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The Capital of Meaning: Using News & Social Media to Monitor a Currency’s Effectiveness

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An interesting realm to look into that can be used to determine the efficacy of a currency (and/or various forms of capital) is done by monitoring news media conversations.

In this work by Joe Brewer and team, they have accrued media outlet topics tweets and found huge disconnects around common themes. The resulting diagrams show digital clusters of self-truths that create walls between each other, undermining the potential for any deeper understanding emerge and meaning-making to arise. Meaning by the way, is humanity’s primary pathway to spirituality.

One of the primary valuations of the dollar (or any currency) appears in how we connect with each other. Under today’s currency, money creates inherent competition forcing isolation of truth into bubbles of self identification and increases the desire for self-centering power, that is then used to downplay and denigrate other’s truths in the name of their own.

Imagine instead, news outlets shifting from being informational channels, to becoming a common medium (media) for integrating (rather than isolating) shared knowledge. This would allow for measurable correlations between conversational depth, monetary exchange, and world wealth (used here in its broadest meaning) to help humanity monitor its own transformation of rising (or decaying) values, where that value can only be done through second degree assessment of conversational relationships.

This approach would turn organizational ‘valuations’ (which are presently determined almost completely by dollar potential only) inside-out. Allowing for currency to return to its original intent, which was to represent the meaning (rather ‘be’ the meaning) of how we determine value in one another.

Thus, the analysis of news through social media becomes a critical tool in creating capital as a dynamic (no longer static) meaningful world.

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Our Responsibility To ‘AWE’

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This short video gives me that spinal shiver we humans get when ‘awe’ is present. When’s the last time you’ve felt it? What moves you? What draws on your desire to be in life? Who are you not to stand up to what is your own momentum into amazing, incredible, awesome!

We have a ‘responsibility to AWE’.

 

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Collaborative Design: Methods for Developing Social Innovation and Social Capital

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How does one go about building social innovation and creating social capital?

Creating more grounded transformative work is done by formulating a collective research process that builds shared capacity. If done well, an emerging social system moves itself (self adaptive) into momentous collaborative action. 

CREATING SOCIAL INNOVATION – RESEARCH STAGES

Asking powerful questions within dynamic interactive feedback loops is key to establishing a foundation for the collective to stand on. Some general advice about how to do social research is as follows:

  1. Inquiry: Starting everyone of my questions with ‘open ended’ question words including the 6 ‘W’s: WHY is it this way, WHAT is it exactly, (w)HOW does it work, WHO is involved, WHEN is it enacted, WHERE does it reside or show up. In this way, your research will expand from isolated assumptions into broader understandings and improve data outcomes.
  2. Clustering: The next step is reducing the content you have found by clustering or mapping common synergistic principles or concepts into groupings.This can often be found by creating keyword maps and phrase streams that appear and link across your data.
  3. Synthesizing: The last stage is integrating your results into something meaningful and valued. This happens by testing some of your new gathered insights “with others”. In other words ‘meaningfulness’ is key to a social movement and thereby social action, and this can only occur through interaction and feedback.

These are my 3 stages for developing new insight and interpretation for social innovation. They are based in the understanding of collaborative learning and design.

Next you will need to put your research to the test; not just proving whether it is true or not, but also (and even more important), using your synthesized research to enable social action – a community of practice.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING – TURNING INFORMATION INTO SOCIAL ACTION

A more challenging but (in my view) more fun part of development, is enabling your research into a ‘social performance’ process for creating social capital and social innovation. This is done through 3 phases as follows (note ‘phases’ are different than ‘stages’):

  1. Enabling a Group Intention
  2. Building a Value Network
  3. Experiencing a Community of Practice

Here is the related article that describes these phases, called Social Innovation: a 3-Phase Transformation Process.

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ADDITIONAL SUPPORTING ARTICLES:


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The Game Is Up … Preserving Our Soul

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Yes, the game is up. And most of us know it, but can not speak to it. So how do we know what to do? What will others do to us if we tell them that we are lost? I will let poet master David Whyte express this point. Listen deeply into the poem and allow personal time for the silence he speaks of to breathe into you. Sit with the mythic images that appear and the voices that speak from stories like this. For it is there we will find our next answers to social innovation issues, as they will not be found where we ‘think’.

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Resiliency through Social Innovation – Design for Engagement and Humanization

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I wonder why so many design initiatives are so data and information constrained.

What about actual human behavior and how to apply its chaotic nature into rational logistics? Where we need to go to move beyond rational design? How do our relations integrate into information from a design perspective?

Imagine how the concept of ‘resiliency’ ties into an understanding of sustainability through the ‘supply chain’. Imagine reforming our concept of ‘supply’ to eliminate the ‘chain’ but still keep the connection. What, for example, would a fractal supply network look like? A design ecology without the bondage of chains – what would it look like?

How might we build a prototype or model of resiliency based on fractally-scaled micro-feedback loops that don’t break the supply chain in times of crisis, but rather undo links that leave them desiring to be reconnected – they intelligently seek new supply nodes to hook up with. I can foresee this approach would redefine ‘resilience’ to align with ‘opened-intelligent-capacity’. I wonder what the code would look like?

These quick simple video animations and article bring some meaning to three points that I feel are crucial in healthy ‘whole-system’ design, and brings the term ‘social innovation’ to a brighter light: 

1- Irrational response mechanisms in the body – how can we apply them in design?

 
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2- Human centered design – rather than data/information centered design

 

3- Humanizing problems through evolved engagement – design solutions MUST include better ways to increase engagement, even more so than improve the information

 

Click here for more articles on Social Innovation.

 

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