engage with information, ideas and possibly even with each other – or at least those humans with access to the web who are willing to spend considerable portions of time to splashing about in this virtual paddling pool.

Interestingly the two houses we visited on Sunday are only a few miles apart and both set deep in the Kent countryside in locations that command wonderful rural views and feel quintessentially English. Both have a sense of timelessness. Of course the “mothballing” effect of being frozen in an English Heritage or National Trust package is partly responsible for this: a house preserved as an exhibit is markedly different to a house full of the hurly-burly of family life (in Darwin’s case) or the extraordinary pageant of society figures that passed through Churchill’s country residence. Yet both houses were clearly refuges and places where creativity and ideas were given time and space to be nurtured.

Churchill employed numerous research assistants for his extraordinary published opus, whereas Darwin harnessed his children’s energy to aid his experiments by monitoring the work of earthworms and charting the flight of bees. Neither man laboured in isolation – but conversely each of them created around himself time and space in which to think, work and play. Time and space into which selected colleagues and collaborators were invited rather than manifesting as a constantly available flow of information. Both houses are characterised by sense of completeness and detachment from unwanted intrusion, which I suspect is intrinsic and not the result of the heritage package deal.

So I find myself wondering what role Twitter and Web 2.0 might have played in the life and works of these two extraordinary men. Would the homes they lived and worked in still have provided them with the space they needed to develop themselves and their projects? Darwin in particular spent years working on his theories. He knew that they would shake the establishment to its core and provoke controversy throughout the Western world, and therefore he refined and re-defined them scrupulously for years. Ultimately he was forced into publication by receipt of an unsolicited paper from Alfred Russel Wallace, another young naturalist who had independently reached similar conclusions. One can’t help wondering how much longer he would have worked before publication without this external impetus – or whether in a world of 24/7 external information exchange he would have developed the powers of observation that gave rise to his discoveries in the first place? Would Churchill have had an army of research assistants Tweeting constant updates on the life of the Duke of Marlborough manuscript in progress and if so would the Tweets have obviated the need for anyone to buy the book when complete?

Intrigued as I am by Twitter and the connectivity it opens up to us – I can’t help wondering if the information flow it creates and the speed at which the packages of wisdom we tweet and retweet flash past will aid the development and discoveries of new Darwins and Churchills – or hinder them. Both Darwin and Churchill fully understood the necessity to self-brand and to stay ahead – and each deployed the media of their age to this end. Both endured their own intellectual and emotional hardships, despite each being born to extraordinary privilege and opportunity. And each of them created around them a private haven, free of external intrusions, in which to work, play, think, create, write and, ultimately, to publish. I can’t help worrying that the exponential acceleration of the information exchange we’re creating online means we will never see their like again.