My commitment to thinking about regrowing a living culture continued this morning with another instalment of the coffee morning online.
There were five people there today including me.
We always try to read the questions – I think that a useful piece of work for me would be to pull them apart a bit and flesh out what it is that *I* think are *my* answers – people often ask for my answers and I deflect by saying that I think that we’ll find that out by practicing the coffee morning “process” and considering the questions without necessarily focusing on each one in detail. After all, I picked them up as an experimental way of anchoring what I wanted to do and I’m pretty sure that Dougald never expected or intended that they’d be used and looked at by a group once a week in this way – and so we can easily trip up on the way that the ideas are expressed now that I’ve chosen to rip them out of their original context, rather than engaging with the ideas that they represent.
Most weeks that we’re online, but especially if I’m feeling on form or a bit excitable, I will add links to the chat and encourage others to do so too to reflect the flavour of what we’ve been talking about. Lots of things come up, but there isn’t a lot of time for context setting or explanation, so this is a way of adding a bit of a breadcrumb trail (albeit mostly filtered through my personal knowledge and interests). Is it a breadcrumb trail, or a set of potential rabbit holes to go down?
I wonder if doing it helps the group feel that we’re engaging in something living? I hope so, and some people who participate say so. It can be a way of validating what someone’s just said or even just acknowledging that they’ve been heard.
It’s always got things that I intend to take further, but rarely do – and when I remember it goes to a shared Google Doc that I’m also not very good at reminding people about or pointing to. A living culture means honesty about one’s frailties and failings, right?
Anyway, here are the links from this morning, together with some brief notes for each from me. Does that give you a feel for how the conversation ran? Why do I feel like I need you to understand?
I guess I’m aiming for something akin to shownotes, but since there’s no recording for you to listen to while looking at these links, do you get anything other than a sense of a conversation that kind of rambled all over everywhere. So, yeah, then they’re just… notes.
- All the Tsunamis that have ever hit Portugal https://www.worlddata.info/europe/portugal/tsunamis.php
- Memories of the 1984 earthquake that was centred in North Wales, but we remember it’s effects in Birmingham
https://www.expressandstar.com/news/west-midlands-earthquake-three-quakes-that-rocked-the-region-harder-than-this-weeks-tremor-5933391 - Titles and theme tune for Marine Boy (1960s Anime) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xri42GBLc5c
- At C4CC we noticed the value of propinquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity but also homophily – the tendency of people to hang out with people who they already had something in common with.
BBC Doc on the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0033gxg/escaping-idi-amin- Lloyd on his 40th birthday https://lloyddavisphoto.blogspot.com/2004/12/yeah-boy-you-may-have-that-fine-curly.html
- The Arc of Oblivion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAhHY4nbZ08
- “Analogue contains grayscale” – Caron said something like this.
- http://websdr.org/ Web SDR – “Software-Defined Radio” – lots of strange sounds between stations to be found
- Douglas Rushkoff’s book that includes noticing that we treat digital time differently from analogue time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_Shock:_When_Everything_Happens_Now
- Immersive X – VR exhibition/conference https://immersive-x.de/
- The electricity supply emergency code that might be helpful to know more about https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-supply-emergency-code/electricity-supply-emergency-code#annex-2–rota-plans
- When can I reuse this diary – https://www.whencanireusethiscalendar.com/
- Pavegen have gone into administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavegen
As a record of an event, it’s all a bit “you probably had to be there”. They’re the sort of things I might have tweeted in the olden days, sometimes driving people mad because of the lack of context or coherence. And they could all be fleshed out and explained even more, if that would really help anyone. And I also wonder whether sharing them encourages or discourages people who weren’t there to/from taking part in future?
So yeah, anyway…
